Sasha Is a Monster

A couple weeks ago, I got to interview Monica Harrington, a woman whose work in tech I respect immensely. I learned so, so, so much from just an hour-long chat with her. She’s incredibly knowledgeable about marketing in the tech space, but I also loved hearing about her career evolution, how she went from being a journalism student in Oregon to kicking ass at Microsoft to ruling the tech startup world.

Part 1 of the piece I wrote ran today. Part II runs next week, and it includes more insight into Monica’s life as well as more insight into marketing.

Per usual, I think it’s a good read for anyone, regardless of your industry or profession. You can read it here and, if you like it, give it a little Facebook “like” love.

This writer’s mantra has been ringing in my head the past week. It comes from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1916 lecture on writing style, and was originally “murder your darlings”:

To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style isnot; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’

I don’t encourage you to read the entire lecture, although you can do so here. Quiller-Couch, frankly, would have done well to murder one or two of his darlings.

The message is this: As a writer, you fall in love with certain passages, certain words, certain turns of phrase, or even certain characters that come about it your own writing. These are your darlings. They mean something, deeply, to you; for whatever reason, you just think they’re awesome. When you’re editing a piece, these are the passages that stay no matter what. You can find yourself building and rebuilding an entire piece around them. These are usually the parts that need to be deleted entirely. It’s just emotionally impossible to do so.

As a blogger, I don’t have to do a lot of darling-killing. I don’t have time to do a lot of darling-killing. Pieces get written, the “Publish” button gets hit, and life goes on. Blogging — especially around news subjects — is a fascinating form of writing, because it happens so quickly, with so little editing, and with essentially no word limit. As I’ve taken on different types of writing jobs lately, jobs where I have weeks to edit articles, to get them down to a max word count, to make sure all angles of a story are addressed, I find that the writing process for me is very different than in blogging. I find I have darlings. I find I don’t want to kill them. Sometimes I don’t when I probably should. Sometimes I think “This is my darling, and I won’t kill it,” when the voice in my head says “Kill your darlings.”

My career as a professional writer has been almost entirely as a news blogger. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written longer-form articles and stories for public consumption. I’d forgotten how much I still have to learn, how much I have yet to internalize, about the process, how hard it is to create darlings and then have to murder them.

This is what happened yesterday:

12:30 pm: Arrive to Trisha’s for her birthday party. Her baby is less than a week old. She was born in Trisha’s living room in a birthing tub after 32 hours of intense labor. Had she gone to a hospital, they definitely would have performed a C-section. It was important to Trisha to have a natural birth, so she stayed at home, endured the labor, and had the baby, surrounded by midwives (who kept a close eye on the health of both her and the baby) and her incredibly supportive husband. I have an immense amount of respect for the inner strength something like that takes. I can’t even imagine. I cry at pap smears.

Sunday, however, was Trisha’s own birthday. We came over and brought pie, vegan ice cream, vegan whip cream, and we all got to hold baby Aster, who is beyond precious, even if she doesn’t do much right now (sleeps, poops, eats). She can definitely hear you, though, and she can look in the direction of a sound. I am convinced she is a super-genius who will be President one day.

2 pm: Leave Trisha’s. I’m heading to Carillon Point with my friend Sara to go out on a ski boat with some friends. We went wakeboarding earlier in the week, and I’m excited to do it again.

3 pm: We leave Carillon Point on the ski boat. We’ve got about 10 people on board, five girls and five guys. We head out into Juanita Bay, but it’s too choppy to do much wakeboarding. We hang out on the boat and swim a bit.

6 pm: A giant yacht pulls into the bay and next to our ski boat. There are two men and a woman on it. The owner (we’ll call him The Baron from now on) starts waving at Sara. (This is pretty standard for when you go anywhere with her.) He motions to her “Two of you can come on board.” She looks at me, but neither of us is about to get out and swim over to a random yacht on our own. So the guys pull our ski boat over to the yacht, tie it up, and everyone boards the yacht.

The people on the yacht could not have possibly been kinder to us. The girl, Leanna, invites us all to come inside and raid the fridge. We do. The owner chats up Sara for awhile, and it turns out the other guy on board, John, knows a bunch of the guys from our ski boat through a mutual friend. Everyone gets along famously.

Leanna tells us she just separated from her husband of nine years after finding out he’d been cheating on her. “He’s out here in the bay,” she tells us. “He’s on a ski boat. We saw him earlier.”

8 pm: Our friends (from our ski boat) decide it’s time to leave. Sara is going to stay on the yacht to have dinner with The Baron, Leanna and John later. She was my ride, and the yacht is going to dock at Lake Union, which is a quick cab ride to my place. I decide to stay on the yacht with her. The rest of our crew piles onto the ski boat and pulls away.

