New East Asian library open at UC Berkeley

The new and beautiful East Asian Library has opened on UC Berkeley's campus. I'm really looking forward to going to see it. They have a huge number of very, very, very old books, and now access to them will be easier. It's a great acknowledgment of our place here on the Pacific Rim.

For my book, John Lennon: All I Want is the Truth, I did research at this library a couple of years ago, when it was small and cramped and had a lovely smell of old books and dust. I couldn't find my way around the shelves at all -- nothing was in English -- but with help of the librarians I was able to request an old issue of Bungei Shunju magazine from the depths of storage. Yoko Ono had written a wonderful article in the magazine about herself and her art work. I had it translated by a Japanese woman, Kyoko K. Bischof, and found it a very revealing self-portrait of Yoko. Which was great, as so much about John Lennon and Yoko is half truths, or out and out untruths that have been repeated over and over again. Love those primary sources!

And much older than Yoko's article, here is a poem I have over my desk by Izumi Shikibu.

In this world
love has no color-
but how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.

Hayward Historical Society, Ron Partridge photo show, "From the Byways to the Highways"

We had a blast. Despite huge changes in Hayward, my dad was able to get me to the Historical Society Building. He's one of those people who can still remember how things looked years ago and run a commentary on all the changes. I was hoping we'd pass Eddie Badiati's place, but we didn't. (This guy is legendary in my dad's mind for hot dipping all parts of his car's engine in chrome when they were teenagers and cars were God.)

The evening was terrific. Great group of enthusiastic people showed up, and my dad was funny, encouraging and inspiring. Thanks to Jeanine Sidran, Education Director, and all her crew, and the board members who made our evening.

Pictures of the evening say it best: (first photo by me, second Jeanine Sidran, and last three by Thomas Taylor. Thanks for sending them to me!)

Hayward Historical Society, watch me wrangle my dad, roughly equivalent to wranging a dozen cats!

Off to speak at the Hayward Historical Society tonight. They have the traveling exhibition of my dad's photographs, From the Byways to the Highways, which I curated from two shows we did a couple years ago. One of them, at the California Historical Society, I co-curated with Sally Stein, the other, at the Oakland Museum, was curated by Drew Johnson.

CERA, California Exhibition Resources Alliance, travels shows to small California museums for a moderate price they can afford. They do really cool stuff. I especially love their photography exhibits. Great photos that have to do with California history or California photographers.

We'll be showing the short film, Outta My Light, that my sister Meg Partridge made withour dear friend Dyanna Taylor. (Her dad, Ross Taylor, was our dad's best friend, so the film is highly personal.) After the film, my dad jumps up and answers questions and I basically provide continuity and fill in the gaps. Guaranteed to be fun for all.

ADHD and good Feng Shui in my writing space

Ever since I heard of the label, ADHD -- Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder -- I thought it probably described me pretty well. I come from a family full of people who can't say the alphabet from A to Z, can't remember appointments, can't sit still, but are full of genius ideas about how to take photographs or put together scanning tunneling electronic microscopes. We've got a couple math geniuses and a few who can't add simple numbers. Spelling in my family is totally random.

Wonder about yourself? check out this easy self administered test with a few simple questions. I scored really, really well.

And then there is my son who never went to class as an undergrad, but preferred to just do the reading and show up for exams. And why didn't he go to class? "The professors talk too slow." Actually, honey, it's that your mind is going too fast.

The good thing about being ADHD is that it frees your mind to run in really interesting directions. The tough part is putting it all together in a logical way.

Fortunately, I have an awesome, amazing friend, Sydney, who loves good Feng Shui. She is determined to help me in my kinetic quest to get my writing done by helping me set up a comfortable, efficient work space. Syd's into clean, non-cluttered desk space and just had some brain waves about how to redo my office. I wish I had a "before" picture so you could see how totally different it looks. but... AH. New space.

