Theodora Goss

Status report: It’s been a dreadful day. Would you like to know what I did for most of it? Well, I’m going to tell you. When I first wrote Chapter 2, I used the Penguin edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. But the scholarly edition, the edition used by scholars in their research – what they call the authoritative version – is the Oxford Complete Works. So what I did today was go through the last section of Chapter 2, which is on Dorian Gray and “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (for which I had used the Harper & Row Complete Works), check all the quotations, and correct all page numbers in the parenthetical citations. Every single one. It took hours.

I keep telling myself that I’m learning valuable things in this process, but sometimes I’m so bored that I could sob into my decorative pillows, and sometimes I’m so bitter that I could kick the walls. And I’m starting to feel the way I felt when I was working as a corporate lawyer: as though I’m spending time that I could be spending doing so many other things – writing stories that people are actually going to read, for instance. I think my disenchantment with academic writing started the day I went to a seminar on publishing academic books and learned that selling 3,000 copies was considered a success – an academic best-seller. At that point, I had already published my short story collection, and it had sold well over 3,000 copies. And I thought, but I want people to read what I write. I don’t want my work to sit in a library somewhere, where only graduate students consult it. I want to communicate.

So, as I mentioned, today was dreadful. Once my work was done, I had to do something. I didn’t know what – it was already seven o’clock, and here I was in the suburbs, with nowhere to go. Stuck.

So I did the best I could. When I’m feeling desperate, I usually try to make or change something. So I went to the fabric store and bought a pillow insert, so I could make a pillow out of the fabric I bought yesterday. I don’t have time to actually make it now, but at least I have everything I need, for when I have the time. Then, I went to the bookstore and bought three decorating books. These, specifically:

Something seems to have happened to decorating, and I think it’s a good thing. It’s an interest in a more casual, artistic, cottage style. That’s the style I like best, using older pieces, making rooms beautiful, comfortable, filled with space and light. But also quirky, with individuality and character. Each of these books is about that style. I bought the French General book specifically because I like the French General aesthetic: it’s actually a store in California that sells all sorts of things, including fabric designed by the owners. Here is the store’s website.

So today I’m completely despondent, but at least tonight I’ll have beautiful pictures to look at. And I’ll think about what I want in the house I’m going to have, someday. That Witch’s Cottage I’ve been wanting for so long, with the high, airy rooms, and the old wooden furniture, and the claw-foot tub. And the cat sitting in the window, while white gauze curtains blow in the breeze. (With an enormous garden, filled with roses and herbs, and a sundial, and a pond.) That’s the sort of thing I need to keep me going, when I’m dealing with everything I’m dealing with now. That dream, and the knowledge that I’m working to make it a reality.

This is going to be a short post, because I’m very tired.

Status report: By the time I go to sleep tonight, I will have finished the second section and half of the third section of Chapter 2. That means one more half-section to go. It will be the hardest half-section to revise, but I tell myself that it’s only ten pages (singled spaced, not counting footnotes, but still). It’s on The Picture of Dorian Gray and “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” by Oscar Wilde.

Today, I revised and revised, and the only fun thing I did was take a half-hour to go to the fabric store and buy a half-yard of two fabric patterns. (I keep using the world half in this post. I think that’s because I’m living a half-life.)

I thought that if I was going to invest in reupholstering a chair, I wanted to be absolutely sure I knew what it would look like. Buying half-yards of each pattern would allow me to put them on the chair itself, see them under the correct lighting. I actually didn’t realize that lighting would make such a difference: they looked much brighter, brasher, under the lights in the fabric store. I liked them so much better when I had taken them home and draped them over the chair.

Tell me what you think.  This one is Norfolk Rose:

And this one is Fairhaven:

I think I like Norfolk Rose best, for this particular chair. The nice thing about having half-yards is that I can use the fabric for making pillows. Not that I have time right now. But eventually I’ll have time, and I’ll be able to make pillows with roses and morning-glories on them. (Fairhaven actually has morning-glories on it, in colors that work with Norfolk Rose). These particular patterns have been around for a long time, and I don’t think they’re going anywhere. And they work with all the other patterns I love – the colors talk to each other. Patterns should talk to each other, they should speak the same language; they should never actually match.

Like these:

Because, you know, I’m not Diana Vreeland:

While I’m working on my dissertation, I sometimes look at the Apartment Therapy blog to cheer myself up. That’s where I saw the picture above, of Vreeland’s famous red living room. And then, just as I had done with Coco Chanel, I started collecting quotations from her.

“You gotta have style. It helps you get up in the morning.”

“The only real elegance is in the mind; if you’ve got that, the rest really comes from it.”

“Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.”

“The two greatest mannequins of the century were Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell – unquestionably. You just couldn’t take a bad picture of those two old girls.”

“The best thing about London is Paris.”

“I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity.”

“I’m terrible on facts. But I always have an idea. If you have an idea, you’re well ahead.”

“Without emotion there is no beauty.”

“Never fear being vulgar, just boring.”

“What do I think about the way most people dress? Most people are not something one thinks about.”

That sounds rather narcissistic, doesn’t it? But when you’re an artist, you have to not think about most people – what they want, what they like. Unless you’re the most commercial of artists, trying to please the public taste, not trying to do anything more than that. But if you have an individual vision, you need to concentrate on what you want to create. You need to ignore the public.

“I think your imagination is your reality.”

I think I like Diana Vreeland. But this one is my absolute favorite:

“The idea of beauty was changing. If you had a bump on your nose, it made no difference so long as you had a marvellous body and a good carriage. You held your head high and were a beauty . . . You knew how to water-ski, and how to take a jet plane in the morning, arrive anywhere and be anyone when you got off.”

If I could take a jet plane in the morning, I think I would get off in Paris . . .

Status report: This morning, I went to the university library to pick up some books and photocopy an article.  I wasn’t able to finish the footnotes to the second section of Chapter 2 yesterday, so I’m going to work on them tonight. And then tomorrow, I’m going to complete the second section and go on to the third section.  Once that’s done, later this week, there will just be the introduction to write.  And then, the entire dissertation will go together.  I will spend August making final revisions, and hand it to the committee on September 1st.  At least, that’s the plan.

But this afternoon I took some time off to show my friend Luke Taylor around the city. Luke and I first met when he was in middle school.  His mother was a friend of the family, and she knew that I was a writer.  Luke wanted to be  a writer as well, so she told him that he should talk to me about writing.  I still remember reading some of his earliest stories and writing him a recommendation for his first writing workshop.  He’s now a college student working on a degree in filmmaking.  We met up at the Boston Public Library and walked through Copley Square, which was once again holding a farmer’s market.  I particularly liked this booth with sunflowers.  Van Gogh would have liked it as well.

We walked through the Common.  Here you can see one of the swan boats, and the financial district in the distance.

I’ve always liked this part of Boston, which reminds me of a European city.  Here is the bridge over the pond.

We walked across the bridge and through the park.  There are always musicians playing here.  In summer, it’s as though Boston becomes an enormous performance space.

I took a picture of these roses in full bloom.  At first I thought they must be hybrid teas, since that’s what you always see in parks.  But I smelled them, and they were almost certainly the David Austin English roses that were developed in the 1990s.  They smelled almost like roses should, although the David Austen roses don’t have the heady fragrance of the true old roses.

Lining the park are the brownstones Boston is famous for.  I put Miss Lavender’s School of Witchcraft in this neighborhood.  It seemed like the right place.

I should probably have gotten a better picture of the Capitol Building, but the streets were clogged with people and buses.  That’s what Boston is like in the tourist season.

We walked to Quincy Market, where there were more tourists and street performers.  I wanted to show Luke the touristy Boston, so he could at least say he’d see it.

But then we headed across the river, to Central Square.  We had lunch at Asmara, the Ethiopian restaurant, and walked across the street to Pandemonium, the science fiction and fantasy bookstore.  I bought Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.  It’s a book that’s trying to make a point, and I want to see what sorts of stories they’ve chosen to make it.  We walked down Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Yard, which was also filled with tourists.  I miss the way it used to look when I was in law school, with elms like the pillars of a great cathedral.

Harvard was also having a farmer’s market.  I tried Kombucha, simply to say that I’d tried Kombucha.  It was all right.  But honestly, I’d rather just have tea.

Of course we had to stop at Burdick’s for chocolate.  They have the most amazing pastries.  Honestly, the best I think I’ve tasted in the United States.  They taste like pastries you might buy in France, where pastry-making is an art.

Then we walked back to Harvard Square and stopped in the Coop.  I remember when it was very much the Harvard Cooperative Society.  Now, it looks more like an average bookstore.  (Coop is pronounced like a chicken coop, by the way.   Not like co-op.  At least, it was when I was at Harvard.)

We took the T to MIT, where we went into the MIT chapel, which was designed by Eero Saarinen.  It’s one of the loveliest, most restful modern buildings I’ve ever been in.  From the outside, it looks like a brick cylinder surrounded by a moat.

On the inside, it’s luminous.  What looks like falling rain is actually a cascade of metal rectangles that reflect the light.  The chairs are simple, almost like Shaker chairs.  It’s all brick, stone, wood, metal – and light.

