The last place I’d want to live 🏠 & secret writing projects

Hello my darlings!

How are you? I’m doing pretty well! I’ve been making a lot of progress on various writing projects this week, which always makes me happy (more on that later). I’ve been rethinking my morning routine lately, which isn’t really a routine at all, and usually involves some form of scrolling or internetting that pre-ruins my day before it’s even started. A lot of writers swear by morning pages, where you brain-dump into an empty document or blank page of paper, but I can’t even do that kind of writing before the coffee has hit my veins or all I write is, “I am tired. I need more coffee.”

I had a horrible round of insomnia last week and the week before it, a topic which, funnily enough, my old college pal Willa just wrote about in her new newsletter, Dark Properties (you can read it & subscribe here). My insomnia is not so much about not being able to fall asleep, but waking up at two and three and four in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep. Not being able to sleep suuuucks. It puts me in a horrible mood and fucks up my whole day. I had to cancel lunch plans with a friend I’m dying to catch up with because I was too afraid to drive on the 10 on four hours of sleep.

The one insomnia tip I have to share is one my mother-in-law passed along to us from her doctor when we were struggling with jet lag after coming back from Japan: sleep when you can. If that means going to bed at a weird hour or taking a long nap, that’s okay. Your body will eventually adjust. But it needs sleep, so don’t force yourself to stay awake at certain hours just to be in rhythm with your time zone. You’ll get there eventually just from living there.

Speaking of time, what a busy week it is, holiday-wise! My goodness, with the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day in the same week, how did the basics among us survive? That’s a lot of opportunities for members of boring heterosexual couples to disappoint each other!

A friend hosted me and my husband Ross to watch the Super Bowl at his place last Sunday. Two thirds of us were just there for the food and the commercials and the Usher and the day drinking (the game started at 3:30pm for those of us on the west coast) and the Taylor Swift reaction shots. I actually don’t really care for most of Taylor Swift’s music, but I love how she can turn conservatives into spluttering balls of rage. “I wish the whole game was just a camera pointed at Taylor,” our friend said. I had to agree.

Anyway, Ross explained to us what a first down is, so now I understand football. Or, I understand it a little more beyond “sometimes famous people’s boyfriends play it” and “CTE is a nightmare” and “mm, tight pants.” Maybe next Super Bowl I’ll learn what holding is and why it’s bad! “It’s honestly wild how little you and Ben know about football,” Ross said afterwards. It sure is!

And I know this is unbelievably edgy, but my husband and I aren’t really into Valentine’s Day. For one thing, it falls six weeks after Christmas and his late December birthday, and I am always fully tapped out, gifts-wise. For another, we both hate the overpriced prix fixes that restaurants do on Valentine’s Day (let me order off a real menu!!), so we usually celebrate by going out either before or after the actual day. Also, I know I’m married, but going out and being surrounded by only other couples doesn’t exactly thrill me. Maybe it’s the married equivalent of, “I only like my own kids.” There are a lot of couples who are toxic or miserable or always fighting or otherwise just shouldn’t be together. And there’s a weird competitiveness in the air on Valentine’s Day that I don’t like.

I have a good story about couple competitiveness. One time, when Ross and I were still living in Brooklyn, we spent a weekend up in the Berkshires at a condo his grandma owned. There weren’t a lot of restaurant options where we were staying, so we went to a cheesy lodge-type place within walking distance whose main decor was a vast variety of animal heads mounted on the walls. This dinner was a prime example of Ross and I being able to have fun together literally anywhere.

We had been dating for several years at this point and were seated next to a young man and woman that you could tell were a pretty new couple. They were both dressed very nicely for what was, again, kind of a corny place. At one point, Ross came and sat on my side of the table so we could share food more easily, and she clearly thought that was romantic, so she made her date move to sit next to her. We were buzzed on stupid green and blue-colored artificial fruit-flavored “martinis,” and I remember having a discussion of whether or not I should order the lobster (I was paying). We may have been a little loud due to being pretty tipsy at that point. “Sure, get the lobster, live a little!” Ross said, so I ordered it, and then the woman in the other couple ordered it as well, clearly thinking he was spending big money on me.

It was so funny, but also, maybe, a little sad. We were in the comfy longtime couple zone and were having the best time because the stakes could not have been lower. They did not seem to be having quite as good of a time, judging by the tense, quiet moments I caught in between cracking lobster claws, ordering appletinis, and laughing a lot.

I get it, though. New love is so exciting, but it’s also awkward as shit. You’re evaluating every little thing they do and reading into it way too much. Things are so much easier when you’ve been together forever and can give each other the benefit of the doubt. For instance, this year, Ross and I just decided to exchange cards on Valentine’s Day and then go out to dinner this weekend to save money. If he had suggested that for our first Valentine’s Day together, I would have been appalled! So cheap! So low effort! Where’s the romance? But Valentine’s Day isn’t a test for us anymore, so I don’t really give a shit what we do that day (meatballs, as it turns out–I made spaghetti and meatballs). 

Let’s get into some things:

- Baking! I made salted caramel pretzel blondies for the Super Bowl, which also had dark chocolate chunks in them. They were delicious, but there was a lot going on in there. I’m going to say something controversial yet brave, which is that I actually think they would have been better without the caramel. To be fair, I did not make my own caramel as that recipe recommends (I don’t have a candy thermometer), but I used some Kraft caramel squares instead, and once they cooled, the caramel bits were just so… chewy.

