Some Random Ideas

1. Every time I read Wise Blood I'm amazed at how unified the story is. There are other amazing things about it, but the unity is my favorite. I love how, in the beginning, Haze imagines Jesus slinking among trees, and then later he feels his heart beating "like a little ape clutching the bars of its cage," and then toward the end Enoch loses his mind, dresses in a gorilla suit, and runs out into the woods. It makes my brain throw sparks.
2. My novel is at 14,982 words now. I only did 500 words yesterday, but I guess I won't consider it a failure since I wasn't driven to it until later in the day.
3. I don't know if it was school starting or what, but all of a sudden I have too many ideas again, I'm interested in too many things, I want to do too much. It's hard to pick a direction.

On Track Again

My novel's first draft, which has lain untouched for almost two months, sits at 14,584 words. My new plan is to write 1000 words every weekday and 2500 words every weekend-day until this first draft is completed.

The working title has been The Other Dead Guy for a while. I'm also considering Dead and Alive and Deadlife. Or The Deadlife of Alex Cropp. I shouldn't even be thinking of a title yet. The themes are still clanging around in my skull. All I have after a few years of considering the story is characters, settings, a plot, and some crazy description.

Oh. I guess that's a story. Except that it's mostly in note form, or still in my head. I need to remedy that.

Word count: 14,584

Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man by Joseph Heller

This is the second Joseph Heller book I've ever read. The first was Catch-22, of course. I read that once about fifteen years ago, loved it, and then never read it or anything else Heller wrote. I even tried reading Portrait a few years ago after picking it up in the bargain section of Barney Noble, but it didn't hold my interest then.

This time I was compelled from the start. Maybe because now I can identify more with Eugene Pota, the story's protagonist. He's a writer, inspired momentarily in a number of directions, but his inspiration fades quickly, leaving him frustrated and depressed. I'm not seventy-five years old, but I know the feeling of fleeting enthusiasm. Oddly enough, reading this book has energized me.

Portrait isn't a great novel, but it's interesting to me because it shows Heller's frustration and links it to the frustrations of many famous authors, most of whom died at an early age or in poverty or despair. I realize that I'm not crazy--or at least no more crazy than others who feel the need to write.

I feel like I need to pick my reading material carefully for a little while. I think I'll start with Wise Blood and then move to Miss Lonelyhearts and The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Those stories resonate with where I see my fiction taking me, and all of a sudden I'm driven to reopen my novel file and start plugging away. My mind will let me see this as a positive for a few days, until I start dwelling on the temporary abandonment of my humor book, or the essay that I started last week, or that line for a poem that charged through my head a while ago. Or I'll get overwhelmed with school again, or I'll just lose my motivation.

Or I'll keep churning away at this beast until it's finished. My choice, I guess.

And They're Off . . .

Today started NaNoWriMo, and I was disturbed to see on the website this morning that some people had started writing at midnight--Zulu time. Meaning, they were perched on their computers in the middle of the night--in England and South Africa--to start writing their novel this month. There were people who hit 5,000 words before I woke up this morning.

That's crazy.

I wrote 2,333 words this afternoon, and I'm going to stop so I can make dinner and prepare to teach logic tomorrow. I didn't plan on that number, but it struck me strange when I got there. If I were to write 1,667 words a day I'd hit the 50,000 word goal. But if I hit 1,667 words tomorrow I'm at an even 4,000, which keeps me on pace for my goal. I'll just take satisfaction that I'm 666 words ahead of the pace.

Wait . . . 666?

Sorry, Diana.

So to stay on pace for the month, tomorrow I need to produce 1,001 words. If Sheherezade could have told a story in a word, my requirement for tomorrow could have made her life a whole lot easier.

I know. Lame.

I'm still aiming for 2,000 again tomorrow.

In other news, the Artists Formerly Known as the Big Polack and Mrs. Big Polack have had the Artist Briefly Known as Little Polack. Did you follow that? Me either. Here are the pictures I was sent:

Cute kid. Although my impression of the second picture was that it looked like something had gone horribly wrong at the deli counter. TAFKABP suggested I call it "Nick's Halloween Deli." Somehow he's subtler than I am. Huh.

Anyway, congrats to Dave and Kim. And Nick, for now being Nick.

Okay, enough goo-gooing over babies. Back to your regularly-scheduled cynicism.

Happy Halloween

Boo.