Finally, we walked down to the Charles River.  The view from the river is one of my favorite views of Boston.

See what I mean?  We walked across the bridge from MIT to Boston, and then went into the Boston University bookstore.  Yes, our third bookstore of the day.

At that point we had seen downtown Boston and Cambridge, three universities, three bookstores, and a river. We were tired, and it was time for me to get back to work. But it was so nice to get out for an afternoon, show the city to someone who had never seen it before, talk about the differences between Boston and where we had grown up (since both Luke and I grew up in Virginia). Also, talk about the differences between writing and filmmaking, which was a fascinating topic.

Now I’m going to work on the second section of Chapter 2, as long as I have the energy. And I’ll be back at it tomorrow. When I get particularly tired, I remind myself that the world is still out there. It’s big and beautiful, and I will spend a lot more time in it. Soon.

Status report: I’m tired and despondent. The revisions to Chapters 1 and 3 are finished, except for the introductions, but I’ll need to write the general introduction first and make sure those are consistent with it. I’m working on Chapter 2. I’ve revised the introduction and half of the first section. By tonight, I’ll have the entire first section done. Then two more sections to go. Those will take a bit more time, because I need to add some footnotes. Once I have Chapter 2 done, all I’ll need to do is write the general introduction, for which I already have nine pages of notes. And then I’ll put the whole thing together, go over it all one more time, and it will be done. At that point I’ll only revise what I’m told to. The whole thing should be ready to go to the committee on September 1st.

I write all this to remind myself of how far I’ve come, how much I’ve already accomplished. How little, in the grand scheme of things, still needs to be completed. I need that sort of encouragement, because the day to day of it is grueling. It’s hot, I’m despondent as I’ve said, and there isn’t a lot I can do that’s fun or interesting. At least I’ll have the trips to New York and Asheville to look forward to.

I honestly don’t know what to write about today, except perhaps fabric. Yes, fabric. Yesterday, I bought that Victorian chair, and during a break from revising, I went to the fabric store to get a sense for what sort of upholstery fabric I might want on it. Because, as you know, it needs to be reupholstered.

So I looked at a couple of my old favorites, like Waverly’s Norfolk Rose:

And Waverly’s Fairhaven.

These pictures are taken with my cell phone, and they’re darker than the actual fabric, which has a cream background.  I was thinking of the Waverly patterns because they’re fresh and feminine, which is what I want on this chair. The chair itself is visually heavy, so I want a fabric that’s light. And I was thinking of roses because there are two carved roses on top of the back rest, and I thought the visual echo might be interesting.

Then, while I was looking at fabric patterns online, I saw this:

It’s the same pattern as the pillows I bought several weeks ago, pink and red geraniums on a taupe background. I fell in love with it when I saw the pillows, and I still love it. So I put one of the pillows on the chair to see what it would look like:

The pattern is probably too big, isn’t it? So I don’t know. I like it better than the Waverly, but I’ll have to talk to the upholsterer and see what he or she says. (Also, it’s quite expensive, about $32 per yard. But it’s worth paying for upholstery fabric, because you’re going to live with it for a while.  Also, no visual pun on roses, but that’s all right.)

So at least that distracted me for about an hour from the dissertation.

It’s hot and I’m having no fun at all right now. And I think, my life needs to change, and it needs to change soon. Or I’ll jump off the roof. (No, that’s not a serious threat. I don’t think I’d look very attractive splattered on the driveway. I’m much more likely to look out the window toward Camelot, get into my boat, and float down the river. That’s more my style.)

It’s such a small thing to keep one going, a chair to reupholster. But some days, that’s the sort of thing that gets me through.

Status report: Today, I worked on Chapter 2. I will be working on Chapter 2 late into the night. But I took some time to go to my favorite antiques store, where I did something that may be very silly, I don’t know. I bought a chair. This chair, specifically:

I know, the upholstery is tattered and stained. But the chair itself is a lovely old Victorian piece, with roses carved on the top. (Those did not come through well in the photograph.) It will need to be reupholstered, of course, which means that my $40 chair (yes, that’s how much I paid for it) will probably need another $140 worth of work. But I saw it sitting outside the antiques store, and something drew me to it. Some pieces of furniture have a sort of charm about them, something that makes them particularly attractive. I liked its proportions and how low it was: the perfect height for me. I can imagine it reupholstered in a Waverly pattern, perhaps something with roses on it. And I have to say, when I sit in the chair, even in its current tattered state, it has a sort of magic about it: I feel calmer. I think proportions do that to us, make us feel certain ways. In my grandmother’s apartment in Budapest, with its 18-foot ceilings and enormous windows, I always feel calm and at ease.