When I told Ross I was making blondies, he really poo-pooed them, saying, “There’s only one good blondie.” He was talking about our friend’s parents’ yellow lab, who is named Blondie. (She is, indeed, a very good girl.) He vociferously lobbied for the superiority of brownies over blondies. I’ll tell you what I told him, which is that I’ve had a lot of disappointing brownies in my life. I always want them to be dense, and rich, and fudgy, and so often they are dry and crumbly and lacking intense chocolate flavor. The bar is much lower for blondies. “What you just said doesn’t make any sense,” he said. Well, I don’t want to say how many blondies we both ate, but let’s just say the pan did not last more than 24 hours.

- Writing! I often hear from you that you like when I write about writing, so, here’s that. I’ve been doing a lot of organizational work lately, making lists and breaking larger projects down into smaller steps. I’ve been trying to turn my phone on DND and write in 25-minute increments (the Pomodoro Method). And, of course, I’m constantly outlining, both things I want to write, and things I’ve already started writing.

A few weeks ago, I met with a writer/director friend from my CollegeHumor days to talk about one of my screenplays, and she shared an idea from a rewriting class she’d taken that I thought was brilliant: take the latest draft of your script and write a list of every scene in it, with a short synopsis of what happens in each scene. It’s kind of like a backwards outline. Then, you can use color coding to identify what scenes correspond to each other and what other pieces you’d need to change if you change or move something. It’s a great way to make structural edits after you already have a full draft. I of course outline before I start writing, but things change in the drafting and revising process.

I intend to do this with at least two of my scripts, and maybe my YA novel, too. Sometimes it’s also just satisfying to do writing-related work that isn’t drafting. I don’t have to be voicey and sparkling with wit when I’m not drafting.

I’ve been working more aggressively on my humorous memoir/book of essays lately, trying to break the project down into smaller pieces, and those pieces into even smaller pieces, so I can trick myself into writing because it seems easier. I finally went through everything I’d written and made a spreadsheet to track the status of each piece (draft, outline, just a really good title, etc.), and now it seems insane that I was operating without that before. I wonder if, in some ways, writing a collection of lots of little pieces is actually more difficult than writing one long story? Some days, it certainly feels that way.

I wrote a personal essay on a topic that I really think hasn’t been explored much that I want to submit to Modern Love when submissions reopen in March. The more pieces I write for this book, the less strict it seems I am on what exactly it’s about. It’s a book about all my weird day jobs, sure, but it’s also becoming more of a collection of stories about ~the Millennial experience~. I worry a bit about broadening the concept. I want to keep it firmly as a funny critique of capitalism, but I also don’t want that idea to limit what else I can include as part of my story.

I can also reveal to you a somewhat secret project I’ve been working on, which is a feature screenplay for a jukebox musical based on Weezer’s blue album. It’s a rom-com about two employees of a record store falling in love in ‘90s Los Angeles. My goal is to finish it by May, when the album turns 30 (!!) years old. I’m writing about it here for accountability. I know there’s a 99.999999999% likelihood this never gets made, but isn’t that true of every script? With the strikes and everything in Hollywood so stuck, I just felt sick and tired of trying to write “the right things” and wanted to write something that’s just fun and deeply creatively fulfilling to me. It’s my impossible project, and it’s been so liberating to work on. Maybe you need an impossible project, too.

It’s the reason why I flew up to the Bay Area to see Weezer perform last August (which was incredible, highly recommend if you get the chance to see them, they’ve totally still got it). I have to say, though, I kind of regret choosing a Weezer album, even though I think this one lends itself very well to the theatricality of a musical format, because I started to do research on the record and the band and Rivers Cuomo in particular, and there is just. So. Much. Material out there!!! They have a millionty-two studio albums, and then there are all the unreleased demos, Rivers’ solo stuff, the musical he tried to write between Blue and Pinkerton, and I even found a bootleg download of The Pinkerton Diaries, a rare book which was released with limited edition vinyls of Rivers’ home recordings and is 247 pages worth of his journal entries and letters from 1994 through 1997. It’s… a lot, and I’m not trying to write a biopic, but I wanted a full picture of the album and the artists who made it before I tried to write an interpretation of it. Research, man! It can be a beast!

So, check in with me in May and see how I’m doing on that goal, alright?

- Chloë Sevigny says that Los Angeles is the last place she’d want to live and she’s not wrong for having her personal reasons, but I do find it funny how in depth she goes. The vegetation? The hardness of the water? Damn, bitch! You’re naming new reasons I’ve never even heard before!

The last place I’d want to live is my hometown of Long Valley, New Jersey. It is so small that whenever I tell other New Jerseyans that that’s where I’m from, I have to put it into context with a slightly larger town; “It’s kind of near Morristown?” (It’s not even that close to Morristown, it’s like a 40 minute drive.) I remember doing a current events report in first grade about the first stoplight going in at the center of town. It used to be mostly farmland and is still pretty rural, but with early ‘00s McMansion developments scattered throughout. I’m not sure about today, but when I was growing up there, it was incredibly demographically homogeneous (white, cishet, Christian, Republican, upper middle class). The most famous person from my high school graduating class is a pageant queen-turned-Fox News host. That really says it all. (The most famous person from my college graduating class is a drag queen. That kind of says it all, too.)

I don’t want to dump on the town because hell, maybe you live there. But suffice it to say, I am definitely a city person. I like the vegetation in Los Angeles! It’s prehistoric! I like the monotonous sunshine and the alienation. I like feeling like an intellectual because I read a book this year. I like the beautiful old art deco theaters and the modern rooftop bars which are all the same. I even like the industry being here, most of the time. I like that everyone shuts the fuck up at the movies. We had an earthquake the other day, and I liked feeling the ground roll underneath me and then feeling disoriented for the rest of the day. It’s a beautiful, weird, interesting place to live.

(The most famous person from Los Angeles is everyone.)

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Alright, that’s about it for me this week!

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Until next time—get the lobster, live a little!

Love,

Liz

XOXO