What do all these things have in common?  An epic music video. 

It’s that time again.  Starting July 16th, we will be filming a new official Budian music video for the one of our newest songs, “Forest for the Trees” that we are hoping to release on our next album.   I’m planning on taking some video for sneak peak band vlogs for our Youtube page.  So stick around.  It’s gonna be good!

Does this differentiation really have to be made?  Apparently, says Mark Herrmann of Aon and Above The Law blogger.  “It’s remarkable how long it takes some junior lawyers to realize that their job is not to do the minimum amount of work needed to get the partner off their back, but rather to help the partner accomplish something,” he says.

In other words, it helps if you try to see things from your taskmaster’s point of view.  What’s his or her larger issue? Keeping your nose to the grindstone will get the job done, but perhaps just barely…if you don’t know (or particularly care) why you’re doing it in the first place.  Not sure where your project fits into the big equation?  Ask questions.

It’s also important to try to remove yourself from the mindset that seeks to avoid “boring” or unwanted projects. They’re not going to go away.  And, again, if you focus on the forest (project) as opposed to just the trees (tasks) in front of you, you’ll realize that “the need to complete projects, rather than to perform tasks, never ends.”

According to Hermann, this isn’t about ranking or hierarchy.  This is an attitude, a willingness to help a partner to achieve what he or she is trying to achieve.   One way in which the author categorizes helpful and not-so-helpful associates is to call the helpful colleague project-oriented and the unhelpful colleague an order-taker.

This breakdown is illustrated in the following scenario:  A partner tells a junior lawyer that he’s had a thought about a brief, and that he’d like the junior partner to develop that thought as it relates to the brief.   Now, an order-taker would come back with only one sentence altered. Tehnically, that might be correct, but it wouldn’t prove very helpful in the long run.

A project-minded individual, on the other hand, might catch on. That one little thought—based on years of experience–might just change the entire playing field. The junior partner, if  she or he is smart, will approach the partner at day’s end with the pertinent parts of the brief–introduction, statement of facts, the argument and the citations–revised to reflect the partner’s thoughts.

Or, if he or she isn’t totally on board with the partner’s way of looking at the case, the junior partner might say:  “I’ve considered your thought, read over the relevant cases and examined our evidentiary cases.”  As Herrmann’s scenario unfolds, he has the junior associate summarize with: “I’m not sure that your idea works in this context.  These are my concerns…. [And] I was thinking of modifying your thought to add the new argument in a slightly different way….”

And there, ladies and gentlemen, we have a helpful, project-oriented associate who sees the forest AND the trees.   Bottom line:  Don’t merely perform tasks, notes Herrmann. Instead, “execute projects.  The world will beat a path to your door.”   To read more, go here:   http://abovethelaw.com/2011/06/inside-straight-tasks-versus-projects/#more-74864

-EM

I visited the Circus Trees in Gilroy Gardens,  Hardone Gardens in Saratoga, San Francisco Botanical Gardens, Filoli Gardens and the Montalvo Gardens.

I love the photographic research, and can’t wait to try and knit / crochet my inspirations for the Forest, For the Trees project!
Here is the link to my Flickr Photo Stream!

Enjoy the greenery!

I am unable to fully comprehend what my problem is. I have been thinking that it’s because I wrote Chapter One and now I’m rewriting it before I continue so that the storyline moves along smoothly. However, I know that on my laptop there’s a chapter that I loved only a few weeks ago. Surely, then you’d tell me to turn away from the laptop and write the chapter long-hand. I have to admit there is something cathartic in
scrawling across a page with a pencil, not caring about the words until you go back over them. (That last sentence comes courtesy of receiving a burst of inspiration last week and writing the end of the novel. – I must add that I love these last few pages, to me they’re filled with emotion.)

However, when it comes to making the book live up to these last few lines, all I can think is, ‘was that it? Is that my inspiration soaked up?’ I’m currently reading The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner, and I must say that it’s been helping me; although I will not be able to make my quota of ten books this month, although I did just reach fifty, so by rights, I’ve caught up with myself.

I’m asking for cures for writer’s block since my  usual cure didn’t work: this cure consists of moving away from the laptop, walking across the room and drinking a cup of tea. I mull over the novel and consider it, so much so that I’ve decided that a character cannot die in the first chapter, two characters must be thrown together and my antagonist is a bitch. Yet I can’t write the novel, I can’t bring myself to actually put pen to
paper, or press my fingers against the keys and create magic on the screen.

I want this book to be everything I love about prose; I want it to be dark and seductive. I want my characters to be loved at some points and hated in others. I’ve been considering one of my characters over the last few days a lot as well. Is he being controlled or is he doing something for his own means? Questions keep arising and I debate whether I’m able to write my novel.