I didn't wear a costume today, but I told my Logic students that I was dressed as my own evil twin. Then they asked me if my evil twin would be nicer to them than I am.

Rotten skunks. Hehe.

On another note: Still not eating meat, seventy-two days later. It's gotten to the point now that I don't even consider that during the course of my day. We discuss what we're going to eat, we pick something, and we make it. The fact that meat isn't included in the conversation becomes less noticeable all the time.

Weird.

Tomorrow starts NaNoWriMo. I think I'm ready. I need something to kick me in the ass and make me keep at it.

I got confirmation today that I'll be teaching two sections of Comp I at OCCC next semester. I'll also be teaching two sections of Fundamentals of English and one section of Comp II at Rose. That's more like a real workload. Should be fun.

We'll be driving to Minnesota for Thanksgiving. I'm not sure how many days we'll be up, but we'll have time to see many of you in the Twin Cities area (those of you not traveling to other places, that is). That's only three weeks away. Yikes.

Some Random Thoughts

1. Other than a barbecue sandwich I had two and a half weeks ago, I haven’t eaten meat (other than fish or shrimp) in twenty-one days. In those three weeks I’ve lost fifteen pounds.
2. Football is huge in Norman. Saturday was the first home game of the season (first game overall, too), and traffic was clogged up for a mile around campus three hours before kickoff. We’ll be staying home on game day from here on out. (And whoever created that website needs to review the spelling of "memorial.")
3. Pandora has been educational, at least in that it teaches me about me. What I’ve found is that “pretty” music bores me more often than not. While I can admire piano ballads and folk tunes, I need some dynamic element to keep my interest, whether that’s Tom Waits’s growly voice and quirky lyrics or the backbeat tension of a John Lee Hooker. Most often I’ll settle for a driving drum beat and rampaging bank of distorted guitars, but Tori Amos makes me want to drown myself.
4. If you can stand the heat, Oklahoma’s weather is almost uniformly beautiful. Except for the odd flash flood that washes out roads and kills half a dozen people. But they have that in Minnesota, too.
5. Whenever I read John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction I am both elated and despondent. Elated because I become convinced I’ve just discovered what my current (novel/short story/essay/ screenplay) is lacking, and despondent because my discovery means that all of my work to that point is preparation.

Lots of Input These Days

We actually got around to renting a couple of movies we've been intending to watch: Pan's Labyrinth and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Neither of us realized how similar the films were until we finished watching them, but the common elements are striking.

The IMDB page for Pan's Labyrinth describes some of the overlap, which is acknowledged by Pan's director Guillermo del Toro:

both films are set around the same time, have similar child-age principal characters, mythic creatures (particularly the fauns), and themes of "disobedience and choice." Says del Toro: "This is my version of that universe, not only 'Narnia,' but that universe of children's literature." In fact, del Toro was asked to direct The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe but turned it down for Pan's Labyrinth.

There are even more commonalities than these, though. Pan's Labyrinth takes place during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 while the story of Narnia occurs during the German bombing of London of 1940-1941. In both films the children are sent to strange homes where they feel unwanted (or even endangered). Both films carry religious overtones (those in Narnia having been well covered), and each ends with a frothy message of hope (though the ending of Pan's is a little obtuse, and perched on a heap of ghastly violence).

I'm glad to have seen both, and I'm glad I rented them--I'm not sure I'd be interested in owning either. Pan's Labyrinth is unique, but I can do without the graphic cruelty at the spine of the story, and Narnia is tainted by its blatant--ham-handed, even--Christian allegory.

I also just finished reading Nathanael West: The Art of His Life by Jay Martin.

It's a compelling biography, but only if you're particularly interested in West and his work already. I found a copy online for eleven cents (plus $3.99 shipping), and I've wanted to read it for a while, so I got my chance for cheap.

West was the epitome of the obsessed and frustrated artist. Though he published four critically-acclaimed novels he never met with popular success--mostly because of bad luck, such as publishers going bankrupt. He foresaw cultural shifts, but wrote about them too early, such as A Cool Million's 1934 prediction of fascism that people dismissed, but which became an indisputable reality a few years later.

West was a notoriously terrible driver, and he died behind the wheel--running a stop-sign in southern California on December 22, 1940.

If this biography teaches me anything, it's the usual: you don't have as much time as you think you do, so write/do/say/accomplish what you have to right now.

