Strap in for another year in review... tis the season, after all. If I were to choose one word to sum it up, I'd go with overwhelming. There were many overwhelming moments along the way -- some happiness, some sadness, some heartbreak, some fearful and painful, some that were downright triumphant. Here's a list of 10 favorites from the past 365 days.
*Movie of the Year: This one is really tough because there was so little this year, movie-wise, that really stood out as great. "Inception" was cool, but had a feeling of missed opportunity to it. "True Grit" was a phenomenal movie, but didn't strike me in the same way you'd expect a favorite movie to really hit home. I enjoyed the heck out of "Tron: Legacy," but it certainly was not without flaws. I'd like to say "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1," because that's probably the closest thing to a favorite I had, but even that didn't stand head-and-shoulders above everything else for me this year. So we'll just let that absence of a favorite movie stand as a statement of hoping next year will be better.
*Puppet of the Year: Sid the Foul-Mouthed Bunny Rabbit from The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Sid makes me laugh out loud, and hard. But I concede there are a small number of people who would even know who he is, and of those people, probably even a smaller number who would appreciate him.
*TV Show of the Year: "Community." Seriously, if you aren't watching this, you are really missing out. I'm not sure I like the broader, more absurdist tone its taken on this year in place of the slightly more believable character interactions from the first season, but it's still the best thing out there right now. Although I am enjoying the subtle way "The Office" is beginning to set up Michael Scott exiting the show.
*Game of the Year: Angry Birds. There really isn't even a close second here.
*Concert of the Year: Rush at the Minnesota State Fair. A three-hour great moment.
*Album of the Year: Surprisingly enough for me, I have to go with "A Thousand Suns" by Linkin Park. Yes, they were one of those aggressive, in-your-face caricature rap-rock bands from the late 90s, but this album bordered on being conceptual, and was, I thought, a great example of how a band can evolve into something you'd never expect without drastically changing their style. A very, very close runner-up would have been the long-awaited (by me) "Alter Bridge III."
*Book of the Year: "The Passage," by Justin Cronin. A monster example of how a post-apocalyptic horror adventure can be character-driven and literary at the same time.
*Literary Agent of the Year: Suzie Townsend. Because even if she shot me down when it came to offering representation for "Following Infinity," she was the first one who was intrigued enough to consider it. For giving me that glimpse at the next step in becoming a published author and letting me speculate what it would be like for a little while, she gets the nod. Though I'd probably like her even more if she'd made an offer....
*Life-Changing Toy of the Year: The iPhone. I owned three cell phones before it, and used the more in the first month than I had the other three combined. A tectonic shift in my life. And for the record - Yeah, AT&T. I have yet to experience a dropped call. Just sayin'. Honorable Mention goes to my original blue yPod -- the iPod shuffle I listened to during my workouts this year. Without the motivation it provided me, I would not have been able to stay as consistent in my workout schedule as I was, and likely wouldn't have lost the 55 pounds (and counting) that I have.
*Artist of the Year: Rush. To think that three guys who have been playing together as long as they have can still be as vibrant and dynamic in their live shows and in the music the released this year (even if it was only two new songs).... pretty impressive. Not to mention that "Beyond the Lighted Stage" was probably the best rock and roll movie released in a long time. Having that movie come out three months before I got to see them live, and having two great new songs to play during the summer as serve as gateway songs to reintroduce a lot of their older music into my current iPod rotation really made the summer.
The thought that always goes through my mind on this day is to consider the calendar of the coming year, and to wonder what things are waiting to happen for all of us in the coming days and weeks and months that we won't see coming, and what changes they will inevitably bring into our lives. Here's hoping for more good than bad.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Greatest Hits (?)
This is admittedly self-indulgent, but nobody says you have to read any further than this. I was bored this afternoon and trying to distract myself from the vague depression that accompanies a stupid, gray, foggy, rainy day in late December, so I went back to find my favorite Facebook status updates from 2010. These were lines just for Facebook - no quotes, no word counts, not really any moments of important news being conveyed. Just lines I liked. Here we go....
********************
Just watched "Memento" and "Groundhog Day" back to back. The world does not make sense to me right now.
Today was a long week.
Graffiti from the back of a spelling test: "Yo-Yo Wats up??? I'm freakishly bored! Hi!! I love dance! So psyched for Saturday!! Heyyyyy!!!! Wazz up homedog???" Front of the test: A perfect score with hearts dotting the 'i's. I think I should at least be referred to as "Mr. Homedog."
The smoke alarm telling you the battery is low? Yeah. Better ways to wake up in the morning.
I hate my phone so much I want to smash it into individual atoms.
Relay for Life this evening. While at the Y I'm on the treadmill, watching The Today Show. Train performs on the summer concert series. Of course. (Only a small number of people would understand this, but trust me -- it's meaningful.)
In a simple two-week period, Silly Bandz have gone from something of which I only had a passing awareness to the bane of my very existence.
Screw the laws of physics. I'm makin' up my own.
Dear Troy Aikman - you either 'establish' a routine, or you 'continue' a routine. You cannot do both concurrently. Stop trying to use big words before you hurt yourself.
When was it decided that "applewood-smoked" bacon was supposed to be any better? I don't remember being consulted on this.
Dear Paul McCartney, thank you for not playing your truly awful Christmas song on SNL. It would have ruined my day.
********************
Just watched "Memento" and "Groundhog Day" back to back. The world does not make sense to me right now.
Today was a long week.
Graffiti from the back of a spelling test: "Yo-Yo Wats up??? I'm freakishly bored! Hi!! I love dance! So psyched for Saturday!! Heyyyyy!!!! Wazz up homedog???" Front of the test: A perfect score with hearts dotting the 'i's. I think I should at least be referred to as "Mr. Homedog."
The smoke alarm telling you the battery is low? Yeah. Better ways to wake up in the morning.
I hate my phone so much I want to smash it into individual atoms.
Relay for Life this evening. While at the Y I'm on the treadmill, watching The Today Show. Train performs on the summer concert series. Of course. (Only a small number of people would understand this, but trust me -- it's meaningful.)
In a simple two-week period, Silly Bandz have gone from something of which I only had a passing awareness to the bane of my very existence.
Screw the laws of physics. I'm makin' up my own.
Dear Troy Aikman - you either 'establish' a routine, or you 'continue' a routine. You cannot do both concurrently. Stop trying to use big words before you hurt yourself.
When was it decided that "applewood-smoked" bacon was supposed to be any better? I don't remember being consulted on this.
Dear Paul McCartney, thank you for not playing your truly awful Christmas song on SNL. It would have ruined my day.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Overthinking 2011
Anyone who knows me, who really, truly knows me, is familiar with my nearly obsessive manner of over-thinking things. Here's an example.
I get an e-mail coupon from Borders this morning, pointing out all of their great post-holiday deals. For the most part I don't care much, but I notice that all of their calendars are on sale for 50% off. Which is great, because I don't have one yet! Not that I desperately need a calendar since I have at least two at school and at least three electronic ones at my disposal, but I have a place on the wall in my kitchen that has kind of become The Calendar Hanging Place, and it needs to be filled.
Then it gets tricky. The calendar you pick becomes a temporary part of your design; something that you've chosen to decorate the home for a specific amount of time, but also something that represents a more recent choice than most of the other things you have up on the walls. So the question emerges: Which calendar will best represent my aesthetic sensibilities for the coming year? Normally, not a big deal. But if you wait until the last minute to make this decision like yours truly, then your options become pretty limited. Because all of the good calendars are gone. And this inner dialogue comes to life:
"There sure are a lot of dog calendars. Well, I've gone that route before, and it's all just a bit too precious. I don't need to show people what kind of dog I have when he's already lying there on the floor."
"Comic strips? Well... I am a grown-up here... maybe not...."
"TV shows... in my kitchen? Nah. Wait - are you kidding me? The cast of The Jersey Shore actually has a calendar? Should I be surprised there are more of these still on the shelf than any of these other left overs?"
"Movies? Was there a movie out this year that (a) I cared about enough to want a calendar for that (b) had a big enough spot in popular culture to earn a calendar? Not so much. Wow - Tron, already? That's like two weeks old. Yes, Olivia Wilde was lookin' good in Tron, but... no. And wouldn't I have to live through at least four months of light cycles as well? No no no no no. Even I'm not that big of a nerd."
"Which leads us to Sports Illustrated cover girls. Since dorm rooms are the only socially acceptable place for these, I'll leave them for the college boys to pick over."
"Sports. The little caring I do about any local sports team only happens during their seasons, so there's just no point. I'll leave those for the tailgating face-painters or lifelong fans."
"Art? Watercolor flowers? That could not be more emasculating if it came with a complimentary purse."
"Fantasy? Yikes. No battle axes, wizards, or unicorns allowed."
"Space? Hubble Telescope images? Maybe at school. I don't want to be needlessly or even subconsciously reminded about school while I'm eating."
"Castles? Lighthouses? Cities from 'Round the World? That would be fairly harmless and neutral, I guess. WAIT! THERE IT IS! Neutral! That's what I'm going for! Now I have some direction."
So what did I wind up with? "Wild and Scenic Minnesota." Snow, lakes, birch trees, wildflowers, waterfalls. And a place to hang the little stickers I get to remind me when my dental appointments are, which is all I was looking for in the first place.
If you stop by my home this year, be sure to take in the view.
I get an e-mail coupon from Borders this morning, pointing out all of their great post-holiday deals. For the most part I don't care much, but I notice that all of their calendars are on sale for 50% off. Which is great, because I don't have one yet! Not that I desperately need a calendar since I have at least two at school and at least three electronic ones at my disposal, but I have a place on the wall in my kitchen that has kind of become The Calendar Hanging Place, and it needs to be filled.
Then it gets tricky. The calendar you pick becomes a temporary part of your design; something that you've chosen to decorate the home for a specific amount of time, but also something that represents a more recent choice than most of the other things you have up on the walls. So the question emerges: Which calendar will best represent my aesthetic sensibilities for the coming year? Normally, not a big deal. But if you wait until the last minute to make this decision like yours truly, then your options become pretty limited. Because all of the good calendars are gone. And this inner dialogue comes to life:
"There sure are a lot of dog calendars. Well, I've gone that route before, and it's all just a bit too precious. I don't need to show people what kind of dog I have when he's already lying there on the floor."
"Comic strips? Well... I am a grown-up here... maybe not...."
"TV shows... in my kitchen? Nah. Wait - are you kidding me? The cast of The Jersey Shore actually has a calendar? Should I be surprised there are more of these still on the shelf than any of these other left overs?"
"Movies? Was there a movie out this year that (a) I cared about enough to want a calendar for that (b) had a big enough spot in popular culture to earn a calendar? Not so much. Wow - Tron, already? That's like two weeks old. Yes, Olivia Wilde was lookin' good in Tron, but... no. And wouldn't I have to live through at least four months of light cycles as well? No no no no no. Even I'm not that big of a nerd."
"Which leads us to Sports Illustrated cover girls. Since dorm rooms are the only socially acceptable place for these, I'll leave them for the college boys to pick over."
"Sports. The little caring I do about any local sports team only happens during their seasons, so there's just no point. I'll leave those for the tailgating face-painters or lifelong fans."
"Art? Watercolor flowers? That could not be more emasculating if it came with a complimentary purse."
"Fantasy? Yikes. No battle axes, wizards, or unicorns allowed."
"Space? Hubble Telescope images? Maybe at school. I don't want to be needlessly or even subconsciously reminded about school while I'm eating."
"Castles? Lighthouses? Cities from 'Round the World? That would be fairly harmless and neutral, I guess. WAIT! THERE IT IS! Neutral! That's what I'm going for! Now I have some direction."
So what did I wind up with? "Wild and Scenic Minnesota." Snow, lakes, birch trees, wildflowers, waterfalls. And a place to hang the little stickers I get to remind me when my dental appointments are, which is all I was looking for in the first place.
If you stop by my home this year, be sure to take in the view.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Christmas Reflections, or My Lazy Substitution for Sending a Card
*For me, gifts are best (given or received) when the gift reflects something about the relationship between the people involved, or is based around some small detail that shows how much the gift giver has been paying attention. The gift this year that I enjoyed receiving the most was from one of my students. One girl who pays attention went home and told her mother what she wanted to give me, and I'm sure her mother at first thought she was crazy, but knowing the way her daughter thinks probably got a good laugh from it. She gave me a six-pack of single serving cans of V8 juice, the same kind she sees me drinking every day during snack time at school. I am saving all six cans until after break and enjoying them in the first week back.
*Most of the cards I receive as a teacher are the kind that say "teacher" on the front, and then have the kid's name signed on the inside, and that's it. But sometimes you get a message in one that surprises you. I had that happen this year when I saw the note: "Thank you for taking care of our daughter." That really knocked the wind out of me. It gets too easy in the day-to-day routine of school to take for granted how important it is for me to do my job as perfectly as I can. Something like that can remind you exactly what the stakes are.
*Mass on Christmas Eve. Packed, shoulder to shoulder with complete strangers, cold and stuffy and sweaty all at once, wishing the guy sitting behind me didn't carry that heavy death-stink of cigarettes on his jacket. But just as I was feeling thankful for it to almost be over, that anonymous little strawberry-blond head four rows up that kept turning around finally caught my eye; one of my girls, all dressed up for the holiday and barely recognizable. I smiled at her and she smiled back, and she was able to sit still for the rest of the time. Made my night to see her there.
*I made Christmas music a big part of my holiday this year; after all, that genre makes up 422 songs on the iPod and only has relevance for about five weeks of the year. I also kept my car radio on the two all-day Christmas music stations in the Cities, and luckily never had to hear horribly manipulative "Christmas Shoes" song at all, and Paul McCartney's marijuana-tinged excuse for a Christmas song only once. In an ironic manner, one of my favorite Christmas music moments of the season has to be Jose Feliciano singing "I want to wish you a Merry Christmas / From the bottom... of my heart / And from Taco John's!"
*I was grateful to see AMC was playing 24 hours of "Scrooged" on Christmas Day. I'm sorry, but "A Christmas Story" has really reached the point of cliché that only "It's a Wonderful Life" had the distinction of achieving before.
*My last day at school before break was in no way a landmark last day, but things all went very well and it was completely enjoyable. The best part was knowing I was able to walk away from school without any work to take care of during vacation, and knowing I had two days of plans in place waiting for my return. I did miss out on seeing someone coming back to visit me -- and only by an infuriatingly small number of minutes, it turns out. But I know we'll catch up another time, and I received a nice little text message greeting on Christmas day instead, which made me smile.
*I still have one more family holiday celebration to attend, the third of three this year, and I'm looking forward to it. All of my holiday this year has helped me appreciate things. I have a secure life, and a vitally important job that owns me which I love. The people close to me, the ones who've somehow found a way past my defenses, bring goodness into my life -- a level of which I'm not always sure I'm worthy of receiving but happily accept all the same. My dog is still with me, resting peacefully at my feet right now. As I sit typing this, I'm healthier than I've probably been at any given point in the past fifteen years, and just as I begin to write my closing sentences, Bruce Springsteen's version of "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town," truly the only necessary contemporary take on any Christmas song, begins playing on the radio.
Things could be worse.
*Most of the cards I receive as a teacher are the kind that say "teacher" on the front, and then have the kid's name signed on the inside, and that's it. But sometimes you get a message in one that surprises you. I had that happen this year when I saw the note: "Thank you for taking care of our daughter." That really knocked the wind out of me. It gets too easy in the day-to-day routine of school to take for granted how important it is for me to do my job as perfectly as I can. Something like that can remind you exactly what the stakes are.
*Mass on Christmas Eve. Packed, shoulder to shoulder with complete strangers, cold and stuffy and sweaty all at once, wishing the guy sitting behind me didn't carry that heavy death-stink of cigarettes on his jacket. But just as I was feeling thankful for it to almost be over, that anonymous little strawberry-blond head four rows up that kept turning around finally caught my eye; one of my girls, all dressed up for the holiday and barely recognizable. I smiled at her and she smiled back, and she was able to sit still for the rest of the time. Made my night to see her there.
*I made Christmas music a big part of my holiday this year; after all, that genre makes up 422 songs on the iPod and only has relevance for about five weeks of the year. I also kept my car radio on the two all-day Christmas music stations in the Cities, and luckily never had to hear horribly manipulative "Christmas Shoes" song at all, and Paul McCartney's marijuana-tinged excuse for a Christmas song only once. In an ironic manner, one of my favorite Christmas music moments of the season has to be Jose Feliciano singing "I want to wish you a Merry Christmas / From the bottom... of my heart / And from Taco John's!"
*I was grateful to see AMC was playing 24 hours of "Scrooged" on Christmas Day. I'm sorry, but "A Christmas Story" has really reached the point of cliché that only "It's a Wonderful Life" had the distinction of achieving before.
*My last day at school before break was in no way a landmark last day, but things all went very well and it was completely enjoyable. The best part was knowing I was able to walk away from school without any work to take care of during vacation, and knowing I had two days of plans in place waiting for my return. I did miss out on seeing someone coming back to visit me -- and only by an infuriatingly small number of minutes, it turns out. But I know we'll catch up another time, and I received a nice little text message greeting on Christmas day instead, which made me smile.
*I still have one more family holiday celebration to attend, the third of three this year, and I'm looking forward to it. All of my holiday this year has helped me appreciate things. I have a secure life, and a vitally important job that owns me which I love. The people close to me, the ones who've somehow found a way past my defenses, bring goodness into my life -- a level of which I'm not always sure I'm worthy of receiving but happily accept all the same. My dog is still with me, resting peacefully at my feet right now. As I sit typing this, I'm healthier than I've probably been at any given point in the past fifteen years, and just as I begin to write my closing sentences, Bruce Springsteen's version of "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town," truly the only necessary contemporary take on any Christmas song, begins playing on the radio.
Things could be worse.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
The View From the Island
I'm slipping into becoming That Guy. Not the version of "That Guy" who makes the rock and roll faux pas of wearing a concert t-shirt from the last tour of a band to a show on the current tour of the same band. Please. Even my socially stunted self knows better than that.... But rather I'm drifting toward being That Guy who lets the blog slide by for weeks at a time. I have a handful of blogs that I follow, and it always irritates me when I have to wait for an update to come through. And that seems to be me right now.
