Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

Menu

Breeze

by

The wind blows like crazy against my office window whenever the seasons are in transition or the temperature changes quickly. Wind Of Change, why must you be so literal as you rattle the stupid windows?

But I guess there is a corresponding truth, because stuff is starting to happen, especially with the book. For the past twenty months The Wilder Life’s life has progressed at the glacial pace of my writing, so it’s a little stunning to have things going so quickly now over the past few weeks: copyedits, design, page proofs, the metadata going out into the universe and getting sucked up into the pneumatic tubes of all the retail websites. And even though I spend every day at work bringing books into existence, this whole process still feels mystifying from the other end. Like I’ve found myself looking at the line on the Amazon page that says “Shipping Weight: 1 pounds” and wonder how anyone could know that at this point. Even when I know perfectly well how it’s possible, because I know there are production managers and purchase orders and specs and templates and cartons and I have to sit in meetings about this stuff every day, but never mind, it’s still sort of magic when it’s your book.

So now there it is—the book writing part was so huge and lonely, it’s hard to get used to the way things are now, with the book stuff just bubbling along on its own in one corner of my life.  Between now and the pub date in April things will be intermittently frenzied: for two weekends in October I’ll be flying out to bookseller trade shows where I’ll meet a whole lot of indie bookstore folks at these speed-date-type dinner events. I still can’t believe that I get to think about other things.

Such as: remember how Chris and I decided that in exchange for his accompanying me to LauraPalooza I would go with him to see all the movies in the Cremaster Cycle? I mean I knew I would do it, but I guess I was counting on being able to make a funny-cute joke about the whole thing for a while before the films showed up at an art house somewhere. But ha, only six weeks after our return from Mankato, there they were at the Music Box! It turns out it’s really hard to casually describe the Cremaster films to people. You tell them that it’s an eight-hour conceptual epic made by Björk’s husband, and it’s about Masons and Mormons and Houdini and the Chrysler Building and bees, and that it has Norman Mailer and opera and the drummer from Slayer and a lot of things made from Vaseline in it, but when you get started trying to explain nobody really wants to meet you halfway. But for three nights straight we went to the theater, and it was fun (in its way). It was also by far the least Laura-Ingalls-Wilder thing I’ve ever done.

But you probably want to see another picture of me with a Little House on the Prairie TV show cast member, don’t you? Well, here you go:

That is none other than Alison Arngrim, aka NELLIE OLESON!!!, who did her one-woman show, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, at Davenport’s last weekend. And if it wasn’t obvious from this review I wrote, I thought her book was great even by non-celebrity-memoir standards.  Her show was full of anecdotes about playing Nellie but also about growing up in Hollywood in the 60s and 70s. The audience was invited to write questions on index cards for her to answer at the end, and SOMEONE, I’m not saying who, asked her if the guy who played Doc Baker was as sexy in real life as he was on the small screen. (Answer: yes, but apparently a lot more people are still hot for Albert after all these years.) Anyway, If she comes to LauraPalooza 2012 they’ll really need to leave room in the schedule for her to discuss things like Dance Fever and Eartha Kitt. Also, she was very cool in person, and I hope that after all those camera flashes she didn’t wind up like Mary Ingalls.

While I do not have awesome stories about Deney Terrio, I will nonetheless be reading funny stuff here in Chicago next week, at Funny Ha-Ha at the Hideout on the 28th, and next month, at Witty Women Writers at the Book Cellar on October 29th. I’ll probably be trying out some stuff from the book, but hey, if you have any requests, let me know. (As long as you come to the show, too.)

Happy first day of fall! When will it be corduroy weather? Come on!

(cross-posted at wendymcclure.net, just to be redundant.)

If you miss me

by

Michigan in winter

In my world it is forever the Long Winter and I am still twisting the proverbial haysticks needed to burn through to the end of this blasted book, this bloody blanged bucking book!  BUT. I am now an occasional contributor to the Beyond Little House blog, where I have written about Miss Virginia Kirkus and have recapped two of my favorite Long Winter chapters, so you can stop by my little shanty over on that virtual homestead and say hello if you wish.

