Novel in progress, two years after initial conception: 33,854 words, less than one-third completed
Short story number one, nine months after initial conception: 11,553 words, over four-fifths completed.
Short story number two, two weeks after initial conception: 1,472 words, the red-headed stepchild of the bunch. Impossible to fractionally calculate how far this one is from completion.
Movie review, two days after initial conception: 2,267 words, not even close to completion.
Leave the house to gather provisions: chocolate milk and sweetened tea. Watch a crow dive down into the wet, shinny streets, chasing a walnut that’s fallen from his/her grasp into the middle of an intersection. The crow spears his/her prize on his/her beak and lifts off, alighting on top of a streetlamp from which the nut will surely fall again.
I wish him/her, “Good luck, yo. That looks like a tough nut to crack.”
The crow stares down at me with its oil colored eyes and does not acknowledge my pun.
Return home, type out the above, and get back to the Work.
Tag: Personal: Writing:
Friday, November 24, 2006
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Something Appropriately Baroque on this Cold and Raining Tuesday
Tuesday again, and I’ve settled into my new job at my new cube farm. The end of training has bequeathed me a measure of autonomy that should last, at the very least, until my first cataclysmic fuck up. Which, with God’s help, will be far off, as this job is heinously easy. In the meantime, I read.
Though my college, Col. Giddens, has graciously loaned me Pullman’s His Dark Materials I am a horrible friend when it comes to reading recommendations. I hope this will keep me from coating the dust jackets of other people’s books with my asinine endorsement blurbs. Then this tendency to fly off and read any old goddamn thing I chose will most likely be used in the service of Justice. In the meantime all it’s good for is adding height to my Must Read pile.
The Pile shows no signs of shrinking, as I’m currently re-reading A.A. Attanasio’s Arthurian saga, staring from the beginning with 1996’s The Dragon and the Unicorn.
Previous to this I tried (honestly I tried) to wade through Malory’s Le Morte d’ Arthur, having no wish to even contemplate Tennyson’s Idylls of the King…but 1468 is a long way from 2006, and the English language has (to borrow Stephen King’s phrase) moved on . I don’t care how much of a philistine admitting this will make me: man can only take so many Chaucerisms at once. And with all the closeness of Sir Malory’s to our own, you’d think we’d be able to “modernize” his text in a way that preserves some modicum of style, in the manner of, say, some of the better Bibles I’ve read around the local college reading rooms. They may not have the authority of the good old King James my grandmother gave me, but they can beat it like the family mule for a good turn of phrase.
There’s plenty of style, and turns of phrase, crammed into Attanasio’s two thousand-plus page re-telling of the Once and Future King’s life…and considering he isn’t even born until four hundred pages into it one is tempted to criticize Attanasio for both stylish and substantive glut…if, that is, one is a heathen devil with no sense of beauty in his or her soul. I’d not have a word of these books cut. Better to see them released as a single, massive tomb, the way Lord of the Rings was intended to be. Sometimes I think all great epics should be monstrous giants…until I stop to consider the power this would give already too-indulgent writers the world over. Then I shutter.
Afterward, I read, not from any great love of epic fantasy or chivalrous romance. Attanasio, bless his Hawaiian heart, chose to go down neither of those well-traveled paths. Instead he hacked a third one through uncharted, genre bending lands, and I doubt it worked as well as either he, or his publisher hoped…though in all honesty I could care less. I have the books, and tell God thank ya for ‘em. They’ve done exactly what I need them to do for me.
I picked them out of a Hastings Bookstore shelf at the age of thirteen. I got them then, but feared that, a decade later, they would fall short of my memory. That’s yet to happen. If anything, I feel as woefully inadequate now as I did thin, faced with Attanasio’s prose stylings. The man writes beautifully, as if he’s swallowed a page of the Thesaurus every morning with his coffee and cornflakes. My mother and I both agree it has to be because he lives in Hawaii, where all is green and good, save the twin poles of sea and the mountain, and the artificial ones laid out by man.
