erika: not sure if you were doing it on purpose, but it didn't seem "messagey" in any kind of overt way ... It has the ambiguity of being either vernacular or ambiguous in the context of your setting. That's why I like it.

Also, *love love love* the description/implications of Formica... At the WAG I actually went to a multimedia show where these well-known feminist artists (local maybe, I can't remember their names) had made a dress out of pink Formica. It had drawers and cupboards and you actually had to have someone help you in and out of it.

Also, I could be picking up on the politics not because they are overt, but because I am currently dragging myself through three term papers while popping post ear-surgery T3s (from mono to a bleeding growth in my ear... This has not been a good 6 months for my health) and I'm in that sort of uber-critical/psychadellic space.

Thanks...I do sneak the politics in...my fanfics have political warnings appended, after all.Formica's funny to me, all those nauseous-making colors being anybody's must-haves, especially that pepto pink...you know the one. But for a while, it was just the shit. I believe I've had that story in me since I watched my grandma's customers go in and come out with the same hair.Which of course I said. "Mom, she didn't *do* anything." I...got shushed a lot as a girl.

erika, Susan, insent to you both.

I was made very happy last night: I read the prologue to Cruel Sister and the four members of my writers group who were present broke into applause. THAT blew my mind.

Time to do some work....

I put this version of "Warhol Days" up on LJ, but I figured I'd share it with you folks before it goes through one! More! Revision!

>>

Warhol Days

I

In the days of the pop stardom draft, your fifteen minutes of fame are mandatory. There will be no notification by mail or Instant Messenger. The paparazzi will simply sprout like the first crop of spring, trampling the lawn and displacing garden gnomes. The animated corpse of Ed McMahon will hand you a cartoon check worth the cardboard it’s printed on, and the weight of effervescence will hit you in the forehead like a pebble in the hands of a paste-eating third-grade bully. Smile for the cameras, lest their microphones transform into switchblades, quick as sound bites. Give them something worth remembering—the lullaby your mother sang to you in the crib, set against the rhythm of the cereal beat box; The bit of Plath you memorized in high school, with a little soft shoe thrown in. Replicate yourself like language, changing color with each inflection. Do not offer the reporters coffee. They’ll be gone before its brewed.

II

Mary-Louise intends to dance across the fluorescent-lit aisles of every Wal-Mart Supercenter in Georgia. It’s a goal that’s brewed longer than truck stop coffee, since that fateful day at age 15 the cameras caught her stealing lipstick at K-Mart. In that instant, she realized that this was a blue light Made for Closed-Caption TV special, and this was her moment to shine.

“Because this is America,” she thought, “and you ain’t worth nothing if you ain’t on TV.”

She curled her lip and began to quiver—carefully starting with chattering teeth then building quickly until her knees were wobbly. She fell to the floor of the stage, her face soaked with tears. Not a dry eye in the place, and even the lemon-bitter manager was moved. She got off with a warning. A star was born.

Soon, she found herself performing awkward ballet to the Celine Dion tune crooned through tinny speakers, remaining motionless when a sales assistant is paged, or a special is announced. One night, she recited Orsinio’s “If music be the food of love, play on” speech in the pet supplies department. Another night, she sang “Amazing Grace” at full volume, the stunned applause of K-Mart shoppers ringing against dilapidated shelves.

The explosion of Wal-Mart cemented the deal, her impromptu performances moved to shinier stages. It was like playing Rockefeller Center, with those clean floors and cameras everywhere, broadcasting to only God and the District Manager knows whom.

She can’t repress a smile each time she sees the lens on the corner of her vision, because it’s in these moments she knows this is America, and in America, someone’s always watching.

III

The spotlight doesn’t care just what it shines on.

IV

This street is a cinema. The neighbors watch each other when they’re shoveling snow, the sinuous pull of muscle and frigid bone captured in a dozen picturesque screenplays. The Technicolor transformation of pale hands to blue, of cheeks turning pinker in the icy air, is recorded daily. The eye is the world’s most perfect camera, pulling light from the sky with only water and flesh—crystal-clear imaging, better and faster than digital. The unfettered human eye should make Spielberg weep with shame.

