Blog this blog!

I am as terrible at blogging as I am at exercise, meditation, folding linen napkins into origami swans and everything else that requires repetition, routine and discipline. Oh well. It's OK. My sporadic nature leaves room for surprise. Or, as my dad likes to say: "Indecision is the key to flexibility."

That's what I tell myself, anyway. Here are a few other things I told myself on my last cottage sitting expedition, where I had three blissful days to write, sun, drink espresso and lounge. Of course, I had the secret mission of accomplishing a whole hell of a lot (write a book), but I couldn't tell myself that directly: it would have been FAR too intimidating. So, as soon as I arrived at that idyllic cottage in the woods, I made a list of 100 things to calm myself down, to sweet talk myself, to sneak up on writing stealthily, through the back door.

1. I don't have to accomplish anything in these three days. This is for my spirit, not my bottom line. If I get lonely or scared or bored, that's OK. If I don't know what to do next, that's OK. If I get freaked out or depressed, that's OK.

2. I'm not getting a grade or a paycheck for my time here. This is not pass/fail. It is just time, to do with as I please.

3. It's really not possible to waste time, right? I'm allowed to spend my time anyway I choose. I can sit in this chair for ten minutes and stare at that tree. I might go inside and flip through the bathroom reading material. That's OK. Right?

4. If I do sit down to write it's OK if I write the wrong thing. Terrible, God-awful things. All manner of shit. It's OK. Obviously, it needed to be said by someone.

5. 34 really isn't that old. It's really quite young, actually. Even if I have taxes and a mortgage and a husband a son, I'm a fucking spring chicken.

6. It's OK if I decide to draw something and it's terrible. There are no yardsticks out here to measure myself against anyone else.

7. I am a very good person. It's OK if I don't type a publishable word on my trip out here. Or ever again. Sometimes, I contribute to society. I have gorgeous eyes and skin. Soft hands. (Often)curly hair. Great curves. Tapered fingers. I have a long neck.

8. I just realized that I like to peel and eat oranges like a wild animal.

9. That laptop in there is horrifying. The files in it are horrifying. It's quite alright if I avoid it like the Black Plague the entire time I'm here, at this gorgeous quiet cabin, perfect for anyone who actually wants to write.

10. I really like dilapidated buildings and outhouses, peeling paint, rotting infrastructures and old wooden spools used as tables like this one I'm writing on now.

11. Lists are very satisfying and reassuring. 1-2-3. Check, check, check. No right or wrong. No need for editing. No revision.

12. My fears and insecurities and shortcomings are not really worse than anyone else's. I'm OK. I'm normal. Hell, the hole in my soul is just as big as the next guy's!

13. No coffee pot, so I'm going to attempt to make my first espresso in 14 years. I melded my last espresso maker together on a stove top in Italy.

14. My greatest fear is not of my lack, but of my power. Attributed to both Marianne Williamson and Nelson Mandela.

15. My other greatest fear is that I'll be deemed unworthy. By people I find unworthy! Emotionally handicapped vindictive narcissists.

16. Actually my greatest fear is that I'll fuck up the espresso.

17. Hot damn, it's delicious! Of course, now I'm ruined for my own lesser coffee. Oh well. That's OK. Coffee's coffee.

18. It's OK that I have an addictive personality. There's room enough in this world, hell, even in Virginia for an addictive personality like mine. More than enough room! Speaking of more, more coffee.

19. It's OK if I bore the living hell out of myself. It's OK if I'm not Anne Lamott or Elizabeth Gilbert or Dorothy Parker or Anna Akhmatova. I have great lips! What did TB say? They'd be sexy if he didn't know me. A-Hole. I do have nice lips. And I have published a few things.

20. It's OK if I never use that laptop again and get carpel tunnel syndrome out here scribbling in my journal. Thumb cramps! A hazard of my trade.

21. My desire to be left alone is tempered only by my craving for people.

22. I'm finally of an age where I've learned how to pack, but I'm still learning how to leave a place like I found it.

23. Actually, some people love me with a vast and astounding intensity. Take Henry for example. He wants me ALL THE TIME.

24. All those places I've been still live inside me, even in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia.

25. There are so many, many things I know absolutely nothing about. Not even enough to be dangerous. Geography? I can't find north on a compass. History? Dance? Art? Music? Politics? Science? Forget it. I don't even know most of the things I'm supposed to know in my own supposed field.

26. Not to mention everything else I know nothing about.

27. My impulse is almost always to talk rather than to write. I'd like to be a professional talker. I'll even practice talking meditation.

28. All of the apples and oranges and carrots I've been eating make me feel like a horse. I want some meat. Chicken. Cheeseburgers. Pork chops. Bacon. A big juicy BLT.

29. The bad news is I don't know how to write about this year without horrifying everyone.

30. The good news is I have a chapter outline.

31-100.