8:02 pm: I’m hanging out on the bow of the ship with Leanna, Sara and John. I hear Leanna screaming something at a nearby ski boat. I figure it’s our ski boat and she’s yelling goodbye or something. She sounds angry, but I figure she’s just joking around. It takes me about 15 seconds to realize that she’s actually yelling a ski boat full of dudes, and I put together that her soon-to-be ex-husband is on that ski boat.

The two of them get really, really heated. She’s furious and so is he. He’s calling her a cunt and a slut and she’s hurling insults back at him. Sara gets involved and so do I, calling him an asshole and telling him to shut the fuck up and go away. (In retrospect, this was very bad judgment.) The guys on the yacht are not involved yet. I see Sara go around to the side of the yacht clutching her glass of champagne purposefully.

I suddenly know exactly how the next thirty seconds are going to play out, and I can’t do anything to stop it.

I run around to the side of the yacht just in time to see Sara throw her drink at the guy on the boat. Furious, he literally jumps from the ski boat onto the back of the yacht, where The Baron is standing. He starts trying to beat up The Baron. “I’ve got nothing to do with this,” he says calmly, which is true. Sara and I try to pull the ex off The Baron, without much success. Leanna comes to the back of the boat and gets involved in the struggle, and another guy from the ex’s ski boat is on board now, involved in the fight. John is still on the bow.

I see the ex head around the side of the yacht toward the bow. I know John is there alone, and he’s smaller than the ex, and I know this won’t be good. I run up to the top deck of the boat and slide down its glass panel to the bow just in time to see the ex punch John, put him in a neck hold and slam his head onto the rail of the bow. I push myself in between them. I don’t even remember who, but someone else winds up on the bow and helps me separate them. The ex runs back to the back deck.

I see heads bobbing in the water nearby. Our friends from our ski boat had seen what happened, turned their boat around, and now they’ve all jumped off their boat and are swimming over to help. They climb up the swim ladder, and suddenly there’s a 15-person brawl on this yacht, everyone punching and kicking, the women included. Sara is perched against the rail of the back deck, kicking the shit out of one of these dudes, and Leanna and the chicks from our boat are throwing punches. I try to pull Sara out of the struggle, screaming at the guy to stop hurting my friend. “Hold me up!” she says. I realize she doesn’t want to be saved from the fight; she wants leverage so she can kick harder. Ha. So I do what any good friend would do — I hold her up so she can kick harder. Meanwhile, Leanna’s managed to get a good hard punch to the side of her ex’s head while the rest of the guys are fighting him. In the space of two minutes, the yacht has turned into a pirate ship.

The Baron is on the top deck calling the cops, and the ex’s buddies realize they’re vastly outnumbered (and that what they’ve done is illegal) and start trying to convince the ex to calm down. They finally get him back on his ski boat and pull away. Everyone just stands there stunned — our friends soaking wet — trying to figure out what just happened.

“Are you okay?” I ask Leanna.

“Would you be?”

The Baron thanks our friends for their help, and they leave in their ski boat again. Another ski boat pulls up and helps us with our anchor, which has been caught in seaweed. “We watched that whole thing go down,” they say. “We pulled up in case you needed anything. We were ready to beat some fuckers up, but we’ll help with the anchor too.” The Baron gives them an bottle of wine for their trouble.

10 pm: We dock at Lake Union. It’s not the dock I expected it to be — it’s an industrial dock, one I’ve never seen before — and I realize I’m miles away from anywhere I can catch a cab. I call my neighbor Tim to come pick me up. Leanna tries to give him directions over the phone, but she’s too drunk to make much sense. I have no idea where we are, really.

“Just come to dinner,” says The Baron. I tell him my friend is on his way to pick me up. “Bring him too.” I give Tim the name of the restaurant, which is only a couple miles from our apartment building.

10:15 pm: Arrive at a fancy seafood restaurant that overlooks the Ship Canal. Tim’s waiting out front. He raises his eyebrows at me. “I can’t stay. I don’t think I can afford anything here. Do you want a ride home or what?”

“I have a feeling we won’t be paying. Stay.”

“I should really go.”

I grab his arm. “Trust me. Stay.”

The Baron orders a pricey bottle of wine, but it’s clearly not pricey enough — he’s also brought his own champagne from his private stash on the yacht. We tell Tim the story of the giant fight and he and The Baron hit it off. Leanna and I slip outside and smoke cigarettes perched on the back of The Baron’s Mercedes AMG, which the valet has parked right in front of the restaurant.

“I can’t believe we’re sitting on it,” I comment.

“I do it all the time,” says Leanna. “It just feels really badass.”

“Yeah. It does.”

11:50 pm: We finish an incredible dinner, and The Baron picks up the tab while the rest of us aren’t paying attention. We all say goodbye and part ways. The restaurant locks its doors behind us, and I realize we’d been the only ones there most of the time. They’d clearly stayed open late for The Baron.