Not only does Attanasio re-animate the overly-archetyped, near-entirely abstracted characters of this myth (Arthur; his father, Uther; his mother, Ygrane, Queen of the Celts, whom nobody ever remembers…and Merlin, ‘natch) he creates a universe of supporting cast members by adding equal doses of historical reality, electromagnetic physics, and new age metaphysics…which is really no more than old myth in new clothes, anyway.
Even the metaphysical is given a physical basis. Gods, demons, the titular unicorn, all are beings of sentient plasma, held together not by magic so much as will alone…and electromagnetic physics. They live above us puny mortals, eternal, everlasting, inside the magnetosphere thrown off by our planet’s poles. To them it appears as a multi-tiered Heaven. We on earth call it the World Tree, and it is as real as the force that pulls our feet down to the floor every morning, and brings our hand down on the Snooze button. It is spread across the Earth, just like Jesus said, and men do not see it.
But more than this melding of physical and spiritual, which struck me as both obvious and stupendously liberating at the age of thirteen (one of those ideas that’s so good you kick yourself for not independently arriving at it), it is the idea that opens the book, lifted whole from Asian mythology and dressed in modern, pseudo-scientific skin, which still rivets me:
My thanks to the author.
Tag: Personal: Reading: The Dragon and the Unicorn:
Though my college, Col. Giddens, has graciously loaned me Pullman’s His Dark Materials I am a horrible friend when it comes to reading recommendations. I hope this will keep me from coating the dust jackets of other people’s books with my asinine endorsement blurbs. Then this tendency to fly off and read any old goddamn thing I chose will most likely be used in the service of Justice. In the meantime all it’s good for is adding height to my Must Read pile.
The Pile shows no signs of shrinking, as I’m currently re-reading A.A. Attanasio’s Arthurian saga, staring from the beginning with 1996’s The Dragon and the Unicorn.
Previous to this I tried (honestly I tried) to wade through Malory’s Le Morte d’ Arthur, having no wish to even contemplate Tennyson’s Idylls of the King…but 1468 is a long way from 2006, and the English language has (to borrow Stephen King’s phrase) moved on . I don’t care how much of a philistine admitting this will make me: man can only take so many Chaucerisms at once. And with all the closeness of Sir Malory’s to our own, you’d think we’d be able to “modernize” his text in a way that preserves some modicum of style, in the manner of, say, some of the better Bibles I’ve read around the local college reading rooms. They may not have the authority of the good old King James my grandmother gave me, but they can beat it like the family mule for a good turn of phrase.
There’s plenty of style, and turns of phrase, crammed into Attanasio’s two thousand-plus page re-telling of the Once and Future King’s life…and considering he isn’t even born until four hundred pages into it one is tempted to criticize Attanasio for both stylish and substantive glut…if, that is, one is a heathen devil with no sense of beauty in his or her soul. I’d not have a word of these books cut. Better to see them released as a single, massive tomb, the way Lord of the Rings was intended to be. Sometimes I think all great epics should be monstrous giants…until I stop to consider the power this would give already too-indulgent writers the world over. Then I shutter.
Afterward, I read, not from any great love of epic fantasy or chivalrous romance. Attanasio, bless his Hawaiian heart, chose to go down neither of those well-traveled paths. Instead he hacked a third one through uncharted, genre bending lands, and I doubt it worked as well as either he, or his publisher hoped…though in all honesty I could care less. I have the books, and tell God thank ya for ‘em. They’ve done exactly what I need them to do for me.
I picked them out of a Hastings Bookstore shelf at the age of thirteen. I got them then, but feared that, a decade later, they would fall short of my memory. That’s yet to happen. If anything, I feel as woefully inadequate now as I did thin, faced with Attanasio’s prose stylings. The man writes beautifully, as if he’s swallowed a page of the Thesaurus every morning with his coffee and cornflakes. My mother and I both agree it has to be because he lives in Hawaii, where all is green and good, save the twin poles of sea and the mountain, and the artificial ones laid out by man.
