A Moment of Jen
THE NEXT BEST THING — In Stores July 3rd!



Saturday, January 19, 2002
posted by Jen at 1/19/2002 11:51:00 PM

It's snowing. Finally!

Here in the Village (Queen Village, to be precise), we like it when it snows. It gives those of us who live within a two-block radius an excuse to throw an impromptu dinner party, featuring whatever we can scavange at Chef's Market or the SuperFresh on Fifth Street, play board games or watch movies, and postpone the inevitable shoveling. It's very cozy. When my sister Molly lived with me, she had one of those fake light-up logs that sat on top of streamers of red and orange cellophane. You'd turn it on and a little fan hidden under the fake light-up log would blow, causing the streamers to hiss and twist in a very realistic fire-type crackling-log noise. It was quite something.

The snow started at around 10 in the morning. At noon or so, Susan stopped by. "What are we making for dinner, kids?" she asked. We went to the market, buying all kinds of goodies, and a nice bottle of wine. Susan wound up doing a version of the fig-jam-and-roquefort pizza we had at a restaurant last week (it sounds gross, but isn't). I mashed potatoes and baked a cake. Adam roasted a roast. Robert and Lisa made a salad with beets and toasted pecans. Everything was sublime, except my cake developed a major crater in the middle, which I disguised by filling it with frosting (ah, frosting. Spackle of the gods). And then, as soon as the guests arrived and marveled over the cake, I felt compelled to say, "Actually, it probably isn't as good as it looks. There was kind of a sinkhole in the middle, so I filled it with frosting."

Adam said that I was giving out too much information, but I figured, better tell people what the deal is, lest they be confronted with a slice where the cake-to-frosting ratio was something like one to one and have to pretend to be polite about it, rather than wondering, "Um, what exactly happened to this cake?" And seriously, I don't know what happened. I put it in the oven, it was fine. I baked it, it was fine. I took it out of the oven, it was fine. Ten minutes later the whole thing had collapsed faster than Quentin Tarantino's career. It was quite tasty, though ("it" being the cake, not Quentin Tarantino).

Over dinner, the talk turned, as the talk often will, to Minnie Driver's love life. Susan saw enough of one of the supermarket tabloids to tell me that she's allegedly dating Harrison Ford (I, personally, was much more interested in reading about Monica Lewinsky's latest woes. She's on the cover of Star, I think. "LEWINSKY BOTTOMS OUT," reads the headline. "LONELY. FAT. BROKE. SCORNED." Or as I liked to call it, my twenties.)

But back to Minnie. Harrison Ford! I mean, he's old enough to be her...well, in any event, he's old. Hot, but old. Well-preserved, but old. My friends and I can't make heads or tails of it. As best we can figure, Minnie's on some kind of romantic scavenger hunt-type thing, where she has to date (and, eventually, get dumped by) a guy in his twenties, a guy in his thirties, a guy in his forties, and a guy in his fifties. And if you have to date an older man, you could do worse than Harrison Ford.

Over and out....
| #



Friday, January 18, 2002
posted by Jen at 1/18/2002 07:10:00 PM

It's wrong to gloat. It's bad form to take pleasure in the failures of others. But now that Talk magazine has indeed died an ignominious death, let me just say, for the record, in my best Nelson from the Simpsons voice -- HAH hah!

In the wake of Talk's folding, there will be pieces a-plenty of what fabled editrix was like to work with, whether or not she wept as she told staffers the bad news. As for me, I never got to work with Tina. I did, however, try to interview her. It was one of the more wretched moments of my life as a reporter.

In the summer of 1999, I was assigned the ungrateful task of trying to write a story about Talk's launch for the Philadelphia Inquirer. I'd read reams of biographical material about La Tina. I'd talked to various NYC magazine-watchers and media critics. I'd interviewed Graydon Carter and Russ Smith. All that remained was trying to get a few minutes in the presence of Ms. Brown.

I called Talk and was delivered into the haute-Brit hands of the in-house publicist. "I'm teddibly sorry," she lied. "Ms. Brown has no time for interviews."

I pointed out that the "no time for interviews" rule hadn't applied to the Washington Post, which had just published a lengthy interview with Tina. (I felt like also pointing out that I remembered Ms. Tea and Crumpets when she'd worked at Miramax, and hadn't sounded even vaguely British. I felt like saying, "Come on, honey, you're about as British as Madonna!" But I decided to keep my mouth shut).