Tim and I meet up with some of our friends at the D&H, a neighborhood dive bar. It’s literally one mile away from where we’ve just had dinner, but it couldn’t feel farther. “You must feel so weird being here right now,” says Tim, referring to the fact that I’ve spent most of the day on a yacht with a gazillionaire and am now in a dark bar with plastic furniture and $3 beers.

“Nah, I finally feel normal,” I tell him, and it’s true.

Tonight? Was insane and amazing. I feel like I existed on three different planets. Allow me to explain:

6pm: I arrive at Girl Power Hour, a women’s networking event I’ve heard buzz about around Seattle. I’d never actually been to one, and this event was walking distance from my house, so I decided to go. I dragged my Seattle 2.0 editor, Jen, along with me, and I knew my friend Lyndi would be there. I was also looking forward to meeting Jeanna Barrett, the social media manager for Whrrl, who I’ve been chatting with on Twitter forever — since I pinged her about Whrrl’s API back when I worked on CrowdHopp — but never met in person.

The event is unlike anything I’ve ever been to in Seattle, which has to be one of the most casual of the major metropolitan areas in the country. The girls are dressed to the nines. Everyone is wearing uber-high heels (no one in Seattle wears heels!) and sipping fancy mixed drinks (everyone in Seattle drinks beer or wine). It was like Los Angeles had transported itself to a tiny patio at a restaurant on Lake Union. It was weird. “This feels like a sorority party in LA,” says Jen (who, like me, came to Seattle after attending school in Los Angeles). I nod.

Later, we will chat with Corrie Westmoreland, the force behind GPH, and she will say, “I know it feels kind of like a sorority party in LA,” and we will feel better about having felt that way, and we will both decide that Corrie is totally awesome and a brilliant marketer and we both want to work with her stat. Jeanna — also a part of the GPH team — was every bit as kickass as I’d expected her to be, and she invited me to an uber-exclusive party at a top-secret location that I’m very excited to attend next month.

It was a lot of fun, actually, to be surrounded by people so different from those I encounter working in the tech space here in Seattle, and to meet people from — gasp! — industries other than tech. In Seattle! (There are industries other than tech in Seattle? I’d never considered the possibility.) It was refreshing to remember that the whole entire world is not the tech world. It’s easy to forget that when you work in tech in Seattle. But I certainly felt out of place there, despite the fact that no one I met could have possibly been nicer.

7:30pm: Still at GPH, I get a text from my childhood friend Clay, who winds up in Seattle every now and again as part of his work for the Coast Guard JAG. (Which is, by the way, the most awesome job ever — not only does he practice military law around the world, but he gets to spend time in Afghanistan creating and shaping the legal system of a burgeoning government.) He says he’s with some Chinese visitors at a restaurant downtown, and he’d love to see me. Jen is on her way out, and I ask her to drop me off at the address. I’m not sure what to expect. “I may be the only person there speaking English,” I tell Jen.

8:00 pm: I walk into a small Indian restaurant in Belltown. Clay and his entourage are the only people there. They all stand to greet me. They have saved me a spot at the table.

I’ve written about Clay before, and he remains one of the most phenomenal people I know. After spending eight years as my academic nemesis in elementary and middle school, he went on to attend Harvard and later live in China, becoming totally fluent in Mandarin, before attending law school and earning a spot in the intensely competitive JAG. He is at the restaurant with a delegation from the Chinese Coast Guard (called the Maritime Police in China). They’re all men. He attempts to introduce me in English, and I notice a lot of blank stares around the table. “You can just talk in Mandarin,” I tell him.

So Clay introduces me to the Chinese delegation in flawless Mandarin, and he says something that makes them laugh hysterically (I do not know what), and then he says I should tell them what I do. I’m completely flustered, having moved from the LA-style girl scene of GPH into what may as well be Beijing in the space of 10 minutes. I attempt to explain to them, in rambling English, the concept of celebrity gossip blogging. It does not go well. Then Clay tries to explain it in Mandarin. They totally don’t get it.

“Paris Hilton?” I offer.

Blank stares.

“Paris. Hilton.” I say it slowly this time.

Still blank stares.

I look at Clay. “Did I just discover the only people in the world who have never heard of Paris Hilton?”

“Maybe.” He explains to them, in Mandarin, who Paris Hilton is, and all of a sudden their eyes open wide with recognition. “No, they know her,” he says.

I am disappointed.

What I come to find, over chicken curry and rice, is that the Chinese folks can understand me — if I speak slowly and deliberately — it’s just that they have trouble responding, especially when I’m peppering them with questions like “What have you found to be the differences between the U.S. Coast Guard and the Chinese Maritime Police?” They understand English much better than they speak it. But they can’t understand me at all when I speak at hyperspeed, which is my standard setting. (”Sasha does everything very, very fast, and her mind jumps around a lot,” Clay explains to them in English, and then again in Mandarin. I decide to take this as a compliment.)