Not only does Attanasio re-animate the overly-archetyped, near-entirely abstracted characters of this myth (Arthur; his father, Uther; his mother, Ygrane, Queen of the Celts, whom nobody ever remembers…and Merlin, ‘natch) he creates a universe of supporting cast members by adding equal doses of historical reality, electromagnetic physics, and new age metaphysics…which is really no more than old myth in new clothes, anyway.
Even the metaphysical is given a physical basis. Gods, demons, the titular unicorn, all are beings of sentient plasma, held together not by magic so much as will alone…and electromagnetic physics. They live above us puny mortals, eternal, everlasting, inside the magnetosphere thrown off by our planet’s poles. To them it appears as a multi-tiered Heaven. We on earth call it the World Tree, and it is as real as the force that pulls our feet down to the floor every morning, and brings our hand down on the Snooze button. It is spread across the Earth, just like Jesus said, and men do not see it.
But more than this melding of physical and spiritual, which struck me as both obvious and stupendously liberating at the age of thirteen (one of those ideas that’s so good you kick yourself for not independently arriving at it), it is the idea that opens the book, lifted whole from Asian mythology and dressed in modern, pseudo-scientific skin, which still rivets me:
There is only one Dragon. It lives inside the earth and is as large as the entire planet. Its mind thrives within the magnetic field thrown off by the core. Its blood circulates with the slow convections of magma beneath the rocky crust that serves as its perdurable hide. Slowly molting with the slidings of tectonic plates, the Dragon renews itself over eons: mountain ranges fin from its back like thorny scales replenished every hundred million years as maritime trenches subsume its old flesh.
My thanks to the author.
Tag: Personal: Reading: The Dragon and the Unicorn:
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Snapshot of the Past
Over the weekend I relapsed and smoked a cigarette, putting me right back into the noxious, gray wastes of the addictive cycle, where anything and everything under the sun makes me long for a smoke. Just one. Good God, at times I’m sure I would birth children just to sacrifice them for a fucking cigarette. Just one.
It’s been five years since I told myself I could have just one. Since I assured my friend-who-happened-to-be-a-girl that, hell yes, I could have just one. That, unlike my parents, my uncles, my grandparents and friends, unlike all those other unlucky bastards throughout history, I had self-control, thank you very much. I could quit, I assured her, whenever I wanted to.
At the time she smiled her best, predator’s smile. “I’m gonna get you addicted,” she promised. It was one of the few promises she kept during the long, slow course of our co-dependent “friendship.”
Tag: personal: authorial bitching: reminiscence:
It’s been five years since I told myself I could have just one. Since I assured my friend-who-happened-to-be-a-girl that, hell yes, I could have just one. That, unlike my parents, my uncles, my grandparents and friends, unlike all those other unlucky bastards throughout history, I had self-control, thank you very much. I could quit, I assured her, whenever I wanted to.
At the time she smiled her best, predator’s smile. “I’m gonna get you addicted,” she promised. It was one of the few promises she kept during the long, slow course of our co-dependent “friendship.”
Tag: personal: authorial bitching: reminiscence:
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Untitled
You paid attention during 86% of high school!
85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!
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This is a horrible overestimation.
This entry not worth tagging.
Sunday Un-funnies
I’m trying something new on this gray, rainy Sunday. Something I hope will lead to further writing and a greater increase in my general output…however I chose to measure it. “Output,” is such a bastardly nebulous term anyway. So nebulous I can hardly use it without falling into a philosophical cluster fuck of inane, unanswerable questions about what, in fact, constitutes “output.”
Should I measure the number of stories completed? Or the number of words on a page within each? The number of words in total for all the various projects I’ve completed, present or past? Or the number of words in each of the three stories-in-progress I currently have kicking against the placental walls of my brain?