I was looking over my Facebook profile today, mostly because I only have two more days of lesson plans to prepare for the short week before winter break, and my spiraling absence of motivation usually winds up leading me to Facebook at some point; and let's face it, Facebook more or less wouldn't exist without a spiraling absence of motivation from its users. (Not to mention -- Bejeweled Blitz daily spin today? 1,000,000 coins!!! Hello!!) ANYWAY, I was reading through my info since I recently gave in and took on the new "60 Minutes"-heralded profile layout and felt vaguely concerned about the overall impression all of those likes and favorites and such would give. I got to the quote section and read one that feels particularly appropriate today:
"If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies... we draw our lines around these moments of pain and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us."
This came from the book "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman. I don't remember the context, but I remember being struck by the quote enough that it stuck in my head for well over a year, until time degraded the accuracy of my memory and I had to scan through all 600-odd pages of a book that was only okay just to find it again. I took this to mean that regardless of how much people can mean to each other, we ultimately have to isolate ourselves from most of the other people in our lives to a degree. We have to maintain a certain level of distance to preserve our own well-being, because if we didn't we'd be overwhelmed by worry and concern and sadness while we looked on at all of the bad things that can happen to each other.
The reason this resonated with me today was because I can think of a few people in my daily life who have different degrees of crap going on right now, and there's really nothing I can do to make these things better for them other than be supportive. This isn't always good because usually I'm someone who, when faced with a problem, wants to take action to make it go away RIGHT NOW. When I can't, I feel pretty helpless. Which comes back to being an island -- you have to acknowledge you can't help, and you have to keep your own life moving forward and enjoy it as much as you can. I've got my own problems to deal with, but in the grand scheme of things, as much gravity as those problems might have for me, most of them are nothing compared to what other people have to deal with. Trying to stay on that island helps me keep that perspective, and, hopefully, keeps me happy enough so I'm able to offer support to people who need it more than I do, and enables me to deal with my own problems more successfully.
Wow. Where the hell did all of that come from? Not exactly what I was planning on writing about today. Maybe I should cut myself off here before I veer away from contemplative and start coming across as a bigger know-it-all than usual....
I was looking over my Facebook profile today, mostly because I only have two more days of lesson plans to prepare for the short week before winter break, and my spiraling absence of motivation usually winds up leading me to Facebook at some point; and let's face it, Facebook more or less wouldn't exist without a spiraling absence of motivation from its users. (Not to mention -- Bejeweled Blitz daily spin today? 1,000,000 coins!!! Hello!!) ANYWAY, I was reading through my info since I recently gave in and took on the new "60 Minutes"-heralded profile layout and felt vaguely concerned about the overall impression all of those likes and favorites and such would give. I got to the quote section and read one that feels particularly appropriate today:
"If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies... we draw our lines around these moments of pain and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us."
This came from the book "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman. I don't remember the context, but I remember being struck by the quote enough that it stuck in my head for well over a year, until time degraded the accuracy of my memory and I had to scan through all 600-odd pages of a book that was only okay just to find it again. I took this to mean that regardless of how much people can mean to each other, we ultimately have to isolate ourselves from most of the other people in our lives to a degree. We have to maintain a certain level of distance to preserve our own well-being, because if we didn't we'd be overwhelmed by worry and concern and sadness while we looked on at all of the bad things that can happen to each other.
The reason this resonated with me today was because I can think of a few people in my daily life who have different degrees of crap going on right now, and there's really nothing I can do to make these things better for them other than be supportive. This isn't always good because usually I'm someone who, when faced with a problem, wants to take action to make it go away RIGHT NOW. When I can't, I feel pretty helpless. Which comes back to being an island -- you have to acknowledge you can't help, and you have to keep your own life moving forward and enjoy it as much as you can. I've got my own problems to deal with, but in the grand scheme of things, as much gravity as those problems might have for me, most of them are nothing compared to what other people have to deal with. Trying to stay on that island helps me keep that perspective, and, hopefully, keeps me happy enough so I'm able to offer support to people who need it more than I do, and enables me to deal with my own problems more successfully.
Wow. Where the hell did all of that come from? Not exactly what I was planning on writing about today. Maybe I should cut myself off here before I veer away from contemplative and start coming across as a bigger know-it-all than usual....
Sunday, December 5, 2010
.........
Eleven people have the new book, "Iridescent," right now.
I'm not pressuring anyone -- seriously -- but I'm kind of going a little crazy waiting to hear if anyone likes it.
Just saying.
I'm not pressuring anyone -- seriously -- but I'm kind of going a little crazy waiting to hear if anyone likes it.
Just saying.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Why I Will Never Ask You
For the record, I did hit my 50,000 words on Thanksgiving morning. It was not a big moment; I knew I'd get there, and I knew once I did that I likely wouldn't be done telling the story. Both of those things came to pass. The motivation to push forward is certainly less now that I've reached that bar, and honestly my word count is already well below 50,000 again since I've started putting it through the revisions it needs before it sees the light of day.
And it's that light of day that we're discussing today. A few posts back I asked who wanted to read this when it was done, and I did get a few responses. If you were one of these people, I'll have a .pdf copy of the whole thing on its way to you the moment it's ready, which will be in the coming week. And I'm glad people did ask, because other than a handful of loyal beta readers I've collected over the years, it's very possible this manuscript that has absolutely eaten me alive over the past month will never be seen by anyone else. Because I have completely given up on asking people to read anything I write.
To clarify: I want people to read what I write, but I will never again* ASK anyone to read something I've written. I want people to read this book, even if it turns out they don't like it much. I still want people to read "Emily," even if all I see in it are flaws right now. I still want people to read "Infinity," because it's just THAT GOOD, and even "Two Years" if they aren't afraid of just how deep into the darkest part of my life it's going to take them. But here's the thing: I've had too many experiences when someone casually discovers that I write books. There's that moment of surprise when they discover something new about me, especially since writing books isn't really the most common of hobbies. And since its kind of an intellectual exercise, people are generally at least a little impressed to find out that someone they know even bothers trying to do it. But you know what? It rarely, RARELY goes beyond that. Example: Someone I know overheard me talking to someone about writing. Their reaction: "You write BOOKS?!?" and then the usual excited follow-up questions. So the next day I asked if she wanted to read one and of course she said she did.
It's been two months.
To the best of my knowledge, she hasn't even started it yet. And I'm not picking on this one person, but using her as an example of what it's always like when you approach someone and ask if they'd like to read something you wrote. Anyone polite will say yes, and then either read it or forget they have it until they guiltily return it unread. And I'm not someone really looking for new ways to be rejected -- I've got my dating life for that. But that's what it feels like when your book gets set aside that way. So I won't do it. I won't ask anyone specifically.
Now, on the other hand, when people ARE interested and motivated, it's very different. Someone approaches you because they heard about your book from someone else and were intrigued? Great. That's what you want as a writer. Not just to be read, but to be read by someone who WANTS to read you. When you invest so much of yourself into creating something you believe in, you want to share it with people. But not in a way that makes them feel like they're taking on extra homework just to be nice.
I hope this isn't coming across as bitter; it really isn't meant to be. I'm just at a point right now where it's not as important to me for a lot of people to read my writing as it would be for a smaller group of interested people to read it.
So if you want to read the new book -- now officially titled "Iridescent" -- and you have already said so, you'll see it soon. If you would like to, let me know. Or if you'd like to read any of the others I've done, let me know.
But I won't ask.
*and all of this will change if I ever get a book deal and I start trying to get people to buy multiple copies; I'm pretty sure I'll become insufferable in my self-promotion at that point
And it's that light of day that we're discussing today. A few posts back I asked who wanted to read this when it was done, and I did get a few responses. If you were one of these people, I'll have a .pdf copy of the whole thing on its way to you the moment it's ready, which will be in the coming week. And I'm glad people did ask, because other than a handful of loyal beta readers I've collected over the years, it's very possible this manuscript that has absolutely eaten me alive over the past month will never be seen by anyone else. Because I have completely given up on asking people to read anything I write.
To clarify: I want people to read what I write, but I will never again* ASK anyone to read something I've written. I want people to read this book, even if it turns out they don't like it much. I still want people to read "Emily," even if all I see in it are flaws right now. I still want people to read "Infinity," because it's just THAT GOOD, and even "Two Years" if they aren't afraid of just how deep into the darkest part of my life it's going to take them. But here's the thing: I've had too many experiences when someone casually discovers that I write books. There's that moment of surprise when they discover something new about me, especially since writing books isn't really the most common of hobbies. And since its kind of an intellectual exercise, people are generally at least a little impressed to find out that someone they know even bothers trying to do it. But you know what? It rarely, RARELY goes beyond that. Example: Someone I know overheard me talking to someone about writing. Their reaction: "You write BOOKS?!?" and then the usual excited follow-up questions. So the next day I asked if she wanted to read one and of course she said she did.
It's been two months.
To the best of my knowledge, she hasn't even started it yet. And I'm not picking on this one person, but using her as an example of what it's always like when you approach someone and ask if they'd like to read something you wrote. Anyone polite will say yes, and then either read it or forget they have it until they guiltily return it unread. And I'm not someone really looking for new ways to be rejected -- I've got my dating life for that. But that's what it feels like when your book gets set aside that way. So I won't do it. I won't ask anyone specifically.
Now, on the other hand, when people ARE interested and motivated, it's very different. Someone approaches you because they heard about your book from someone else and were intrigued? Great. That's what you want as a writer. Not just to be read, but to be read by someone who WANTS to read you. When you invest so much of yourself into creating something you believe in, you want to share it with people. But not in a way that makes them feel like they're taking on extra homework just to be nice.
I hope this isn't coming across as bitter; it really isn't meant to be. I'm just at a point right now where it's not as important to me for a lot of people to read my writing as it would be for a smaller group of interested people to read it.
So if you want to read the new book -- now officially titled "Iridescent" -- and you have already said so, you'll see it soon. If you would like to, let me know. Or if you'd like to read any of the others I've done, let me know.
But I won't ask.
*and all of this will change if I ever get a book deal and I start trying to get people to buy multiple copies; I'm pretty sure I'll become insufferable in my self-promotion at that point
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Breakthrough
I found it.
After God alone knows how many aborted plot lines, I finally know how this book is going to come together. And in knowing that, I'm feeling much more confident it's going to work. Confident enough that I'm going to let you in on the two candidates I'm wavering between as I try to settle on a title: Either "Iridescent" or "Just Look Up to the Sky." I'll have to see which fits best when it's all over with.
Okay. Update's over. Gotta write.
After God alone knows how many aborted plot lines, I finally know how this book is going to come together. And in knowing that, I'm feeling much more confident it's going to work. Confident enough that I'm going to let you in on the two candidates I'm wavering between as I try to settle on a title: Either "Iridescent" or "Just Look Up to the Sky." I'll have to see which fits best when it's all over with.
Okay. Update's over. Gotta write.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Recruiting
Sunday afternoon, though it feels like Sunday evening with the darkening sky. Still not used to the time change.
I'm going to hit 30,000 words today before I go to bed. This puts me just a little ahead of my self-assigned NaNo pace, and hopefully still on the way to reaching my goal of somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 words by the end of the month.
I'm finding that more than usual, I'm anxious to see what people will think of this project. Most of the time when I write something and I get a certain amount of progress done, I get excited about sharing it because I feel so confident about the responses being positive, which is how most writers would think at the end -- why bother with the effort if the book going to suck?
But this time, I'm anxious for opinions just because I really don't know how this one is going to work. Will it connect with people on multiple levels like I'm kind of intending it to do? Will the imagery work? The parallels? The characters? I just really, really don't know. My stock answer right now when I talk about this is that people will either take to it in the way I'm hoping, or they will politely describe it as "interesting."
So, I'm asking ahead of time for anyone reading this: If you've ever read anything else I've written before or even if you haven't, would you like to see this thing when it's done? I don't feel any remorse in being this shameless about asking. Usually I don't ask people directly to read anything because it seems that almost EVERY TIME I do, they'll say yes because they feel obligated to after I've asked,and then they just let it sit around for months before they read it, if they ever do at all. Which bothers me a little, but not tons because it'd be tough trying to win over a non-motivated reader in the first place. But this time it's different, because when I hit The End I'll be curious right away, and if I know ahead of time how many people I can send the file to, I don't have to bother waiting for reaction from one or two people at a time. Now, I'm talking about a PDF file, so you'd be reading it off a computer screen. For some people at longer distances, this is really the only option. People more local, we can probably work something out with printed copies. But once it's done I want to get it out there.
So, if you'd like to see it, just leave a comment, either here or on the Facebook link that will lead to this post. A simple "yes" with your name will be plenty. I don't want to say too much about it ahead of time, but just so you have some idea I'll say this much: It's a novel written for older children (no surprise). It's not scary. Nobody dies.
Anybody want to help me out here? You've got sixteen days to decide.
I'm going to hit 30,000 words today before I go to bed. This puts me just a little ahead of my self-assigned NaNo pace, and hopefully still on the way to reaching my goal of somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 words by the end of the month.
I'm finding that more than usual, I'm anxious to see what people will think of this project. Most of the time when I write something and I get a certain amount of progress done, I get excited about sharing it because I feel so confident about the responses being positive, which is how most writers would think at the end -- why bother with the effort if the book going to suck?
But this time, I'm anxious for opinions just because I really don't know how this one is going to work. Will it connect with people on multiple levels like I'm kind of intending it to do? Will the imagery work? The parallels? The characters? I just really, really don't know. My stock answer right now when I talk about this is that people will either take to it in the way I'm hoping, or they will politely describe it as "interesting."
So, I'm asking ahead of time for anyone reading this: If you've ever read anything else I've written before or even if you haven't, would you like to see this thing when it's done? I don't feel any remorse in being this shameless about asking. Usually I don't ask people directly to read anything because it seems that almost EVERY TIME I do, they'll say yes because they feel obligated to after I've asked,and then they just let it sit around for months before they read it, if they ever do at all. Which bothers me a little, but not tons because it'd be tough trying to win over a non-motivated reader in the first place. But this time it's different, because when I hit The End I'll be curious right away, and if I know ahead of time how many people I can send the file to, I don't have to bother waiting for reaction from one or two people at a time. Now, I'm talking about a PDF file, so you'd be reading it off a computer screen. For some people at longer distances, this is really the only option. People more local, we can probably work something out with printed copies. But once it's done I want to get it out there.
So, if you'd like to see it, just leave a comment, either here or on the Facebook link that will lead to this post. A simple "yes" with your name will be plenty. I don't want to say too much about it ahead of time, but just so you have some idea I'll say this much: It's a novel written for older children (no surprise). It's not scary. Nobody dies.
Anybody want to help me out here? You've got sixteen days to decide.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Knee Deep in the Word Count
NanoWriMo Day 9, or as I might choose to start calling it because I don't care much for the cutesiness of that name, "Nanoblahblahblah," with credit to Mr. Bomani for riffing up that handle.
Anyway. Call it what you want, Day 9 is now a memory. I'm sitting right at 18,500 words which puts me at a much slower pace than I was last year with Infinity, but still ahead of the recommended pace so I'm fine with that. With this word count, I should be just over one-third of the way finished. But it surely does not feel that way. I'm planning on taking this one at least to 60,000 words just to give myself some edit room, and who knows? It might even go on longer than that. It's impossible to say since I've just had to face up to the fact that when I write a manuscript, as confounding as it might be for some people to think about, I am seemingly unable to write it in chronological order. I have chunks of ideas that I'll explore, and then find ways to link them together as the story develops. Without exception, every manuscript I've finished that doesn't suck has been done this way. I do not discount the idea that because I'm writing like this, I'll possibly reach the end of November and this thing still won't be finished.
But I'm honestly looking forward to it being done. Not to get it over with so much; the work hasn't been hard. I've had the discipline to wake up an hour earlier than usual and knock off 1,000 words before my day really starts, which only leaves another 1,000 in the evening, and seriously? That's nothing. A thousand words is three pages, give or take a paragraph. Not that tough to do once you set your mind to it. But I want this done so I can see what it turns out like. The idea I have, the overarching concept or theme or story or conflict or whatever you want to tag it as, I think it has the potential to be something very original, and -- though I loathe the word from the abuse it receives in staff development sessions -- powerful. But will it be? I honestly don't know. I think some people will read this and instead of being moved or touched or reached in the manner I hope they would be, I think it's possible they'll just dismiss it as kind of interesting but won't admit how it didn't really capture their imagination. Which in the case of this one, would actually be more harsh than having someone say they really disliked it.
I could take dislike. I could take any reaction that had the force of opinion behind it. Vague ambivalence would be harder to take. And I kind of feel like I might be setting myself up for that in a lot of cases. I think either people just aren't going to get it, or, more likely, I'm not going to get it across the way I want to.
Time will tell. But if I manage to pull this off, I'm going to be pretty friggin' happy.
Anyway. Call it what you want, Day 9 is now a memory. I'm sitting right at 18,500 words which puts me at a much slower pace than I was last year with Infinity, but still ahead of the recommended pace so I'm fine with that. With this word count, I should be just over one-third of the way finished. But it surely does not feel that way. I'm planning on taking this one at least to 60,000 words just to give myself some edit room, and who knows? It might even go on longer than that. It's impossible to say since I've just had to face up to the fact that when I write a manuscript, as confounding as it might be for some people to think about, I am seemingly unable to write it in chronological order. I have chunks of ideas that I'll explore, and then find ways to link them together as the story develops. Without exception, every manuscript I've finished that doesn't suck has been done this way. I do not discount the idea that because I'm writing like this, I'll possibly reach the end of November and this thing still won't be finished.
But I'm honestly looking forward to it being done. Not to get it over with so much; the work hasn't been hard. I've had the discipline to wake up an hour earlier than usual and knock off 1,000 words before my day really starts, which only leaves another 1,000 in the evening, and seriously? That's nothing. A thousand words is three pages, give or take a paragraph. Not that tough to do once you set your mind to it. But I want this done so I can see what it turns out like. The idea I have, the overarching concept or theme or story or conflict or whatever you want to tag it as, I think it has the potential to be something very original, and -- though I loathe the word from the abuse it receives in staff development sessions -- powerful. But will it be? I honestly don't know. I think some people will read this and instead of being moved or touched or reached in the manner I hope they would be, I think it's possible they'll just dismiss it as kind of interesting but won't admit how it didn't really capture their imagination. Which in the case of this one, would actually be more harsh than having someone say they really disliked it.
