Turn it upside-down! Barbie it!
This Tippi Hedren Barbie is the only Barbie I own. She was ridiculously expensive and came with a complicated cardboard backdrop of eerie schools and picket fences. I junked all that (giving my Barbie-collector friend a coronary for ruining the value by taking her out of the box) because I like to play with her. My mom decided she didn’t have enough birds attacking her so she went to Michael’s and bought a half dozen seagulls with pokey sticks so I could stab her with them.
Of course as a kid, we had ALL TEH BARBEEZ. My sister and I would rip their feet off and stab one another with the pokey metal underneath, while our cousin would try to stop us.
Now I can’t imagine stabbing my sister with a Barbie leg or anything else. I’d be lost without her.
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If you read this blog, you know that I tried to wrestle an Alcatraz puzzle to the ground, but it kicked my ass before I could finish it. I suspect Alcatraz earned its reputation for ass-kicking, and it transmogrified into that hellish puzzle that Satan himself likely couldn’t finish.
A dear friend sent her husband to my place recently (he drives to my city every morning for work) and he brought me this:
It’s very … orange. And green. But happily, the orange isn’t Alcatraz orange, and the greens are varied enough that I can at least get them in the right piles. I dumped the pieces out on the table, propped up the cover, and started finding edge pieces. I thought, “This looks fun. Some sort of warrior jungle princess about to square off with a huge orange beast while the anthropomorphized trees look on, in either terror of the beast or an inability to intervene. In fact, I’d venture to say that two of the trees look actively mad. At our warrior? The monster? Each other?”
Then I looked at the spine. It’s the Jabberwocky! It all came clear and I instantly fell in love with the puzzle. “Jabberwocky” was the first text I ever memorized when I was very young, and every word of it is still in my head. Ah, we have the titular beast, the Tumtum tree, and the beamish boy. That beast wouldn’t look so smug and drooly if it knew it was about to be decapitated.
I set to:
The best thing about this puzzle is that while I’m working it, I’m reciting the poem over and over in my head and thinking of nothing else. Where’s the handle of that vorpal sword?! I can’t think about the decimation of the human race! Bonus!
I still need to find that last piece of the beamish boy’s face, but I’d made a good start. Then I found myself trying to fit the same pieces into the same spots over and over, knowing they wouldn’t fit.
This isn’t an easy puzzle, but I don’t hate it with the burning intensity of a thousand desert suns that accompanied my attempts at Alcatraz. In fact, I love it. But I wasn’t seeing it clearly enough to make any real progress. I can fit on average a piece every four or five minutes depending on what area I’m working on. I gave it a rest and did some editing.
When I came back to it, I decided I wanted to work on the tree tops and that green sky. But the puzzle is longer vertically, so I moved to the other side of the table.
Fucked if I didn’t have fifteen pieces in place in under two minutes. I looked at it upside-down and saw it from a whole new perspective. Now I go back and forth when I get stuck.
I bet you know where I’m going with this, but I want to tell you the Barbie story first. Okay. Here’s some text:
Now, here’s that same text Barbied™:
Same words, but what the hell? I’ll often advise the authors I work with to Barbie their manuscripts. I do it myself. It makes you see it in an entirely different way. Find the silliest, pinkest font you can, and mess around with size and bolding and moving it all over the page if you want.
When you read your Barbied manuscript, it’s like you’re reading it for the first time. Because you are. Other than the words, this bears no resemblance to the original text. It’s a whole different document.
I have no scientific proof that this is real. But it works for me, and several of my authors. Once you’ve Barbied it, print it (yeah, yeah, colour cartridges are expensive. Do you want to edit your book or not?), and read it out loud in your best Barbie voice, pencil in hand. My bet is that you’ll catch things if you defamiliarize the text and your voice (and the way you edit if you typically edit on screen). It will feel completely new to you, and you’ll catch things you wouldn’t normally catch.
Put on a tutu. Stab a plastic seagull into your head. Read it to your dog. Write down what you find, or cut what can go.
Puzzles: work on it upside-down, and it’s a new puzzle. Manuscripts: Read them back to front. Barbie the fuck out of them and they’re entirely different documents.