AND. I will be introducing the enchanting Jami Attenberg, reading from her book The Melting Season (read about it!) at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square this Thursday night at 7:00. And I know this is just a hurried blog post but it all kind of fits together, doesn’t it? Winter and burning and melting and haysticks and book covers with wheat on them. THERE IS A THEME TO EVERYTHING. That is how my mind goes these days.

See you in the spring!

Holly Jolly

by

2896

If I weren’t travelling for the holidays this year I might have had time for another gingerbread project. In keeping with the neighborhood theme, I was really hoping to make Governor Blagojevich’s house, complete with a little gingerbread media circus lovingly made with gumdrop cameras, licorice cables, graham cracker TV vans, etc. But since I’m leaving for Michigan tomorrow morning and had to spend the past week in a shopping/working/gift-wrapping/working/driving through stupidly deep snow/working frenzy, I guess I have to give up on my little dream of making corrupt little cookie Blagojeviches (using half a jar of chocolate jimmies just on the hair) and just wish all of you a very Merry Christmas.

And stay warm. This afternoon we went out to see friends (yes, INSTEAD of making gingerbread spectacles, sorry) and the temperature was a degree. One degree, not plural!  Though of course the windchill was negative plural multiple minus ABC-blackout googleplex degrees, so cold that the world ceases to make sense, and you travel backwards through time, and your fingers and toes hurt like hell because invisible dinosaurs are stomping on them, but it’s good that they hurt, right? It means something. Don’t ask me to explain because it’s cold. Too cold for sciencey thinking! So bundle up.

And, hey! If you’re anywhere near NYC in a couple of weeks, come see me and Attenberg read at Good World Bar on January 11th.

More in the new year, when I’ll get to tell you what else I’ve been up to these days. Happy everything!

About last Tuesday

by

Where I voted

The night before Election Day, both Chris and I slept fitfully and then got up early to vote. A little before 6 am we walked around the corner to the place where we vote—a Mexican restaurant with amazing chicken burritos and a kind of janky sign—and there was a line already, almost to the end of the block, waiting for the doors to open.

We went back there for dinner later that night, after the polls had closed and it was a mostly empty restaurant again. We had the chicken burritos and every now and then checked the TV in the corner to see how the electoral votes were doing. It was a Spanish-language station but of course all you needed to see were the numbers, and Obama’s were already in the hundreds.

We were short on sleep and nursing cruddy colds and worn out from the constant effort of trying to live an ordinary day on Election Day. We didn’t go to Grant Park. We wanted to be home when it happened, and as we sat on the couch switching the channels from one big garish map to another, it happened sooner than we thought, sooner and even more perfectly than I’d ever thought in my most audaciously jinxy thoughts.

After a few minutes I got up and stepped out on the back porch to see if I could hear horns honking or people cheering or any sign that this thing had really happened, but the neighborhood was quiet. I went back to the couch and our laptops and sat there while Obama’s win became more and more real on every screen I looked at. And then we finally sat still and watched the speech. And that was it!  It feels so strange to feel proud and thrilled of a president, and also to think of him as a president and not the just the guy who won for the blue team.

All the same, I was exhausted this whole week and somehow Barack Obama did not cure my stupid cold. And while I know I got a little teary Tuesday night, it wasn’t until Friday when I was home sick that I really felt what happened—and I was happy he’d won, yes, but I also couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the thought of how much was at stake (is still at stake) and how we wouldn’t be feeling joy and relief of this magnitude if we didn’t also sense, on some level, how unprecedentedly screwed-up this country as become. I thought I knew how awful it all was (how awful it still is) but I didn’t understand it emotionally until this week, when I have been just wrung out by gladness. And so for a little while I cried and coughed, and then I went back to sleep. But it feels like things are getting better, my cold and everything else.

Also, and this is sort of a little thing and sort of not: while I’ve never been one to romanticize the First Family, I am extremely heartened to think that in a few months’ time the “American Princesses” will be these two beautiful little girls who are not white or blond or licensed Disney characters.  I can’t help but think that will good for six-year-old daughters everywhere.

Anyway, hello, and how are you?

