A Frolic of Her Own

The seamless transition

Much has changed since I finished a draft of a novel in (I think?) 1996.  The Web barely existed; I remember considering Michael Kinsley's decision to leave the New Republic to found Slate to be some sort of semi-ludicrous, inexplicable gamble.  It was pre-9/11, of course.  Both of those things combine to make the novel I wrote (which involved, among (many) other things, a shadowy organization plotting a terrorist attack in New York City) outlandishly dated, something that is probably a blessing in disguise.  Recently I was reading it over and many times had the thought, "This isn't half bad; with some aggressive reworking and editing, it might be publishable."  And if it weren't so dated, I might be tempted to have another go at it.  But really, I think that's a temptation I should resist.  I started writing it nearly 20 years ago, and I know that, whatever its merits, there are reasons why it was rejected.  Right now, I think it would be a pretty big mistake to go back.

Obviously, things have changed for me personally as well.  When I finished my draft, I hadn't yet acquired either of my post-graduate degrees; I was still in the process of getting my MFA. (Ironically, I took a semester's leave of absence to finish my novel!)  And, of course, I was still unmarried, still no kids.  But from the point of view of becoming a writer, the biggest change is perhaps that I was then very young, and I'm now (at least by the standards of first novelists) old.  I turned 41 last month.  The Millions has recently started a feature on "over-40 bloomers" as writers.  They certainly exist, but there are not many of them, and their stories are all so idiosyncratic that they hardly provide definitive reassurance that there is any sort of well-trodden path to making it as an older writer.

On the other hand, I suppose, the mere existence of the "over-40 bloomer" category is heartening, suggesting that some sort of narrative of late blooming exists just as surely as the (more familiar one) of the literary prodigy.  This 2008 piece by Malcolm Gladwell suggests that precocity and slowness-to-get-off-the-ground are simply two different models of artistic success.  I feel a bit odd to somehow embody both models.  When I was taken on as a client by an agent in 1996, I remember her saying something on the order of, "We decided to go with you because we thought, well, if she's writing this well at 25, imagine what she'll be doing at 40."  My novel, as everyone recognized, had flaws, but somehow being young and promising made them all OK.  Well, here I am at 41.  I forfeited my eligibility for all those "Best under 40" awards a couple of years ago, and what I was doing at 40 was teaching civil procedure, taking care of my kids, and writing law review articles.  But now at least, thanks to The Millions, if I ever manage to write something in the future, I'll have a new label, no longer young and promising but at least an "over-40 bloomer."  And (I mean this quite sincerely!) I appreciate that.

JD/MFA

I have never actually met anyone who has, like me, both a JD and an MFA, though I am certain many exist (a question I've wondered about: for those who have both degrees, which one typically comes first?).

I recently learned that Hamline University is offering a joint JD/MFA program.  Although my impression (formed long ago) is that Hamline's writing faculty is actually pretty decent, this strikes me as a staggeringly silly idea.

Second Acts in Blogging

So in the nearly six years since I last posted here, I've acquired some kids, a job (and tenure) as a professor, and increasingly strong ambitions to start writing fiction again.  I am always at least several weeks behind in keeping up with friends, daily minutiae, etc. I'm sure the same thought would have occurred to anyone: what better time to start a blog?  But then it occurred to me: I already had one!  Actually, it didn't quite work that way.  I had, in fact, completely forgotten that this blog was still up.  I did a google search on the name to see if anyone else had claimed it in the interim.  And what did I find?  I pulled up a blog that looked vaguely familiar, not so much for its content but for the persona behind it - some overambitious, striving young writer who had time to meticulously edit posts, keep up with current events, and embed her posts with lots of links.  Frak, I thought, not another one.  It was really only after I'd delved reasonably far that I realized that that person was actually ME, six years ago!  And while there's much to be said for fresh starts, there's also much to be said for inertia, so I figured that rather than start completely anew I might as well come back and refurbish the place a bit.  So I've updated some of the links, removed a couple of posts that seemed outdated, silly, and/or a little "off" in tone (honestly, why did I dislike Mickey Kaus with such intensity?), and ... well, actually that's all I've done, but I am totally thinking about, like, adding graphics and stuff.  And possibly linking this to my real name, though for now I think I'll remain identifiable but technically anonymous.