This movie is nothing avant garde—condensed water is relocated from the street to the curb, from the curb to edge of the lawn, a blanket transformed into a wall. It’s only water, and they are only flesh, and this is the most magnificent alchemy imagined. Where the snow once fell, there is now only a kitchen chair to mark the space, and the critics’ opinions are largely left unvoiced.

V

Catherine watches Desperate Housewives with an attention she otherwise reserves for chopping celery. She complains that women in their forties don’t look like that, although her hair, too, falls gently on her shoulders like snow and her smile flashes like the sun off airplanes. Margaret karaokes Whitney Houston songs in a bar in San Clemente, (continued...)

( continues...) California—just close enough to Hollywood to fear it’s radiation, just far enough away to not step into the sun. Andy has been slamming the same three poems in a Chicago bar since 1989, and Manuel has voted his co-workers off the island fifteen times in his head this week, mumbling the words, “You’re fired,” when he’s certain no one is listening.

When the days of the pop stardom draft come round, they will be prepared. There will be no preparation or commitment or work, just that meteoric rise to fame, the inevitable fall, and the feel of a heat on their fingers that burns like a sun, before it’s extinguished. The A&E special will be a commercial, their dreams hawking peanuts on the edge of stranger’s sleep.

VI

If all the world’s a stage, and all it’s people merely players, then tell me: who is in the audience, and who will clap when the curtain falls?

Effing writer's block!

A trade magazine I receive is looking for stringers, and I happen to think I'm qualified. I can readily write the body of a query letter explaining why--here's my experience, here's a link to some samples, yadda yadda yadda. What I'm stuck on is a nice opening hook. Those are easy to do for a query on a specific subject, because all you have to do is imagine how you'd lead the article. Is it OK to say something like this: "I was intrigued by the ad for stringers in the December issue. As a freelance writer with experience in research-intensive news articles, I believe I am highly qualified." Or is that too bland?

OK, I think this is a slight improvement:

Your request for stringers in the December 2004 issue of PubName intrigued me. As a freelance writer with experience writing research-intensive news articles, I believe I am highly qualified to write for PubAcronym.

Thoughts?

I don't know why it's so easy for me to write other people's cover and query letters, but as soon as it's me, I freeze up and obsess over every. single. word. Actually, I do know why--it's an artifact of having gotten rejected over and over again after having the good luck to sell two of the first three articles I queried. I've gone from "I'm good and I know it," to "I always thought I was good, but I've sure gotten a shitload of rejections this past year...AM I EVEN DOING THIS RIGHT????"

It sounds fine to me, Susan, but I have Absolutely No Qualifications for delivering a point of view. And of course, you're good. It's just that there's middle ground between "good and also right for this particular piece" and "not good and not even doing this right" -- you know?

In other news, it occurs to me that I maybe oughta pseudonym the following drabble, but you are probably the only person who might know who it's about. Heh. And I don't suppose he would mind the pejorative, anyway.

Mark

Ass.

That's pretty much the extent of what I thought. Just so damnably full of himself, his talent, his reputation, his...irony.

He had the one band, the name band, full of aging ego rockers, famous enough in their corner of the industry. And the other, the rockabilly one where he got to play stand-up and sing power ballads as sweet as arsenic. So satisfied, he was.

I never intended to give him a chance. To see the depth of vulnerability and character beneath that sharp-edged veneer. Years later, empty glasses between us, I would notice I had started to care.

Nice, Liese.

And dayum. Victor. I can see you pacing and hear you reading that aloud. The whole thing has a beat. It's wonderful!

Susan, I like the blurb, but I think I'd use another word for "highly" qualified. Not uniquely, either. Definitely, usefully, especially. It's a chance to get a quirky but not nutty impression in there, something that will make you linger in the memory. In a good way. A "hook", as you say.