An Autumn in New York

It's late autumn in New York. I've been here almost two months and time is faster than ever. It's been a gorgeous fall. Until just last week, I wore a skirt almost everyday. The leaves are doing their chameleon thing, and the wind is brisk and flirty. I almost love it, until I remember how much worse/colder it gets. New York is beautiful beautiful. Every filigreed curlicue, every shining tower of light, the very ground beneath me glitters. Diamonds in my eyes.

I've been manic for months now. At first I thought it was the sexing around South America. But after all the body closedness in Bangladesh, who wouldn't let loose? Then I thought it was the love in Bolivia. And I did love. At first sight. Without even having spoken or touched. And after the speaking and touching, well... Then I thought it was the altitude in Peru. I'd brush my teeth at 10,000 feet, and experience a kind of high I associate with rolling. Then I thought it was the writing in London. Everyday I sat in the sun in the inner garden of Jim's lux Pimlico apartment complex and I rewrote Olive Witch. Writing has always made me happy. Then I thought it was the working out in New York. I've now scammed free short term memberships from five of New York's finest gyms. That's two solid months of running, yoga, dance class, aerobics, pilates. Endorphins, endorphins, come out and play.

But now my mania is due to the music. I'm not atop a mountain, have not made love nor written in ages. But even on the days I don't work out, I step outside, into the mad bad fad energy of this city, and the music moves me to laughter.

This is what's playing on my Nano right now:
Daft Punk's "Make Love"
The Killers' "Human"
Fischerspooner's "Emerge"
Royksopp's "So Easy"
Adam Freeland's "Supernatural Thing"
Ladytron's "Versus"
Amon Tobin's "Chronic Tronic"
Joseph Arthur's "Honey and the Moon"
Mika's "Relax"
Pobon Das Baul's "Dil Ke Doya"
Rihanna's "Umbrella"
Alias' "Unseen Lights"
Duffy's "Mercy"
Beck's "Gamma Ray"
Stoic Bliss' "Abar Jigai"
The Decemberists' "Mariner's Revenge Song"

I can put any of those songs on repeat, like the obsessive I am, and the world's alright with me.

All through September, I stayed with Cynthia who converted the cosy study room in the back of her Chelsea flat into a bedroom for me. Now, through October, I'm sleeping beside my beautiful boy, Rahim, in the West Village, who lets me wear his socks and doesn't mind if I snore. Next month, I think I'll move to Fort Green in Brooklyn and crash with Arif. In between, I've stayed over Arati's in the Bronx, cooked countless dinners with Sheba in Hell's Kitchen, and had drinks with Sharlene in her Park Slope bar, Commonwealth. I love my friends. They've made it possible for me to live in New York for 3 months, save $3000, and have a blast while I'm at it.

So that's what I've been doing. Working up a storm, and I have nothing but money to show for it. I have two jobs, both of which I found after hours of trolling Craigslist. One is assisting Cy, a funny old professor and environmentalist, organise his life in the Upper West Side. The other is proofreading in Midtown. While neither is very well paid, both are uber-flexible, and mostly interesting. Ok, the proofing isn't riveting, but I love my co-workers, gay actor boys who know their grammar (hot). And there are free apples and cartons of Tropicana in the fridge. Incidentally, the professor makes the best salads and so I almost never buy lunch on the days I work uptown. So, all in all, not a bad deal. Though this 40 hour work week is bearable, fun even, only because I know it's going to end, and I'll go back to working part time, writing full time, and being (even more) poor.

I remember the first time I thought about the concept of cash. I was 22, sharing a flat on 20th and Walnut, in Philadelphia, with my first love, Glenn. After one of our rock and roll fights (my college friends can attest to our turbulent yet utterly trusting 7 year relationship), Glenn's fantabulous mother, Ann, told me that if it was a problem that could be solved with money, then it wasn't a real problem. I wouldn't forget her words, but I wouldn't understand them then either.

When I was 27, I went from being a grad student to being a single startup employee with a six figure salary. I paid off my student loans in less than 9 months, scored a corner flat on the 17th floor near City Hall, all the fuzzy cashmere sweaters I wanted, weekend love retreats in Europe, money coming out my ears. I felt poor. This is because there is never enough money. Admit it. There isn't.