And I need calm now, because my life is a mess. I have so much to do, and there’s simply no way to keep up. You can always tell when my life is a mess, because my room is a mess.  There are papers and books on the floor, pictures that still need to be hung up months after I bought them.

The necklace I bought is still on top of the dresser in its box, rather than in its proper place in my jewelry drawer.  I still need to move the painting behind the mirror.

The beside table is overflowing with books I haven’t read, although at least I’ve managed to clear off the chair.

There are stickies on the table, because I’ve been marking pages as I read.  Research, you know.  At least the bed is made.  I can’t stand unmade beds.

In the other bedside table is the manuscript for a poetry collection that I’ve had no time to work on.  The shelves are covered with writing projects in piles.

The books are completely unorganized, so when I go to look for one, I look on all the shelves, trying to remember where in the world I put it.  I miss the days when I knew where my books were, but that was in the apartment, two years ago.

There are stickies on the walls and on my desk.  The desk itself has a constantly revolving pile of papers, depending on what I’m working on that day.

I think I have three computers in my room: my current one, my old one, and the netbook.  Plus my Blackberry.  Well, at least I won’t lose contact with the world.

The other desk is covered with the dissertation, in piles.  Also my calender, marked to show all the deadlines.  There are so many of them!

And that’s the end of the tour.  The desk with piles, the printer.  Paper, paper everywhere.  When I die, will I be held personally responsible for the deaths of all those trees?

I know, all I’m doing in this blog post is complaining. But that’s all I have for you tonight: complaints and the knowledge that I need to get back to Chapter 2.

Someday, and it’s going to be someday soon, I’ll have a space I love.  It’s going to be perfectly organized, and everything will be in the right place.  I’ll know where my books are.  The paintings will be hung, properly framed, on the walls. There will be no piles on the floor. The new chair will be reupholstered, and I will sit in it, looking around, pleased and satisfied.  Until then, I’ll do the best I can with what I have, even if I sigh when I look at it. And I’ll trust that it’s coming – the place in which I’m going to write all those brilliant books.

Status report: It’s been a strange day. I’ll tell you why in a moment, but first, an actual status report. Chapters 1 and 3 are revised. I’m working on Chapter 2. I’m going to try to finish that chapter over the weekend, so that next week I can focus on the introduction. I need to get that done by August 3rd, because on the 4th I’m going to New York. I’ll be there until the 7th. Then I’ll have another week to revise, and then I’ll be in Asheville for a couple of days. It will be nice to get out of town for a while.

So my status report is that I’m working on Chapter 2, hoping to have that finished soon. And I’ll be working on the introduction next week.

Why did I have a strange day?

Well, as you know, the edits to The Thorn and the Blossom were completed yesterday. Today I looked at the Amazon page for the book, and I saw this:

The cover! Isn’t it gorgeous?  Now, I still can’t tell you anything about the story itself.  But I can tell you this.  What you see above isn’t the cover of the book.  No, it’s the cover of the slipcase.  The book actually goes inside the slipcase.  And I’ll tell you about it as soon as I’m allowed, but I promise that it’s going to be just as beautiful.

When I first saw the slipcase at Readercon, I thought, it looks like a secret garden.  Like a thicket through which you push, to enter an enchanted place. I hope the book itself will be that sort of enchanted place to its readers. I also think it’s interesting that the design looks so much like something I would choose and love. I mean, doesn’t it look like the dress I’m wearing in the photograph on this page? A little like a William Morris design gone wild and natural, rather than stylized.

And then, I received the final proofs for my Folkroots column in the August issue of Realms of Fantasy. Which also has a gorgeous cover:

My column for the August issue is about monsters, as you can see from the title. I think it will interest Realms of Fantasy readers. I certainly hope you like it! And the next column will be “The Myth and Magic of Narnia.” I especially enjoyed writing that one.

Finally, my brother wrote me a message that said, “Did you knew Kevin Brockmeier mentioned you in Salon?” And he sent me a link to this article: “A Wistful Farewell.” It’s about the closing of the Borders bookstores, and in it, prominent authors reminisce about their experience with Borders. Brockmeier writes,

“The truth is that I’ve only known three Borders branches well – in Ann Arbor, in Madison, Wis., and in Gainesville, Fla., – but at each of them, I’ve discovered books I grew to love, and not just best-sellers, either, but strange little small press books: In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing by Lucia Perillo, Written Lives by Javier Marias.”