Extremities

by

I was in awe of all the lady-funniness going on around me at the Hideout last week, so thanks to everyone who came to see us! In addition to girl comedy, the night’s fun included being held hostage by the Ting-Tings, who apparently decided to shoot five seconds of their music video right outside the Hideout, which meant that for nearly an hour or so nobody could really leave or even go sit out on the breezy little brokedown patio and instead we were all forced to stay inside and sweat and drink our compensatory drinks, and oh, it was a nightmare. Well, except not really.

One of the things I read was based on my Bad Times entry a few years ago, but of course I had to revise and update it in order to cite new developments in the world of chain-store shopping discomfort, such as the Extreme Value Item Transaction at Jewel supermarkets. The Extreme Value Item Transaction doesn’t quite count as Bad Times, but it always confounds me just the same, because I inevitably fail to come up with a satisfactory response to the Extreme Value Item. The Extreme Value Item, for those of you who do not shop at Jewel, is a daily designated grocery item that has been deployed to a special location right there at the cash register, where the cashier can point out the fabulous savings opportunity it presents.

Is the value of the Extreme Value Item truly extreme? I have no idea because it’s never an item I’d buy. It’s always a can of nuts, or fruit roll-ups, or one of the more dubious flavors of Doritos. And the cashier has to point to it and say something like, “Have you seen our Extreme Value of the day?” Even when there isn’t a distinct subtext of I’d rather I didn’t have to ask you this the whole thing is extremely awkward. One time I tried just going, hmm! while pretending to deliberate about buying the Extreme Value, but that felt really pathetic and on some level unfair to the cashier. I’ve tried to say just, “no thanks,” but even that seems too much somehow, because when it comes down to it, I suppose I deeply resent having to take a position regarding the Extreme Value appeal of Blue Gatorade. Unsubscribe please! Now I find that most of the time I just avert my eyes and mumble uhnuhnuhnuhthanks, which is also my standard response for panhandlers and people handing out flyers and Hair Question Men. It’s still not the best response to the Extreme Value Item Transaction, but it’s all I’ve got, other than using the self-checkout or shopping somewhere where the bargains do not actually accost me.

I meant to tell you about the 5K but there isn’t much to say, other than: I ran it! Very slowly! I did the Couch to 5K program, in which you drive yourself apeshit for 7 weeks trying to measure and keep track of the myriad running/walking intervals until suddenly you really do find yourself sprinting along gazelle-like for miles, plural miles! Of course then at the 5K you see that you are are not at all a gazelle and that other slow runners are faster than you, as are some powerwalkers, people on crutches, and glaciers. But never mind! I’m probably going to do at least one more later this summer or in the fall.

There’s more to catch up on, but I really want to just be in bed now, continuing my Little House series reading kick. I’m on These Happy Golden Years now and can’t get enough of all the euphemistic horse-lust, cute little schoolhouses, and endless confounding descriptions of dress-sewing. Oh, behold the cambric basque with the darted polonaise and the lace jabot! Whatever the hell that is! Good night!

Lamest girl in blogland breaks unexplained hiatus just to plug some stuff & then leaves on vacation

by

It is what it is, people.

First there is this, and you should come:

funnyhahaladiesnight-medium.jpg

If you show up at the Hideout on Wednesday night at 7pm you’ll see me and the other funny ladies read wacky stories about female stuff like housework and ovaries and how chocolate is better than husbands. Or… something. Just be there!

Also the new BUST is out, where you can read my PopTart column on Miley Cyrus, poor little flutterbudget that she is. I just turned in the next issue’s column on Monday, which is one of the 1,472 reasons why I haven’t been able to update.

subscribe_aug_r1_c1.gif

(I am rereading all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books right now, which is why I am saying a word like “flutterbudget.” I will tell you more about it when I get back.)

Oh, and I ran a 5K somehow. I have to tell you about that when I get back, too. NEXT WEEK I PROMISE, and look, here’s some ice cream and a five dollar bill, go buy yourself anything you want in the Walgreen’s toy aisle and DON’T GIVE ME THAT SAD FACE OKAY? Okay.

Connect with me

Visit Us On TwitterVisit Us On FacebookVisit Us On Instagram