This September, I got to New York with less than $100 in my pocket. I had just spent my last $500 on a plane ticket from Paris. I thought I'd get here, crash for a few months with friends, get feedback about my newly rewritten Olive Witch book, rewrite it, find a flat, and a job, and an agent, and be all respectable like.

Instead a month in, I got feedback that threw my entire schedule off track. My critics (all writer/editor friends of mine) had eerily similar things to say. Along the lines of, Abeer, you have a rare and unusual talent, BUT this here isn't a book. Your use of language is fantastic, so incredibly poetic, BUT there's no narrative cohesion. Your stories are energetic, magical, vibrant, BUT the themes all peter out, if they ever get started at all.

Imagine if writing a book were like going from stage 1 to 10. I figure I'm at stage 3. When I left London late summer, I had thought I was at stage 8.

None of this is bad news, per se. Narrative arc, theme development, tension buildup, backstory and foreshadowing, characterisation - these are all things I can learn. Versus changing my writing style, which I feel I'm pretty much stuck with, but apparently, that's not one of my major literary failings.

I'm hoping some of it I'll learn over this next draft. Others might take a lifetime. But fortunately, that's what I got. A lifetime. I'm committed to feeling poor for the rest of my life, if that's what it takes to keep writing and photographing and learning my arts.

So I've decided to put aside writing for now. I'm working for 3 months, saving up some money, praying for Obama to win (oh please God), and then taking off for 3 months to rewrite Olive Witch (Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Mexico City are potentially my writing retreats). I also want to revise "the Lovers and the Leavers" so that I can pitch it as a novel in stories. This is the new in-thing to do. Scrounge out any loose link between the stories in your collection, call it a novel, and presto, marketability. Apparently, no agent or publisher likes to represent or sell short story collections (let alone mine, which has interlaced poetry and photographs to boot). This is apparently because no one wants to buy story collections. You all (me all) want novels. Yes, yes, there are exceptions, but this is what I heard from agent after publisher.

Take Rana Dasgupta's enchanting surreal darkly provocative book, Tokyo Cancelled. 13 passengers are stranded in an airport (their flight to Tokyo cancelled). They tell each other stories to pass the time. These stories are set in the major and minor cities of the world. From North African deserts to Eastern European brothels, from London to Lagos to lala land. If he can call this collage "a novel in fragments," well then, I certainly can do the same for my book "the Lovers and the Leavers," which, point in fact, has repeating characters throughout, side characters who become main characters, and everyone's roots leading back to South Asia. I may not even have to thicken the connections that much, but we'll see.

My plan is to return to NYC in February or March 2009 and pitch my so fresh and so clean novels, one nonfiction, one fiction, to agents, one of whom will snap me up, find a willing publisher, along with an eye watering advance, or at least a few thousand dollars, so I can go gypsying through Africa (my next travelling dream).

During my brain-dead spare time, I've also come up with a five year plan. Hardik made me make one, almost exactly five years ago, against my vehement protests. Much to my dismay, I found out he was right. It was incredibly useful. Not because I did everything on the list (anyway, I couldn't fit that first plan into 5 years, so I made it into a 20 year plan), but because it clarified what I thought was important, what might be possible, what I realised I didn't want to do after all. And now, looking back, I can see what I misunderestimated, and I can revise and adjust my time frame, my means, and my ends. I'm learning what I'm capable of. Slowly. Who knew a snap judgment queen like me would take so long to figure out what's what?

So, tentatively, this is what I might want to do by the time I'm 40: rewrite and publish the two books I have now, join a choral group, take photography, bartending, and guitar lessons, write a collection of poetry, design a text/photo book, blog more, redesign my website, volunteer once a week, hold a photography exhibition in SF or NYC, write a novel, practice patience with my parents, learn Spanish, have a savings plan, live in another country, have or adopt a bastard love child (or kill this bothersome baby urge), catalogue and do more with my photograph collection, go back to Nigeria, teach a creative writing course, try something brave and new each year.

If I only do half of those things, I'll feel accomplished. If I do a quarter of those things and the rest of the time fall in loose languid love, then that'd be alright too. In fact, by now, you know I could do none of those things, and as long as I can walk the streets of the world with my music, alone and alive, I'll be happy.