As for my purpose in starting this blog, it's mostly to spur myself to continue working on my novel, partly to collect in one handy place the links I consult daily anyway, and partly to record the usual random observations about the usual topics.  And who knows what else?  At any rate, I am happy to be back!

I give up.

Despite promises to the contrary, I just can't post regularly while trying to be a law-firm associate (though others, with more stamina than I have, manage to do it very gracefully).  I've thought a lot about taking down this blog, but I hope to return to it someday, and I especially hope not to be in my current job forever.  So I am leaving it up for now, and I may drop in occasionally.  Thanks to all who've been along for the ride.

Not just plagiarism, but bad plagiarism

If you're going to plagiarize by copying extensively from another writer, changing only a few words here and there, is it too much to ask that you at least try to improve somewhat on your source?  In my opinion, each of Kaavya Viswanathan's "borrowed" passages is a lot worse than the original.

Worst of the best

A poll of the worst Best Picture winners ever.  I can quarrel with some of the ordering, but I'm pretty much in agreement with most of the inclusions.

Billable hour woes

For all the melodramatic accounts that float around every so often about the miseries of a junior associate's life, I rarely see discussions of the unpleasantness of billing hours, in and of itself.  So far, it's actually the only thing that really, conclusively makes me unhappy at my job.  The billable-hour expectations where I work are actually fairly reasonable, all things being equal, but the process still nonetheless makes the job suck, at least for me.  Part of it is my own quirky working style; I confess that I'm a bit dreamy and lazy, and it takes me a while to actually settle in and get going on a task, particularly one that requires any creativity.  In jobs I had pre-law school, I was able to compensate for these flaws by being fairly focused and efficient once I actually got going.  Obviously, in a law firm, that doesn't work.  My productivity measured by, say, how many motions I've written is high; nonetheless, my billable hours are low.

Then there are days like today.  A project I was working on that I expected to take about 8 hours took more like 2.  For the first time in a while, all my cases are slow, so there's nothing I can immediately turn to.  The natural thing to do is to ask to get on another case, but unless I get assigned one, like, right this minute, I'll have a deficit of several hours for the month - which, added to the several-hour deficit I accumulated last week, means a full working weekend, or else several late nights, to get up to par.  I suppose I should have pre-emptively gotten on another case last week, but it was hard to tell at that point how things would shape up this week, and overcommitting often puts me in the position of having 3 things due for different cases at once, and no way to get them all done competently.

I suppose I'm lucky in that I'm now trying to start on another law review article, and slow times enable me to get work done.  Still, it's hard to clear my head of the nagging guilt/anxiety/fear of getting an end-of-month talking-to that's been fairly constant since I started this job.

TV on DVD

Sam Anderson has a nice article up on Slate on the virtues of watching HBO on DVD.  I doubt I'll ever have the fortitude to actually skip a season of a favorite TV show in order to watch the whole thing on DVD, but I certainly have experienced the pleasures of the immersive, entire-season-in-3-days experience.  In fact, I think my preferred TV-watching pattern has become: 1) completely ignore show as it becomes cultural phenomenon 2) long after the hype has died down (hence little possibility of accidentally reading spoilers in the media), succumb to badgering of more media-savvy friend and order experimental DVD from Netflix; 3) finish DVD, become distraught at prospect of 2-day wait to get remaining DVDs from Netflix; 4) break down and purchase entire season at local B&N, then proceed to watch it all over some long, feverish weekend when I'm supposed to be doing something else. 

I'll note that this mode of watching adds even more to broadcast TV than HBO; given the inevitably erratic schedule, shorter episode running time, and need to fast-forward through commercials, it's really hard to get emotionally involved in any given episode of a broadcast show.  I am watching Gilmore Girls in real time this season after having watched the previous 5 in a summer through some combination of DVD, TiVoed reruns, and (I confess) BitTorrent, and I can't figure out if the show has dramatically deteriorated or if it's just too delicate and slow-paced to work one episode at a time.  Same with Veronica Mars, for which I also switched to real-time viewing this season - did the plot suddenly become choppy and nonsensical, or is it just that I can no longer remember what happened in the early-season episodes I saw months ago?

