a shitty morning and damage control

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on July 11, 2010 at 3:38 PM

I woke up today thinking I would finally be able to use my stand mixer to make some cookies. Hub-a-dub and I recently finished the upper cabinets in the kitchen, so we were able to install the over-the-range microwave, so we could get rid of the old microwave, so we finally have space on the countertops for the big stand mixer my family gave me for a wedding present. It’s a really pretty teal color, and I’ve been so annoyed that it remained boxed in the garage until now. So when I woke up, I was thinking, “Oh boy! I’m gonna make some cookies for breakfast.”

Wrong.

Kyle left the bedroom while I was getting ready, but shortly came back. “I think Buttons did something on the carpet and Roomba smeared it around.” Oh, God. So not what I want to hear.

You see, we’re going on vacation in about a week. We have someone who lives in town who is willing to come over to the house once a day to keep Buttons company and make sure everything’s okay. To make things easier on this kind soul, we decided to buy all automatic cat stuff: self-dispensing food and water bowls and a self-cleaning automatic litter box. Now, there’s always an adjustment phase for such things with a set-in-her-ways kitty, and we knew that. For a while, I had to coax her to drink water with my fingers because the bowl is black, and she could see her reflection in it. (She drinks on her own now, but very cautiously—ready to run at any moment if that “other cat” comes back.)

The litter box is a different story. Turns out, we bought the one that has crystal litter instead of clay, which is a lot coarser and apparently uncomfortable on her soft little pillow paws. It has a motion sensor, so 20 minutes after she gets out of the box a rake comes by and pushes any waste into a little receptacle that we’re supposedly only going to have to change once a month or so. Well, I’ve been checking the waste box to make sure she’s been going, and she hasn’t. I got her to poop in it once, but I wasn’t seeing any clumps of urine.

We went back to the pet store to ask them about it, and it turns out the crystal just absorbs liquid and doesn’t clump, so she’s probably been peeing in there just fine and I didn’t know. Yay! Just when I thought we were okay… Kyle wakes me up with, “I think Buttons did something on the carpet and Roomba smeared it around.” Ugh.

Buttons occasionally gets hairballs (she’s very fluffy), so I assumed she got a hairball and then Roomba (automatic vacuum) made a mess. But when I went to clean Roomba’s dirt trap, I smelled poop. The distinct, fragrant aroma of shit. Now, hairballs smell like vomit, for those of you blessed enough to be unaware. So I very suddenly realized that Buttons had pooped on the carpet and Roomba had, indeed, smeared it around. The carpet’s fine—easy to clean up and it’s pretty much shit anyway, so no big loss—but Roomba’s innards were now coated in semi-crusty, pungent doo-doo.

I couldn’t exactly put him in the sink and wash him, since he’s got tons of electrical gears and gizmos in there that would have been ruined. And although I briefly contemplated throwing him away, he’s very handy and he costs like $300 dollars (at least). Plus, he was a gift. So I had to dig deep in my motherly reserves, lock Buttons in the garage so I didn’t kill her, and take apart the crap-encrusted vacuum piece by piece and clean it all by hand. I’ll spare you the rest of the details, but let’s just say it took well over an hour and Roomba still smells very faintly of poop. (He’ll be okay. Just needs to air out for a couple of days.)

The only good news? If Buttons continues to not use her litter box, it is returnable/exchangeable. We can just get an automatic one that uses clay litter instead of crystal. (No, we can’t just use different litter with this one.) So at least we didn’t just waste $100 on a useless thing. But until we get this all straightened out and Buttons is regularly using her new litter box, Roomba’s daily timer is getting turned off. No more early-morning poop scooping for you, vacuum robot.

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Creative License

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on May 27, 2010 at 4:15 PM

Laurell K. Hamilton has talked before about how important research is when you write fantasy, because if you’re asking your readers to believe this crazy, magical stuff, everything that they know to be true has to be accurate. If you’re describing a police investigation and they catch a flaw, she argues, it will make them less trusting when you describe your werewolf’s social hierarchy. You have to sound like you know what you’re talking about—with every aspect, possible or not.