Motel X, Cabin Y

We all know about the importance of a room of one's own.

Well, I have that- and don't get me wrong- I THANK MY LUCKY STARS FOR IT EVERY DAY- but it does little to infiltrate the boundary-less qualities of motherhood, wifehood, workhood, etc., all of which have little regard for the sturdiest of blueprints or shut doors. And since I've always been a big fan of moving (that is until I stopped completely) I do what I can to create an altogether geographically removed location of my own.

This can be hard when my time is pressed and my budget is zero, but not, thank God, impossible. This past Hannukah I received a $50 Visa card and within minutes to the day, I used it to book a motel room on West Broad. It was less than two miles from my house, so I had to plan everything I wished to accomplish with my 3 pm to 11 am getaway in the less than 6 minute drive. A whole lot of too much- is what I wanted- but I was delighted to give it a try.

I have stayed in some nice hotels in my day, quite by accident, but this one topped them all. The less than glamorous online reviews only made it all the more appealing. "Seedy" someone said. "More a place for lover's trysts than business meetings." Oh boy! Never had I been able to wake up with such an excellent view of the Auto Zone, not to mention the Waffle House where I worked my first job at 16- hired by Bubba Hicks(I sh*t you not); slinging coffee with Doris who smoked through her traech.

Also, I'd invited a girlfriend with similar hopes of accomplishing everything and nothing to join me. I figured she'd keep me on track and off, equally desirable aspirations. We met, on the dot of check-in, laptops and plentiful snacks in tow, giddy with our alone togetherness.

Amazingly, we got work done. We banged around ideas and started stories. We edited. We brainstormed. We ate and we slept. We made repeat trips to the lobby for refills of watery coffee, but that counted as exercise. And even the bad coffee was good: the high water content enabled us to drink three or four times as much. It was luxurious. It was exotic. It was productive. Of course check-out came way too soon. Luckily, I had the long, stop-light ridden two mile drive home to reflect on the thrill of my recent uninterrupted accomplishment.

And also, to begin to dream about my next getaway. No more Visa giftcards have fallen in my lap, but a small miracle has. I have been asked to Cabin Sit for a new friend while she is away for several days on business. Several Days. Several long, empty, rural, (good) coffee-filled days. I might miss the light/noise/air pollution of suburban shopping Hell, but I think I'll manage.

Cabin Y, ready or not, here I come.

short stack

I am a big fan of short fiction.

As a counselor at a creative writing summer camp, I taught a flash fiction elective I called the Daisy Duke. (Also 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover and Candle Making with Leonard Cohen. What were these kids, 12? Geez.)

In college, I wrote a series of one page stories that as a collection won some sort of prize. Really, though, the titles were more memorable than the prose, most of which I no longer have anyway. Although I struggle more with naming stuff now than I used to, here's a short list of some ancient stories I pulled out of ye-olde file, just for fun:

Little Pig
Manuel Noriega, Manuel Noriega
Friends of the Devil
Girl in Love With Life
When Angels Fight With Poison Ivy
Yellow Popcorn, Yellow Bathrooms and Dreams of Wyoming
Southern Comfort
Invisible Witches and the History of My Name
God Made the Train Tracks When He Was Sleeping
An Exodus in Drowning
The Lips of a Loose Woman
The Whore You Could Never Afford
It's Surprisingly Sweet!
A Shotgun and a Bitch
An Exodus in Drowning
Intersection
Reunion
Shrinking
Royal Suburban Girl
Trash Fire
Mutiny
Deliver Me
Love is a Vehicle Like Any Other
The Land of Milk and Honey
Table of Contents
Pretty Little Head

Nowadays, I think these titles are more valuable, to me at least, than any sort of explanation or "story" that may have followed. That's why I am also a big fan of FaceBook status updates. How I love to write just ONE SENTENCE and feel as though I've accomplished something for the day. All that could possibly follow would be dull drudgery (read: writing my book).

In the same vein, last summer I was introduced to the concept of the "6 word memoir" by my friend Anne Soffee, who has written 2 actual memoirs. That are captivating from first word to last, thank God for her, me and everyone, but not every writer is so lucky to have that much good stuff to say. 6 word memoirs, first introduced by Smith Magazine, have made a HUGE splash and I can see why. They are pithy, fun and inject a sense of accomplishment without the accompanying sense of getting chased down, wrung out and hung up like longer prose seem to do.

So naturally I've introduced 6 word memoirs to a few of the creative writing classes I'm teaching to kids at local schools. And they are....AWESOME. From "I am getting an ugly hat" to "Blastoff! Blastoff! Blastoff! Getting boring" to "Get out of my face, dummy" to "Love is my fate, yours too" to "I represent America, and cheese pizza," I am proud of these kids, and a little jealous. They don't worry about whether or not their writing is publishable, or even good, really. They just squeeze out that fresh joy of what they want to say on the page. Ta-da! There I am, in sentence form: newly practiced cursive etched out in #2 on wide-rule paper. Me.