I could take dislike. I could take any reaction that had the force of opinion behind it. Vague ambivalence would be harder to take. And I kind of feel like I might be setting myself up for that in a lot of cases. I think either people just aren't going to get it, or, more likely, I'm not going to get it across the way I want to.
Time will tell. But if I manage to pull this off, I'm going to be pretty friggin' happy.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Surfing Down the Avalanche, or Jumping Off the Cliff
Self-indulgent writer alert....
October 29th. This is likely to be my last post before NaNoWriMo 2010 begins.
Last night, for the sake of curiosity more than anything else, I played through the iTunes playlist I fine-tuned a year ago into what eventually became my "Following Infinity" writing soundtrack. Even though so many people have read that manuscript now that I can't even remember who's seen it and who hasn't, I feel they've missed out on the full experience without hearing the music I listened to while writing it. I can't separate the ideas from the songs I played that inspired the tone of the writing. I can't separate the emotion I tried to convey from the emotion that these songs inspired. I listen to this playlist in order, and I'm back inside Molly's head. I feel her pain and confusion, and her ultimate steps toward closure. I smell the smoke on Frank's jacket. I hear Ali singing along with the radio even though she never did in the book, because she did during parts of the story that I didn't write but, for me, still happened with as much authenticity as anything I did write. I remember what it felt like when Molly's knees gave out from underneath her when she broke down, because the same thing happened to me once.
And revisiting all of this actually makes this year's attempt seem all the more daunting. Most of the people who know me and are familiar with my daily life felt they had a pretty good bead on who I modeled Molly after, and to a certain degree they weren't wrong. But a lot more of her came from my experiences than from anywhere or anyone else. And this year? The story I'm going after is a lot less personal. So there's going to be a lot less for me to tap into. Which is okay. I really feel that my approach to writing has changed dramatically in just the past three or four months, and I'm excited to see what that's going to do. I've got tons of ideas for this new project, and I'm anxious to start playing them out.
But the problem is I've only got it figured out to a point. I have what I think is about a third of what will ultimately be the whole book plotted out in fair detail: I know my two main characters. and I know what drives them. I know what matters to them most. I know what they love and what they fear. I know where they are as the story begins, and I know what carries them into the catalyst of not just the main plot line, but what could be at least three concurrent subplots as well. I know how one innocent kiss will bring them together in a way that neither of them ever would have imagined in the beginning. And I know that soon after that, their worlds will start to unravel.
I just don't know WHY yet.
I know why it needs to happen, and I have a general idea of what will happen in the wake of the unraveling, but I don't know how to get there yet. There have been many possibilities jumping up at me, but so far none of them have really stuck. There's not that satisfying feeling of things sliding into place because they are exactly as they should be. And this means I'm throwing a lot of faith behind the idea of letting the characters further develop as the story comes together, and hoping the added definition of who they are will show me what direction to go. It would also be great if somewhere along the line here, I can come up with a title that doesn't completely suck.
So there's a vague sense of adventure in beginning this. I'd love to start tonight, but I can't begin officially until midnight, Nov. 1, and if I am anything at my core it's an obsessive rule-follower. So I will wait. But I'll plot, and note-take, and diagram, and whatever else I can to do give myself a head start. And I'll write up my lesson plans for the week so I don't have to bother with them during the school nights I'll be writing. And I'll format lesson plans through Thanksgiving so I can save time in the coming weeks. And I'll clean the house within an inch of its life this weekend because I know that's going to get neglected until I'm done. And I'll plan out what my meals will be for the next week down to the portion size, just to eliminate the random bits of time wasted by trying to decide what to eat. And I'll set the DVR so I can pace out my TV watching during the week to allow myself time to write each evening, and even more time over the weekends (hey, you have to clear your head somehow). I'll plan out which nights I HAVE to go to the Y, and know exactly what my workouts will be while I'm there, and know exactly how long they will take me, from the moment I leave the house to the moment I get home, or at least within 10-15 minutes, which still feels pretty precise. I know my Bejeweled Blitz skills will fall off quite a bit, as well as my Angry Bird skills and Cut the Rope skills. The XBox and the DVD player are going to be active dust collectors through Thanksgiving.
To "win," I have to hit 50,000 words. "Following Infinity" drafted at 51,000 odd words, and was edited down to about 40,000, which is on the edge of being short. This time through, I'm aiming for somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000-70,000, just because I know what will happen to it in the aftermath.
And just for the sake of anyone who cares, I do have the beginnings of a new writing soundtrack coming together. I'm sure some songs will stand out as more important as I write, as some already have, and others will be set aside. But for the moment, everything on the list comes from music released by Peter Gabriel since 1992. If that means anything to you, then perhaps you'll at least have an idea of the tone I'm going for.
Fifty hours to go. I'll keep my Facebook status updated with word count totals throughout the month. Wish me luck.
October 29th. This is likely to be my last post before NaNoWriMo 2010 begins.
Last night, for the sake of curiosity more than anything else, I played through the iTunes playlist I fine-tuned a year ago into what eventually became my "Following Infinity" writing soundtrack. Even though so many people have read that manuscript now that I can't even remember who's seen it and who hasn't, I feel they've missed out on the full experience without hearing the music I listened to while writing it. I can't separate the ideas from the songs I played that inspired the tone of the writing. I can't separate the emotion I tried to convey from the emotion that these songs inspired. I listen to this playlist in order, and I'm back inside Molly's head. I feel her pain and confusion, and her ultimate steps toward closure. I smell the smoke on Frank's jacket. I hear Ali singing along with the radio even though she never did in the book, because she did during parts of the story that I didn't write but, for me, still happened with as much authenticity as anything I did write. I remember what it felt like when Molly's knees gave out from underneath her when she broke down, because the same thing happened to me once.
And revisiting all of this actually makes this year's attempt seem all the more daunting. Most of the people who know me and are familiar with my daily life felt they had a pretty good bead on who I modeled Molly after, and to a certain degree they weren't wrong. But a lot more of her came from my experiences than from anywhere or anyone else. And this year? The story I'm going after is a lot less personal. So there's going to be a lot less for me to tap into. Which is okay. I really feel that my approach to writing has changed dramatically in just the past three or four months, and I'm excited to see what that's going to do. I've got tons of ideas for this new project, and I'm anxious to start playing them out.
But the problem is I've only got it figured out to a point. I have what I think is about a third of what will ultimately be the whole book plotted out in fair detail: I know my two main characters. and I know what drives them. I know what matters to them most. I know what they love and what they fear. I know where they are as the story begins, and I know what carries them into the catalyst of not just the main plot line, but what could be at least three concurrent subplots as well. I know how one innocent kiss will bring them together in a way that neither of them ever would have imagined in the beginning. And I know that soon after that, their worlds will start to unravel.
I just don't know WHY yet.
I know why it needs to happen, and I have a general idea of what will happen in the wake of the unraveling, but I don't know how to get there yet. There have been many possibilities jumping up at me, but so far none of them have really stuck. There's not that satisfying feeling of things sliding into place because they are exactly as they should be. And this means I'm throwing a lot of faith behind the idea of letting the characters further develop as the story comes together, and hoping the added definition of who they are will show me what direction to go. It would also be great if somewhere along the line here, I can come up with a title that doesn't completely suck.
So there's a vague sense of adventure in beginning this. I'd love to start tonight, but I can't begin officially until midnight, Nov. 1, and if I am anything at my core it's an obsessive rule-follower. So I will wait. But I'll plot, and note-take, and diagram, and whatever else I can to do give myself a head start. And I'll write up my lesson plans for the week so I don't have to bother with them during the school nights I'll be writing. And I'll format lesson plans through Thanksgiving so I can save time in the coming weeks. And I'll clean the house within an inch of its life this weekend because I know that's going to get neglected until I'm done. And I'll plan out what my meals will be for the next week down to the portion size, just to eliminate the random bits of time wasted by trying to decide what to eat. And I'll set the DVR so I can pace out my TV watching during the week to allow myself time to write each evening, and even more time over the weekends (hey, you have to clear your head somehow). I'll plan out which nights I HAVE to go to the Y, and know exactly what my workouts will be while I'm there, and know exactly how long they will take me, from the moment I leave the house to the moment I get home, or at least within 10-15 minutes, which still feels pretty precise. I know my Bejeweled Blitz skills will fall off quite a bit, as well as my Angry Bird skills and Cut the Rope skills. The XBox and the DVD player are going to be active dust collectors through Thanksgiving.
To "win," I have to hit 50,000 words. "Following Infinity" drafted at 51,000 odd words, and was edited down to about 40,000, which is on the edge of being short. This time through, I'm aiming for somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000-70,000, just because I know what will happen to it in the aftermath.
And just for the sake of anyone who cares, I do have the beginnings of a new writing soundtrack coming together. I'm sure some songs will stand out as more important as I write, as some already have, and others will be set aside. But for the moment, everything on the list comes from music released by Peter Gabriel since 1992. If that means anything to you, then perhaps you'll at least have an idea of the tone I'm going for.
Fifty hours to go. I'll keep my Facebook status updated with word count totals throughout the month. Wish me luck.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Decision
I've made my choice. I'm going with number 5. I'd like you to notice the date of my last post and the date of this one. At some point between those two dates a brand new idea came to life, and its something I definitely want to try. As I always feel at the very beginning of a project, I'm convinced its brilliant. It is definitely unlike anything I have ever attempted before.
Just remember, if you read this someday, the manuscript will have evolved from germination of the idea to completed first draft in just a little over six weeks. Either that will seem impressive or like a monumental waste of time.
Just remember, if you read this someday, the manuscript will have evolved from germination of the idea to completed first draft in just a little over six weeks. Either that will seem impressive or like a monumental waste of time.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Very Open to Suggestions - I Need Some Help
National Novel Writing Month begins in... crap. Sixteen days. And I don't have an idea.
Or at least not ONE idea that I'm sold on. I have several ideas -- a whole Vault with a capital 'V' of ideas. I'm just not entirely sure which one I'd like to pursue.
For those who may be new to the blog (assuming anyone reads it -- I'm still surprised when someone makes a reference to it even existing as something beyond Facebook News Feed spam) National Novel Writing Month, also known as the less-preferable NaNoWrimo, is a project started by some people back when, encouraging people to try their hand at writing an entire book in the span of one month. They define a novel as 50,000 words long, which, depending on what genre you're looking at, is a short-to-average length book.
The first year I was goaded into trying this, I took a pretty good idea and slowly and very gradually drove it into the ground. It's a good idea, but a desperately flawed manuscript that I don't mentally count on my tally if anyone ever asks how many books I've written. It's that weak. Barely first draft weak. Weak and unfinished the point that if I changed a character's name halfway through, I didn't go back and fix it. Maybe someday it will get a revision, but not anytime soon.
The second year I entered into the endeavor more willingly, and came up with a manuscript that some of you out there may know as Following Infinity. The first draft of that actually only took 24 days, and I must say that even though the one literary agent who looked at it brought many necessary revision points to my attention, it's something I'm still very proud of pulling off.
Which brings us to this year. As far as writing goes these days, I'm working on revising another manuscript, code-named "Emily" for those who know what I'm talking about, and taking that from scary to flat-out epic. But as much as I'd like to pound out a revised Emily in one month, revision is delicate work, and nothing about NaNoWrimo is delicate. It's about 2,000 words a day. For kicks, try writing 2,000 words organized around a structured topic just to see how long it takes you. And then imagine doing it for a month, including days you have to go to work, and then eat, and work out... etc. There's a time crunch involved.
So the purpose of my NaNoWriMo experience this year is simple: A work out. It will force my brain into a mode where it's thinking at least equal parts school and writing, and hopefully by the end I'll be much more prepared to get some serious Emily revision accomplished.
So here's where you come in. Since I'm not going to work on Emily, I need a different project. I have a couple possibilities in mind, and I'd like to open things up to see what people think. HOPEFULLY I'm going to get some responses to this so I get a little direction on which project to go with. I'm going to link this post to my Facebook page so more people will see it since that's a wider potential audience, and maybe when these sixteen days are up I'll have enough people commenting to nudge me toward whichever of these I'm probably leaning toward already without realizing it.
So seriously -- please vote. Even if you're just lurking here and have never commented on a post before, I don't care. I'd still like to know what as many people think as possible. Here are the choices: If you vote, you can just tell me which number sounds interesting in your comment, or say anything else you'd like. Thanks in advance to anyone who helps out. I'll tell you a little of each without giving any major plot points away. Here you go:
(1) A middle-grade thriller based around social networking, ethical dilemmas, and kinda/sorta time travel. I've tried starting this at least 4 times and made some progress, but a fresh start into a whole new draft might be what it needs.
(2) A young-adult (teenage audience) comedy about a high-schooler so sick of the problems that come with one aspect of her (or his; I don't know yet) life she enlists several unwitting life coaches to give her advice without realizing they are doing it. This is an idea I've kicked around for a few years that might be ready to try.
(3) A more literary character-based comedy based on the people that populate a certain activity / area of the course of a summer. I would have to try and tap into some degree of inner Garrison Keillor for this to work, but it would be fun to try.
(4) I recently saw a picture of two sisters. Not mine, for the record. The composition of this picture is highly evocative, the kind of picture that really does tell a story. I just looked at it for a few minutes and saw the back story behind it coming to life. Happy and beautiful and tragic. It might be interesting to explore this.
(5) None of the above. Just sitting down with no idea and starting and see how deep of a hole I get into and what I do to get out of it.
So... ANY SUGGESTIONS??
Or at least not ONE idea that I'm sold on. I have several ideas -- a whole Vault with a capital 'V' of ideas. I'm just not entirely sure which one I'd like to pursue.
For those who may be new to the blog (assuming anyone reads it -- I'm still surprised when someone makes a reference to it even existing as something beyond Facebook News Feed spam) National Novel Writing Month, also known as the less-preferable NaNoWrimo, is a project started by some people back when, encouraging people to try their hand at writing an entire book in the span of one month. They define a novel as 50,000 words long, which, depending on what genre you're looking at, is a short-to-average length book.
The first year I was goaded into trying this, I took a pretty good idea and slowly and very gradually drove it into the ground. It's a good idea, but a desperately flawed manuscript that I don't mentally count on my tally if anyone ever asks how many books I've written. It's that weak. Barely first draft weak. Weak and unfinished the point that if I changed a character's name halfway through, I didn't go back and fix it. Maybe someday it will get a revision, but not anytime soon.
The second year I entered into the endeavor more willingly, and came up with a manuscript that some of you out there may know as Following Infinity. The first draft of that actually only took 24 days, and I must say that even though the one literary agent who looked at it brought many necessary revision points to my attention, it's something I'm still very proud of pulling off.
Which brings us to this year. As far as writing goes these days, I'm working on revising another manuscript, code-named "Emily" for those who know what I'm talking about, and taking that from scary to flat-out epic. But as much as I'd like to pound out a revised Emily in one month, revision is delicate work, and nothing about NaNoWrimo is delicate. It's about 2,000 words a day. For kicks, try writing 2,000 words organized around a structured topic just to see how long it takes you. And then imagine doing it for a month, including days you have to go to work, and then eat, and work out... etc. There's a time crunch involved.
So the purpose of my NaNoWriMo experience this year is simple: A work out. It will force my brain into a mode where it's thinking at least equal parts school and writing, and hopefully by the end I'll be much more prepared to get some serious Emily revision accomplished.
So here's where you come in. Since I'm not going to work on Emily, I need a different project. I have a couple possibilities in mind, and I'd like to open things up to see what people think. HOPEFULLY I'm going to get some responses to this so I get a little direction on which project to go with. I'm going to link this post to my Facebook page so more people will see it since that's a wider potential audience, and maybe when these sixteen days are up I'll have enough people commenting to nudge me toward whichever of these I'm probably leaning toward already without realizing it.
So seriously -- please vote. Even if you're just lurking here and have never commented on a post before, I don't care. I'd still like to know what as many people think as possible. Here are the choices: If you vote, you can just tell me which number sounds interesting in your comment, or say anything else you'd like. Thanks in advance to anyone who helps out. I'll tell you a little of each without giving any major plot points away. Here you go:
(1) A middle-grade thriller based around social networking, ethical dilemmas, and kinda/sorta time travel. I've tried starting this at least 4 times and made some progress, but a fresh start into a whole new draft might be what it needs.
(2) A young-adult (teenage audience) comedy about a high-schooler so sick of the problems that come with one aspect of her (or his; I don't know yet) life she enlists several unwitting life coaches to give her advice without realizing they are doing it. This is an idea I've kicked around for a few years that might be ready to try.
(3) A more literary character-based comedy based on the people that populate a certain activity / area of the course of a summer. I would have to try and tap into some degree of inner Garrison Keillor for this to work, but it would be fun to try.
(4) I recently saw a picture of two sisters. Not mine, for the record. The composition of this picture is highly evocative, the kind of picture that really does tell a story. I just looked at it for a few minutes and saw the back story behind it coming to life. Happy and beautiful and tragic. It might be interesting to explore this.
(5) None of the above. Just sitting down with no idea and starting and see how deep of a hole I get into and what I do to get out of it.
So... ANY SUGGESTIONS??
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Memorial
To commemorate the 6th year anniversary of my sister's death, here's a brief excerpt from the memoir I wrote about the days surrounding all of that.
As always, if anyone reading this is interested in seeing the whole manuscript, let me know and I'll somehow get a copy for you to look at.
**************
I quietly stepped away from the crowd still congregating in Erin’s room with the lights still down, speaking in the hushed tones of late night but not with the same cautious quiet there had been when there was a danger of waking her. I went to the front door and stepped outside. It was early Tuesday morning now, October 5th. I stood out in the dark as it occurred to me for the first time that would be the date on the marker by her grave. October 5th had always been just another date to me, one of the dates that passed with little consequence. Another page to be torn off the desk calendar and discarded. When Erin died, October 5th took on a new importance, and did so with such immediacy it was as though it had been a landmark date all along, a date that had a depth and resonance I had somehow managed to overlook my entire life and suddenly understood.
I looked up at the sky. It was a cool night and the sky was crystal clear. Elk River is a fair distance from the Cities, so the nights out there aren’t as affected by the light pollution as the skies above my own home, the skies I stare into when taking Spencer out for his final walk of the night. There were so many more stars there, and the sky looked infinite. I stood there for a few minutes wondering about where Erin was, what she was doing, what form she had taken. Was she in Heaven already, or did she have a journey to complete before getting there? Was she still hovering in that corner of her bedroom, watching over everyone as they were slowly recovering from the shock? Did she see me leave and follow me outside? As I looked up into the stars, the only conclusion I could reach was my sister as I knew her was now gone, and had become something far beyond what I could understand.