Words About Words and Wordsmiths

And the words keep rolling along. My novel draft is pushing 24,000 words now, and I can see the light at the end of this pre-tunnel. I'm trying a new strategy with this story and it seems to be working. I love that I'm still discovering things about the story, and I hope that I can continue that all the way through each draft.

I just finished reading Very Old Bones by William Kennedy.

The man has a talent with language that I wouldn't associate with a journalist--but that's my bias speaking, not reality. The man won the Pulitzer Prize for his earlier novel Ironweed, so he clearly has the ability to turn a phrase.

Very Old Bones involves the Phelan family, and Francis, from Ironweed, makes a few appearances. The story is compelling, the language is great, the characters are vivid and flawed. This is a good read. It lacks the tight focus that made Ironweed so powerful, but it's easy to sit back and enjoy how Kennedy manipulates his material. And it's spurring me to better work on my own story, so I really appreciate it.

I might need to slow down the reading for a bit, though. I have too much work to do. Time to get at it.

No Rest for the Whacked

This week has been a tough one, for a reason I haven't faced before. I have no schedule and it's driving me nuts. I wake up when I feel like it (anywhere from 4 am to 8:30 am, so far) and I spend my morning in a blend of web-surfing and leisurely writing. Then we go run some errands and come home. I write some more, we might nap for a while. We have dinner and watch a movie. Then I lay in bed and read until I'm sleepy. This should by idyllic for me, and there are moments when I really enjoy this, but I'm not so good without structure.

I'll need to structure myself for the next three weeks.

I finished reading Thom Jones last night. It was good, but maybe what I got from it that will benefit me most was that a) I write this well, and b) Thom Jones was even older than I am now when he started publishing. The stories all had Vietnam, epilepsy, boxing, and boxer dogs--or some combination of these (with the exception of "I Want to Live!").


Now I'm reading William Kennedy's Very Old Bones. I found a hardcover copy for 99 cents in an Oklahoma City gift shop in May (along with Philip Roth's Operation Shylock), so I almost feel like I'm cheating.

100th Post

Wow. That snuck up on me. I didn't realize I was anywhere near 100 posts. So here I logged in to toss out a brief update, and there it is. The century. I've presented a whole lot of nothing in 100 posts. Hooray for me.

Now that we're here and I have a job (in the near future, anyway) life has calmed and slowed. We got our damage deposit check from our last apartment yesterday, so that eases my mind a bit about not being employed now, so I can concentrate on reading, writing, creating my syllabi, and planning to teach in just under a month.

The writing's going better than it has in years. I'm working on a pre-draft draft of a novel that's been banging around in my head for three years. Right now I'm just assembling a summary version of the story, arranged into chapters. I've reached 17,000 words, and I imagine it will almost double in length before I'm ready to set it aside for a bit. I have a box full of notes and fragments to sort through before I can finish this stage. Then I can concentrate on the short stories, essays, and screenplays I have in various stages of completion--at least for a little while.

I've been reading, too. The novel I just finished is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.

It's an interesting book--beautifully written and inventive in a fresh way*. I've been anxious to read Murakami because I wanted to get his contemporary take on Kafkaesque absurdity. For the most part I think he pulls it off, but there's something about the weirdness of this story that feels unearned. In Kafka there's the sense that the unpredictability of the stories, the lack of control the characters experience, is a commentary on the human condition. In this novel I felt like I'd been shot into space for a fun ride with no real destination.

Not that I have a problem with that. One of my guiding principles about literature is borrowed from Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, where he decries intellectual misomusy as "tak[ing] revenge on art by forcing it to a purpose beyond the aesthetic." Murakami has built a beautiful artifact, and I can accept it for what it is.

Now I'm going to start reading Thom Jones: The Pugilist at Rest. I feel a little guilty for not having gotten to this book sooner. I've never heard a bad comment about it, and plenty of people have recommended it. Now I can correct my neglect. And it's something to read while I wait for Tom Maltman's book to come in the mail.

*Edit: "Inventive in a fresh way?" Is there some sort of stale inventiveness of which my subconscious is aware? Such as, "That Shakespeare sure did some original work, but five hundred years have really diminished its relevance?" Geh.

I Do Not Smell Good Textures

This afternoon's thesis reading in Mankato was fun. All three readings were good, but as predicted, Kassie's was great. She read a story she wrote after she handed in her thesis, and it was hysterical and voicy and strange--like all of Kassie's stories. And like Kassie, for that matter. One of her characters, a Moldovan girl named Tatiana, actually said, "I do not smell good textures." I'm sure it was funnier in person than it is here, because of the voices Kassie was using, but it's had me chuckling since we got back.

