Monday, February 28

Is it time?

To give a glorious last hurrah for the postwar pretense to a universal middle class. Is it over now? Did it ever exist? Are we all so slotted and marketed to via our shared and divisive demographics to give up the need for universal everything? There's a story or two in here, or at least a backdrop to consider I suppose...


Sunday, February 27

Submission denied

Well, at least it was fast. So McSweeney's said no; any other places like that, anyone?

Connor and I had a great day yesterday, heading up to Bear Lake at Rocky Mountain National Park with Westley. We took a walk at Lake Estes (before a big quick snowstorm drove us back to the car) then we went up to Bear Lake and walked around a bit, then came down to lower elevations in the park and watched/filmed elk and a coyote for a while, then came back to the plains and went for a short walk along Devil's Backbone just west of Loveland before coming home for pizza, cake and a viewing of Ray just in time to see Jamie Foxx win the award tonight, eh? Right. Oh, and I edited 20 pages yesterday, so that's a plus too.

Saturday, February 26

Submission sent

OK, so I just e-mailed a fiction submission to McSweeney's, one of Nick's favored websites. It's a fictional exaggeration and recap of an annual corporate employee performance review in a Harper's Index style, which several people said was funny and Krell encouraged me to submit. So it's submitted. And I'm not sure of the appropriateness of posting it here while I wait to hear, so I'll just chill and see if it can find a much, much larger audience there. And while I wait for a response, I'll work on the novel for a bit before heading up to the mountains today to take a walk around Bear Lake at Rocky Mountain National Park with Connor as the Anderwomenfolk head to Denver to take in the Colorado Ballet on a fantastic sunny warm late winter's day.