As always, if anyone reading this is interested in seeing the whole manuscript, let me know and I'll somehow get a copy for you to look at.
**************
I quietly stepped away from the crowd still congregating in Erin’s room with the lights still down, speaking in the hushed tones of late night but not with the same cautious quiet there had been when there was a danger of waking her. I went to the front door and stepped outside. It was early Tuesday morning now, October 5th. I stood out in the dark as it occurred to me for the first time that would be the date on the marker by her grave. October 5th had always been just another date to me, one of the dates that passed with little consequence. Another page to be torn off the desk calendar and discarded. When Erin died, October 5th took on a new importance, and did so with such immediacy it was as though it had been a landmark date all along, a date that had a depth and resonance I had somehow managed to overlook my entire life and suddenly understood.
I looked up at the sky. It was a cool night and the sky was crystal clear. Elk River is a fair distance from the Cities, so the nights out there aren’t as affected by the light pollution as the skies above my own home, the skies I stare into when taking Spencer out for his final walk of the night. There were so many more stars there, and the sky looked infinite. I stood there for a few minutes wondering about where Erin was, what she was doing, what form she had taken. Was she in Heaven already, or did she have a journey to complete before getting there? Was she still hovering in that corner of her bedroom, watching over everyone as they were slowly recovering from the shock? Did she see me leave and follow me outside? As I looked up into the stars, the only conclusion I could reach was my sister as I knew her was now gone, and had become something far beyond what I could understand.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Late Night Ramblings
*It's a good sign that I haven't written in a while if I have to actually stop and think about what my password is. That happened once at the Y -- I hadn't gone in a long time, and one day when I was about to go I realized that I didn't remember the combination to my lock anymore. The realization of a nightmare I had during several junior high and high school winter breaks that finally caught up with me in adulthood, and saw me making a Target run to buy a new purple combination lock to replace the blue one I couldn't open anymore. You'd think I would have saved the sticker with the combination on it, but no.... Luckily this time there was a good, easy-to-remember mathematical relationship between my numbers so even if I wasn't going as often as I am now, and even if I hadn't saved the sticker this time (which I did), I'd be able to remember what it is. Speaking of my Y adventures, I also recently bought a new iPod to replace the original blue yPod shuffle (which I've now christened the yPod Nano, of course). It has a built-in pedometer, which is pretty cool, and a built-in radio tuner so I can hear the sound on the Y televisions if I choose, and it can hold more than one playlist so I don't have to change the thing every time I go according to my mood for the day. Pretty sweet set up.
*What the hell is it with my dog being able to wake me up in the middle of the night like this because he's thirsty, and then he's able to fall back asleep in three minutes while I'm left with enough energy to sit here and write? I wonder if it's too late for the two of us to redefine this aspect of our relationship....
*What the hell is it with my dog being able to wake me up in the middle of the night like this because he's thirsty, and then he's able to fall back asleep in three minutes while I'm left with enough energy to sit here and write? I wonder if it's too late for the two of us to redefine this aspect of our relationship....
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Shamelessness
Okay, you know how OCCASIONALLY I'll mention something here about the manuscript I'm using to hunt down an agent? There's a contest going on, offered by a freelance editor who will give the thing a significant look-see if I win. I figure my odds of winning this are approximately the same as getting one of these agents to pick my query out of their slush pile and decide THAT's the one that glows in the dark for them... so why not enter?
Here's a link to the contest. It's a pretty cool opportunity.
http://www.camarshall.com/2010/09/freelance-editor-ca-marshalls-free-edit.html
Here's a link to the contest. It's a pretty cool opportunity.
http://www.camarshall.com/2010/09/freelance-editor-ca-marshalls-free-edit.html
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
A Thousand Suns
Music post today. It was release day for Linkin Park's new album "A Thousand Suns." I downloaded it before going to school this morning, and have played through it twice now.
At the risk of falling into cliché territory, it's really next-level stuff for them. Not so much metal, more industrial but still melodic, and very dark and moody.
I can barely wait for the next time I feel depressed so I can put it on and really enjoy it in the way it seems to have been intended.
At the risk of falling into cliché territory, it's really next-level stuff for them. Not so much metal, more industrial but still melodic, and very dark and moody.
I can barely wait for the next time I feel depressed so I can put it on and really enjoy it in the way it seems to have been intended.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
The Big Five-Oh
“What big five-oh? He’s nowhere near that age.” No. I’m not. This refers to an entirely different fifty.
Since I started working at it back in mid-February, I have now lost 50 pounds.
No diet plans, no surgery. Just a doctor slappin’ me upside the head and following two simple steps: (1) Eat like a dietician. (2) Work out like a bad ass.
For anyone who only first met me in the past fifteen years, I now weigh less than I have at any other time we’ve known each other. I do not exaggerate when I say experiencing this kind of change makes the world a very different place. And since this is the kind of thing that most people haven’t done before -- or have needed to do, for that matter -- I’m going to give you some examples of just how much the world has changed. Here is a list of 50 things that I’ve noticed are different after losing 50 pounds.
1 - Six inches dropped off your waistline.
2 - Your fingers are visibly narrower.
3 - When you tie your shoes, you can actually reach far enough to position the knot where it’s supposed to be, instead of skewed off to the side.
4 - I used to have these permanent indentations in the sides of my head from wearing glasses. I don’t anymore.
5 - You can again fit into the clothes you’ve kept in the bottom of the drawer or the back of the closet. In fact, some of them are too big now.
6 - Your blood pressure drops.
7 - You know that how fat you are isn’t going to be the first and most defining characteristic about you when you meet people for the first time.
8 - When you go to church, you don’t have to sidestep your way into the pews.
9 - Also at church, you can kneel without having to sit at the same time.
10 - You can clasp your hands behind your back.
11 - You can feel your bones -- cheek bones, ribs, knee caps. Name it. It’s actually kind of weird.
12 - You don’t get heartburn anymore because your diet has changed so much.
13 - You sleep a lot better.
14 - You can be on a treadmill and have a conversation at the same time, when before you’d be breathing too hard for this.
15 - You don’t sweat through your clothes from just standing still.
16 - Your natural walking pace is suddenly a lot faster.
17 - The day comes when you realize your wristwatch doesn’t fit anymore.
18 - You can sit in a theater or an arena and not have to worry about the awkward feelings of knowing that you’re spilling over into the seats next to you.
19 - You can jog up three flights of stairs without feeling the slightest bit winded.
20 - Your blood glucose falls to a much more reasonable level.
21 - You hurt less. In whatever way you care to see that statement.
22 - You can see your Adam’s apple.
23 - Your average heart rate drops.
24 - You develop the mindset that being full means you’ve finished a meal, and doesn’t mean you’ve stuffed yourself to the point you don’t even have room left for a Goldfish cracker.
25 - Regular soda pop, and even Gatorade, tastes so over-the-top sweet that you just can’t bear it anymore.
26 - The momentum of losing a lot of weight nearly eliminates the temptation to eat the things you shouldn’t.
27 - Your muscles are always a little bit sore, but in a good way.
28 - It’s easier to get in and out of a car.
29 - You can ride a roller coaster without feeling like the safety bar is going to cut you in half.
30 - You can walk really long distances and not feel even a little bit tired from it.
31 - You’re not overwhelmed with feelings of self-consciousness whenever somebody gets out a camera and starts playfully taking pictures of everyone.
32 - You start buying pants and shorts that have concealed drawstrings instead of concealed elastic waistbands. Because instead of of worrying about whether or not you can get your pants buttoned, you have to worry about keeping them up.
33 - Your laundry smells worse because half of it is made up of workout clothes.
34 - A rumbling stomach doesn’t bother you anymore. In fact, you learn to welcome it as a good sign.
35 - A very small piece of cake gets the job done for you at birthdays.
36 - Your self-confidence balloons. Granted, some of you might think that’s a dangerous thing for me to say. If that’s the case then you really have NO idea where I’ve been living all this time. It’s called a defense mechanism.
37 - You start to see your workout as a welcome break between your professional life and your home life instead of just one more thing you have to do.
38 - One shirt size smaller, and getting closer to dropping another.
39 - If some kind of backyard game starts up, you don’t automatically keep yourself on the sidelines because you’re much more able to keep up with the action.
40 - Your food preferences change. Some cravings disappear, and some things you couldn’t stand before become tolerable.
41 - Climbing on the scale becomes like a video game, since you’re hoping to beat your last score every time you do it.
42 - Your muscles have definition.
43 - It can be a little more uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time, because you’d rather be moving, and because you simply don’t have as much padding as you used to.
44 - You can wear those ‘cause’ rubber band bracelets and they have some give to them; before you could read “Made in China” reverse-imprinted on your skin when you took them off.
45 - You see a lot more veins in your body. I really don’t know if that’s from the weight loss or the weight lifting, but it’s definitely a difference.
46 - You essentially need to replace your entire wardrobe.
47 - Your lower back doesn’t hurt.
48 - You don’t have a rush of anxiety whenever someone makes any kind of “fat” joke. You also don’t want to punch the person who made the joke in the throat. Though you do still feel kind of sorry for them having to walk through life so ignorant.
49 - You get to live your life with much less self-loathing.
50 - You get to live your life with an stunning sense of accomplishment.
Try to imagine how long I’ve been waiting to write this. Seriously.
Since I started working at it back in mid-February, I have now lost 50 pounds.
No diet plans, no surgery. Just a doctor slappin’ me upside the head and following two simple steps: (1) Eat like a dietician. (2) Work out like a bad ass.
For anyone who only first met me in the past fifteen years, I now weigh less than I have at any other time we’ve known each other. I do not exaggerate when I say experiencing this kind of change makes the world a very different place. And since this is the kind of thing that most people haven’t done before -- or have needed to do, for that matter -- I’m going to give you some examples of just how much the world has changed. Here is a list of 50 things that I’ve noticed are different after losing 50 pounds.
1 - Six inches dropped off your waistline.
2 - Your fingers are visibly narrower.
3 - When you tie your shoes, you can actually reach far enough to position the knot where it’s supposed to be, instead of skewed off to the side.
4 - I used to have these permanent indentations in the sides of my head from wearing glasses. I don’t anymore.
5 - You can again fit into the clothes you’ve kept in the bottom of the drawer or the back of the closet. In fact, some of them are too big now.
6 - Your blood pressure drops.
7 - You know that how fat you are isn’t going to be the first and most defining characteristic about you when you meet people for the first time.
8 - When you go to church, you don’t have to sidestep your way into the pews.
9 - Also at church, you can kneel without having to sit at the same time.
10 - You can clasp your hands behind your back.
11 - You can feel your bones -- cheek bones, ribs, knee caps. Name it. It’s actually kind of weird.
12 - You don’t get heartburn anymore because your diet has changed so much.
13 - You sleep a lot better.
14 - You can be on a treadmill and have a conversation at the same time, when before you’d be breathing too hard for this.
15 - You don’t sweat through your clothes from just standing still.
16 - Your natural walking pace is suddenly a lot faster.
17 - The day comes when you realize your wristwatch doesn’t fit anymore.
18 - You can sit in a theater or an arena and not have to worry about the awkward feelings of knowing that you’re spilling over into the seats next to you.
19 - You can jog up three flights of stairs without feeling the slightest bit winded.
20 - Your blood glucose falls to a much more reasonable level.
21 - You hurt less. In whatever way you care to see that statement.
22 - You can see your Adam’s apple.
23 - Your average heart rate drops.
24 - You develop the mindset that being full means you’ve finished a meal, and doesn’t mean you’ve stuffed yourself to the point you don’t even have room left for a Goldfish cracker.
25 - Regular soda pop, and even Gatorade, tastes so over-the-top sweet that you just can’t bear it anymore.
26 - The momentum of losing a lot of weight nearly eliminates the temptation to eat the things you shouldn’t.
27 - Your muscles are always a little bit sore, but in a good way.
28 - It’s easier to get in and out of a car.
29 - You can ride a roller coaster without feeling like the safety bar is going to cut you in half.
30 - You can walk really long distances and not feel even a little bit tired from it.
31 - You’re not overwhelmed with feelings of self-consciousness whenever somebody gets out a camera and starts playfully taking pictures of everyone.
32 - You start buying pants and shorts that have concealed drawstrings instead of concealed elastic waistbands. Because instead of of worrying about whether or not you can get your pants buttoned, you have to worry about keeping them up.
33 - Your laundry smells worse because half of it is made up of workout clothes.
34 - A rumbling stomach doesn’t bother you anymore. In fact, you learn to welcome it as a good sign.
35 - A very small piece of cake gets the job done for you at birthdays.
36 - Your self-confidence balloons. Granted, some of you might think that’s a dangerous thing for me to say. If that’s the case then you really have NO idea where I’ve been living all this time. It’s called a defense mechanism.
37 - You start to see your workout as a welcome break between your professional life and your home life instead of just one more thing you have to do.
38 - One shirt size smaller, and getting closer to dropping another.
39 - If some kind of backyard game starts up, you don’t automatically keep yourself on the sidelines because you’re much more able to keep up with the action.
40 - Your food preferences change. Some cravings disappear, and some things you couldn’t stand before become tolerable.
41 - Climbing on the scale becomes like a video game, since you’re hoping to beat your last score every time you do it.
42 - Your muscles have definition.
43 - It can be a little more uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time, because you’d rather be moving, and because you simply don’t have as much padding as you used to.
44 - You can wear those ‘cause’ rubber band bracelets and they have some give to them; before you could read “Made in China” reverse-imprinted on your skin when you took them off.
45 - You see a lot more veins in your body. I really don’t know if that’s from the weight loss or the weight lifting, but it’s definitely a difference.
46 - You essentially need to replace your entire wardrobe.
47 - Your lower back doesn’t hurt.
48 - You don’t have a rush of anxiety whenever someone makes any kind of “fat” joke. You also don’t want to punch the person who made the joke in the throat. Though you do still feel kind of sorry for them having to walk through life so ignorant.
49 - You get to live your life with much less self-loathing.
50 - You get to live your life with an stunning sense of accomplishment.
Try to imagine how long I’ve been waiting to write this. Seriously.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Why Concerts Suck
The first big-time rock show I saw was Styx, on the Kilroy Was Here tour, on my 15th birthday. In the subsequent 27 or so years, I couldn't even name off the top of my head how many shows I've seen and which bands I've seen live, or how many times I've seen some of them. A concert in which one of your favorite musical artists performs can be a transcendent experience. Even if it's not one of your favorites, it can still bring you to a level of connection with the performers and the music that you didn't have before that you'll carry with you afterward. Concerts are great.
But they also suck. For several reasons, few of which have anything to do with the music.
To qualify: This post is following last night, when I saw Rush at the Minnesota State Fair. Second time I've seen Rush. Great band, easily in my top ten. More than 200 Rush songs on my iPod. The show was great. Pretty good sound for an outdoor show, great visual accompaniment like Rush is known for, and they played several songs that have great personal meaning to me, many of which I've been quoting on Facebook throughout the summer to mentally prepare myself for the show: "Time Stands Still," "Subdivisions," "Red Barchetta," "The Camera Eye," "2112" (though not the complete 20+ minute version) to name a few. Outside at the grandstand, warm and windy, beautiful night.
But that was the performance. What sucks about concerts is the peripherals.
(1) The merch line. I'm one of these people who will buy the t-shirt, $35 price tag be damned. Not every time, but often. And even if you get to the show early enough to buy your shirt or poster or keychain or CDs or RUSH SOCKS for crying out loud, you're stuck in the line surrounded truly bizarre people. Last night, it was the 5'2" dude with only most of his teeth and the shoulder-length graying pony tail sticking out of his beer-advertisement ball cap who had some personal vendetta against a woman further up the line he was convinced was personally responsible for the line moving so slow. On the other end of the spectrum, thankfully not in our line but in the one my cousin was trapped in, was the woman he said got to the front of the line and thought she was shopping at Kohl's, having the stoner behind the counter bring her each shirt so she could examine it closely. And you know, back in the old days, you just got up there with your handful of cash and walked away when you were done. Do we really need the credit card machines at a concert?
(2) The dancers. Invariably there will be someone in your section, usually in the row right in front of you, who decides to get up and be the only one dancing the whole time. If everyone communally decides to stand, fine. I can get behind that. But a solo performance? UNNECESSARY. I almost started writing this section ready to tell the female concert goers of the world to STAY IN YOUR !@#$%^$!! CHAIR!!! I don't care how many beers you've had, I didn't pay to watch you stand right in front of me and dance all night!! And I'd argue that most of these offenders are women, but last night I was reminded that is not always the case. Two 30-something dudes (I'd usually supply more descriptive language here but since I strive for a PG rating on my blog, I'll let you imagine) spent way too much of the night on their feet dancing and waving their cell phones around while their embarrassed girlfriends or wives tried to get them to sit down -- right in front of my nephew and his friend. Who couldn't see unless these two went to get refills. It's a cyclical irony that the people who can barely stand up are the ones who feel like they're the best dancers in the place.
But we did also have Captain Air-Guitar in our section, and he was pretty entertaining to watch. Though I'm sure the couple sitting behind him would not agree.
(3) The yeller. The person who goes "WOOOO!!" with the regularity and volume of a mid-July storm siren thoughout the show to make sure everyone within 20 yards knows how happy they are to be there. Which is even preferable to the knucklehead who thinks yelling out the title of his favorite song from 300 yards away means the band will hear it and change their set list to accommodate him. When my sister and I saw Peter Gabriel years ago, we had a guy in front of us yell "BIKO!" a minimum of thirty times. I was so happy when it wasn't played.
(4) The traffic. This could be the traffic exiting the venue after the show, the mass of people filling the walkways that separates you from the rest of the group you came with; thank God for cell phones. It could be the traffic in the parking ramp after the show that takes eight times longer than normal to get you to a main thoroughfare. It could be the drunken masses waiting for the shuttle bus and riding the shuttle bus away from the state fair that crushes your faith in humanity; I will never ride that shuttle following a Grandstand show again. Waiting for that Northtown bus to arrive was dangerously close to going all "Red Sector A" in a heartbeat (Rush reference there -- if you don't get it, it's your own fault).
I love music, as any of the anonymous readers of the blog out there would know. I love the experience of hearing my favorite songs played by the artists who created them, and the memorable moments that come to life from that experience. But as far as attending concerts goes?
