I’m the daddy of the mac, daddy

I got sucked into the videos at TED.com late on Sunday night and lost an hour or so watching them. If you only have time to watch one video in your busy day, watch Ken Robinson’s talk on how institutional education kills creativity. It has the virtues of being both moving and entertaining:

(I can’t embed the video, despite three tries, so just view it on the TED.com site)

Memorial Day hangs on the calendar as my Point of No Return for the allergy season. If I can survive Memorial Day weekend, I’m good for the rest of the year. If I can’t survive Memorial Day weekend then, well, I suppose I’ll have other things to worry about.

As of last night, the current project sits at 60,000 words (Microsoft count, not estimated count). I think I just passed the halfway point last night. I don’t know if that means I have another 60,000 words of manuscript to generate, but I know that the ball needs to start rolling a little faster at this point.

I spent $60 on gas on Sunday.

More updates as the situation warrants.

god loves ugly

A quick one to start us off: my favorite workout at the gym - to observe, not to perform - is the desultory chin-up. That’s when a guy walks up to the bar and does one chin-up, maybe two, before remembering how hard they were. Then he drops to the mat and walks off like he has something else in mind.

Now to talk about how much reading sucks: I’m glad that the fantasy story trope of “your wish comes true, but it’s twisted” gets less play these days. You know the one I mean: I wish for a million dollars, but it comes in the form of a life insurance payment when my wife dies. Or I wish for time to read in peace and quiet, but I only get it after a nuclear bomb wipes out civilization. Also known as the “monkey’s paw” conceit, after the 1902 short story which spawned it, this slapdash shortcut has been worn into a faceless grit through overuse. Holy hell, it’s annoying.

For one thing: if horror is really just a form of Gothic moralizing (the prince who taunts the Red Death plague gets infected; the girls who sleep around get their throats slashed; etc), then what lesson should the reader learn from this story? “If you get the chance to make a wish, phrase it very carefully”? Great lesson; I’m sure it’ll stick with me in the wish-filled future I anticipate. “Getting what you want without hard work will curse you with sorrow”? I can see that - kind of the Protestant work ethic with slick urban styling - but maybe there’s a better way to phrase it. Really, I see nothing but downsides to telling generations of impressionable children that “getting what you want will ruin your life.”

For another: note that the magical malefactor always picks a particularly ironic way to fulfill the wish. Irony requires intelligence - recognizing a pattern that matches in some ways but differs in others - so we have to presume that the monkey’s paw has, I dunno, some evil genie watching it and waiting to screw over the life of whoever holds it. Because if I had to grant evil wishes, and I felt particularly lazy, I wouldn’t be very creative about it:

Rube: I wish my boss hadn’t fired me.
Genie: Fine! Now your boss hasn’t fired you, or anyone else - because he’s dead!
Rube: I wish I looked just like this for the rest of my life.
Genie: Mwah-ha-ha! You’ll look exactly the same for the rest of your life if I kill you in five seconds!
Rube: So you’re not exactly granting my wishes as much as looking for an excuse to murder people, are you?
Genie: Just for that, I’m going to murder Jeff Probst! Ha ha ha ha ha!

And so forth.

Fortunately, sci-fi / fantasy is a great and terrible beast that eats its young and pits them against each other. Every trope worth naming in the genre has been established, re-hashed, deconstructed and reassembled in the 20th Century alone. Take time travel for instance. Ray Bradbury gave us the notion of the fragile past in “A Sound of Thunder,” in which stepping on a butterfly in the prehistoric past causes the entirety of Western Civilization to be rewritten. Fritz Leiber riffed on this concept, presenting a past that stubbornly resisted time travellers’ attempts to change it in “Try and Change the Past.” Alfred Bester did the same, but with a bit more style, in “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.” Rather than telling the same tedious story over and over again, sci-fi turned time travel into an open-ended source of inspiration.

Let’s do the same thing with “wishes.” Instead of a wish that twists the speaker’s words, how about a world where every wish comes true - a constantly fungible reality, alien and nightmarish, subject to the most recent whims of the greatest number? Or how about a world where warring nations use Monkey Paws like weapons? Drop a Monkey’s Paw in an enemy garrison, let opposing soldiers start screwing up their own lives until they run out of wishes, then send a black ops team in to mop up the chaos? I picture a hazmat team in full chem-gear, stalking through an outpost filled with titanium statues in tortured poses, carrying out a glowing orb in a lead container. “Let me guess - I’ll bet they wished to be bulletproof. Or maybe to live forever. Gets ‘em every time. Who’s paying for the beer, anyhow?”

In an unrelated closing observation: have you ever noticed how the questions “can you do me a tiny favor?” and “can you do me a huge favor?” mean almost exactly the same thing in requested effort?

rulers make bad lovers

Another look into the writing process:

My writing style tends to imitate whoever I’ve read most recently. This process smooths out over time, and if I read a lot of different styles in rapid succession, such that I’m no longer a total slave. Picture a blank canvas: you start with red strokes, fear the final product will have too much red in it, then add in more colors until the final product looks rich and real. Then you tear it off the easel, hide it in your closet behind the winter coats, and go play Bejeweled instead. Anyhow, take a look at the twenty-one books I’ve read so far this year, then try to guess what my writing sounds like as a result. Bonus points if your answer incorporates needless French expressions (e.g., melange, fait accompli, pret-a-porter, mise-en-scene, and so forth).