February 26

Things that happened on this day that you never had to memorize in school:
1076: Godfried III with the Hump, duke of Netherlands, is murdered
1361: Wenceslas of Bohemia Holy Roman Catholic German emperor (1378-1400) is born.
1531: Earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, kills 20,000
1564: Christopher Marlowe, dramatist (Dr Faustus), is baptized
1616: Spanish Inquisition delivers injunction to Galileo. World is still flat.
1797: Bank of England issues 1st £1-note
1802: Victor Hugo France, author (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables) is born.
1813: Robert R Livingston US diplomat (signer of the Declaration of Independence), dies at 66
1845: Alexander III St Petersburg, Russian tsar (1881-94) is born.
1815: Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from Elba to begin his second conquest of France.
1846: William F "Buffalo Bill" Cody of Davenport IA, who later killed 4000 buffaloes, is born.
1848: The Communist Manifesto, written by Friedrich Engels and a 29-year-old Karl Marx, is published in Brussels.
1852: John Harvey Kellogg surgeon, inspired flaked cereal industry, is born.
1861: Ferdinand I Vienna, 1st tsar of modern Bulgaria (1908-18), is born.
1866: Herbert Henry Dow pioneer in US chemical industry (Dow Chemical), is born.
1869: Franz Schubert's "4th Tragic" premieres
1870: Wyatt Outlaw, black leader of Union League in North Carolina, is lynched.
1876: Pauline Musters shortest known adult (58.9 cm, 1' 11.2"), is born.
1887: Grover Cleveland Alexander Hall of Fame baseball pitcher (Phillies, Cubs), is born.
1891: 1st buffalo purchased for Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
1891: Henrik Ibsens "Hedda Gabler" premieres in Oslo
1893: William Frawley of Iowa, actor (Fred Mertz-I Love Lucy, Bub-My 3 Sons) is born
1903: Richard J Gatling US inventor (Gatling Gun), dies at 84
1908: Tex Avery cartoon director (What's up, Doc?) is born.
1912: Coal strike begins, Derbyshire, England. Becomes a general, nationwide strike on March 1.
1916: Jackie Gleason of Brooklyn NY, comedian (Ralph Kramden-Honeymooners) is born.
1916: Mutual signs Charlie Chaplin to a film contract
1919: Congress establishes Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona
1920: Tony Randall [Leonard Rosenberg], Tulsa OK, actor (Felix-Odd Couple, Love Sidney) is born.
1921: Russia: The revolutionary Kronstadt sailors sent delegates to Petrograd find out about strikes occurring there. The delegation visited a number of factories and returned two days later, beginning protests against the Bolshevik counter-revolution.
1926: French anarchist Georges Butaud (1868-1926) dies in Ermont. Sensitive to the problems of food consumption, he became an advocate of vegetarianism.
1928: Antoine "Fats" Domino New Orleans LA, rhythm & blues pianist/singer (Blueberry Hill,) is born.
1929: President Calvin Coolidge establishes Grand Teton National Park
1930: 1st red & green traffic lights installed in Manhattan, NYC.
1930: West Indies make 1st Test Cricket win, by 289 runs over England
1931: Robert D Novak, Joliet IL, news reporter (CNN-Evans & Novak) is born.
1932: Johnny Cash of Kingsland AR, country singer (I Walk The Line, Folsom Prison Blues, Boy Named Sue) is born.
1933: Golden Gate Bridge ground-breaking ceremony held at Crissy Field
1935: New York Yankees release Babe Ruth; he signs with Boston Braves
1936: Hitler introduces Ferdinand Porsche's "Volkswagen"
1943: Bob "The Bear" Hite California, singer (Canned Heat-Going Up the Country) is born.
1945: Mitch Ryder rocker (Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels-Devil With the Blue Dress) is born.
1950: Jonathan Cain, Chicago IL, rock guitarist/keyboardist (Journey, Bad English, Babys) is born.
1952: British government announces possession of H-bomb.
1954: Michael Bolton, New Haven CT, vocalist, is born.
1954: First typesetting machine (photo engraving) used, Quincy MA
1954: Michigan Representative Ruth Thompson (R) introduces legislation to ban mailing "obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy" phonograph (rock & roll) records
1954: Four crewmen aboard a C-119 die when their plane crashes after observing the time-honored Air Force tradition of buzzing the Huntington, Tennessee courthouse.
1955: Singer LaVern Baker appeals to Congress to revise the Copyright Act of 1909 so recording artists can be protected against "note-for-note copying" of all presently recorded R&B tunes and arrangements by white artists and arrangers. The long-standing problem had been exacerbated by white "rock and roll" artists ripping off previously recorded black music.
1956: Writers Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes meet at a party in Cambridge
1957: Connie Carpenter-Phinney of Madison WI, 79k cyclist (Olympics-gold-1984) is born.
1959: Lou Costello actor (Abbott & Costello), dies at 52
1962: Creator of the Edge of Nowhere born between 2 and 3 a.m. in Santa Rosa, California.
1962: US Supreme court disallows race separation on public transportation
1962: Wilt Chamberlain of NBA Philadelphia Warriors scores 67 points vs New York
1965: Jimmy Lee Jackson, civil rights activist, dies from beating by Alabama police.
1966: Four thousand picket outside New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel as Pres. Lyndon Johnson receives the National Freedom Award. As Johnson begins his speech in defense of his Vietnam policies, James Peck of the War Resisters League jumps to his feet and shouts, "Mr. President, peace in Vietnam!" On the streets, meanwhile, activist A.J. Muste presents the crowd's own "Freedom Award" to Julian Bond, who has been denied his seat in the Georgia legislature for refusing to disavow his war opposition and his support of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
1968: J T Snow Long Beach CA, infielder (New York Yankees, California Angels) is born. 1970: U.S. Army supposedly discontinues surveillance of civilian anti-war demonstrations and maintenance of files on protestors.
1970: Beatles release "Beatles Again" aka "Hey Jude" album
1971: Erykah Badu singer is born.
1972: West Virginia coalslag heap, which had doubled as a dam, suddenly collapses, flooding the 17-mile ling Buffalo Creek Valley. 118 die, 14 mining camps leveled, and 5,000 people are left homeless.
1973: Marshall Faulk NFL running back (Indianapolis Colts) is born.
1974: Ford Motor Co., Henry Ford, and their Nazi war efforts revealed in Senate report.
1976: Body of American Indian Movement activist Anna Mae Aquash, in a murder never solved but widely attributed to the FBI, is found in rural South Dakota. The FBI initially claimed Aquash died of exposure, and buried her before family or friends could view the body; when exhumed, she was found to have an FBI-issue bullet in her head.
1977: 1st flight of Space Shuttle (atop a Boeing 747)
1978: The Edge of Nowhere gets its drivers license.
1979: Last total eclipse of Sun in 20th century for continental US
1983: Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album goes to #1 & stays #1 for 37 weeks
1983: The Edge of Nowere is now legal to drink. Celebrates by dancing to Thriller at The Graduate in Chico, Califonia.
1984: Robert Penn Warren, Pulitzer Prize winner, named 1st US poet laureate
1986: Former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, ousted by a popular revolution the previous day, flees the Philippines with U.S. assistance.
1987: Tower Commission starts probe of Iran-Contra affair
1990: Czech leader Vaclav Havel announces departure of all Soviet troops.
1991: U.S. air forces, in the infamous "turkey shoot," drop fuel-air bombs and massacre thousands of retreating Iraqi conscripts on the Basra road from Kuwait.
1991: President George Bush I admits supporting Khmer Rouge in Cambodia -- an illegal act.
1993: Bomb blast rips though seven floors of New York City's World Trade Center, killing six, injuring 1,000. By the following day, over 40 groups will claim responsibility.
1997: David Doyle actor (Charlie's Angels), dies at 67
1997: Thirty-six arrested at a state capitol encampment protesting welfare cutbacks, St. Paul, Minnesota. 1998: An international weapons inspection team, including Canadian MP Libby Davies, is not allowed entry to either confirm or deny the presence of weapons of mass destruction at the Bangor (Wash.) nuclear submarine base. Aerial photos the same day, however, suggest the odds of such heinous weapons were pretty damn high. 1998: Oprah Winfrey beats Texas cattlemen in beef trial.
2005: Edge of Nowhere celebrates the birth of its human container by posting long, self indulgent tribute to its birth date, self-referentially noting said post features the worst attributes of ego-blogging.