I love my DVD player and my big TV.
But they also suck. For several reasons, few of which have anything to do with the music.
To qualify: This post is following last night, when I saw Rush at the Minnesota State Fair. Second time I've seen Rush. Great band, easily in my top ten. More than 200 Rush songs on my iPod. The show was great. Pretty good sound for an outdoor show, great visual accompaniment like Rush is known for, and they played several songs that have great personal meaning to me, many of which I've been quoting on Facebook throughout the summer to mentally prepare myself for the show: "Time Stands Still," "Subdivisions," "Red Barchetta," "The Camera Eye," "2112" (though not the complete 20+ minute version) to name a few. Outside at the grandstand, warm and windy, beautiful night.
But that was the performance. What sucks about concerts is the peripherals.
(1) The merch line. I'm one of these people who will buy the t-shirt, $35 price tag be damned. Not every time, but often. And even if you get to the show early enough to buy your shirt or poster or keychain or CDs or RUSH SOCKS for crying out loud, you're stuck in the line surrounded truly bizarre people. Last night, it was the 5'2" dude with only most of his teeth and the shoulder-length graying pony tail sticking out of his beer-advertisement ball cap who had some personal vendetta against a woman further up the line he was convinced was personally responsible for the line moving so slow. On the other end of the spectrum, thankfully not in our line but in the one my cousin was trapped in, was the woman he said got to the front of the line and thought she was shopping at Kohl's, having the stoner behind the counter bring her each shirt so she could examine it closely. And you know, back in the old days, you just got up there with your handful of cash and walked away when you were done. Do we really need the credit card machines at a concert?
(2) The dancers. Invariably there will be someone in your section, usually in the row right in front of you, who decides to get up and be the only one dancing the whole time. If everyone communally decides to stand, fine. I can get behind that. But a solo performance? UNNECESSARY. I almost started writing this section ready to tell the female concert goers of the world to STAY IN YOUR !@#$%^$!! CHAIR!!! I don't care how many beers you've had, I didn't pay to watch you stand right in front of me and dance all night!! And I'd argue that most of these offenders are women, but last night I was reminded that is not always the case. Two 30-something dudes (I'd usually supply more descriptive language here but since I strive for a PG rating on my blog, I'll let you imagine) spent way too much of the night on their feet dancing and waving their cell phones around while their embarrassed girlfriends or wives tried to get them to sit down -- right in front of my nephew and his friend. Who couldn't see unless these two went to get refills. It's a cyclical irony that the people who can barely stand up are the ones who feel like they're the best dancers in the place.
But we did also have Captain Air-Guitar in our section, and he was pretty entertaining to watch. Though I'm sure the couple sitting behind him would not agree.
(3) The yeller. The person who goes "WOOOO!!" with the regularity and volume of a mid-July storm siren thoughout the show to make sure everyone within 20 yards knows how happy they are to be there. Which is even preferable to the knucklehead who thinks yelling out the title of his favorite song from 300 yards away means the band will hear it and change their set list to accommodate him. When my sister and I saw Peter Gabriel years ago, we had a guy in front of us yell "BIKO!" a minimum of thirty times. I was so happy when it wasn't played.
(4) The traffic. This could be the traffic exiting the venue after the show, the mass of people filling the walkways that separates you from the rest of the group you came with; thank God for cell phones. It could be the traffic in the parking ramp after the show that takes eight times longer than normal to get you to a main thoroughfare. It could be the drunken masses waiting for the shuttle bus and riding the shuttle bus away from the state fair that crushes your faith in humanity; I will never ride that shuttle following a Grandstand show again. Waiting for that Northtown bus to arrive was dangerously close to going all "Red Sector A" in a heartbeat (Rush reference there -- if you don't get it, it's your own fault).
I love music, as any of the anonymous readers of the blog out there would know. I love the experience of hearing my favorite songs played by the artists who created them, and the memorable moments that come to life from that experience. But as far as attending concerts goes?
I love my DVD player and my big TV.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Take Out the Trash Day
No, it isn't Garbage Day -- that's a whole other celebration on its own. Today's title is yet another West Wing reference, which is deserved since (a) I have a lot of points to cover tonight, and (b) today at 7:00 A.M. I watched the episode "Impact Winter," which is a good indicator of how the show found its mojo again after the mumbling, consternation and unhappy facial expressions that defined Season 5. Plus it was the episode that in the greater story arc of the entire series that saw everything about who Josh Lyman was come to fruition, and make a decision on his own that actually changes world history. If you have no idea what I'm talking about in this paragraph -- your loss.
So. A handful of topics to cover. Many of these are things that I at one time intended to be stand-alone posts, but as that first day of school grows closer, I find myself all too willing to indulge in the lazy for the few days I have remaining, knowing what it's going to be like when that first day arrives and I'll have to hit the ground running.
**First with the writing. Emily is still out there, trying to find herself and agent. A new record was set today: My absolute fastest rejection turn-around ever. Seriously. It took like four hours. Good news, it wasn't a form letter. Bad news, the letter basically said "I like everything about this: the title, the concept, the premise. Except your sample pages are boring." Kind of backhanded as far as compliments go, but hey. What are you gonna do except continue to get kicked in the mouth and try again.
**Also I feel some sideways progress, and significant progress at that, has been made on the new book, which I suppose I can call "Briarwood" in here even though that's only a working title and it's never going to stick. After the writing conference last week that I was all woe-is-me about in my previous post, I decided to try a new method; I honestly don't remember if I came up with this idea on my own or if I read a mention of it somewhere during the conference; either is possible. But regardless, it seems to be working. The whole issue here is to make the characters stronger, because EVERYTHING that was mentioned in that conference as far as what makes manuscripts stand out came down to two things: characters, and voice. Now, if I can be momentarily immodest (yeah, some of you are thinking, "momentarily?"), voice I'm not so worried about. I've been doing this for more than twenty years now, and in that time I think I've managed to craft myself a voice. But characters are tougher, because you have to make them real. So in that pursuit, I've decided to set aside the big push on novel word count for now, and I'm splitting time between word count and development. To get to know the characters, I'm writing a series of very short stories - 3 to 6 pages each - where my characters interact with each other in situations other than what happens in the book. Some of the things I'm learning about them are fascinating, and it makes it much easier to know how they would react when something happens to them in the main story.
**I'm crushing on Iron Maiden's brand-new album "The Final Frontier" today. It was released today, but being the huge iTunes nerd I am, I've discovered that if you time it right, you can actually find your way to downloading new releases about an hour before the actual release date -- I think it probably has something to do with time zones. But whatever gets the music in my hands faster works for me.
**Today was a good day, overall, for one reason. I'm going to keep that reason hidden away on my other blog, but trust me -- it was big. And good.
**iPhone Love. It only seems fair that after the huge deal I made about this all summer that I recap how awesome it is. I don't miss white at all (particularly since they still aren't even available). My old phone was one that I usually had silent or off, and not many people had luck reaching me on it. The iPhone has brought me to the point where my cell phone is my constant companion. I have a record of all text message exchanges, about 100 favorite photos I've imported, a growing contact list of about 45 people (with the goal of assigning each of them a photo and a personal ringtone), a calendar that includes every important date I have coming up in the next three months so far, access to my Facebook page, access to two of my three blogs, a countdown to when different agents are scheduled to reject my manuscript, a Nick Hornby book, Pandora, an app that will tell me what song I'm hearing (I tried it on a movie trailer; it works!), Radio Paradise, three different apps that I use to keep track of all my health and fitness business, a flashlight, an app that will tell me any kind of business I want to find in a certain radius, what times the movies start at whatever town I'm in, my Netflix queue, a drum machine, ten different games, Rush bobbleheads and trivia, NFL status and a predictor that will give me percentages of which teams are favored by how much throughout the season, iMovie, so I can edit the HD video I shoot with the built in camera, two other photo editing apps, KARE 11 news updates, access to my e-mail, and well over 1,000 carefully chosen songs, podcasts, and feature-length movies stored on the iPod part of the phone. Not to mention that having Bejeweled Blitz, Maya Pyramid, and Collapse on my phone more or less eliminates 90% of the reasons I would ever sign on to Facebook, so that's kind of nice, too. It amazed me to think today I was driving around listening to a new album, in my car, through a telephone that's really more of a computer that fits in my pocket which was plugged into my car. Welcome to the 21st century. It's not all global warming and political divisiveness.
So. A handful of topics to cover. Many of these are things that I at one time intended to be stand-alone posts, but as that first day of school grows closer, I find myself all too willing to indulge in the lazy for the few days I have remaining, knowing what it's going to be like when that first day arrives and I'll have to hit the ground running.
**First with the writing. Emily is still out there, trying to find herself and agent. A new record was set today: My absolute fastest rejection turn-around ever. Seriously. It took like four hours. Good news, it wasn't a form letter. Bad news, the letter basically said "I like everything about this: the title, the concept, the premise. Except your sample pages are boring." Kind of backhanded as far as compliments go, but hey. What are you gonna do except continue to get kicked in the mouth and try again.
**Also I feel some sideways progress, and significant progress at that, has been made on the new book, which I suppose I can call "Briarwood" in here even though that's only a working title and it's never going to stick. After the writing conference last week that I was all woe-is-me about in my previous post, I decided to try a new method; I honestly don't remember if I came up with this idea on my own or if I read a mention of it somewhere during the conference; either is possible. But regardless, it seems to be working. The whole issue here is to make the characters stronger, because EVERYTHING that was mentioned in that conference as far as what makes manuscripts stand out came down to two things: characters, and voice. Now, if I can be momentarily immodest (yeah, some of you are thinking, "momentarily?"), voice I'm not so worried about. I've been doing this for more than twenty years now, and in that time I think I've managed to craft myself a voice. But characters are tougher, because you have to make them real. So in that pursuit, I've decided to set aside the big push on novel word count for now, and I'm splitting time between word count and development. To get to know the characters, I'm writing a series of very short stories - 3 to 6 pages each - where my characters interact with each other in situations other than what happens in the book. Some of the things I'm learning about them are fascinating, and it makes it much easier to know how they would react when something happens to them in the main story.
**I'm crushing on Iron Maiden's brand-new album "The Final Frontier" today. It was released today, but being the huge iTunes nerd I am, I've discovered that if you time it right, you can actually find your way to downloading new releases about an hour before the actual release date -- I think it probably has something to do with time zones. But whatever gets the music in my hands faster works for me.
**Today was a good day, overall, for one reason. I'm going to keep that reason hidden away on my other blog, but trust me -- it was big. And good.
**iPhone Love. It only seems fair that after the huge deal I made about this all summer that I recap how awesome it is. I don't miss white at all (particularly since they still aren't even available). My old phone was one that I usually had silent or off, and not many people had luck reaching me on it. The iPhone has brought me to the point where my cell phone is my constant companion. I have a record of all text message exchanges, about 100 favorite photos I've imported, a growing contact list of about 45 people (with the goal of assigning each of them a photo and a personal ringtone), a calendar that includes every important date I have coming up in the next three months so far, access to my Facebook page, access to two of my three blogs, a countdown to when different agents are scheduled to reject my manuscript, a Nick Hornby book, Pandora, an app that will tell me what song I'm hearing (I tried it on a movie trailer; it works!), Radio Paradise, three different apps that I use to keep track of all my health and fitness business, a flashlight, an app that will tell me any kind of business I want to find in a certain radius, what times the movies start at whatever town I'm in, my Netflix queue, a drum machine, ten different games, Rush bobbleheads and trivia, NFL status and a predictor that will give me percentages of which teams are favored by how much throughout the season, iMovie, so I can edit the HD video I shoot with the built in camera, two other photo editing apps, KARE 11 news updates, access to my e-mail, and well over 1,000 carefully chosen songs, podcasts, and feature-length movies stored on the iPod part of the phone. Not to mention that having Bejeweled Blitz, Maya Pyramid, and Collapse on my phone more or less eliminates 90% of the reasons I would ever sign on to Facebook, so that's kind of nice, too. It amazed me to think today I was driving around listening to a new album, in my car, through a telephone that's really more of a computer that fits in my pocket which was plugged into my car. Welcome to the 21st century. It's not all global warming and political divisiveness.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Dark and Discouraging Days
Self-indulgence alert... consider yourself warned. This is your last chance to turn away.
WriteOnCon has been going on this week. It's an online writer's conference devoted to 'children's literature,' which encompasses the categories of young adult(generally teenage-centered books), middle grade (generally upper-elementary/low-end middle school books) and picture books (little kids). There have been authors, editors, agents, publicists, people from every imaginable corner of the publishing world participating and answering questions in this event.
In theory, it was a great idea. In execution, it has been equally great. I sat in on a few Q & A sessions, followed along with a few panel discussions, watched several vlogs, and really found a wealth of useful information along the way, stuff that has already made a difference in the direction of my writing on the current book.
But in the end, I have to say the experience has left me really, really discouraged, like Charlie Brown sticking his head in the mailbox even though he knows there's never going to be a Valentine in there (another arena of discouragement that would merit its own topic). I'm feeling particularly down about that whole foot-in-the-door issue. Yeah, I had a good little high this past spring when I had a manuscript request. And it really didn't shake the world out from under me when it didn't happen; I'll admit to being disappointed, but I didn't beat myself up afterward. I was genuinely happy to reach that level.
Months later now, especially after this glimpse into the publishing world, I'm feeling more than ever that manuscript request was a bit of dumb luck. Sure, the query letter had to be solid to be noticed; that much I'll admit. It's a good letter. It should be since it probably took longer for me to write than the first draft of the book itself. But now I'm back out there pushing at a different book, the ghost story I finished last summer and revised this summer. Yep, a whole different book. I have one agent read the other one and pass, and I shelve it. I'm that fickle. Actually that one agent made some comments that gave me ideas of what I could do differently with it, and I wanted to give the manuscript some mental time off before I tackled it again, so I went back to another one that had been given enough time off already. I feel very strongly that the one I'm pushing is a great book, and not just because of how enthusiastic my several dozen beta readers have been about it. It's just something I know. After the work I put into crafting this thing, I don't mind saying that. I feel I've earned the right.
But being a great book doesn't mean it's ever going to go anywhere. It's a ghost story, which unfortunately is going to mean it gets commonly lumped in with other books under the heading of 'paranormal,' and because there are so many stinkin' vampire / werewolf / fallen angel / teenage witch books out there, it's likely that a lot of agents aren't going to give a the concept of a haunted adventure story a second glance. It does have a few things going for it (it's middle grade instead of young adult, and YA is where the biggest paranormal glut is; it has boys for main characters, so it has a 'boy book' appeal that some agents and editors are looking for; it's polished within an inch of its life and has a definable voice; I could go on but won't at the risk of patting myself on the back even harder than I am already).
But one agent on a panel tonight said that out of the 3,000 queries she had received last year, she had offered representation to ONE author. (Kind of questioning whether or not I should have queried her.)
And the thing is? Being repped by an agent guarantees NOTHING as far as publication goes. Someone please tell me how pursuing a career that demands emotional investment and goes against odds that staggeringly ridiculous is NOT self-defeating and a little masochistic. Because regardless of how much an idea can click, or how well it comes together when it's written, there are going to inevitably be many, many more times that you feel like the biggest chump in the world instead of feeling like someone that has anything worth contributing. And that pile of manuscripts you've bled out only serves to support one of those arguments.
Yeeeesh. I think I need to go play some XBox or something to clear my head... sure not getting any worthwhile writing done tonight.
WriteOnCon has been going on this week. It's an online writer's conference devoted to 'children's literature,' which encompasses the categories of young adult(generally teenage-centered books), middle grade (generally upper-elementary/low-end middle school books) and picture books (little kids). There have been authors, editors, agents, publicists, people from every imaginable corner of the publishing world participating and answering questions in this event.
In theory, it was a great idea. In execution, it has been equally great. I sat in on a few Q & A sessions, followed along with a few panel discussions, watched several vlogs, and really found a wealth of useful information along the way, stuff that has already made a difference in the direction of my writing on the current book.
But in the end, I have to say the experience has left me really, really discouraged, like Charlie Brown sticking his head in the mailbox even though he knows there's never going to be a Valentine in there (another arena of discouragement that would merit its own topic). I'm feeling particularly down about that whole foot-in-the-door issue. Yeah, I had a good little high this past spring when I had a manuscript request. And it really didn't shake the world out from under me when it didn't happen; I'll admit to being disappointed, but I didn't beat myself up afterward. I was genuinely happy to reach that level.
Months later now, especially after this glimpse into the publishing world, I'm feeling more than ever that manuscript request was a bit of dumb luck. Sure, the query letter had to be solid to be noticed; that much I'll admit. It's a good letter. It should be since it probably took longer for me to write than the first draft of the book itself. But now I'm back out there pushing at a different book, the ghost story I finished last summer and revised this summer. Yep, a whole different book. I have one agent read the other one and pass, and I shelve it. I'm that fickle. Actually that one agent made some comments that gave me ideas of what I could do differently with it, and I wanted to give the manuscript some mental time off before I tackled it again, so I went back to another one that had been given enough time off already. I feel very strongly that the one I'm pushing is a great book, and not just because of how enthusiastic my several dozen beta readers have been about it. It's just something I know. After the work I put into crafting this thing, I don't mind saying that. I feel I've earned the right.
But being a great book doesn't mean it's ever going to go anywhere. It's a ghost story, which unfortunately is going to mean it gets commonly lumped in with other books under the heading of 'paranormal,' and because there are so many stinkin' vampire / werewolf / fallen angel / teenage witch books out there, it's likely that a lot of agents aren't going to give a the concept of a haunted adventure story a second glance. It does have a few things going for it (it's middle grade instead of young adult, and YA is where the biggest paranormal glut is; it has boys for main characters, so it has a 'boy book' appeal that some agents and editors are looking for; it's polished within an inch of its life and has a definable voice; I could go on but won't at the risk of patting myself on the back even harder than I am already).
But one agent on a panel tonight said that out of the 3,000 queries she had received last year, she had offered representation to ONE author. (Kind of questioning whether or not I should have queried her.)
And the thing is? Being repped by an agent guarantees NOTHING as far as publication goes. Someone please tell me how pursuing a career that demands emotional investment and goes against odds that staggeringly ridiculous is NOT self-defeating and a little masochistic. Because regardless of how much an idea can click, or how well it comes together when it's written, there are going to inevitably be many, many more times that you feel like the biggest chump in the world instead of feeling like someone that has anything worth contributing. And that pile of manuscripts you've bled out only serves to support one of those arguments.