After the story, Diana turned around and whispered, "I forgot how much I love Kassie." It really was great.

The party afterward was at Terry Davis's place, and it was the typical party at Terry's: a ton of food, about seven coolers of beer, a table full of margarita-fixins, and too many people to fit in the house. Good thing he has a couple of sizable porches. It was good to see familiar faces again. Diana, Terry, Kassie, Nick Healy, Ed Micus, Nate, Phil, Reed, Nicole. It was great to be among writers. Man, I miss that atmosphere.

But then we left, drove home in the dusk. Saw deer grazing in St. Peter and along the Minnesota River. Now we're home, and I think I need to write for a bit before going to bed. I haven't felt this peaceful in a long time. Good things are accumulating.

I Have Been to the Mountain Top

The other day Michele told me I'm spreading myself too thin. My energy level tells me she's right, but I still don't feel like I'm accomplishing much. But that should change now.

I got involved in a "Ten-Page Challenge" on the American Zoetrope website. Eighteen of us submitted the first ten pages of a screenplay, and then we all reviewed and scored each other's . I just finished the last one this morning. It was interesting and I learned a lot. The comments I received for Blood Goggles were encouraging and interesting (some of these other writers have sold scripts or read for production companies), but I learned even more getting such broad exposure to other screenplays. Kind of like Terry's class, but with professionals instead of students, and everyone has material to share. There were some in Terry's class that I never saw anything from. It seemed there were four of us who always had something, and then ten more who took up space. But I digress.

On top of that, in the last six weeks I've reviewed eight full length screenplays and have two more waiting. I've written eighty pages of Blood Goggles (with what feels like about sixty left to go), and I'm generating ideas for other stories like crazy. I even had a bit of a revelation about my "Bumble Sutra" essay that's been languishing for eighteen months.

Now that I've gotten through this cluster of scripts I can take some time to write again and be social. Wait, what was that? Social? Riiiiiight.

It's Been a Hell of a Week

I haven't posted in a while, but that's only because there isn't much to say. Life has been bumping along pretty monotonously since the holidays wound down, which is mostly a good thing. I'm only working about 55 hours a week now, so I get a little more time to write than I'd had while Book Store was blazingly busy. Just a few things are worthy of mention:

1. It's cold. According to Michele's perusal of the internet this morning, it was -13. With wind chill? -34. I'm not one who generally takes note of the temperature, because it just doesn't impact what I do or how I do it, but this is crazy. The air, without movement, makes my cheeks sting. My eyes continue to water ten minutes after I've gotten inside. Days like this make me hope Michele gets a letter of acceptance from the University of Texas at Austin. And fast.

2. I'm a loser. American Zoetrope announced the winner of their screenplay contest, and it wasn't me. They also listed the top ten runners up. No me. The semifinalists and quarterfinalists included about a million names. But not mine. Lucky for me I have another screenplay in the works and it feels better than Running the Asylum did as I wrote it. It's more cinematic, funnier, and more commercial. I hate thinking of that as a benefit, but screenwriting is as much business as art. Maybe more.

3. I was sick. Yesterday I only lasted two hours at work before I had to go home, green and gasping with nausea. Just the day before we'd been exposed to others with the same bug, but I didn't worry--I never get that stuff. I have a stomach of iron. If either of us gets something, it's usually Michele. No consolation when I was facedown in the throne yesterday doing the technicolor yawn.

4. I'm interviewing. I sent my resume off to an online university, and while they're not hiring right now, they want to put my materials on file for future possibilities. I identified about ten courses they list that I'd be qualified to teach and they agree on four of them, so they sent me an e-mail interview. It feels weird interviewing without seeing the interviewer, for a job at which I may never see my supervisor or my students. Complete disconnect. But I have no way to predict our direction for the next six months or so, and I really want to teach. This might be the only way.

Hopefully we start hearing from grad schools soon. That will help a lot. This limbo crap sucks. On the bright side--I'm writing pretty well now, though I have creative ADD. I spend a week on my short story, then completely fail in the AZ contest and hit the screenplay hard. I should be taking some sort of drugs, I think. Prozac or Zoloft or crack*. Something.

*I am, of course, kidding. I would never take Zoloft.