Some writers seem to find it easy to write a first draft, but if something niggles me I go back and fix it immediately. I wonder whether my problem stems from writing a first draft over a year ago and seeing it as nothing but problematic. In the beginning my cast of characters was huge! Seriously, I’d bring in new characters all the time and they’d be exactly the same as other characters.

A beautiful critiquing friend of mine, carraka.wordpress.com, told me that the same problem was rising in the rewrite. I’d realised this problem
and decided to fix it. I am not killing my babies, I’m completely slaughtering them. Characters are being cut left right and centre. There are only three characters left that were in the first draft; two MCs and an antagonist. Or they could all be antagonists – Juniper Brown could be the ultimate anti-hero! She’s not, but she could be.

What’s also amazingly humorous is that I can sit here and write a blog, I can exalt my characters and my drafts, but I cannot for the life of me write.

So please, please, please, if you’re reading this, help me with my writer’s block. Give me your wisdom, or your kind words. Offer to send me boxes of Yogi Licorice Tea because it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever tasted.  Just, please, help me.

Until next time, that is all.

So today I’m going to share with you guys one of my writer secrets: the best book I’ve ever read aimed at a writer.
That’s right. Aimed at writers, by a writer. Now, I’m not talking about one of those dime-a-dozen How to Pen a Bestseller in 90 Days kind of book – there’s only a gazillion of them out there, all pitching to weekend-warrior newbie writers and simultaneously imparting bland tips & tricks, truisms of the “show, not tell” variety, and “action, then reaction.”

No, what I’m talking about is a book that talks straight to your heart if you are a committed writer. If you’ve been around the block long enough to know there is no holy grail to find on the way to publishing success, other than hard work. This is NOT a book about the therapeutic process of art, a la Julia Cameron, either. Trust me, there’s less therapy and recipes for bestseller in this than any other random book out there.

No. This book is simply the ONLY book that has reached me completely. Written as though its author had somehow crawled inside my head, saw all the silly insecurities, idiosyncrasies that crazy writer stuff that us artists carry within us but refuse to admit to anyone else.
Not only has this woman seen that secret part of me, heard all my hopes, fears and random crying bouts, but she is speaking directly to it.

I’ve skimmed through plenty of books that profess to give advice to writers, from Stephen King to et al, and while they’re packed with useful tips, they’ve never reached me the way Forest For The Trees has. Penned by former editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ballantine, Simon & Schuster, and Doubleday and current literary agent Betsy Lerner, you’d do yourself a tremendous favour to read it.

Lerner’s book runs the gamut from insider’s perspective (having purchased many new authors’ manuscripts in her editorial capacity), to presenting friendly and unabashedly honest advice as someone who has been around writers her entire life and has seen exactly how nutty and eccentric we can get. In other words, she really gets it.

I don’t really know what else to say, except that I don’t unequivocally recommend books very often, but this one is worth its weight in gold. Not only have I found it comforting, but I’ve bought it for my writer friends.
It’s that good.

And when installing my kudzu knitted ivy and leaves at the Future Studio in December, I thought how beautiful it might look to have a textured natural background instead of a white wall.

My student and friend Sue has gone felting crazy, and now I have jumped on the bandwagon too.
Thanks to Suzoo’s Wool in Costa Mesa.

The owner is fabulous and friendly, and the store has everything a novice and pro needs!

Special thanks to Sue who felted this little Walter after his run-in with a Pit Bull last weekend.  I know he is on the mend because all of our socks have begun to disappear again.

I will be hosting a knitting workshop at the Grand Central Art Center, Saturday, April 23, from 1:00-4:00 pm. First-timers and pros are welcome to partake in knitting, crocheting, fiber arts, venting, conversations, and even a little installation art. Participants will be shown how to make ivy, and critters which will no doubt make wonderful inhabitants to the forest Caterina and The Arroyo Arts Collective will be growing this Fall at The Annex at Avenue 50 Studio. All artists are welcome to the Stitch-n-Bitch, and to participate in this site-specific, fiber-based installation.

Sue will be my special guest and bring materials to teach felting!

goodbye LCD

I need to say something about the last LCD Soundsystem show and the supposed end of them.  I’m actually surprised I didn’t write this earlier.  I watched the show from home, which in certain ways made up for the fact I wasn’t there.  Not sure what I would’ve done were there no webcast and I just had to watch small bits of YouTube video to try to piece together what other people witnessed.  Thanks to Pitchfork for a great stream so the rest of us could enjoy it with friends in living rooms all across the country.