So I did what journalists do well -- I begged. I pleaded. I promised the publicist that I had no hope of even attending the grand launch party (and boy, I'm sure she risked a rupture trying to hold back mad gales of laughter at the thought of inviting me to hobnob with Salman and Demi), and that I just needed a few moments in the presence of Herself so that I could finish my story. Barring that, I needed a telephone interview. Not to much to ask for -- especially from a nascent publication whose bosses, you'd think, would crave the free ink.

Nothing doing.

"Ms. Brown," I was told, "is on holiday." The only time she could possibly spare even a second to call me was on a Thursday afternoon in late July. A Thursday afternoon, as luck would have it, that I was scheduled to be on a holiday of my own, a bike-and-camping trip through the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

What was a girl to do? I wrote the story -- a long, long story, a story that I would love to link to, but can't, because it's buried somewhere in the for-pay section of the Inky's archives -- around her. I went off on my bike trip, arranging my schedule so that, on the appointed Thursday afternoon, I'd be in possession of a fully-charged cell phone, and near a pay phone, in case the cell phone wouldn't work, I checked my voice-mail religiously and, wouldn't you know it, the day before our scheduled phone chat, Tina backed out. "Too busy," said the message. "Teddibly sorry." Yeah, right.

I called back. I begged some more. I explained that this was our big Sunday Arts & Entertainment centerpiece and that the paper (okay, the reporter), was going to to look stupid if we ran a huge piece about Talk and couldn't get one lousy quote from Tina. Nothing doing. I wound up using my cell phone to edit the story with my understandably disappointed editor, with the obligatory graf reading "Brown declined to be interviewed for this story." And on that day, on my way to Skaneateles, I solemnly vowed that no matter what else happened, now matter how stellar a staff it attracted, no matter how vigorously it pimped Gwyneth Paltrow, no matter what stunning relevations it promised in re: Chandra Levy's sex life, I was never ever ever going to purchase so much as a single copy of Talk.

And now it's gone!

Heh.



| #



Wednesday, January 16, 2002
posted by Jen at 1/16/2002 07:55:00 PM

You know what the worst part of being a stay-at-home writer is? People assuming that you have no job at all.

Picture this: my husband and I are at a family gathering. One of his cousins approaches. "So when are you going to write something new?" he demands.

I explain that I am hard at work on my second book (which is true, by the way), and that it's going to be published in the spring of 2003 (also true. May, we think).

"Yeah," says the unsatisfied cousin, "but when are you going to write something I can read???"

I take a deep calming breath and explain that because I'm on leave from my day job as a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, it might be a while before I write something he can read.

"On leave?" he repeats. "You know, when you're on leave from a job, you're on leave from a paycheck!"

Right. Thanks. Because I never would have figured that out on my own.

"Okay, you got me," I say. "I'm actually lying on the couch all day, eating bon bons, polishing my ring and watching "The Price is Right."" (Not true. I have actually not succumbed to the lure of daytime programming, although Bob Barker is mightily tempting).

And the weird thing is, he isn't the only one to assume that even though I say I'm writing, I'm actually just playing some extended version of hooky, sitting on my laurels, getting pedicures and taking in matinees.

Take my Nanna. I told her the "if you're on leave from a job, you're on leave from a paycheck" story, hoping, for some unknown reason, that she'd rise to my defense and say, "Well, of course you're working!" Instead, she sighed and said, "Well, you know, a year is a long time to be on leave from a job." Argh!

I think the trouble is that, for most people, writing really doesn't look like work. You sit there. You think about things. You consult other books. You type. It's all very internal, and very quiet, and sometimes it involves spending an hour or two reading other people's stuff, and occasionally it involves a walk, or a nap, and from the outside, to the untrained eye, it looks a lot like you're just hanging out, or daydreaming, or...taking a nap. But it is work, and it's lonely sometimes, which is hard to remedy. When you take your laptop to the neighborhood coffee shop you can't help but feeling like a wretched poseur because the very act of taking a laptop to a coffee shop is completely redolent of conspicuous artiness and flat-out fakery. Real writers don't write in coffee shops. Would-be poets and frustrated undergrads write in coffee shops (exclusively about themselves, I think). Real writers write at home. Sans latte.

So needless to say I am quite desperate to finish up the draft of this book and stick some chapters on the web just so everyone can see what I've been doing, or will at least be convinced that I've been doing something.
| #



Tuesday, January 15, 2002
posted by Jen at 1/15/2002 08:49:00 AM

So yesterday morning I'm taking Wendell for his walk, and we come around the corner and see the Smallest Dog Ever. Now, this is saying something. Wendell is a ten-pound rat terrier, so he's generally one of the smallest dogs we see, but this dog was tiny. Miniscule. It was a teacup poodle with dark brown fur and a large black sweater, and it looked like a punctuation mark, cowering by the newspaper box.