Yeeeesh. I think I need to go play some XBox or something to clear my head... sure not getting any worthwhile writing done tonight.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
An Open Letter to Meredith
Hey kid.
Maybe you'll see this, maybe you won't. Even if I now have the privilege of being one of your Facebook friends, I've noticed you have more friends than many rural communities have people living in them, so I'm not entirely sure if my link will get noticed in your news feed or not. (Someday you'll have to tell me how you manage having that many friends, because it just baffles me.)
If you do see it, great. I've been very happy to reconnect with you seven years out. So pay close attention as I give you one last lesson before you spread your wings on out of state next week, leave for college and begin the next chapter of your life.
As you probably know better than most people, what sorts of advice my adult self might pass along to my younger self has been a topic on my mind quite a bit this summer. Since I can't actually do that, I will instead tell you a few things that might fall into the category of things I wish someone would have told me as I was leaving for college. Or perhaps things that were told to me that I should have listened to better than I did.
1 - The Blank Slate is a beautiful thing. You'll get down to Dayton, settle in, and spend the first few weeks and months walking around anywhere, doing anything, being whoever you want to be, and nobody will care. No history, no baggage, no labels, especially for you, being so far away. Everything will be completely neutral and waiting for definition. You'll live in glorious, intoxicating anonymity for a good long time, and even after you establish your new circles of friends and acquaintances, that's how things will be most of the time. Looking back I probably would have gotten more out of college if I didn't live 35 minutes from my hometown, so I totally think you've got a good thing going. Enjoy it.
2 - I know you're psyched to be on your way and ready to leave CRHS behind, which is awesome; I really pity anyone who looks back at high school as the high point of their life, especially since I think it's more something that you just survive and escape. BUT. It's important to remember that everyone and everything about life here that you leave behind had some part in forming the person you are and still will become.
3 - I don't think this will be much of a problem for you, but try things out. Soak up college life, whatever that winds up being for you. Experience things. Some of my best memories from that time came from the chances I took, and some of my bigger regrets had to do with opportunities I let pass by.
4 - It's a great idea to try and get a job. A, there's the money - you can only eat so much macaroni and watch so much basic cable. B, and more significantly, having a job will provide you with some balance. It gives you a whole separate aspect of your life away from school. If you can find something off campus and related to your field of study, all the better. I'm not sure I would be the completely awesome teacher I am now without the work I did on the front lines at the Boys and Girls Club before I had any idea what I was doing.
5 - There are going to be crap professors just like there were crap teachers in high school. This is all subjective; sometimes you'll click with them and sometimes you won't. In high school, it's their job to teach you, but in college it's your job to learn from them. And when you throw yourself into doing your best and things still don't quite work out, let that be okay. I got a B instead of an A on a major English paper once because I argued with the professor about the use of one descriptive word she didn't like that I wouldn't take out. (I was right, by the way.) You probably want to handle those situations with a little more poise and diplomacy and maturity than I did. But in the end, the thing to remember: Your GPA will only wind up being one line on the resumé. It's important, but it's not everything.
6 - Don't trust any guy who seems really polite and has a drink in his hand if it's past 11 P.M., especially on a week night. Seriously. I know how these dudes think. You're better than all of them.
7 - Learn to recognize the small moments as well as the big ones. You have specific ideas in your head about why you're so excited for college. When those things happen, and when those expectations are surpassed because there will be times when they are, pause and allow yourself half a thought to appreciate that it's happening. Some of the strongest memories for me were things I never saw coming. Especially pay close attention to the music you listen to and love over the next few years. It will be very important to you throughout your adult life. I have a lot of those songs from my younger days on a playlist now, and the clarity of the memories that mix of songs evokes can be overwhelming at times.
8 - You know what? Sometimes things really aren't going to go your way. That's how it works. You'll make mistakes, or things will just take a wrong turn of their own accord, or even a combination of the two. Just pick up the pieces and move on, and don't make it bigger than it needs to be. When things are coming apart or you just feel overwhelmed or broken down or whatever has you feeling justified in beating up on yourself -- I COMMAND you to remember what you did for me when my sister died. To this day I still tell people it was the most meaningful gesture anyone made throughout that whole experience, because it was. And you were just a kid at the time! Any person who would do something that thoughtful for someone else has inestimable value.
9 - While living on campus, don't hook a Clapper up to the TV so you can turn it off without getting out of bed. It's an invitation for people to pound on your door at two in the morning to turn it back on. Which, trust me, sucks.
10 - You have your whole world officially at your feet. Go own it. I'll just be back here staying proud.
Maybe you'll see this, maybe you won't. Even if I now have the privilege of being one of your Facebook friends, I've noticed you have more friends than many rural communities have people living in them, so I'm not entirely sure if my link will get noticed in your news feed or not. (Someday you'll have to tell me how you manage having that many friends, because it just baffles me.)
If you do see it, great. I've been very happy to reconnect with you seven years out. So pay close attention as I give you one last lesson before you spread your wings on out of state next week, leave for college and begin the next chapter of your life.
As you probably know better than most people, what sorts of advice my adult self might pass along to my younger self has been a topic on my mind quite a bit this summer. Since I can't actually do that, I will instead tell you a few things that might fall into the category of things I wish someone would have told me as I was leaving for college. Or perhaps things that were told to me that I should have listened to better than I did.
1 - The Blank Slate is a beautiful thing. You'll get down to Dayton, settle in, and spend the first few weeks and months walking around anywhere, doing anything, being whoever you want to be, and nobody will care. No history, no baggage, no labels, especially for you, being so far away. Everything will be completely neutral and waiting for definition. You'll live in glorious, intoxicating anonymity for a good long time, and even after you establish your new circles of friends and acquaintances, that's how things will be most of the time. Looking back I probably would have gotten more out of college if I didn't live 35 minutes from my hometown, so I totally think you've got a good thing going. Enjoy it.
2 - I know you're psyched to be on your way and ready to leave CRHS behind, which is awesome; I really pity anyone who looks back at high school as the high point of their life, especially since I think it's more something that you just survive and escape. BUT. It's important to remember that everyone and everything about life here that you leave behind had some part in forming the person you are and still will become.
3 - I don't think this will be much of a problem for you, but try things out. Soak up college life, whatever that winds up being for you. Experience things. Some of my best memories from that time came from the chances I took, and some of my bigger regrets had to do with opportunities I let pass by.
4 - It's a great idea to try and get a job. A, there's the money - you can only eat so much macaroni and watch so much basic cable. B, and more significantly, having a job will provide you with some balance. It gives you a whole separate aspect of your life away from school. If you can find something off campus and related to your field of study, all the better. I'm not sure I would be the completely awesome teacher I am now without the work I did on the front lines at the Boys and Girls Club before I had any idea what I was doing.
5 - There are going to be crap professors just like there were crap teachers in high school. This is all subjective; sometimes you'll click with them and sometimes you won't. In high school, it's their job to teach you, but in college it's your job to learn from them. And when you throw yourself into doing your best and things still don't quite work out, let that be okay. I got a B instead of an A on a major English paper once because I argued with the professor about the use of one descriptive word she didn't like that I wouldn't take out. (I was right, by the way.) You probably want to handle those situations with a little more poise and diplomacy and maturity than I did. But in the end, the thing to remember: Your GPA will only wind up being one line on the resumé. It's important, but it's not everything.
6 - Don't trust any guy who seems really polite and has a drink in his hand if it's past 11 P.M., especially on a week night. Seriously. I know how these dudes think. You're better than all of them.
7 - Learn to recognize the small moments as well as the big ones. You have specific ideas in your head about why you're so excited for college. When those things happen, and when those expectations are surpassed because there will be times when they are, pause and allow yourself half a thought to appreciate that it's happening. Some of the strongest memories for me were things I never saw coming. Especially pay close attention to the music you listen to and love over the next few years. It will be very important to you throughout your adult life. I have a lot of those songs from my younger days on a playlist now, and the clarity of the memories that mix of songs evokes can be overwhelming at times.
8 - You know what? Sometimes things really aren't going to go your way. That's how it works. You'll make mistakes, or things will just take a wrong turn of their own accord, or even a combination of the two. Just pick up the pieces and move on, and don't make it bigger than it needs to be. When things are coming apart or you just feel overwhelmed or broken down or whatever has you feeling justified in beating up on yourself -- I COMMAND you to remember what you did for me when my sister died. To this day I still tell people it was the most meaningful gesture anyone made throughout that whole experience, because it was. And you were just a kid at the time! Any person who would do something that thoughtful for someone else has inestimable value.
9 - While living on campus, don't hook a Clapper up to the TV so you can turn it off without getting out of bed. It's an invitation for people to pound on your door at two in the morning to turn it back on. Which, trust me, sucks.
10 - You have your whole world officially at your feet. Go own it. I'll just be back here staying proud.
Monday, August 9, 2010
The On Deck Circle
Seems I've been falling behind here. Which also reminds me I haven't done today's Rush status message yet. That's actually becoming far less amusing than I thought it would be, mostly because now that I'm pretty burned out on Bejeweled Blitz and Scrabble, I'm finding I'm not terribly interested in Facebook. Still nice to keep up with people, but as far as just going on as a time waster... eh....
Also hard to force Rush into my psyche, even though I'm still pretty stoked to see them later this month. But I have been getting quite a bit more writing done in the past week (WOO HOO!!!), and the writing soundtrack for this new project has evolved into a very definable tone. Included on the list so far: Porcupine Tree, 30 Seconds to Mars, The Dead Weather, and a little bit of Filter. I'm actually sitting here auditioning one of my favorite CDs right now to see if it's appropriate to add: "Darkest Days" by Stabbing Westward. If you're familiar with any of these bands, you can make a pretty good guess about what kind of tone this book is going to have. If not, well... kind of dark.
Incidentally, I'm on the last Stabbing Westward song and have decided it doesn't make the playlist. I have too much emotional imprinting there for it to fade into any kind of a background.
But I didn't intend to talk writing all that much tonight. Nope, believe it or not, I've noticed little bits of school creeping back into my head already. A year ago I remember writing something about how starting the year had become absolutely routine and there was nothing special about it anymore. I don't know. This year, I'm kind of looking forward to it. And not for the obvious reasons of just seeing how things are going to change with everything that will be so new for us this year: New principal, new classrooms, new students, new programs in the building, new staff members... a lot of new going on.
Some of it is that, for certain. And some of it comes from my time in Summer Institute last week. As much poor-baby self-pity whining as I'm apt to do when it comes to staff development, I really felt the class I had was worthwhile and useful. It didn't hurt that I had a lot of time to work (and could listen to music nearly all day on my iPhone!), but it did get that school part of my brain stirring a little. A LITTLE. It was pointed out to me this weekend that while I only have three more weeks of vacation left, that still represents more time off than a lot of people get from their jobs for the whole year. That bit of perspective really did frame things differently for me, in a good way.
I've got the latest yearbook out, which I needed for some vague writing research. As I looked through all of the signatures inside my cover, I saw a lot of students referencing what had been running jokes throughout the year that I barely remember now. There are a few kids who signed with a last initial instead of a last name, and for the life of me I can't think of what that last name was. All a big reminder for me that year is over, that crop is long gone, and there is another waiting on deck, hopefully ready for their turn. I know I will be when the time comes.
But thankfully, that time isn't here just yet.
Also hard to force Rush into my psyche, even though I'm still pretty stoked to see them later this month. But I have been getting quite a bit more writing done in the past week (WOO HOO!!!), and the writing soundtrack for this new project has evolved into a very definable tone. Included on the list so far: Porcupine Tree, 30 Seconds to Mars, The Dead Weather, and a little bit of Filter. I'm actually sitting here auditioning one of my favorite CDs right now to see if it's appropriate to add: "Darkest Days" by Stabbing Westward. If you're familiar with any of these bands, you can make a pretty good guess about what kind of tone this book is going to have. If not, well... kind of dark.
Incidentally, I'm on the last Stabbing Westward song and have decided it doesn't make the playlist. I have too much emotional imprinting there for it to fade into any kind of a background.
But I didn't intend to talk writing all that much tonight. Nope, believe it or not, I've noticed little bits of school creeping back into my head already. A year ago I remember writing something about how starting the year had become absolutely routine and there was nothing special about it anymore. I don't know. This year, I'm kind of looking forward to it. And not for the obvious reasons of just seeing how things are going to change with everything that will be so new for us this year: New principal, new classrooms, new students, new programs in the building, new staff members... a lot of new going on.
Some of it is that, for certain. And some of it comes from my time in Summer Institute last week. As much poor-baby self-pity whining as I'm apt to do when it comes to staff development, I really felt the class I had was worthwhile and useful. It didn't hurt that I had a lot of time to work (and could listen to music nearly all day on my iPhone!), but it did get that school part of my brain stirring a little. A LITTLE. It was pointed out to me this weekend that while I only have three more weeks of vacation left, that still represents more time off than a lot of people get from their jobs for the whole year. That bit of perspective really did frame things differently for me, in a good way.
I've got the latest yearbook out, which I needed for some vague writing research. As I looked through all of the signatures inside my cover, I saw a lot of students referencing what had been running jokes throughout the year that I barely remember now. There are a few kids who signed with a last initial instead of a last name, and for the life of me I can't think of what that last name was. All a big reminder for me that year is over, that crop is long gone, and there is another waiting on deck, hopefully ready for their turn. I know I will be when the time comes.
But thankfully, that time isn't here just yet.
Friday, July 30, 2010
August Rush
And you thought this was going to be about that movie, didn't you? I know a lot of people love that movie but I plan on never seeing it -- I've reached a point in my life where I can't stand Robin Williams and the three characters he's capable of playing (wacky; too sincere for his own good; insane and menacing).
No. This post, I think, is much better, and yet still related to music. In honor of one of my top 10 bands, Rush, coming to town later in the month, I will be posting daily Facebook status messages leading up to their performance, each of which will be a quote from a Rush song and yet still have a thread of applicability to whatever is happening in my life that day.
You're welcome.
No. This post, I think, is much better, and yet still related to music. In honor of one of my top 10 bands, Rush, coming to town later in the month, I will be posting daily Facebook status messages leading up to their performance, each of which will be a quote from a Rush song and yet still have a thread of applicability to whatever is happening in my life that day.
You're welcome.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Evolution of a Computer Nerd
I've always been a little fascinated by technology. It likely goes back to Star Wars for me, seeing that opening scene with the rebel blockade runner being pursued by that star destroyer that just kept getting longer and longer until it finally ended with these huge engines, each of which looked to my nine-year-old eyes to be close to the size of what I imagined Rhode Island was.
I don't think it's too much of a jump to go from all the cool Star Wars stuff into computers. I vaguely remember my mother bringing an Apple IIc home from school for a summer, which may have had a few text-based games like old-old-school Oregon Trail, if that. I remember my aunt and uncle having a computer in Turtle Lake, one that had a few more games on it. By this time video games were creeping into society. Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Battle Zone, Asteroids, Tempest... the classics. When my friend Todd had another Apple version up in his attic and a text-based, choose-your-own-adventure game, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
And things just kept progressing. Color printing, with old printers that used dot matrix and ribbons. Video arcades: The standard for us was Aladdin's Castle at the Mariner Mall in Superior, where I once played $12 worth of quarters in an afternoon, which I still feel a small bit of residual guilt over. Atari; the games didn't look the same as the arcade versions, but they were enough to keep us awake until late at night. I remember one year I was so psyched about a game I KNEW I was getting that I waited for my parents to leave, peeled back the tape to carefully unwrap the gift, gently open the box to take the cartridge out and play the game for a bit before putting it all back together and re-wrapping it, making sure I absolutely destroyed the box when I opened it Christmas morning to leave no evidence behind. Unquestionably, I was a devious child.
In high school I took a computer class that was just showing us how to write commands in BASIC. Even in college, back in the late 80s, computers were still largely glorified typewriters for most of us, and since I had a nice electric typewriter I'd been given for high school graduation and a video arcade in the student union, I was content. The first time I ever heard of a FAX machine was in about 1989, and when the girl in my class who was giving a presentation on them tried to explain how they worked, the concept mostly went over my head. (Plus she was really cute, so I may have been distracted from what she was saying anyway.)
My first encounter with the once-almighty CD-ROM was in student teaching, and again, I still didn't quite get it. The school where I was assigned had one computer in the media center that had a CD-ROM drive, and only the media teacher ever used it. I didn't quite get the power of the CD-ROM until I wound up in my own teaching job, and once I saw what it could do, it was an epiphany.
My first personal computer was a Macintosh Performa CD, with 8MB of memory and a hard drive that was so small by today's standards I didn't even pay attention to what size it was. And it didn't matter anyway because I played games right off the discs and saved any work on tiny little floppy disks. My first foray into the Internet was Apple's old online service, eWorld, which was really pretty bare bones but I look back at as awesome now in the same way that some people will romanticize their high school days.
And now today, having gone through 5 personal computers, 6 gaming systems, and 3 cell phones, I'm on the verge of merging all of those devices into one -- my iPhone 4 is scheduled for delivery sometime today. Yeah, it's AT&T. But you know what? I know a good number of people with iPhones, and I have yet to hear anyone complain about the service. In fact, these people have been nothing short of superlative in their praise. I was holding out for the white iPhone 4 for the longest time, but after the news reports had stories about "manufacturing difficulties" and production delays, I got spooked and went with the black one. Which doesn't matter anyway since I already picked up my free case, and it's a nice dark purple one.
So this little thing about the size of a deck of cards will allow me to make phone calls, browse the internet, video chat, e-mail, take pictures, shoot and edit HD video, pay bills, listen to music, organize my life and yes, play games. It will be able to do more than my first four computers were able to do, and it will have more data storage than those first four computers COMBINED.
Technology continues to amaze me. It makes me anxious to see what will be the next big thing someone comes up with. It also makes me hope a little bit that I don't live long enough to see robots go all Terminator on us....