LCD Soundsystem has been my favorite band for the last 6 years.  I think it was sometime in the fall or winter of 2004 I heard of James Murphy and bought the DFA compilation #2, featuring “Yeah” and “Beat Connection.”  I can’t be sure, but I think that the Pitchfork 9.0 may have been the first time I heard of DFA #2 or even DFA itself.  I can’t be sure, but I’ll fess to be being late.

Regardless, my love of LCD didn’t really strike until I went to SXSW in 2005 for a film I worked on and stuck around for the music conference.  It was there I attended one of those “looking back can you believe it?” shows.  Shows that don’t happen often.  The lineup at Elysium that night was: Ratatat, Hot Chip, M.I.A. and LCD.

James Murphy got us all to move and sweat, but he also was a bit surly.  In typical fashion, I think he wasn’t too pleased with the sound mix.  Also some intoxicated people, including myself, might have been too eager in facetiously taunting him that he’s losing his edge.  I had the distinct impression he wasn’t seeing the humor in his own joke.  And I know he talked back to the audience a little.  That made this schlubby older dude conducting irresistible grooves even cooler.

So yeah, LCD is gone.  It’s sad, but I’m going to take the outlook Murphy implied at the end of the last show.  They played their last song, sure, but he’s not done making music and we’re all still alive and able to enjoy lots of other great and interesting music.  But as for the other implication in his “retiring” of LCD at its peak because he has a hang up about getting too old to make and perform dance music…I’d say first, does that mean he’s going to stop listening and dancing to dance music?…and second, get back to me when I hit 40.

Forest For The Trees Exhibition

Amy Caterina of the blog Free Range Knitting  has sent out a call to all knitters and crocheters for an  exhibition of epic ecological importance. As she states on her blog:

I used to collect books about writing.  How to write, what to write, when to write, how to seduce the muse and beat the system.  A fair amount of them supposedly contained the Secret, Key, and One True Way to fame, fortune, and a literary life.

I bought a lot of these from the remainder and discount tables at the local bookstores.  This doesn’t reflect their quality—necessarily—so much as the vast quantity of advice arriving every other day to shove the older items off the shelf.  Regardless of price, some contained solid advice.

Some, in retrospect . . . didn’t.

Over the years and through many moves—and my discovery that writing professionals often blog—I’ve weeded my core collection down to four that were written by authors who don’t believe  that Getting Published was the sole goal of telling a story and that effort, care, and a fair amount of reading and research, were crucial.

Other books come and go, and even stick around,* but I would not gladly part with these:

On Writing by Stephen King.  Say what you want about his chosen genre—I say, more, please—but the man writes stories that non-readers read, and this book explains at least part of how he does it.  The chapter about the writer’s toolbox alone is worth the price of this book—but the rest of it is, in my opinion, is just as good.  Mr. King believes in good storytelling, the kind that sends shivers up your spine and tears down your cheeks—and he knows how to break it down into understandable components just as well as he writes it down into compulsively readable fiction.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.  Ms. Lamott is so open and honest about how difficult she sometimes finds this whole writing business that I can’t help but be reassured.  She is a well-known author who still struggles—in one chapter, she describes the time her agent (editor?) told her that the book she’d wanted to write wasn’t the one she’d actually written.  So, she took it home and spread the pages and sections on the floor and walked through it, literally, cutting and pasting, adding and subtracting, until it was as fixed as she could make it . . . that, to me, is one of the bravest acts of writing I can imagine.

Telling Lies for Fun and Profit by Lawrence Block.  Full disclosure—I hold Mr. Block at least partially responsible  for my lifelong love of characters with alternative moral compasses:  Bernie Rhodenbarr, Matthew Scudder, Keller—hit man, philatelist, philsopher—and Martin Ehrengraf, bless his twisty soul** . . . What’s an impressionable girl to do?  Some of the wry advice in Telling Lies might seem a little outdated—Mr. Block started out in the heyday of magazine fiction—but his principles of storytelling remain sound, and the stories about storytelling make for great reading.  If you have the opportunity to hear him speak—the man tours like whoa and visits a lot of libraries—go.  You won’t regret it.

Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner.  I bought this book when it was first released and read it and consulted it until it fell apart. A second edition is out now, updated for the electronic world, but it still explores the expectations, assumptions, and methods of everyone involved in this writing, agenting, and publishing business.   Forest made me think about how I operate as a writer and why, and how to work with that.  In my opinion—-and believe me, I’m not just  saying this because my current copy is autographed and I spend a lot of time over at Ms. Lerner’s blog-based community—this is one of the best writing books out there.

Arguments?  Agreements? Suggestions?