A lesson I will learn from them.

Talk Is Cheap

My good friend Darren, a fine and many times published poet gives this advice: "Save it for the page."

My good friend Slash, a storyteller, performer, comedian and writer advises against revealing your ideas before you have actually executed them.

Sound advice, yes. Practical, wise. Advice I am guilty of betraying on a daily basis.

The other day I was at a gathering of creatives who were discussing the difference between extroverted and introverted artists. It seems clear to me that the introverted artist has the advantage. As far as actually producing ANYTHING worth a goddamn.

That is why I am considering pursuing a line of work in Talking rather than Writing.

Please, let's discuss this idea until it is a bloody pulp. Let's hash it out and grind it into the seventh layer of Hell. Let's meet at the coffee shop to talk about it until there's nothing left.

Another friend- a screenwriter and freelance writer working on her first novel-has a fantasy in which she becomes a dental hygienist who wears Victoria Sweatshirts with lots of bling. I share this fantasy with her. It is so lovely, so alluring, so...easy. So impossible.

How nice it would be to go to bed each night without the nagging, ripping feeling that there is still work to be done. Deep, hard, intense creative work. That won't let me rest until it's over and out and framed and complete. A tangled, gnarled web of thoughts and ideas that have to be expressed in just the right way. The write way. The write, elusive way that requires time and space. Not answering the phone or the door. Keeping my body pinned to the chair, my pen to the page, one lip sealed against the other.

Unfortunately, so far, I have not been to keep my own secrets. To shut it down. To quiet myself. For more than a few hours at a time, anyway. That's why I like to write short short stories. Daisy Duke stories. One page per week. One sentence per day. It's tough though, when I get a book idea. Especially a few book ideas. Ideas that sound fantastic. To talk about. To outline. To graph. Honestly, right now I have some really great chapter titles. Outstanding. Pithy. But they are lonely without their chapters. Naked. And as hard and as I try to drown them out, I can't make them shut up.

To Be or Not to Be a Memoirist (When Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction)

My name is Valley Haggard and I am writing a memoir.

There, I said it. But rest assured, that statement is offered up with a cringe, an apology and enough explanations to assure you that I'm not just like every other self-indulgent narcissist out there editing their over-wrought diary entries from high school. Except that well, I am, a little.

See, once upon a time I wrote fiction. But then weird, interesting, fascinating, tragic, life-changing things started happening to me. You know- crazy shit like falling in love, getting my heart squished, traveling around---essentially the same stuff that happened to everybody who couldn't find a good job after college. I've just never been able to shake these experiences loose when it's time to sit down to write a "story." Even if I get as far as inventing a gutsy heroine utterly unlike myself, suddenly out pops the buffalo head I saw sitting on a picnic table in Arkansas. Or the remains of Hooker, the first horse I ever rode, rotting out in a clearing in the Flat Tops Wilderness Area. Certain images have been so burned into my consciousness that they have overridden every other thing I've tried to write about for any sustained period of time. So while I dabble around the blurry lines of creative nonfiction, I have to tell the truth, ugly as it may be. I am writing a memoir.

My mother, for one, would prefer I wrote a novel. So, perhaps, would everyone else in my book who makes more than a cameo. But other than borrowing certain devices- like plot and dialogue- from the world of fiction- I just don't see what there is to be gained from changing the story. Avoiding lawsuits? Bah. What's the fun in that? Maybe my imagination jumped ship somewhere in Alaska, but I think it's more likely that I've made the full conversion to become a devoted handmaiden to the belief that Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction.

But it's not as easy as typing up my journals or scribbling down what I think you said. At this year's James River Writer's Conference one of the top New York agents said- to roughly paraphrase- that by and large memoirs fall into 2 categories: those by the already famous with huge, exciting lives that can't write for shit OR beautifully written, lyrical memoirs by nobodies about absolutely nothing at all. The trick, my friends, is to strike the balance.

In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I love reading memoirs. It is a bit of a guilty pleasure because I always feel like I should be reading Moby Dick or Gravity's Rainbow, but please. What I haven't read (or finished reading) is an entire confession unto itself that I'll submit to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates.

Memoirists who can ride the seesaw of a thrilling life captured by perfect words are the writers to whom I am currently offering virgin sacrifices. One such is Jeannette Walls, whose books I've gobbled up and who I would definitely select as my one allotted companion on a desert island- or Welch, West Virginia- wherever I happened to be stranded. I have had the pleasure of interviewing Jeannette at her rural Virginia farmhouse twice- once in 2006 after the publication of her international bestselling memoir, "The Glass Castle" and more recently- this past September for "Half Broke Horses: A True Life Novel" about her spitfire maternal Grandma, Lily Smith. And Jeannette- one of the kindest, toughest, smartest, bravest women I've had the honor of knowing- is far from apologetic about whatever it is she chooses to write.