Friday, February 25

John Irving's writing seminar

The Austin Chronicle interviews John Irving. "The point of the seminar was not just good writing and strong narrative, it was that writing is a job. A job you can prepare yourself for and get better at. A job you have to work at every day."


Word to your mother

And I quote: Rappers and bloggers—they're the same!

Essentially, blogging is sampling plus a new riff. Political bloggers take a story in the news, rip out a few chunks, and type out a few comments. Rap songs use the same recipe: Dig through a crate of records, slice out a high hat and a bass line, and lay a new vocal track on top. Of course, the molecular structure of dead-tree journalism and classic rock is filthy with other people's research and other people's chord progressions. But in newspaper writing and rock music, the end goal is the appearance of originality—to make the product look seamless by hiding your many small thefts.

For rappers and bloggers, each theft is worth celebrating, another loose item to slap onto the collage. Rap music and blogging are populist, low-cost-of-entry communication forms that reward self-obsessed types who love writing in first person. Maybe that's why both won so many converts so quickly.

That, of course, assumes you're blogging in the collage style, which the Edge of Nowhere is not doing. The Edge of Nowhere is not doing much these days, as is clear. Just livin la vida suburban.


Wednesday, February 23

Hunter S.

"Thompson had a gift for the details and one of the best crap detectors in history. His flawless nose for the truths, dynamics, and motivations driving the players starring in his stories lent those narratives a quality that somehow fused unflinching naturalism with sweeping mythology."

This is from one of a gazillion obits and memories, on the good doctor flooding the web this week, and it's the one 'graph I've 'note to self'ed to remind myself to capture the motivations and dynamics of the fictional characters I write about, really know and understand them, to make the fiction better. And, as my friend Krell always says, focus and capture the important, revealing details.


Tuesday, February 22

Ponder this

Are artists "the uninsulated emotional conductors for the rest of society"? I read that in some article today.


This week's goals

Last week's accomplishments:
1. Paper edit 25 more pages: failed - 0 pages.
2. Make changes to three chapters: failed - 0 pages
3. Gather all my fiction into the blue room office: failed.
Yack. A less-than-stellar week on the old writing front. What did Woody Allen say? Eighty percent of success is just showing up? Well, clearly I failed to show up last week. We'll see how I do this coming week, during which I'll keep the same goals since they didn't get accomplished last week… Sigh.