"Is your dog friendly?" asked the woman with the little dog (and see, that's cool for me to write, because usually I'm "the woman with the little dog."

"He barks," I replied. Which is true. Wendell, meanwhile, is making a major display of his disinterest, sniffing around the base of a tree.

"Mine, too," she said.

We decide to go for it. Her dog walks toward Wendell. Wendell walks toward the little dog. There's a moment of standoff, where they both hold perfectly still. Then the little dog starts barking, and I swear, it was the funniest thing I've ever heard.

"RAOWR! RAOWR! RAOWR RAOWR RAOWR!" Except you have to imagine that really high-pitched and agitated. The dog sounded like a little old lady having a sneezing fit. I cracked up, which I felt badly about later, because I know Wendell doesn't like it when people laugh at his shows of masculine (well, neutered male) aggression (also, he doesn't like it when people say Yo quiero Taco Bell, which we also get a lot of.) Wendell didn't know what to make of it. Then he started barking, too, and the little dog walked all the way to the end of his leash as if to say You want a piece of me? There's not much to go around, but I could take off this sweater and we could get it on. Heh.


Meanwhile, big excitement around here (and by "around here," I mean the second floor of my house, consisting of the laundry room/home office and the bedroom/repository of clean but unfolded laundry). I finished the second draft of the first third of my second book, IN HER SHOES! Just two-thirds more to go!
| #



Monday, January 14, 2002
posted by Jen at 1/14/2002 10:48:00 AM

I SAW RUNNING MA... -- er, The Chamber -- with my jaw literally hanging open. This is horrible, horrible, bad, degrading, awful stuff -- literally, you get to watch people suffer physically in order to win cash prizes (and not even that much money, either. Seven thousand damn dollars for enduring incredible heat, air-cannon blasts and a painfully vibrating chair in your underwear? You'd have to pay me a lot more than that just to get me on TV in my underwear). And the funny thing is, I thought September 11 was supposed to have put paid to all of those decadent spectacles of the watch people fight! Watch couples cheat! Watch people dive into vats of worms and poisonous scorpions! variety. Didn't I read somewhere -- like, everywhere -- that what we hunger for now is intimate dramas, familiar comedies, shows that celebrate love and connection and the resiliency of the human heart?

And now we're watching something that's essentially a snuff film minus the finale? Sheesh. Embarrassing.
| #



Welcome to A Moment of Jen, author Jennifer Weiner's constantly-updated take on books, baby, and news of the world. Email me at jen (a) jenniferweiner.com.

JenniferWeiner.com
Facebook
Follow me on Twitter

To order Then Came You, click on the cover




To order Fly Away Home, click on the cover




To order Best Friends Forever, click on the cover




To order Certain Girls, click on the cover




To order The Guy Not Taken, click on the cover




To order Goodnight Nobody, click on the cover:



To order Little Earthquakes, click on the cover:



To order In Her Shoes, click on the cover:



To order Good In Bed, click on the cover:



My bio
JenniferWeiner.com
Advice For Aspiring Writers

This weblog is now syndicated via this link.

Subscribe to
Posts [Atom]



Jen International

Goodnight Nobody - Norway


Little Earthquakes - Norway


The Guy Not Taken - UK


Good In Bed - Japan


Good In Bed - Dutch


The Guy Not Taken (Dutch)


Goodnight, London!


Goodnight, Amsterdam!


Petit Earthquakes!


Little Earthquakes Japan


IHS Japan


GIB Norway


IHS Norway


Chaussure à son pied


Little Aardschocken


In Her Shoes - Polish


En sus Zapatos


Bueno en la Cama!


Little Earthquakes - Germany


In Her Shoes - Germany


In Her Shoes - UK


In Her Shoes - Italian


In Her Shoes - Dutch


GIB in Finnish


GIB in French


Germans love Hasselhoff and GIB:


Cannie hits Japan!:


NEW - Little Earthquakes Sweden


Cannie goes Swedish!


Cannie hits Rio!


Cannie Goes Dutch:


Polish:


Jen's Favorite Links:

All in the Family:

Throwing Things
Joe Weiner
BenderSpink

News and Media:
MediaNews
Television Without Pity

LitLife:
Moby Lives
Publisher's Weekly
Booksense
Old Hag
Beatrice
Sarah Weinman
Galley Cat
Southern Comfort

Baby Mama:
Bad Mother
Parsley


Snarkspot archives:




Powered by Blogger



Copyright 2002-2008, Jennifer Weiner

Listed on BlogShares