I don't think it's too much of a jump to go from all the cool Star Wars stuff into computers. I vaguely remember my mother bringing an Apple IIc home from school for a summer, which may have had a few text-based games like old-old-school Oregon Trail, if that. I remember my aunt and uncle having a computer in Turtle Lake, one that had a few more games on it. By this time video games were creeping into society. Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Battle Zone, Asteroids, Tempest... the classics. When my friend Todd had another Apple version up in his attic and a text-based, choose-your-own-adventure game, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
And things just kept progressing. Color printing, with old printers that used dot matrix and ribbons. Video arcades: The standard for us was Aladdin's Castle at the Mariner Mall in Superior, where I once played $12 worth of quarters in an afternoon, which I still feel a small bit of residual guilt over. Atari; the games didn't look the same as the arcade versions, but they were enough to keep us awake until late at night. I remember one year I was so psyched about a game I KNEW I was getting that I waited for my parents to leave, peeled back the tape to carefully unwrap the gift, gently open the box to take the cartridge out and play the game for a bit before putting it all back together and re-wrapping it, making sure I absolutely destroyed the box when I opened it Christmas morning to leave no evidence behind. Unquestionably, I was a devious child.
In high school I took a computer class that was just showing us how to write commands in BASIC. Even in college, back in the late 80s, computers were still largely glorified typewriters for most of us, and since I had a nice electric typewriter I'd been given for high school graduation and a video arcade in the student union, I was content. The first time I ever heard of a FAX machine was in about 1989, and when the girl in my class who was giving a presentation on them tried to explain how they worked, the concept mostly went over my head. (Plus she was really cute, so I may have been distracted from what she was saying anyway.)
My first encounter with the once-almighty CD-ROM was in student teaching, and again, I still didn't quite get it. The school where I was assigned had one computer in the media center that had a CD-ROM drive, and only the media teacher ever used it. I didn't quite get the power of the CD-ROM until I wound up in my own teaching job, and once I saw what it could do, it was an epiphany.
My first personal computer was a Macintosh Performa CD, with 8MB of memory and a hard drive that was so small by today's standards I didn't even pay attention to what size it was. And it didn't matter anyway because I played games right off the discs and saved any work on tiny little floppy disks. My first foray into the Internet was Apple's old online service, eWorld, which was really pretty bare bones but I look back at as awesome now in the same way that some people will romanticize their high school days.
And now today, having gone through 5 personal computers, 6 gaming systems, and 3 cell phones, I'm on the verge of merging all of those devices into one -- my iPhone 4 is scheduled for delivery sometime today. Yeah, it's AT&T. But you know what? I know a good number of people with iPhones, and I have yet to hear anyone complain about the service. In fact, these people have been nothing short of superlative in their praise. I was holding out for the white iPhone 4 for the longest time, but after the news reports had stories about "manufacturing difficulties" and production delays, I got spooked and went with the black one. Which doesn't matter anyway since I already picked up my free case, and it's a nice dark purple one.
So this little thing about the size of a deck of cards will allow me to make phone calls, browse the internet, video chat, e-mail, take pictures, shoot and edit HD video, pay bills, listen to music, organize my life and yes, play games. It will be able to do more than my first four computers were able to do, and it will have more data storage than those first four computers COMBINED.
Technology continues to amaze me. It makes me anxious to see what will be the next big thing someone comes up with. It also makes me hope a little bit that I don't live long enough to see robots go all Terminator on us....
Friday, July 23, 2010
Live Monsters
A couple of posts back I mentioned how I didn't have a Definitive Album for Summer of 2010 yet, and had been relying on an iPod playlist to fill that void. I'm happy to say this has changed.
Big Head Todd and the Monsters: "Live at the Fillmore." So, so cool.
BHTM have been a band embedded deeply in my library for some time now. If you've listened to adult contemporary radio in the past 15 years you've heard a couple of their songs: "Bittersweet" and "Broken-Hearted Savior" were the two big hits they had right out of the gate before they kind of shook off the idea of following music industry rules and focused on making the kind of music they wanted to. I can remember playing my cassette of the "Strategem" album while working in my classroom after school, way back before I even taught the grade I've been at now for fourteen years. The band is made up of four guys, three of whom have played together through high school and college. There is actually a Todd in the band - Todd Park Mohr, the guy who sings, does most of the songwriting, and plays guitar. Probably why he gets separate billing in the band name, though I don't think his head is unusually large, at least not physically. (David Letterman might disagree; I watched his show one night to see BHTM play at the end, and Dave had a running joke all night that was based around variations of the phrase "Look at the size of that guy's head!!") If Todd does have a big head for the reasons that people would normally attach to that label (and I'm not saying he does; in fact available evidence points to the contrary), then he's earned it. Because the dude knows how to play a guitar. He's got a deep tone you can feel vibrate in your chest. He plays with such little effort it's almost an afterthought. His style, while being refreshingly old-school and basic, has such a thick DNA to the sound it could be easily picked out from any other number of guitar heroes out there. His singing is slurred just enough to show he's singing more about emotion then idea, and his voice sounds like it's been damaged by whiskey and cigarettes in the best ways possible. The music ranges anywhere from bar-band rockers to almost traditional blues to tender ballads bordering on alt-country, and more often than not a combination of those elements in varying degrees. A lot of the songs are written as stories, but not in such an obvious manner they only have one interpretation.
"Live at the Fillmore" is what we old folks used to call a double album, a live set so long that it would take 2 CDs to handle all the music. It includes a few of my favorite songs from the band, but what I appreciate the most about it is how the live versions breathe so much vitality into songs from earlier in their career that came across as kind of lifeless before. The whole album, everything from the playing to the stage banter to the audience reaction, has such a casual feel it sounds like they're just hanging out and playing in someone's backyard, if that backyard could hold 4,000 people. Which would be perfect. Imagine yourself at someone's house, enjoying a summer cookout with a crowd of your friends. Someone puts on a CD that provides perfect background music for the good times your having; music that doesn't grab you by the face and demand your attention, but subtly reels you in until you start wondering, "Who is that? They are good." This would be the album you were listening to.
One of the reasons I downloaded this was because I was already getting the new album they released this summer, "Rocksteady," (also great). I also saw in the newspaper that they will be playing a one-hour set opening for the BoDeans (...eh...) at the state fair this year.
Anybody want to go see them? I'm in. Seriously We wouldn't even need to stay for the BoDeans....
Big Head Todd and the Monsters: "Live at the Fillmore." So, so cool.
BHTM have been a band embedded deeply in my library for some time now. If you've listened to adult contemporary radio in the past 15 years you've heard a couple of their songs: "Bittersweet" and "Broken-Hearted Savior" were the two big hits they had right out of the gate before they kind of shook off the idea of following music industry rules and focused on making the kind of music they wanted to. I can remember playing my cassette of the "Strategem" album while working in my classroom after school, way back before I even taught the grade I've been at now for fourteen years. The band is made up of four guys, three of whom have played together through high school and college. There is actually a Todd in the band - Todd Park Mohr, the guy who sings, does most of the songwriting, and plays guitar. Probably why he gets separate billing in the band name, though I don't think his head is unusually large, at least not physically. (David Letterman might disagree; I watched his show one night to see BHTM play at the end, and Dave had a running joke all night that was based around variations of the phrase "Look at the size of that guy's head!!") If Todd does have a big head for the reasons that people would normally attach to that label (and I'm not saying he does; in fact available evidence points to the contrary), then he's earned it. Because the dude knows how to play a guitar. He's got a deep tone you can feel vibrate in your chest. He plays with such little effort it's almost an afterthought. His style, while being refreshingly old-school and basic, has such a thick DNA to the sound it could be easily picked out from any other number of guitar heroes out there. His singing is slurred just enough to show he's singing more about emotion then idea, and his voice sounds like it's been damaged by whiskey and cigarettes in the best ways possible. The music ranges anywhere from bar-band rockers to almost traditional blues to tender ballads bordering on alt-country, and more often than not a combination of those elements in varying degrees. A lot of the songs are written as stories, but not in such an obvious manner they only have one interpretation.
"Live at the Fillmore" is what we old folks used to call a double album, a live set so long that it would take 2 CDs to handle all the music. It includes a few of my favorite songs from the band, but what I appreciate the most about it is how the live versions breathe so much vitality into songs from earlier in their career that came across as kind of lifeless before. The whole album, everything from the playing to the stage banter to the audience reaction, has such a casual feel it sounds like they're just hanging out and playing in someone's backyard, if that backyard could hold 4,000 people. Which would be perfect. Imagine yourself at someone's house, enjoying a summer cookout with a crowd of your friends. Someone puts on a CD that provides perfect background music for the good times your having; music that doesn't grab you by the face and demand your attention, but subtly reels you in until you start wondering, "Who is that? They are good." This would be the album you were listening to.
One of the reasons I downloaded this was because I was already getting the new album they released this summer, "Rocksteady," (also great). I also saw in the newspaper that they will be playing a one-hour set opening for the BoDeans (...eh...) at the state fair this year.
Anybody want to go see them? I'm in. Seriously We wouldn't even need to stay for the BoDeans....
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The Summer So Far
While working through a fairly productive day today, I brought up my Mac dashboard to check the countdown widgets, looking to see how many days were left until I should give up on the next agent on the list. There was another widget there off in the corner, one that I had put up 40 days ago that had 40 more days left on its countdown.
40 days until school starts. Yes. My 2010 summer vacation is half over.
For the record, I'm counting the first day of school as the first day when I am contractually required to show up at my school at 8:35 in the morning and work a full day. There are going to be several days when I go into my classroom on my own time for a few hours here and there to get a head start on setting up my room, and there 2-3 days of technology work I'll need to attend to before the year actually begins (luckily, these are all PAID days), and then there's the potential of going to Summer Institute for two days in a couple of weeks. Summer Institute is staff development training that takes place, well, in the summer. It's a great idea since it happens when teachers have time to go, and I openly acknowledge the value of staff development, but most of the times I've gone to Summer Institute have wound up with me suffering through such an overpowering combination of boredom and stir-craziness that I've considered slowly chewing off one of my pinky fingers just to remind myself I'm alive. And please understand, this has almost everything to do with my undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder and nothing to do with the sessions -- a convenient qualifier for me to throw out there, since I've been the presenter a few times myself. After all, the second best part of SI is that it's voluntary (the best part being the money we get for going). But right now, two weeks out and thinking about sitting in a high school classroom painted in a shade of industrial white that had to be engineered to lull one into complacency? I shudder. However, they are paid days that will be an enormous help in the coming months, so there are certainly WAY bigger problems I could have. But not whine? Where's the fun in that?
So 5 paid days out of 40 really isn't the end of the world. The hardest thing to believe is that there are still 40 days of summer remaining. Speaking for myself, June is mostly defined by shaking off the previous school year, July is the meat and potatoes of summer vacation, and August is when the new year begins to slowly creep into my psyche. I remember writing something on here about how the beginning of the last school year felt routine for me, but there's nothing about this upcoming one that feels that way, which is really good. But it's too early to begin thinking about that yet.
My summer has been remarkably uneventful this year, which, seriously, doesn't bother me a lot. I had a good time with my cousins for a weekend in Wisconsin, I've played fewer video games than I've read books, I've gotten into the habit of staying up late enough to see if Craig Ferguson is going to open his show with a puppet, I've celebrated Garbage Day about six times, I've put in well over 200 miles of cardio work at the Y (and a big thank you to those two ladies sitting poolside in my line of sight today that made my time on the stationary bike much easier to endure), I've seen eight or so movies, I've watched the first season of Mad Men on DVD (Pete Campbell = Weasel who needs a good slap, because it would be more insulting than a punch in the face), I've worked out a couple chapters of one book, finished revising another one, and have fought though great conceptual struggles with a third, I've downloaded 11 new albums from iTunes, and have walked Spencer through the neighborhood approximately 34 times. I did have an unpleasant streak of days in there largely defined by anger, depression, and self-pity which is thankfully over, and I'm easily sitting here tonight in the best health I've been in for what has to be close to fifteen years -- a statement so much more ironic than most people will ever understand.
The biggest disappointments of the summer have been: (1) One book I'm having trouble getting off the ground; it went nowhere for the longest time until I was able to reconcile a big plot problem I couldn't get past, but now that seems to be more or less resolved, and (2) The still mysterious absence of the white iPhone 4. Yeah, Antennagate. I know. I don't care. I always planned to get a bumper anyway and still will, because I'm going to get one. My contract is over on my current phone, which I hate so much I don't even turn the @#$% thing on anymore, and the VERY DAY I'm able to pre-order the white iPhone, I'll be putting the gears of commerce in motion. Why the white one? Why wait, when I could just get the black one pre-ordered now? BECAUSE IT LOOKS SO MUCH COOLER. And I know that's a stupid reason, but for someone as visually attuned as I am, it's a good enough reason for me to continue waiting. At least that's what I keep telling myself....
40 days until school starts. Yes. My 2010 summer vacation is half over.
For the record, I'm counting the first day of school as the first day when I am contractually required to show up at my school at 8:35 in the morning and work a full day. There are going to be several days when I go into my classroom on my own time for a few hours here and there to get a head start on setting up my room, and there 2-3 days of technology work I'll need to attend to before the year actually begins (luckily, these are all PAID days), and then there's the potential of going to Summer Institute for two days in a couple of weeks. Summer Institute is staff development training that takes place, well, in the summer. It's a great idea since it happens when teachers have time to go, and I openly acknowledge the value of staff development, but most of the times I've gone to Summer Institute have wound up with me suffering through such an overpowering combination of boredom and stir-craziness that I've considered slowly chewing off one of my pinky fingers just to remind myself I'm alive. And please understand, this has almost everything to do with my undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder and nothing to do with the sessions -- a convenient qualifier for me to throw out there, since I've been the presenter a few times myself. After all, the second best part of SI is that it's voluntary (the best part being the money we get for going). But right now, two weeks out and thinking about sitting in a high school classroom painted in a shade of industrial white that had to be engineered to lull one into complacency? I shudder. However, they are paid days that will be an enormous help in the coming months, so there are certainly WAY bigger problems I could have. But not whine? Where's the fun in that?
So 5 paid days out of 40 really isn't the end of the world. The hardest thing to believe is that there are still 40 days of summer remaining. Speaking for myself, June is mostly defined by shaking off the previous school year, July is the meat and potatoes of summer vacation, and August is when the new year begins to slowly creep into my psyche. I remember writing something on here about how the beginning of the last school year felt routine for me, but there's nothing about this upcoming one that feels that way, which is really good. But it's too early to begin thinking about that yet.
My summer has been remarkably uneventful this year, which, seriously, doesn't bother me a lot. I had a good time with my cousins for a weekend in Wisconsin, I've played fewer video games than I've read books, I've gotten into the habit of staying up late enough to see if Craig Ferguson is going to open his show with a puppet, I've celebrated Garbage Day about six times, I've put in well over 200 miles of cardio work at the Y (and a big thank you to those two ladies sitting poolside in my line of sight today that made my time on the stationary bike much easier to endure), I've seen eight or so movies, I've watched the first season of Mad Men on DVD (Pete Campbell = Weasel who needs a good slap, because it would be more insulting than a punch in the face), I've worked out a couple chapters of one book, finished revising another one, and have fought though great conceptual struggles with a third, I've downloaded 11 new albums from iTunes, and have walked Spencer through the neighborhood approximately 34 times. I did have an unpleasant streak of days in there largely defined by anger, depression, and self-pity which is thankfully over, and I'm easily sitting here tonight in the best health I've been in for what has to be close to fifteen years -- a statement so much more ironic than most people will ever understand.
The biggest disappointments of the summer have been: (1) One book I'm having trouble getting off the ground; it went nowhere for the longest time until I was able to reconcile a big plot problem I couldn't get past, but now that seems to be more or less resolved, and (2) The still mysterious absence of the white iPhone 4. Yeah, Antennagate. I know. I don't care. I always planned to get a bumper anyway and still will, because I'm going to get one. My contract is over on my current phone, which I hate so much I don't even turn the @#$% thing on anymore, and the VERY DAY I'm able to pre-order the white iPhone, I'll be putting the gears of commerce in motion. Why the white one? Why wait, when I could just get the black one pre-ordered now? BECAUSE IT LOOKS SO MUCH COOLER. And I know that's a stupid reason, but for someone as visually attuned as I am, it's a good enough reason for me to continue waiting. At least that's what I keep telling myself....
Saturday, July 17, 2010
The Blank Page
I'm at something of a creative impasse these days.
On one hand, a year after completing the manuscript, I now have a polished version of "The Ghost of Lake Emily" sitting on the hard drive and ready for submission. Which isn't a huge milestone since I felt it was pretty solid to begin with, but there were a few things that needed to be updated and consolidated and cut. Making those changes wasn't a huge issue, but hammering out a query letter was. I don't know if I've gotten into the query process much here, but just in case not here's the short version: The query is a letter you send to an agent asking them to take you on as a client so your book has a better shot at being published. This letter serves two purposes: (1) Make your book sound so compelling that Agent X absolutely has to check it out, and (2) offer some kind of proof that you can actually string coherent sentences together so they know they are dealing with someone who is taking the endeavor seriously.
Writing a letter that does these things is no ride around the lake, but I think I've got one in place now that could get the job done. I've researched up some agents and have sent the first round of 'Emily' queries out, so there's not much more to do but wait. BUT. I still have more than half of my summer left, technically. I could get some serious writing done in that time, and there's no reason I shouldn't. Except that I'm hung up. I wouldn't call this writer's block so much, because the story I want to begin has been coming together in my head for years now, but I just can't get it off the ground because I'm too busy second-guessing myself with it. When you begin writing and you look at that blank page, whether it's in a notebook or a typewriter or a brand new Pages document (or, God help us, friggin' Microsoft Word), it's kind of daunting.
If I was going to tell a student how to get past this, I'd tell them to just start writing. It's not going to be perfect on the first try so there's no sense worrying about quality since you'll have to revise it anyway. Yeah, well. Easier said than done. I figure my best play at this point is to get out one of the middle-grade / YA novels I brought home from school and just read. If it turns out to be good, that's usually enough to kickstart my brain. Trouble is I'm reading a non-fiction book right now, "War" by Sebastian Junger. With a cousin in Afghanistan, I thought it would be interesting to read a book by an acclaimed journalist who spent a great deal of time embedded with the military in Afghanistan. A tip for anyone out there who knows someone in Afghanistan and is thinking, "Hmm, yeah, that might be kind of interesting." Trust me - you'd rather not have your questions answered, at least from reading this book. No punches pulled whatsoever.
Very compelling, but not the type of writing that gets your wheels turning for writing a vaguely sci-fi middle grade novel.