Thursday, February 17

Idea

"Everything is scripted."


Spring?

Lo and verily, climbing out of my van to come into the building this morning I heard, from down by the corporate pond, a meadowlark's song, the first of the year. There's still a thin layer of snow everywhere, but the sky is blue, the sun is bright and it feels like spring.


Tuesday, February 15

Romping in the snow

I'm sitting up here on the second floor looking out over the backyard which is now about four inches deep with pure new white wet snow and Westley is running in those big galumping running steps he takes when he's frolicking in the snow. It snowed nearly all day to day, big wet flakes twisting and blowing around the gray sky, after yesterday being about 65 sunny blue sky degrees. If you don't like the weather, wait 10 minutes. That's what they say around here. That's what I say, at least.

Anyway, I came out of work and the big torn apart cotton clouds were ripping to shreds, the snow was drying up and patches of winter blue sky were appearing above the clouds. It's the perfect snow: the roads are wet but not icy or snowy; our driveway is clear and yet the dogs have about four or five inches of power to romp around in. Sweetness!

Had an idea for a bunch of short stories -- a short story collection, if you will, when I spied the current Premier magazine on our coffee table: Magazine Articles About Ordinary People Who Don't Normally Have Feature Articles Written About Them. Maybe I'll write one or two samples and post them here in the near future.

OK: I have to go pick up Reade from violin lessons, hang out while Connor's drum teacher appears, set up the video tape (we're 20th century pre-Tivo Luddites here) to record the second night of the Westminster Dog Show, go play racquetball and still find time to edit five or ten pages of my novel later tonight. So I best be off.

Oh, there goes Westley again, back legs leap frogging through the powder, shoulders twisting, mouth down biting snow, ears flopping, his face an icy blur of laughing whiskers. Now he's banging on the back door. Good night!

This week's goals

Here's last week's goals and accomplishments:

1. Move laptop to the blue room, find the phone jack -- I moved the laptop but couldn't find a phone jack so unrolled a 25-foot phone cable to cross the room, snake over the upper stairs landing and traverse to the phone jack in the bedroom. Not an elegant solution. But workable.

2. Paper edit/proof 25 pages of the novel. - Did it!

3. Make changes to three chapters of the novel. - Made edits to 1.7 chapters.

This week's writing-related goals:

1. Paper edit 25 more pages.

2. Make changes to three chapters.

3. Gather all my fiction into the blue room office. Don't sort or file, just find, collect and stack. Oh, and shut up and write.


Saturday, February 12

Saturday morning

Just a bit of house cleaning (and, momentarily, dog washing).

+ Work progresses nicely on the novel and I hope to find time today and tomorrow to put in a couple of hours back here at the keyboard to make some edits. And to read/edit the paper copy.

+ Got to see Connor play drums Thursday night when he played with the school's third and fourth graders on a couple of songs at their concert.

+ Started reading Siddhartha by Hesse in a new (2000) translation published by Shambala, and I like it a lot.

+ We're back from a walk with the dogs up and over the hill, and now Westley needs a bath and a foundation cleaning as next Friday and Saturday Kristen shows him at the Denver dog shows.

+ It's overcast and gray today, but not cold, good weather to stay indoors and organize an office, work on a novel, wash a dog, take in a movie and maybe even do taxes. Yippee?

+ I'm writing to you from the blue room desk and window overlooking our yard, a corner of the school yard behind us, an intersection, a clumb of trees, a thousand rooftops in the Kelly Farms development and, beyond that, the mountains of Colorado and a tiny corner of Wyoming. And a sky full of blue-gray couds.

+ Oh yeah, I didn't get that job in the learning and development department of one of the world's largest insurance companies I may have mentioned here a few weeks back. I was disappointed, then mad, and now I'm just trying to forget about it and move on, focus on the present and the near future, and fiction. Fiction is the future.