I think this is a wonderful point, not only for fantasy but for all fiction. All writing, even. Whether I am so enamored with heavy research before a project because of this advice or coincidentally, I don’t know, but I am. I find it incredibly frustrating when I can’t track down a fact that I need to describe a scene accurately. In my opinion, creative license is what you do with characters’ personalities and plot, not real locations, time periods, or details that could be true. I’m not saying I’m perfect; I’m sure there are and will be some facts I accidentally skew or miss altogether, but I can assure you that I am trying my utmost not to.

I’ll give you an example from the gothic novel I’m writing right now. Windows play an important role in my story, together as atmosphere setting devices, metaphors for deeper meaning, and plot tools. My novel takes place in 1603. So, before I jumped right in and wrote it, I had to make sure of some things. Did they have glass back then? Did they have stained glass? Did you have to be rich to have it? How was it made and how common were windows glassed-off instead of pane-less?

Because believe it or not, there are a lot of people out there that actually know the answers to these questions off the tops of their heads. There are glass makers, architecture students, antique collectors, and more, and they would all immediately notice if I put glass before glass existed, or used it incorrectly. I don’t want to bump these people of out of my story; I want to draw them in. If they stop trusting my words when I get to the first window, how will they ever believe Plot Turn A, which actually is a little incredible? I mean, they want to, because they picked up my book, but I have to give them cause to. I have to do the work, not just the play.

When someone picks up a fiction novel, they are already agreeing to suspend disbelief to some degree. This story never really happened; they know that. And whether or not it could have happened, they want to forget that it didn’t as they read. They want to be pulled in so deeply that the impossible registers as factual in their imagination. So it’s my job to get it right—not to knock you out of the story in puzzlement or doubt. Because if you’re willing to take that leap of faith and buy my book, you (hopefully), as my potential reader, better be able to believe it.

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at my wit’s end

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on May 25, 2010 at 4:04 PM

When I went to line camp my freshman year of drill team, I remember dancing in my sleep. That week of learning dances and practicing sometimes 20 hours a day sank so deeply into my brain that even in my dreams I was working on the moves I’d learned. It was exhausting, really. In fact, I remember one morning when my alarm clock went off at some ungodly hour, I actually danced out of bed. I know it sounds like some cheesy metaphor, but I’m serious. The sound woke me and my arms and legs flailed in some sort of mid-motion arabesque and it took me a moment to fully wake and be embarrassed. Because I had a roommate, and she was older and she didn’t dance out of bed.

At officer camp, too, my senior year (which turned out to be about 10 times harder than line camp was that first year, even though at that time I’d thought I would die), we all danced in our 3-4 hour nights’ rest. I specifically remember being kicked heartily in the shin several times by my bedmate. We were so deeply ingrained in the process, that I found myself counting as I shampooed. 5-6-7-8, and then I’d scrub on beat.

Again, when I got a job at Sonic as a carhop, I had to learn to make all of the drink combos for the first few days. I was scooping ice in my dreams, and raising my hands overhead to grab the cups. Something about being that dedicated to something for days at a time tricks your mind. And when you finally get a break—you get to go to bed and think you don’t have to do that anymore—your brain can’t stop.

That’s me lately with novel writing. I’m clocking over 3,000 words daily (about twice as much as the original goal of 1,667/day), and last night in particular, I kept waking up from dreams where I was plotting in my head. Working out kinks, coming up with new ideas that were actually bizarre and crazy but seemed good at the time. I even found myself stringing together prose and editing it as I “typed.” My characters were the same, but they started doing crazy stuff that I hadn’t planned. Too weird.

And I found it every bit as exhausting as the dancing and drink-making had been. I love my job, I really do. Some days it’s hard to make myself sit down and work, but almost always, once I do it’s a blast for me. But I don’t want to do it when I’m not doing it! I need some breaks, some times to replenish my muse with other things. A girl can only write so much. Geeze. Take a chill pill, brain.