____

Wondermark Comic from the relentlessly talented David Malki !

*Someone recommended Nancy Peacock’s A Broom of One’s Own (MacDougal Street Baby?) and after checking it out of the library I bought it.  It’s a keeper, but it’s not precisely a how-to.

**Even Chip Harrison, though he’s not exactly bent, just randy.

The idea of taxes is unpleasant: you can’t talk about them without saying exactly what they are. Taxes are taking a portion of wealth transfers and giving those portions to some other entity which is typically unknown to either of the parties in a transaction, or only tangentially associated with the transaction itself. Explaining why taxes are needed isn’t necessarily helpful. Most people know they drive on public roads and take advantage of federal bank deposit protections — and if they don’t participate in either of these things, you are talking to a hermit who keeps his or her money in the form of precious metals in a coffee can and only appears at the fence line to scare away tresspassers; Godspeed.

Taxes are like insurance: in an ideal world, everyone would be personally responsible for their behavior and no one would be left accountable for something not entirely his or her own fault. The world is not ideal. People crash cars and cause damage that must be repaired at a cost; drivers are required, for this reason, to carry auto insurance. Almost no one purchases auto insurance because they think that they are extremely likely to cause an auto accident and be financially responsible for repairing their own or someone else’s car, leg, or lung. People purchase auto insurance because on a large scale, it is more reasonable for the government to require that all drivers carry insurance than to rely on the ability of the minority of accident-causers to foot the bill for damage they cause.

Taxes, in an oblique sense, work the same way. Taxes that fund things like improved medical care for the poor prevent those without private health insurance in the US from relying entirely on emergency medical services, for which they are simply not equipped to pay. (Obviously, as with auto insurance, requiring everyone to purchase insurance would significantly improve this, but we’re not here to talk about that today.)  Providing education services and subsidies means that an effort is being undertaken to prevent people from slipping to a lower literacy level, and directly related to that, a higher level of poverty. It’s a form of insurance, administered through taxation. These programs don’t guarantee that people will succeed in starting their own businesses, or move into a higher tax bracket, or become more informed consumers, but they are a small, concrete step toward stopping the exact opposite from happening.

The real, uncomfortable, and truest argument is that taxation will prevent you from becoming destitute — not the other way around. If you are paying taxes on your salary, you are first, and foremost, earning a salary — if you are not, you are not paying income taxes. This is conveniently left out of any screaming match about the government stealing your money through taxation. Yes, you may feel that the amount you pay in taxes is too high compared to the amount you earn, and you are probably right in the sense that life is expensive, and real food costs more, and things just don’t last as long as they used to and you get less for more.  But if you aren’t paying taxes, the number of things you will pay for out of pocket in the event of an emergency or personal disaster, or just the course of the average life, increases.

Without taxes, there are no unemployment benefits when you lose your job. There are no food stamps for your children when you lose your job. There are no health clinics to get a flu shot to try to prevent your children getting ill in the winter so that you don’t have to use emergency health services once you lose your employer-sponsored health insurance benefits, when you lose your job.

If you are the kind of person who still does not acknowledge that you will likely lose your job at some point, you are not being realistic enough to complain about much of anything.

Without taxes, there is no [admittedly limited] Social Security income to prevent you from becoming destitute as a senior citizen, once retired from those jobs you are lucky to have had. If you think that there is no way that you will reach retirement and be in need of Social Security income — whether due to your greater than average money-management skills or any other reason — consider that Social Security has prevented literally millions of seniors from living in poverty or working until their deaths. It’s easy to think that with prudent financial planning, and a hefty dose of go-get-’em bootstraps-pulling, you’re capable of doing a better job planning your future than a government program or tax schedule. The reality, though, is that the majority of people are not capable.  Taxes, like insurance, save us from our own pride, and let us down easier in the case of catastrophe than we would otherwise be able to do.

A couple days ago, Betsy Lerner invited her blog readers to share the titles of their works-in-progress .  The one she liked best would win its writer an autographed, revised copy of her book, Forest for the Trees.

Full disclosure:  I’ve read my first edition copy of Forest to the point where it’s in desperate need of a spinectomy and if I were to contract a dread childhood disease and  consign it to the rubbish heap for fear of contagion, it would probably become a Real Editor as per the Velveteen Rabbit Rule.  It’s funny and encouraging and has helped me understand so much about the writing business and the business of writing.  Awesome book—and great holiday gift for that writer you know, or the one you are.

So I submitted The Pigeon Drop and went on to read what ended up being looong list of great titles, feedback, and suggestions; Ms. Lerner has a talented and supportive community over there.  When I checked back on my entry, there was some confusion over what a pigeon drop was*—plus a couple of interesting guesses—and someone  asked me to give a brief idea of my premise, which I did.