Articles season, Part II

As mentioned, I recently submitted an article to law journals.  Despite the fact that I was a law review articles editor, I found the process both mysterious and bewildering from the author's point of view.  The blogverse abounds with tall tales and rumors, from "fast as Domino's pizza delivery" acceptances to editors who spend their Saturday nights sending out rejections.  In the midst of such craziness, the Greedy Clerks board (which should really be retitled the Not-so-Greedy Ex-Clerks board) was an invaluable source for solid information.

I'll blog later about my own experience as an author, but for now I thought I'd contribute what I can to lessening the mystery of the process slightly, by explaining as well as I can remember what went on in my mind, and in articles board meetings, when I was on the other side.  Obviously, I can't claim that this is a typical law review experience; indeed, I know that many of our procedures were unusual.  But since so many people (these days, myself included) are curious about how the process works at individual law reviews, I thought I'd put it out there.

Many law professors are concerned about having their articles reviewed by students.  While, having worked at a peer-reviewed journal I have some thoughts about how that process compares to law reviews, I will say that my colleagues on the articles board resembled, say, Ph.D. students more than typical just-out-of-college kids.  With one exception, all of us were over 30 and had a master's degree before coming to law school.  All of us had ambitions to be academics.  We took the process very seriously and, in a policy I've heard is somewhat unusual, always sought a faculty opinion before accepting an article and before rejecting an article that made it to the final stage of review.

That said, I believe the process was a mess, and inevitably somewhat arbitrary.  We were a pretty highly ranked law review (though we regularly lost pieces to Yale and Harvard), so just about everyone submitted to us, meaning that was got somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 articles a year.  These were divided among five of us, meaning that each of us had to read a few articles each semester, plus the articles that other editors forwarded to the whole board for further consideration. 

Given this, I think the important thing to understand about our process, the thing that many authors lose sight of, is that we were not running a contest - we were not trying to pick, of that 2,000-plus, the very best articles we could get.  Such a task would have been impossible not only because of the sheer volume of submissions and the fact that we couldn't possibly know everything about every subject area, but because of the apples-to-oranges comparisons involved in weighing, say, a groundbreaking article on a narrow aspect of tax law against, say, a slightly less groundbreaking but still worthwhile article on the death penalty.  (Obviously, of the two, one could disagree forever about which is a more "important" piece of scholarship; further, in the vast majority of cases, anyone qualified to judge one will not be qualified to judge the other.)

Because we had no feasible way to select "the best," what we were looking for instead was something different - articles that we believed represented a sufficiently high level of quality to be worthy of publication in our journal.  Basically, then, when one of us ran across an article he or she felt merited publication, that person would take it to the full board; if the board agreed, and there was space, and Yale didn't steal it out from under us, we'd publish it.  This seems obvious, but in reading authors' comments about the process, it seems clear that many of them regard it as a competition, and a fairly orderly one, in which articles are directly weighed against each other, and that somewhat misconceives the process, at least for us.  When we floated an article to the whole board, we had normally read only a small percentage of that semester's submissions, and had no idea what else was out there, or if the article in question was the 5th best or only the 177th best; we simply knew that it was an article that we liked and would be happy to edit and publish. 

There were, also, several elements of arbitrariness built into the process.  First, we were only human, and as our tenure wore on, we had to skim a lot, and discarded many articles after the first few pages.  Second, as mentioned, we were fundamentally looking for articles we liked, and what we particularly liked had a lot to do with our individual interests.  Therefore, our board was particularly responsive to articles about intellectual property, immigration, and legal history; we were less responsive to articles about tax, corporate law, and employment discrimination (which is not to say we did not consider articles on these subjects when they were particularly good).  While sorting by subject matter in this way was, in some sense "unfair," I believed and continue to believe that with 600-odd journals in the country, any article with merit was bound to get published by a good one, and that, as long as we fulfilled our obligation to search for and publish high-quality articles, we were doing our jobs responsibly.  Further, I think there's a great deal of benefit to having a variety of law journals edited by students with a variety of values and priorities - both because it gives the author of a slightly offbeat or daring piece a better chance of being published and because, frankly, it makes law reviews more interesting to read.

It's because of this belief that I really have come to despise the expedite process (whereby an author tries to shop up an offer to a slightly higher-ranked journal), because it is fundamentally founded in the "contest" model described above.  But more on this later.

Diversion of the day

A rather entertaining kerfuffle over Todd Zywicki's outrage at being quoted . . . accurately.