So, after much agonizing, I've (mostly) come to terms with the fact that I'm writing a fucking memoir. And I've managed to get one chapter smack in the middle of it, Mountain Baby, published by the Writers' Dojo out of Portland, Oregon. It is just one chapter and it is just online but please, humor me while I pretend I won a Pulitzer this year, OK? The rewards of spending so much "free time" in tortured introspective life-revisions are few and far between so I must insist on eeking out this small glory long enough to get me through the next chapter.

The Right Book at the Wrong Time: A Deviant History of Reading

I have never owned one of those decorative fabric bookcovers meant to hide trashy Harlequin romances, poolside. But still, whether I like it or not, the books I read say as much about my state of mind as a temporary tattoo.

Before I discovered the joys of sneaking out in the middle of the night, I broke bad by reading "Mad Magazine" under the covers with a flashlight long after Lights Out. My mother claims this is why I'm near-sighted now, but I don't care. It was worth it.

In elementary school I blew through a few books a week when I should have been learning something about sports. Or math. Or how to get along with The Republicans.

In high school my friends and I wrote the equivalent of 12 epistolary novels each semester. I read other books too, but literature during that time consisted of decoupaging the bloodied shards of my heart into a spiral bound notebook, passing it off to friends in the hall and then white-knuckling it through Chemistry to read their replies.

Although I took a heavy load of literature classes in college, I got the most pleasure from checking out unwieldy stacks of unassigned books and stashing them by my bed to read with a stolen bit of cheese and box o' wine. I was really pulling a fast one on my professors by sneaking Rilke, Hesse, Nabokov and Rimbaud while Tolstoy, Babel and Sophocles waited patiently for me on the sidelines.

During my 4th or 5th restaurant job after graduating, a waitress-colleague and I passed trashy dating advice books wrapped in brown paper bags back and forth to each other at the cash register- like they were pistols or a pound of weed! We could not risk letting our boyfriends (or the guys on the deck eating tuna melts) know what the hell made us so beguiling.

It seems that around the time of my wedding I was on a book starvation diet and that is why, irrationally, on my honeymoon, I took up basketweaving. A venture into crafts that I repeatedly forced into other venues: stained glass, crotchet, scrapbooking.... all with the same tragic end. Now I leave crafting to the crafty and keep my nose where it belongs, in a book.

I started reading again, in earnest, after I had my son. I read all of the ironic, literary parenting books I could get my hands on--Operating Instructions, Inconsolable: How I Threw My Mental Health Out With the Diapers, etc. They were my lifeline out of the diapers and the boppies.

And then, in the midst of learning how to live with a monkey on my back, I was asked to put together a few cogent thoughts about the books I was reading. Reconciling thinking and parenting was a challenge, and as I struggled not to lactate on the books that I inevitably rolled over in bed, the likes of Breath and Bones and Whores on the Hill breathed life back into my milk-addled brain. Thank God. Not thinking beyond the realm of the mall play area would have done me in.

Untrained as a journalist, but writing for a paper, I clung to certain memoirs by certain writers that schooled me more than any copy editing class at any community college. I laughed my ass off through Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking it in Hair Metal L.A. and But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous, praying to one day write my own journalistic tell-all. Or at least pass myself off as a journalist until things got good.

You know how you find some books and some books find you? I was working at a local children's hot spot when I called up my old editor from a locked bathroom stall to see if he might have any extra work lying around. He happened to mention "I Was a Teenage Dominatrix" and I haven't found myself mixing primary colors in an apron ever since.

Lately, Bad Valley has been choosing 9 out of 1o of the books by my bed. She never finishes the dull books and skips straight to the end of the good ones. Yes, my husband has mentioned that he preferred finding "Open: Love, Life & Sex in an Open Marriage" under my pillow on our 7th anniversary to "Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On" on the occasion of our 8th. But it's my job to read everything, right? Of course it is.

Still, I felt like I was sharing a secret with my librarian this spring when I checked out "Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity" alongside Clifford's Birthday Party and Shel Silverstein's "Falling Up."

Not that staying in bed for two and a half days straight to read "The Bell Jar" bodes that well either.

And, really, there's something not right about me reading "Hos, Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex," right now in the midst of this economic turndown. Because it seems that writing about life pays a lot less than living it.

I know what Azar Nafisi, author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran," meant when I interviewed her on the phone: "Reading is the one place we can allow ourselves to be promiscuous." But in these desperate times writing about reading about being promiscuous seems a necessary measure, too.