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To get to the other fried. I mean SIDE!

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on May 23, 2010 at 3:15 AM

I was telling hub-a-dub that I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to finish this entire novel by the end of the month. (I’m sure I’ll be able to hit 50,000, since I just did (sub-parentheses parenthesis HOLLA!), but I’m not sure if I’ll finish the actual full manuscript, which should be around 80,000.) He said, “Well, don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

I was like… “Uhh. I’m not. That’s what I’m saying.”

He blinked at me and said, “Oh. I mean, don’t knock your chickens before they hatch.”

Lolz. So, what he’s saying, is that I shouldn’t knock my chickens.

Which would make this entirely out of the question:

me: Knock knock.

my chickens: Who’s there?

me: Chickengoes.

my chickens: Chickengoes who?

me: No! Owls go who. Chickens go Bck-cawk! Bawk, bawk bawk bawk!

So I won’t. Consider my eggs uncounted and my chickens unknocked. (But… I’m afraid I might not finish but I really want to and I think I can.)

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Four Classic Gothic Novels: a review of Vathek, Otranto, Udolpho, and The Monk

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on May 19, 2010 at 5:50 PM

Many people are fascinated by the dark allure of the gothic genre, like myself. Usually drawn in by modern spins such as Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, we find ourselves wanting to go back in time to trace the origins of these thrilling stories. I have done so, and if you’re interested in pursuing the “forefathers” of modern-day horror, here’s what you should know—blunt, honest, and simple.

Vathek by William Beckford, 1782

Subtitled, “An Arabian Tale,” this is sometimes credited as “the first” gothic novel. Quite frankly, it sucks. It is excruciatingly drawn-out, and reads more like a list of random, supernatural oddities than a novel. There are no emotions, no characters one can become invested in, and no details to make the story interesting. There is no hinting or mystery, only recounting in straight-forward terms the over-the-top occurrences that fall one after the other so quickly that if you don’t understand one you might as well move on to the next. It is one of four books in my entire life that I found unworthy of finishing.

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, 1764

More generally the consensus as the first gothic novel–written in English. (Vathek was translated from French.) This novel isn’t really worth your time, either, although infinitely better than Vathek. It is very short, so if you just want to be able to say you’ve read it, it won’t take you long to check it off your list. The sentences are long and muddling, and the dialogue isn’t separated with new lines or even quotation marks from the rest of the prose, so it can be rather tiresome to make sense of. I’d have to Wikipedia it to remember any of the characters’ names, which tells you how little I cared about them.

One thing I can say for it: it is a clear predecessor to the gothic genre, and that’s kind of cool. My suggestion: read a summary. Also, read the cool facts about Walpole’s life, house, and obsessions. A better story than the novel itself, if you ask me.

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, 1794

I actually enjoyed this book quite a bit, but it’s not for a reader who dislikes “old” prose. The sentences are lengthy and wandering, as are the numerous descriptions of scenery. I believe there are abridged versions available that cut out these unnecessary wanderings, and having only read the original version, I would recommend giving one of those a try—especially if your goal is just entertainment.

The story is good. The characters are emotional and relatable in comparison with the two novels above, and the atmosphere is fantastic. There is mystery and suspense. For the average reader, I would recommend starting here as the birth of the gothic novel, and perhaps with an abridged version.

The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, 1796

Fantastic. Juicy. Detailed but still succinct (there are few aimless wanderings like with Radcliffe). A wonderful read and by far the best novel of these four. It made shockwaves during its time for the scandalous content, and even now, it’s not for the innocent. Several times I found myself surprised by how modern it seemed in its refusal to back down to the graphic, grotesque, and profane.

One thing that might throw some readers: the elements of unexplainable supernatural. Radcliffe uses the “explained supernatural” in her story, which gives us the chills without the doubts. Lewis has no such qualms; you’d better be willing to suspend disbelief before you crack open this bad boy. But if you want good entertainment in the classic gothic style, go for The Monk.

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