I have an eight-week-old baby. (YAY ME.) He is absolutely lovely and delicious and, as far as newborns go, excessively easygoing. But it’s still been a pretty intense few months, because I also have deadlines. It’s actually easy to write with a newborn. It is. Truly. They eat, more or less, every three hours. Then they sleep for two hours. So you can write in that two-hour period, and then feed them and gaze at them adoringly until they sleep again. If they’re fussy, you can pop them in the ergo, and keep typing. That’s all there is to it. (This is assuming you don’t have a nightmare hellbaby who screams all the time. Ned was like that. But Arthur, blissfully,  is not.) While we’re on the subject, writing with a toddler is a fucking nightmare, because toddlers are tiny cavemen with giant egos. But newborns are easy.

However. I’m the don’t-expose-a-newborn-to-outside-germs-unnecessarily type, and my baby is the fuck-your-bottles-I-only-want-the-boob type, which means we are pretty much at home ALL the DAMN TIME and so doing anything apart from eating / sleeping / writing is challenging, if not impossible. All of this is a very boring and long-winded way of saying: I’m doing a lot of home grooming in order to look human.

This lovely dpHue gloss allegedly extends the lifespan of highlights, so is hopefully helping me to avoid the hair salon. I also use this as a conditioner once a week to keep the ol’ tresses bright and sunny rather than dull and brassy. My hair got all dry during pregnancy, so I put this It’s A Ten stuff on right out of the shower, before I blow dry. And then, on dry hair, I swear this Mise En Scene shit has magical bouffy-shiny properties. And of course, my hair probably needs a trim. (It always probably needs a trim). This collagen protein thing swells the hair shaft so it looks slightly less bedraggled. (Why does shaft always sound so filthy?) (I know why, I know why.) (Because PEEN.)

The skin on my body is dry AF after having a baby. Always is. I think it’s a hormonal thing; it gets all burlap-esque. I’ve been using this AHA moisturizer and it does some magic tingly exfoliating shit and I swear to go, leaves my skin all creamy and even-toned. And the skin on my face is recovering from a ghastly bout of pregnancy-induced melasma over the summer, so I’m alternating Clark’s Botanicals Smoothing Marine Cream and this lovely French Ystheal retinol. You can’t use retinol when you’re knocked up, and I’ve been knocked up on-and-off for about two years when you think about it, so retinol and I have some catching up to do.

My nails are terrible. I cut them short with toenail clippers and never think about them.

I look tired all the time, because, um, I am quite tired all the time, and I’ve made peace with that fact. I’ve been fantasizing about getting fillers in the dark troughs under my eyes. In my fantasies I don’t become blind from it, which is apparently a legit risk, and the reason I won’t be ever doing it. So instead, I’m splatting this on and smushing it around with the NuFace in the hope that it pushes my jowls up into my eyebag troughs. (Does the NuFace really work? IDFK darlings. It is extremely expensive – but I *think* it helps with puffiness.)

What else is there? Oh, I know. Make-up. Most days I cannot be bothered, but when I can, I just want to look fresh-faced and put together, and not like this. I discovered this Hado Labo face mask during a late-pregnancy-insomnia-fuelled Reddit deep-dive – and it’s genuinely GREAT! It plumps out pores and leaves your face all smooth and dewy and divine. Then I throw on this SPF, which has a very subtle glow, and use my fingers to push NARS concealer around my chin and nostrils and eyelids, with a little extra Cle de Peau concealer on any particularly blotchy bits. Then lots of Bobbi Brown Pale Yellow Powder with this brush, then some of this nothing-looking-yet-totally-something NARS Impassioned blush. Hourglass Platinum blonde, some L’Oreal Voluminous mascara, and Bobbi Brown Baby matte lip stain stuff. This is not a make-up look to get excited about, but it makes me look like a human in about three and a half minutes. And that’s a win.

I totally had a baby last week.

Surprise!

I kept it quiet – in fact, almost entirely mute – because, well, you know, 2017 was a rough year of false starts, baby-wise, and even *thinking* about the pregnancy ending with an actual baby was almost impossible. So I crossed my fingers, threw up a lot, hid from the world and wrote and wrote and wrote, and in the end, made a perfect little boy born on September 27.

Arthur Noel Barry.

So so happy. Mwah. x

One of the best and yet worst things about growing up is figuring out what you’re good at (writing, keeping small people alive, staring into space while thinking about writing and keeping small people alive) – and what you’re not (singing, staying out past 11pm, hangovers from staying out past 11pm).

I LOVE this book. I wish I was living in NYC in 2002 with nothing but a wild urge to party and a trust fund. If you do, too, read Meet Me In The Bathroom:

Here’s the blurb:

“Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the transformation of the New York music scene in the first decade of the 2000s, the bands behind it—including The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and Vampire Weekend—and the cultural forces that shaped it, from the Internet to a booming real estate market that forced artists out of the Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Drawing on 200 original interviews with James Murphy, Julian Casablancas, Karen O, Ezra Koenig, and many others musicians, artists, journalists, bloggers, photographers, managers, music executives, groupies, models, movie stars, and DJs who lived through this explosive time, journalist Lizzy Goodman offers a fascinating portrait of a time and a place that gave birth to a new era in modern rock-and-roll.”

I went to LA last week and sold another show to a studio!  The deal is being worked out right now, so I can’t go into too many details. But I can’t wait to get started. I also sold a show to a cable network recently – something set in the 80s – and just got the all-clear to move from outline to script stage.

The outline process is INTENSE and sometimes slow. But oh, so useful. I love outlining. (I wrote my first novel on a whim, with no outline, no plot, no plan, in fact nothing in my mind aside from a general desire to make my reader laugh and feel happy and understood. Sometimes I look back and think, my God woman, you were lucky to get an agent and a book deal off that thing.) I think of outlines as the blueprint for the house I’m designing and building: I have to make sure the people paying for the house are happy with the blueprint, right? So they can’t say at the end “uh, since when was there a fucking gazebo on the roof deck?”