Guys . . . my title came in first.  Not only that, but Ms. Lerner had some encouraging things to say about the premise.

That should keep me going for a while, once I can stop making this breathless, squeeing noise every time I think about it.

But before I do, please join me in another brief happy dance!

___

*It’s a common street scam with many variations, usually based on “found” money  and the offer to share it, if you’ll only put up some of your own cash to prove you’re an honest person . . . who wants a share of money that doesn’t actually belong to you.  If you agree, you’ll end up with your fair share all right, minus whatever you put up.  And, yeah, you’re the pigeon in this scenario.

I suggest you stalk your demons. Embrace them. If you are a writer, especially one who has been unable to make your work count or stick, you must grab your demons by the neck and face them down. And whatever you do, don’t censor yourself. There’s always time and editors for that. (Lerner, 2000)

Betsy Lerner in The Forest for the Trees, encourages “The Ambivalent Writer” to find the real reason they write. Writers who do extensive research and read broadly in the face of a deadline are called – procrastinators. Learner describes ambivalent writers as those too frightened to share their emotional truth. This writer is stuck and sadly that writing may never stick.

Lerner speaks the truth with a mentor’s heart. She says we write because we are haunted, bothered, and uneasy in the world. Writers suffer from excessive feelings and must bleed on-screen to find motivation – the reason they write. Nobody has to read this first vent, but it is part of the process. If you do not connect with your own heart – you will not connect with anyone else’s. There is enough writing out there for the head. People want writing for the heart. This explains the reason Creative Nonfiction is so popular . They want history, biography, and science in story form; they want narrative to matter.

Recently while watching Book TV on CSPAN,  I was mesmerized by Rebecca Skloot discuss her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She writes about science, a topic I am not normally interested. She was talking about a woman, known to most medical researchers only by her cells, the HeLa cells. The author tells Henrietta’s little known story:

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

I would have switched the channels if they had told me the story of the women in their books that changed their world of medicine. They wrote science as narrative. I wanted to read this science book and know more about Henrietta Lacks. Rebecca Skloot allowed Henrietta’s life touch her own and it touches our heart. Skloot does more than write a textbook about cancer cells, she tells a

Henrietta Lacks 1940s

story she that haunted her about a poor black woman. “Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. They launched a medical revolution and a multimillion-dollar industry.”

Writers carry around demons. Some of those demons are emotional, some are physical, some are spiritual, some are just stories that won’t go away – they haunt us and taunt us to deal with them. Writers are gifted with the opportunity to reach around and grab those things by the neck and wrestle it into words.

A wise graduate professor suggested that before we write anything else, that we deal with the elephant in the room. My Creative Nonfiction class has been a profound journey. It has forced me to look deep into the eyes of my demon and decide if I want to keep doing this writing thing. Why would anyone want to go through the agony of digging into the foundation of your soul, scaffolding your sentences so others can safely see what you are building? Then submit to the final humiliation – exposing your grammatical disability and giving your editor the power of life and death over your work? Why bother? That’s the question every writer must ask and answer. In that answer – you will find your motivation to write.

There is a cool post up at Bungie. The post is about how Guardian looked before the release of Halo 3. There’s some cool pictures, and good article to read. Go read it now.

Forest For The Trees

3 piece Punk Rock ‘n’ Roll today from a band that for some reason are still relative unknowns, at least in Britain anyway. They have the kind of catchy pop hooks that would make them ideal candidates for a bit of chart action but alas they seem destined to stay as a support act for other arena superstars.

Fuzzed out riffing is the name of the game with Danko Jones and rock n roll cliches are everywhere, not that it is a bad thing it makes for a pretty sweet party album. Never Too Loud is the most accomplished and strongest album of their career and is also the most commercially succesful but  this doesn’t mean that there is any less dirty blue rock going on, it still kicks some fuzzy ass.

Best song is probably ‘Forest For The Trees’, which coming in at 6 minutes long is an epic compared to most of the album, John Garcia (Kyuss) and Pete Stahl (scream, wool and goatsnake) guest on it, this probably explains the length.

The full album can be found here on Spotify

He can’t see the forest for the trees or can’t he see the trees for the forest?

The two are not interchangeable.

If you can’t see the forest for the trees (most commonly used) it means you can’t see the big picture because you are focused on the details.

On the flip side it can be said; you can’t see the trees for the forest meaning you can’t see the details because you are focused on the big picture. This isn’t used often.

I do know, it is better to learn what shape is the box.

I am going to watch the ripples on the pond.