So, Kevin Brockmeier read and liked my short story collection! Now that is seriously cool.

Do you see why my day has been so strange? Here I’ve been, correcting the citations to H. Ling Roth’s The Aborigines of Tasmania and adding a footnote on the influence of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels on H.G. Wells. And all the while, the important things have been happening. And they’ve had nothing to do with my dissertation. They’ve been the real things, the things that happen in the world. The very large world outside this room and the research I’m doing – a world I very much want to be a part of. And will be, I hope. Soon.

Status report: I didn’t work as much on my dissertation today as I should have, because I was still working on The Thorn and The Blossom. Today was the day we made the final edits, so I spent quite a long time on the telephone with my editor, and then there was some email correspondence. (Thank goodness for my Blackberry.) While all of this was going on, I thought, this is a new paradigm, isn’t it? Because I don’t think this is the way publishing used to work. I like the new paradigm: I think it gives authors more freedom than they used to have, allows them to do things they didn’t used to be able to do. But I can understand why it makes some writers nervous. It means inhabiting a world that moves more quickly, in which you have to be more connected than before. It’s harder to live in a cabin on the side of a mountain and just write – I mean if you actually want a writing career.

So it was a busy day, but in the middle of it, I took a walk around the neighborhood and took pictures of the sorts of things that inspire me. I said once that I called my decorating style Shabby Mission. The “Shabby” comes from Shabby Chic, a decorating style associated with the designer Rachel Ashwell. It’s often mischaracterized, so if you google the words “shabby chic,” you may get pages of pastel horrors, which is not at all what the style is about. At its core the style is about accepting the faded, the shabby, the incomplete. Ashwell lives in Los Angeles, and she focuses on pale woods, walls, linens. Those sorts of things look right in the California light, but not in Massachusetts. The “Mission” comes from the fact that I love Mission Style, with its solid woods and dark colors – its greens and ochers. But true Mission Style is incredibly expensive, and it can also be cold. In magazines, Mission Style rooms often look as though they are museums, as though one could not live in them. So I combined the two ideas into Shabby Mission: a style informed by Mission Style, but also by the lived-in aesthetic of Shabby Chic.

My aesthetic, if you want to call it that, is based on the natural world around me. I love the colors in forests, gardens. Like the hostas that are blooming behind the shed.

Or this pile of split wood in a corner of the back yard.  I love greens and browns.

Across the street were these mismatched but rather charming mailboxes.

Down the road to the park was this garden, in full bloom.  This is the sort of garden I like, spilling over its wall.

In the middle of the garden was this birdhouse. I like that it’s built of wood, and I like the Black-Eyed Susans beneath it.

The park is surrounded by forest, and by the forest path was this large plant.  I’m not sure what it is.

And look at these gorgeous ferns. I love the way green layers on green in the forest. That’s something I try to do in my decorating.

So now, on to the decorating itself. I brought home some Queen Anne’s Lace and put it in a vase on the dining room table, next to a bowl full of acorns.

In the dining room is this shelf, with books and my favorite green pottery.  Do you see what I mean by Shabby Mission?  It’s Mission Style, but not the expensive stuff.

I like chandeliers. This one is in the dining room. I also like curtains that let in light, like the lace curtains here. Those were made out of table clothes that I cut in two. The painting is of a road through the forest, by my grandmother.

This shelf is for supplies of various sorts, in green file boxes. The painting on top is of me, painted by my grandmother. I really should hang it up, shouldn’t I?

This is the small shelf I bought at the antiques store, with books (including a lot of Ruskin).  Next to it is a basket with blankets.  I keep baskets filled with blankets in several rooms.  You never know when you might need a blanket, and they just look cosy.

These are pillows on the futon, which serves as a sofa.  I realized at one point that I decorate as though I were living in a forest: in browns and greens.  (I sewed the smaller pillow to the right from a William Morris fabric.)

Remember this small shelf?  It was a thrift store find.  On top is a pottery bowl from the same thrift store, filled with pine cones.  Right now, this is where I’m keeping the books I need for my non-dissertation research.

And finally, this is what my floor looks like at the moment.  Things are actually more shabby than I would like, with piles of papers and books everywhere.  I prefer things to be worn but neat.  Here is the basket I keep in my room for blankets. It’s actually larger than it looks: I took this picture from a strange angle.

That’s all for now. I still have work to do tonight. But I thought I would write a post on my preferred decorating style. I’m doing so much writing nowadays that it’s actually difficult to sit down at the end of the day and write about writing. You may be getting more posts like this one for the next few weeks! But I think that in the end, these posts are also about creating the writing life. After all, I write much better in rooms decorated like forests.