The joy of getting a totally wonky first draft done

I've just hit one of the most amazing points in writing a book: I've finished my crappy first draft. This isn't a draft that I'd be willing to show my editor, or even anyone else. Far, far cry from that.

This is the draft where I start trying for some semblance of order. I'm a very intuitive, free-form writer. So I start writing by what my lovely friend Bruce Coville calls "barfing on the page." And another pal, Deborah Brodie, more tastefully calls "dessert first." (Funny that they are both eating/un-eating metaphors.) The basic idea is just get something down. Write down snippets of scenes, put bits of character tags down. You can do the hard work later.

Then after I have masses and masses of this stuff, I start trying to arrange it which is absolutely my weak point as a writer. (and as a human, I have to honestly say.) I write up big charts on a huge piece of butcher paper taped on my wall, I go through stacks of post-its. I whine a lot during this stage. And despair. Eat huge amounts of chocolate, the darker the better.

Then I begin putting everything in some kind of order. So I've got scenes in first person and scenes in third. Characters inexplicably come and go, and my main character has a split personality from having so many different, weird issues. There are giant, looming empty spots and optimistic little notes that begin with "TK" journalist speak for To Come. (Don't ask me about the TK/TC thing, because I have no idea.) Last year I took a class from Dennis Foley (very kick-ass, no whining allowed) at Writers.com and this was one of his helpful hints. Put in TK -- you can search for it later -- and keep moving.

So now I have 59,997 words, of which probably 58,997 will need to be replaced at least once and probably two or three times, but I have a START.

Next up: another Bruce-ism: "run your character up a tree and throw rocks at her." I've done that. Now, I'm clueless how to get her down more-or-less in one piece.

Sunset

I love it when the light begins to intensify as the sun goes down. Colors deepen, distances seem to compress. Then, when it is truly dusky, I can have a rush of feeling very melancholy. There is some pause, some loss in the air. I think there's some English or Scottish word for this. The gloaming?

But tonight as I was bringing in wood for the stove, the sky lit up and my melancholy disappeared in the blaze. To celebrate, I sat down and wrote for four hours.

How do you do this novel writing? Laurie Halse Anderson and Neil Gaiman

Now that I'm working on a novel, I'm racked with insecurities. Can I do it? How do you do it? How do other people do it?

I find other writers' blogs very comforting. Laurie Halse Anderson recently left a character writhing on the cutting room floor, and found her novel is better off for it.

Here's her answer to a query asking if it was hard:

"The different parts of the writing process feel like different countries to me. The etiquette and customs of one country is extremely different from the next. In the early drafts, I include everything that falls into my head and I love it all. I could never cut out a character at that stage. When I get to later drafts, that changes. The only thing that matters is what works best for the story. if I fall in love a character and she doesn't work in the story, she's gets cut. I can always send her flowers, take her to the movies, or go out for coffee with her. But if she isn't a vital thread in the fabric of the story, out she goes."

Neil Gaiman took a huge, anxious leap away from home to get a grip on his novel, then returned with something (pages? confidence?), to home and garden shed and family, and finished.

Here's a bit from a recent blog of his, answering the question of how he writes:

"The truth is, as the truth about so much is in writing, that there are no rules, and even a writer who normally does things one way doesn't have to be consistent. You do what produces pages. You keep moving forward. If I'm really stuck on a scene I'll sometimes skip to the next scene I DO know how to write, and often by the end, the solution to the one I was stuck on is obvious, or I can't even remember why it was a problem." Check out Neil Gaiman's blog for more.

Helpful. Comforting. How we all twitch around and get mental space for some parts of the writing and listen and imagine and then get ruthless and use a different part of our brain to rewrite and then send off what we've done to our trusty editors and sit on pins and needles till we hear what is good and what is rotten and we make the changes we can make and send it back again and try to forget all those wonderful characters we spent so much time with. We take to hanging out in cafes without a stricken look on our faces and go to yoga and see friends who probably though we'd died or been incarcerated and pay our ignored, overdue bills.

And then? Start the whole damn thing over again.