No one wants a fucking gazebo on the roof deck.

With these two projects, and two others in the pipeline, I’m a busy little cougar these days. But I keep thinking: “man, I want to write a funny / beauty / fashion / something post for the blog.” And then I don’t because… by the time I’ve finished writing and thinking about worlds and plots and characters all day, and dealt with two very small redheaded boys, I’m wrung out like an old dishcloth. It’s all I can do to watch Younger, read about the most recent evils and idiocies of the administration, say hello to Instagram, and pass out.

So, forgive that it’s short, but here’s a round-up of things I fucking LOVE right now:

& Other Stories: Maquis de Nuit

I popped in on Saturday, swiped this across my face, immediately decided that I looked like I was in St Tropez in the 1920s, only without having to deal with the tediousness of Hemingway being such a little bitch to everyone. The salesgirl told me that they only put them out that morning for the first time, and “There are only like three left! They are walking out of here!” It looks dark blue-red in that photo, but it’s more of a dark burnt brick-red. Delicious.

Etude House Moistfull Collagen Cream

I have pretty good skin. I have bad hair – very, very bad hair. But good skin. And if people ask me what I do, I am totally honest: I don’t get facials or laser treatments or anything like that (BORING and seriously who has the time?), I cleanse with cheapie-cheap Cetaphil, I wear SPF 50 or higher every day, I don’t drink wine (vodka yes, Campari yes, even beer yes – but wine, almost never, unless I’m eating a GREAT steak somewhere like Raoul’s and the steak personally asks me to drink a glass of red as its last request, you know what steaks are like). And I moisturize more than anyone else on the fucking planet. I have gone on about my love of moisturizers before, and recommended quite a few, but then I read about this as a viable alternative to the infamous-always-sold-out-expensive-AF-$130 Tatcha moisturizer, and figured, why not, it’s only $17. I’m now on my second pot. (For me to repurchase something, rather than think, eh, I’ll try something new, means it’s really good.) I throw this moisturizer on in the morning as a mask when I wake up, then remove with a warm wet face cloth an hour later when it’s time for CE Ferulic Acid (yes, I’m a convert, I wish I wasn’t, it’s so goddamn expensive, but a little goes a long way) and SPF. During the day, if I’m not going out, I just throw on a glob or two early afternoon for fun. At night, I apply it over my SKII. It’s sort of gel-like, it doesn’t have any smell, and it just makes your skin all plump and happy. Trust moi.

.Maybelline Lasting Drama Waterproof Eye Pencil in Silken Turquoise

The secret to wearing wild eye pencil colors is to throw them on like you don’t give a shit*. The messier the better. Line your waterline, smush it under your bottom lashes, scribble over your eyelid. Use your pinkie to smear it around. You can’t fuck it up, because fucked up is THE POINT. The LAST thing that you want to look like is one of those sweet, sad teens on the internet taking selfies with ‘baked’ foundation and eyes made up to look like peacock feathers, or whatthefuckever. The aim should be to look real, and like you’re having fun. This pencil, plus mascara, plus bronzer (this one, always, forever, amen) is my favorite summer look right now. It’s sort of Brooke Shields in 83, and we all need more of that.

*This is probably the secret to everything in life: don’t give a shit what anyone thinks of you, just work as hard as you can and be kind and happy. And wear turqoise eyeliner

One of my best friends from college reminded me of this song last night, from the movie Eurotrip. It’s a weird little cameo from Matt Damon, and he NAILS IT.

I’ve been writing a lot, which means I’ve been reading a lot to calm my brain down. And I can only calm the damn thing down by reading non-fiction. I don’t know why. It’s veh annoying. But it’s true.

Here’s what I’m reading. (BTW I never recommend the books I think are kak. Only the good ones. But I don’t name and shame the kak books, either, because, eh, it’s just my opinion, and I don’t want to hurt an author’s feelings. We are very tender types, you know.)

The Chief: The Life Of William Randolph Hurst by David Nasaw

This book is thoroughly enjoyable account of a total eccentric. I started reading it because I was reading a biography of Rockefeller, and it was honestly one of the most boring books I’d ever read, not because the writing was bad – it was fine – but because Rockefeller was DULL as FUCK. Holy shit, the man was a robot. So I mentioned that to one of my American girlfriends and she said ‘oh, yah, try Hearst, he was fun’.

The Final Days by Woodward and Bernstein

I have this thing for presidencies on the verge of collapse, for obvious reasons.

Ghostbuster’s Daughter by Violet Ramis Stiel

An absolutely delightful book about Harold Ramis, written with love, honesty and humor, by his eldest daughter Violet. He sounds like he was everything you would ever want him to be, and more. Such a lovely read.

An Odyssey: A Father, A Son And An Epic by Daniel Mendelssohn

This is book is gentle and thoughtful – not a page-turned, exactly, but every time I picked it up I was happy I was reading it. Part exploration of The Odyssey, part memoir of the author’s father, and partly a rumination on time and love and death. Just lovely.

City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940′s by Otto Friedrich

A chaotic, deliciously satisfying cavort through the 1940s in Hollywood. LOVED this book.

Indecent Exposure by David McClintick

Terrible title, great book.

Final Cut by Steven Bach

One of those ‘when it goes wrong, it goes WRONG’ Hollywood books.

Name Above The Title, an Autobiography by Frank Capra

For more Hollywood books, go here and here and here (I have this thing for books about Hollywood.)

Watch and cry, my loves. Watch and cry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Gh0LRdKu4 

Every time I watch this, I scream with laughter. Actually. Literally scream.