On one hand, a year after completing the manuscript, I now have a polished version of "The Ghost of Lake Emily" sitting on the hard drive and ready for submission. Which isn't a huge milestone since I felt it was pretty solid to begin with, but there were a few things that needed to be updated and consolidated and cut. Making those changes wasn't a huge issue, but hammering out a query letter was. I don't know if I've gotten into the query process much here, but just in case not here's the short version: The query is a letter you send to an agent asking them to take you on as a client so your book has a better shot at being published. This letter serves two purposes: (1) Make your book sound so compelling that Agent X absolutely has to check it out, and (2) offer some kind of proof that you can actually string coherent sentences together so they know they are dealing with someone who is taking the endeavor seriously.
Writing a letter that does these things is no ride around the lake, but I think I've got one in place now that could get the job done. I've researched up some agents and have sent the first round of 'Emily' queries out, so there's not much more to do but wait. BUT. I still have more than half of my summer left, technically. I could get some serious writing done in that time, and there's no reason I shouldn't. Except that I'm hung up. I wouldn't call this writer's block so much, because the story I want to begin has been coming together in my head for years now, but I just can't get it off the ground because I'm too busy second-guessing myself with it. When you begin writing and you look at that blank page, whether it's in a notebook or a typewriter or a brand new Pages document (or, God help us, friggin' Microsoft Word), it's kind of daunting.
If I was going to tell a student how to get past this, I'd tell them to just start writing. It's not going to be perfect on the first try so there's no sense worrying about quality since you'll have to revise it anyway. Yeah, well. Easier said than done. I figure my best play at this point is to get out one of the middle-grade / YA novels I brought home from school and just read. If it turns out to be good, that's usually enough to kickstart my brain. Trouble is I'm reading a non-fiction book right now, "War" by Sebastian Junger. With a cousin in Afghanistan, I thought it would be interesting to read a book by an acclaimed journalist who spent a great deal of time embedded with the military in Afghanistan. A tip for anyone out there who knows someone in Afghanistan and is thinking, "Hmm, yeah, that might be kind of interesting." Trust me - you'd rather not have your questions answered, at least from reading this book. No punches pulled whatsoever.
Very compelling, but not the type of writing that gets your wheels turning for writing a vaguely sci-fi middle grade novel.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Summer Song(s)
First of all, a brief update since I'll be writing about music today -- my "Unplayed Archive" iTunes playlist currently sits at 3,910 songs. Will I be able to successfully reach my New Year's resolution of playing each song in the library at least once? Really not sure. It's getting harder to do as I realize how much mediocre crap is taking up space in my library. And yet I can't bring myself to delete it. Go figure.
But today we're going to talk about the music that does get played; in fact, music that gets overplayed in such a small concentration of time that it becomes symbiotic with a particular period of time. These are the kinds of songs that you can't hear without remembering something in specific detail from the part of your life when those songs were important, and you can't think about that part of your life without hearing those songs. For example, I have a very clear memory of my high school best friend Todd and I painting the walls in the drugstore that my father managed during one June overnight in 1985. I remember this because we had the radio on the whole time, and the station we were listening to played two brand new songs they were very excited about no less than four times throughout the night: "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams, and "All You Zombies" by The Hooters. We liked Bryan Adams well enough back then and liked hearing his new song. "All You Zombies" left us nothing but perplexed.
But for me, summer isn't so much about particular songs as it is about albums. Since I'm essentially laid off from my job for some 70-80 days each summer, I get a lot more time to listen to music, and it seems like every year there are one or two albums that become definitive for that year. A few even get so much play time that the whole album will be locked on to that summer for me. The same could really be said for the other seasons as well, but somehow summer is different.
To prove my point, here is a short list of some of those albums, and a sampling of the memories they recall for me.
**"Busted" by Cheap Trick. Summer of 1990. The ugly little brown 1983 Dodge Colt I drove and how I had a small boom box riding shotgun all the time because the cassette player in the dashboard went out every time I made a left turn; driving across the Division St. bridge into downtown St. Cloud; the academic whiplash of taking a philosophy class and my Phy. Ed. content course within an hour of each other; the way the living room window frame in my apartment swelled in the humidity to the point I couldn't close it; driving up to Sauk Rapids to work at the Boys and Girls club summer program; Paxton, the kid who threw nothing but granny shots all summer; how awesome Laura looked in that dress she wore to our staff meeting, and how I hated her boyfriend for the month that followed.
**"For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" by Van Halen. Summer of 1991. Playing side 2 of the cassette in my Walkman while I ran up and down Variolite to train for the Turtle Trot; driving all over rural Minnesota pursuing fruitless job interviews and staying overnight in a few motels to make sure I'd be at the interview on time; seeing the video for "Poundcake" more than once since it was all over MTV during what may have been one of the last years they actual played music videos more than anything else.
**"Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen. Summer of 1984. Seeing the first concert of the tour at the St. Paul Civic Center, and then listening to a Kansas City version of the same tour on a bootleg tape in Todd's Pinto, and naively hoping we wouldn't get pulled over for speeding and found in possession of a Springsteen bootleg; dropping my sister off at the grocery store where her summer soccer team met to leave for away games, and hoping to see a girl I had a crush on (and now 26 years later I don't even remember who she was); singing along to "Darlington County" in my cousin Paul's Pinto (I know, Pinto summer, right?) on the way to a wedding in South Dakota -- some girl in a passing car saw me rocking out and laughed and pointed me out to the rest of the car and I was so into the song I didn't even care.
**"Hot House" by Bruce Hornsby. Summer of 1995. Driving back and forth between my memorably awful Coon Rapids apartment and Elk River to help my dad close down his drug store; staying up until midnight consistently to watch "Mystery Science Theater 3000" on Comedy Central; foolishly driving headlong into what had to be the ugliest, ominous, multi-colored storm front I have ever seen with my own eyes; summer afternoons at the Moore Lake Athletic Club, and killing time at Northtown on the way home, back when Northtown wasn't as post-apocalyptic as it is now; spending most of August playing games and signing on to eWorld with my very first computer, a Macintosh Performa 5200 CD, which still stands today as the most expensive computer I've bought. But man, was Dark Forces an awesome game. Totally worth the headaches and blurred vision.
I don't have one solid album on track for the summer of 2010 yet, though I do have a favorite playlist I've developed that gets a lot of car time. There's some older Better Than Ezra there, some OneRepublic and Train from last year, old Glen Burtnik, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, even this year's Ozzy release, which doesn't completely suck. I guess with the advent of digital music, it's easier to put together a playlist that is strong in great songs and low on filler, which is a claim that very few albums by any artist can make. But even with that advantage, I still love having that imprinted relationship with one particular piece of music, awesome songs, filler and all. But with the ADD nature of music today, it just doesn't seem to happen as much anymore.
But today we're going to talk about the music that does get played; in fact, music that gets overplayed in such a small concentration of time that it becomes symbiotic with a particular period of time. These are the kinds of songs that you can't hear without remembering something in specific detail from the part of your life when those songs were important, and you can't think about that part of your life without hearing those songs. For example, I have a very clear memory of my high school best friend Todd and I painting the walls in the drugstore that my father managed during one June overnight in 1985. I remember this because we had the radio on the whole time, and the station we were listening to played two brand new songs they were very excited about no less than four times throughout the night: "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams, and "All You Zombies" by The Hooters. We liked Bryan Adams well enough back then and liked hearing his new song. "All You Zombies" left us nothing but perplexed.
But for me, summer isn't so much about particular songs as it is about albums. Since I'm essentially laid off from my job for some 70-80 days each summer, I get a lot more time to listen to music, and it seems like every year there are one or two albums that become definitive for that year. A few even get so much play time that the whole album will be locked on to that summer for me. The same could really be said for the other seasons as well, but somehow summer is different.
To prove my point, here is a short list of some of those albums, and a sampling of the memories they recall for me.
**"Busted" by Cheap Trick. Summer of 1990. The ugly little brown 1983 Dodge Colt I drove and how I had a small boom box riding shotgun all the time because the cassette player in the dashboard went out every time I made a left turn; driving across the Division St. bridge into downtown St. Cloud; the academic whiplash of taking a philosophy class and my Phy. Ed. content course within an hour of each other; the way the living room window frame in my apartment swelled in the humidity to the point I couldn't close it; driving up to Sauk Rapids to work at the Boys and Girls club summer program; Paxton, the kid who threw nothing but granny shots all summer; how awesome Laura looked in that dress she wore to our staff meeting, and how I hated her boyfriend for the month that followed.
**"For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" by Van Halen. Summer of 1991. Playing side 2 of the cassette in my Walkman while I ran up and down Variolite to train for the Turtle Trot; driving all over rural Minnesota pursuing fruitless job interviews and staying overnight in a few motels to make sure I'd be at the interview on time; seeing the video for "Poundcake" more than once since it was all over MTV during what may have been one of the last years they actual played music videos more than anything else.
**"Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen. Summer of 1984. Seeing the first concert of the tour at the St. Paul Civic Center, and then listening to a Kansas City version of the same tour on a bootleg tape in Todd's Pinto, and naively hoping we wouldn't get pulled over for speeding and found in possession of a Springsteen bootleg; dropping my sister off at the grocery store where her summer soccer team met to leave for away games, and hoping to see a girl I had a crush on (and now 26 years later I don't even remember who she was); singing along to "Darlington County" in my cousin Paul's Pinto (I know, Pinto summer, right?) on the way to a wedding in South Dakota -- some girl in a passing car saw me rocking out and laughed and pointed me out to the rest of the car and I was so into the song I didn't even care.
**"Hot House" by Bruce Hornsby. Summer of 1995. Driving back and forth between my memorably awful Coon Rapids apartment and Elk River to help my dad close down his drug store; staying up until midnight consistently to watch "Mystery Science Theater 3000" on Comedy Central; foolishly driving headlong into what had to be the ugliest, ominous, multi-colored storm front I have ever seen with my own eyes; summer afternoons at the Moore Lake Athletic Club, and killing time at Northtown on the way home, back when Northtown wasn't as post-apocalyptic as it is now; spending most of August playing games and signing on to eWorld with my very first computer, a Macintosh Performa 5200 CD, which still stands today as the most expensive computer I've bought. But man, was Dark Forces an awesome game. Totally worth the headaches and blurred vision.
I don't have one solid album on track for the summer of 2010 yet, though I do have a favorite playlist I've developed that gets a lot of car time. There's some older Better Than Ezra there, some OneRepublic and Train from last year, old Glen Burtnik, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, even this year's Ozzy release, which doesn't completely suck. I guess with the advent of digital music, it's easier to put together a playlist that is strong in great songs and low on filler, which is a claim that very few albums by any artist can make. But even with that advantage, I still love having that imprinted relationship with one particular piece of music, awesome songs, filler and all. But with the ADD nature of music today, it just doesn't seem to happen as much anymore.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Vampires
I realize I'm posting this something like a day or two before the new Twilight movie comes out.
For the record, although I'm fairly certain anyone who frequents this blog would be able to guess this on their own, but the whole Twilight phenomena? A love triangle between a teenager, a vampire, and a werewolf? Fine. Whatever. Let the story be the story. There are so many books in the world that the laws of probability dictate that was going to happen sooner or later. And if people like reading the books? Great. Hard to complain about that. But to become so culturally defining that this stuff makes it into Burger King cups? I'm skeptical. And no -- I haven't read any of the books. But. I have seen several of my students reading them, and there have been a few times I've picked up a copy from one of their desks while they weren't in the room and browsed a few pages. I'm going to leave it at this: I've done enough random sampling of the "saga" (Really? It merits being referred to as a saga?) to know they aren't for me. So why bother with the movies? Chances are pretty good the author didn't write these stories with someone like me in mind as her target audience, so I think I can guess the same case could be made for the movies.
I read a different vampire book a few years ago, a cinder block of a novel called "The Historian." I call it a cinder block for two reasons: (1) It was so long and heavy that it's size approximated that of an actual cinder block, and (2) the writing was kind of heavy. I have only abandoned maybe four or five books in my adult life, and this was one of them. That thing actually could have benefited from some teenagers taking themselves way too seriously.
When it comes to vampires, well, of course it all began with Bram Stoker's "Dracula." Which I will never read because it's a classic, and the time I spent earning my English minor and the books I was force-fed during this time (and the papers I had to write about them) has completely beaten away any inclination I will ever have to read any book considered a classic for the rest of my life. Seriously. I had to take a class called "Survey of 18th Century British Literature - Part 2." Because there was so much boring it couldn't all be contained in just one class.
Anyway. So Dracula is never going to pop up on my radar, although I did kind of like the freaky Gary Oldman version of it at the movies not long ago. And as far as Twilight goes -- come on. Teenagers. Vampires. Werewolves. Supernatural wars. It was much better the first time, when it was really funny and called BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. That show was on for something like six of seven years, and it was hilarious.
So if you want to talk vampire books -- to say nothing of the TV shows and movies, and please, other than Buffy, let's say nothing about them -- you're really left with "Salem's Lot." When it comes to scary, old school Uncle Stevie knows what he's doing better than anyone.
BUT. Believe it or not, there is a brand new, and I mean so brand new it was only released this month, vampire book out. And it is truly, truly amazing. It's called "The Passage," by Justin Cronin, an award-winning author of literary fiction and an English professor, who is easily the best writer I've come across in many years. He's one of those guys who writes so fluidly and perfectly that several times I've pulled myself out of the story to re-read how crafted a paragraph, or a sentence, or even just a metaphor, was, and then I sit there and shake my head and wonder how he can do that and do it so often.
I read an anecdote he told about "The Passage" in some interview before the release date. He said that his daughter once commented that the other books he had written were probably boring, and he should write a book about a girl who saves the world. Which he said he went and did. Now, I think that's going to be a conditional saving the world thing, because the world as we know it pretty much came to an end within the first 200 pages, and in a spectacular fashion. If you ever read Stephen King's "The Stand," you were probably creeped out by how plausible the end of the world seemed. Same deal here, in many ways. But instead of camps of good vs. evil, you see the population break down into surviving humans and the virals hunting them. The virals are essentially the vampires here and are even apologetically referred to as such earlier in the book, though instead of walking around in satin capes or moping around in fashionably distressed clothing while listening to Death Cab for Cutie and The Bravery, these things are frighteningly animalistic. And while I'm only about halfway through the book at this point, I can say the few hints given about this girl who saves the world have been tantalizingly few and unpredictable. It's been a long time since I've had a crush on a book like I do on this one. If you like reading scary, or are ready for a more grown-up vampire story, go get this one. Walk into Borders, and I'm fairly sure you'll see a huge display set up right by the entrance. This dude can WRITE.
So now I'm wondering why I'm still here writing about this thing instead of actually reading more of it... excuse me.....
For the record, although I'm fairly certain anyone who frequents this blog would be able to guess this on their own, but the whole Twilight phenomena? A love triangle between a teenager, a vampire, and a werewolf? Fine. Whatever. Let the story be the story. There are so many books in the world that the laws of probability dictate that was going to happen sooner or later. And if people like reading the books? Great. Hard to complain about that. But to become so culturally defining that this stuff makes it into Burger King cups? I'm skeptical. And no -- I haven't read any of the books. But. I have seen several of my students reading them, and there have been a few times I've picked up a copy from one of their desks while they weren't in the room and browsed a few pages. I'm going to leave it at this: I've done enough random sampling of the "saga" (Really? It merits being referred to as a saga?) to know they aren't for me. So why bother with the movies? Chances are pretty good the author didn't write these stories with someone like me in mind as her target audience, so I think I can guess the same case could be made for the movies.
I read a different vampire book a few years ago, a cinder block of a novel called "The Historian." I call it a cinder block for two reasons: (1) It was so long and heavy that it's size approximated that of an actual cinder block, and (2) the writing was kind of heavy. I have only abandoned maybe four or five books in my adult life, and this was one of them. That thing actually could have benefited from some teenagers taking themselves way too seriously.
When it comes to vampires, well, of course it all began with Bram Stoker's "Dracula." Which I will never read because it's a classic, and the time I spent earning my English minor and the books I was force-fed during this time (and the papers I had to write about them) has completely beaten away any inclination I will ever have to read any book considered a classic for the rest of my life. Seriously. I had to take a class called "Survey of 18th Century British Literature - Part 2." Because there was so much boring it couldn't all be contained in just one class.
Anyway. So Dracula is never going to pop up on my radar, although I did kind of like the freaky Gary Oldman version of it at the movies not long ago. And as far as Twilight goes -- come on. Teenagers. Vampires. Werewolves. Supernatural wars. It was much better the first time, when it was really funny and called BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. That show was on for something like six of seven years, and it was hilarious.
So if you want to talk vampire books -- to say nothing of the TV shows and movies, and please, other than Buffy, let's say nothing about them -- you're really left with "Salem's Lot." When it comes to scary, old school Uncle Stevie knows what he's doing better than anyone.
BUT. Believe it or not, there is a brand new, and I mean so brand new it was only released this month, vampire book out. And it is truly, truly amazing. It's called "The Passage," by Justin Cronin, an award-winning author of literary fiction and an English professor, who is easily the best writer I've come across in many years. He's one of those guys who writes so fluidly and perfectly that several times I've pulled myself out of the story to re-read how crafted a paragraph, or a sentence, or even just a metaphor, was, and then I sit there and shake my head and wonder how he can do that and do it so often.
I read an anecdote he told about "The Passage" in some interview before the release date. He said that his daughter once commented that the other books he had written were probably boring, and he should write a book about a girl who saves the world. Which he said he went and did. Now, I think that's going to be a conditional saving the world thing, because the world as we know it pretty much came to an end within the first 200 pages, and in a spectacular fashion. If you ever read Stephen King's "The Stand," you were probably creeped out by how plausible the end of the world seemed. Same deal here, in many ways. But instead of camps of good vs. evil, you see the population break down into surviving humans and the virals hunting them. The virals are essentially the vampires here and are even apologetically referred to as such earlier in the book, though instead of walking around in satin capes or moping around in fashionably distressed clothing while listening to Death Cab for Cutie and The Bravery, these things are frighteningly animalistic. And while I'm only about halfway through the book at this point, I can say the few hints given about this girl who saves the world have been tantalizingly few and unpredictable. It's been a long time since I've had a crush on a book like I do on this one. If you like reading scary, or are ready for a more grown-up vampire story, go get this one. Walk into Borders, and I'm fairly sure you'll see a huge display set up right by the entrance. This dude can WRITE.
So now I'm wondering why I'm still here writing about this thing instead of actually reading more of it... excuse me.....
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