“It seems painful for you to speak so slowly,” one of them comments.

“It’s less painful than speaking in Mandarin,” I respond, slowly.

I ask them which provinces in China they’re all from, and we go around the table, and they tell me the name of the province, I attempt to repeat it, and everyone laughs. My terrible Mandarin is a fantastic icebreaker!

“Sometimes,” says the head of the delegation, “I can understand everything you say perfectly. And then sometimes I can understand nothing of it at all.”

This is fairly standard even for fluent English speakers, I think, but I don’t attempt to communicate it.

They show me their cell phones (after I ask Clay if they have “future phones”) and their social networks. Facebook, MySpace and YouTube are banned in China. “Doesn’t that make you angry?” I ask. They say they don’t mind. They say they have Chinese versions of all of these. “But doesn’t it make you angry that your government won’t let you use a part of the Internet?” They don’t seem bothered at all by this. I harp a little further on it, until Clay gives me a Sasha-please-don’t-start-an-international-incident-here look.

Clay and I begin our standard routine of arguing in public over who was the stronger student during childhood. “I worked very hard,” says Clay, “but Sasha was always the smart one.”

“Lies,” I say. The Chinese people laugh. I’ve successfully made a joke!

Actually, the entire conversation is laughable, as Clay is here taking a break from creating Afghani case law to host the Chinese Coast Guard delegation, wearing a T-shirt that says “Harvard” in Mandarin, and I am attempting to convince these people that someone actually pays me to talk shit about Paris Hilton. Our seventh-grade class rankings no longer feel representative of our comparative success.

9:30pm: The checks arrive. The owner has split up all our checks. I watch as the Chinese folks — visiting the U.S. for the first time — attempt to count out their U.S. currency. I ask them about their own currency, and we discuss the exchange rate, playing math games (at which they kick my ass), and they give me some yuan as a gift. I’ve been given six yuan total. “It’s almost one dollar!” I announce. They nod excitedly. I have successfully learned the exchange rate.

We leave the Indian restaurant. I say “Shi shi ni” (thank you) to the adorable and accommodating Indian owner (whose own English is imperfect — during dinner, I found myself having to translate his thick Indian accent into American English for Clay, who then translated into Mandarin), and the Chinese folks teach him how to say “You’re welcome” in Mandarin. Everyone grins. It is a strikingly touching multicultural moment, and one I won’t soon forget.

We walk down 2nd avenue toward their hotel, and a car drives by blasting Lady Gaga.

“Lady Gaga? Do you know her?” I ask.

“Oh yes!! Lady Gaga!”

This opens up a whole new avenue of conversation. They also know Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson. Why did I even attempt to use Paris Hilton as common ground?? Clearly Justin Bieber is now the true international superstar. We chat about Justin Bieber all the way to Pike, at which point I have to part ways with them catch a cab to Hops and Chops. It’s sad to say goodbye — I feel like we all bonded in a really precious sort of way.

10pm: Arrive at Hops and Chops, a weekly get-together for folks in the Seattle tech crowd. I am among my people at last. My people have been drinking since happy hour. They are wasted, and it’s awesome. We sit around and drunkenly gossip about tech companies and tech people. I attempt to tell them about my meeting with the delegation from the Chinese Coast Guard. Jen is there, and we also attempt to tell them about Girl Power Hour. I don’t think they quite understand or believe either story. (”The Chinese Coast Guard? And girls in high heels?”)

I get a text from Clay — “They LOVED you!!!” This makes me smile, because I loved them too.

And it was the perfect way to end the night — winding up with my best friends, people who speak my language, and getting to tell them of all the strange and foreign countries I’ve visited in the past four hours. My friend Jeff gives me a ride home and a hug goodbye. “Were you telling the truth about the Chinese delegation?” he asks. For a second, I consider taking my yuan out of my wallet to show him, but I decide against it. I just smile, tell him goodnight, and get out of the car.

If you have not read this, you must:

http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html

I laughed harder than I have in a long time. And I’m a cat lover.

Just sosososososoooo in love with the city.

I think, from all those years growing up in Arizona, I’m programmed to dread summer and bright sun. After four summers in Los Angeles and on my third in Seattle, I’m still working to change that mindset. I fear summer. I fear sun. I don’t like warm days. I loved Seattle for its endless gray and rainy, chilly days. But lately I’m seeing the beauty in summer, and I’m beginning to understand why so many people look forward to it. June was a really, really rough month for me, but July has been looking up. Things just keep getting better and falling into place and, while I know that feeling is temporary, as all feelings are, it’s another reminder that through God and faith all things are possible.