A significant portion of my ideas come from the unconscious: random word associations or images that flit into my mind at odd hours. I vividly recall floating in the hypnagogic haze between wakefulness and dozing during a presentation at The Company when the word library planet appeared in my head. Those of you who’ve read “The Archivist” will recognize the result. My current project, which some of you have seen, came to me from the phrase murder kit. What goes into a murder kit, I wondered? And who would come up with that list? And why?

When I start writing and really hit the proverbial “zone,” I find myself in a sort of trance state. I become hyper-conscious of the sensory content of the world I’m writing, as perceived by the narrator or protagonist. Some people write best with music on or in a coffeeshop; I can’t stand the slightest surprising noise. Traffic and birds and crickets, yes; doors opening and people talking, no.

I never offer much in the way of description because I never go much for description in what I read. I frequently glaze over large blocks of text in order to get to dialogue; quote marks act as highlighter for me. Raymond Chandler and writers in his vein have proven the only exception, and you could make the argument that his particular method of description (”… the hole in her face where she unzippered her teeth …”) counts as dialogue anyway.

I never do a lot of research before I start writing, and I never break the trance once I get going. If I find something that I cannot reasonably fake, I’ll leave a note in brackets (”the total came to [[INSERT DOLLAR VALUE HERE]]; I paid in plastic”) and come back later. On occasion this gets me in trouble, as I’ll forget who I named what and pay for it later. That’s why I still need friends; that and the whole human thing.

Laptops work for some folks; not for me. At the end of an hour my lap feels too warm, and if I’m writing on a table I might as well have a desktop. I never write outside of my room (see above re: coffeeshops). I try not to write on my bed; it doesn’t have great lower back support when I’m sitting up and it confuses my body as to bedtime. And I prefer a larger screen and a higher resolution anyway: easier on the eyes.

I worry most about being melodramatic or grotesque, or about the picture in my mind being depicted clearly on the page. I worry least about being boring.

Two thousand words counts as a good night’s work for me, though I’m comfortable with anything over fifteen hundred. I can produce this in about an hour. Two nights of this a week means 3000-4000 words per week. Presuming you miss some nights and, on average, only stick to schedule 75% of the time, that’s still 112,500 words in 50 weeks. I give you two weeks’ vacation and one night in four off and you can still turn out a pretty thick novel in a year.

The best writing teacher I ever had, Dr. Vincent Fitzpatrick, always cautioned us against “writing abstractly about an abstraction.” I’ve just done that for about six hundred and fifty words here. All apologies.

everybody told her it was sweet and good

Some stuff about writing:

#: I’m maybe ten to fifteen thousand words shy of the first section (of three) of The Levittown Barbecue Club. Already I’m much more excited about this novel than I am my last one. So much so, in fact, that I think I might pass around this first draft to readers before I let anyone see a page of Three Born In Eden.

Why? Levittown feels more polished, already, than Three Born in Eden. Part of it has to do with the genre, no doubt - this one’s a thriller set in the modern day; the first one was a surreal horror novel set, well, somewhere weird. Further, Three Born in Eden was inspired by a dream I had, which gave it miles and miles of creative juice but not much in the way of coherence. But above all else, the very fact that I wrote Three Born in Eden first means that I have 110,000 words of experience going into this novel. I’m at least 5th level already.

I don’t think that Three Born in Eden will prove to have been a waste, even if Levittown becomes the first novel that I feel comfortable showing other human beings. The experience alone made it worthwhile. So I guess if there’s an object lesson in all this, it’s that no writing is ever wasted if it makes you a better writer^*.

#: A conversation I had with Victoria the other day reminded me of why I want to write:

Victoria: I was talking about mcsweeney’s and open letters with a coworker who was unfamiliar.
Victoria: and I went to find one that has been my favorite for a long time.
Victoria: so I was rereading it and got to the end.
Victoria: and started to laugh.
Professor Coldheart: that’s how you and I hit it off so quickly - you’ve known my name for years
Victoria: must be the case. my coworker is still laughing at me right now.
Victoria: well played, Professor. well played.
Professor Coldheart: I set that one up years in advance just to sting ya

I enjoy talking about writing with friends and peers. But that’s not why I write. I write because I hope someone’s going to find my writing, before they ever meet or know me, and say, “Damn - that hit the spot.” I don’t want to be a cool guy who also happens to be a writer; I want to be a writer who happens to be cool.

I know that my lifelong dream - to see my name on the cover of a hardback novel on a stranger’s house or in a bookstore in a foreign city - won’t be the End-All of everything. There are thousands of people who hit that step and fade into obscurity. But humans aren’t built to achieve One Perfect Moment and then die quietly. We’re constantly seeking new goals. We’re always moving.

So I don’t consider Getting Published my lifetime dream. It’s my dream for now. And I’m making slow progress.

Postscript: That ended a lot more after-school special than I thought it would. Short version: positive feedback on my writing makes me happy; accidentally discovering that I wrote something you love makes me happier still. I suggest randomly searching the forums on RPG.net and then IMing me when you find something funny: “did you write this?” Odds are I didn’t.

_________________________
^* Except Head of the Class fan-fiction. C’mon, Kev. I mean: seriously.