And then there’s my damn novel, also in progress, which my colleague Col. Giddens so aptly labeled “your baby”. As a dog mother (who spent the majority of her teenage years raising her little brother, for all practical purposes) she knows a fretting parent when she sees one. And, oh, how I fret over my baby. Over all of them, really, for they are all my children…even the ones that arrive stillborn, malformed and hideous to behold. The ones I kiss before gladly dashing their heads against the nearest unyielding surface. Believe me when I say its better that way for all concerned. Especially the stories themselves.
Occasionally I get the hot idea to use this blog as a journal of my writing, a record of progress that I could look back upon with awe in those dark times when the melancholy rises like a five armed octopus and wraps its tendrils around the support beams of my frayed self-confidence. Unfortunately, by the time I wrap things up for the (day/night/hour/minute/whatever) I rarely if ever have the patience or energy to spend any more time writing…certainly not writing about my writing.
At various times in various magazine interviews, Hunter S. Thompson decried the whole business and practice of writing. “Nothing’s fun when you have to do it every day,” he said. It was a specific reference to journalism, particularly the type he practiced during his drug-fueled hay days of the late-60s/early-70s. And in this, as in so much else, Dr. Thompson had a point. There are times when this—this hum-drum magic making, this everyday necromancy, this thing that is the Art and craft of writing—is the last thing on earth I want to do.
There are times I’d rather walk down to the Southern Pacific rail lines and just lay in wait on the tracks. A train is bound to go by, sooner or later.
Now is not one of those times. Now the pensive weight of a week spent in idle fantasy (and a day [yesterday] spent in hedonistic splendor) is moving my hands with unearthly speed. The Col.’s Ritalin is certainly helping and if I hadn’t already, I’d thank her.
But now I must get back Into It, and say good afternoon to this damned, dusty blog.
Tag: Writing: personal: authorial bitching:
Should I measure the number of stories completed? Or the number of words on a page within each? The number of words in total for all the various projects I’ve completed, present or past? Or the number of words in each of the three stories-in-progress I currently have kicking against the placental walls of my brain?
And then there’s my damn novel, also in progress, which my colleague Col. Giddens so aptly labeled “your baby”. As a dog mother (who spent the majority of her teenage years raising her little brother, for all practical purposes) she knows a fretting parent when she sees one. And, oh, how I fret over my baby. Over all of them, really, for they are all my children…even the ones that arrive stillborn, malformed and hideous to behold. The ones I kiss before gladly dashing their heads against the nearest unyielding surface. Believe me when I say its better that way for all concerned. Especially the stories themselves.
Occasionally I get the hot idea to use this blog as a journal of my writing, a record of progress that I could look back upon with awe in those dark times when the melancholy rises like a five armed octopus and wraps its tendrils around the support beams of my frayed self-confidence. Unfortunately, by the time I wrap things up for the (day/night/hour/minute/whatever) I rarely if ever have the patience or energy to spend any more time writing…certainly not writing about my writing.
At various times in various magazine interviews, Hunter S. Thompson decried the whole business and practice of writing. “Nothing’s fun when you have to do it every day,” he said. It was a specific reference to journalism, particularly the type he practiced during his drug-fueled hay days of the late-60s/early-70s. And in this, as in so much else, Dr. Thompson had a point. There are times when this—this hum-drum magic making, this everyday necromancy, this thing that is the Art and craft of writing—is the last thing on earth I want to do.
There are times I’d rather walk down to the Southern Pacific rail lines and just lay in wait on the tracks. A train is bound to go by, sooner or later.
Now is not one of those times. Now the pensive weight of a week spent in idle fantasy (and a day [yesterday] spent in hedonistic splendor) is moving my hands with unearthly speed. The Col.’s Ritalin is certainly helping and if I hadn’t already, I’d thank her.
But now I must get back Into It, and say good afternoon to this damned, dusty blog.
Tag: Writing: personal: authorial bitching:
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