OK, clearly I have nothing to say today, so I've checked in, and now I'm checking out. I hear the water running in the tub and washing Westley is something of a two person job. Later


Thursday, February 10

I like it

So I get home from picking up my son at school last night and swinging by the library only to get home and have my daughter say she needs to go to the library so she can do some research on a state park and use their computer to build a PowerPoint for a presentation. Sigh. It's been a long day, and it's getting to be a long week and I'm not feeling all that great about my progress or the book. Stupid Inner Editor has shown up sometime late morning. Bleeech.

But wait: library time! So I gather up the paper copy of the novel and, after we pick up her friend who's has to do the same work, we arrive a little before 6 p.m. I settle into a table down in the periodicals, not far from the licking flames in the fireplace as the girls get to work. And I get to work for 90 minutes or so.

And I make progress on the copy, editing a couple or three (four?) chapters, getting to chapter 19 or 20, page 49 or so (nearly half-way of the 111 pages on this print out). I made good additions to sections of dialogue, realized one or two possibly good ideas (will have to revisit later) about breaking up a chapter by splitting it and moving part to earlier in the book. And while there was one bad rough spot, a long dense chapter written in the wrong tense and the wrong style (all tell, no show) for what came before and after, the rest of it seems pretty OK. Maybe even good. Hey, I think, I like this. This does have potential. I can see a couple of early problems, but yes, this is going good.

And so on the drive back home, I started thinking again about this upcoming writer's conference in Colorado Springs, the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, which I've been thinking of attending (with Jared, who I think plans to pitch 'Wrath'). And in my vision in the car, I see myself talking to agents and book editors, making the most of one of the most important parts of the conference: the opportunity to schedule 10 minute pitch sessions with literary agents and book editors. I might just sign-up and see this through, making sure I get a good solid draft done before then.

Recent reading & learning

I find myself blowing warm and cold on Nicholson Baker, or is it hot and lukewarm? I like his books, he's smart, he's got a great talent of describing how things work, how they're built and designed, an evolution of design and a superb self-awareness/self-consciousness that I enjoy etc etc, but I also find myself wishing a bit for a plot, for something to happen.

I just finished his first novel 'The Mezzanine' this morning, which features DWF-like dense footnotes that are fun to read but not quite laugh-out-loud funny. They're smart, good, and yet somewhat annoying, tiring and it's taking forever to read, it's almost too much work, too much detail, too much thought. In fact, I finally gave up reading them yesterday to just plow through the main story, the primary text. They became a hassle and not a pleasure, which to me is one of the top three reasons of reading a novel (or two, if I think about it; no, three). (And yet I brought the book with me to read the footnotes, or at least skim them, today at lunch.) (I also brought my next thin novel: Siddhartha by Hesse to start if that mood strikes.)

Anyway, reading some of Baker's fiction is more like work, which I'm willing to do for a good payoff, but I'm not sure Baker in fiction has the necessary payoff - at least not for me. This is the fifth book of his I've read in the past month (the others, in order I've read 'em: Counterpoint, Box of Matches, U and I, Vox), and they all have their charms (except 'Counterpoint', which maybe isn't charming) and pros, but they also have some luggage in my mind (well, 'U and I' has the least amount of luggage for me, now that I think about it, and it may have been the easiest to read as well, altho' Vox due to its subject matter was a very fast read, too...). (But then this raises the question of what a 'good payoff' is, Anderson, and what does 'some luggage' mean? What are you looking for? What do you seek? Because Baker is a brilliant writer.)

I agree with my friend Krell that 'U and I' (an '05 MELDAR read) is self conscious and self serving, and perhaps too much of both, cutting too close to home at times, but that's sort of the point too, isn't it? Baker seems a grad-school lit-crit type showing off for his peers (at least in 'U and I'), confessing in a safe yet over the top way about his need to please and at the same time show up his mythical mentor/ literary father figure type (Updike, the U), showing off his skills while trying to downplay them, bragging about his obsession while trying to pretend it isn't as great as it was even though it's greater than he admits or perhaps wants to admit. All that meta-meta-meta gets a bit wearying towards the end. It's all too much of everything. And yet -- it worked for me. Non-fiction. I enjoyed it.

But the style doesn't work for me in his fiction. I need small doses. That might be the answer. So what can we learn from this? Don't write that way. That's what I learn: It comes back to the need to somehow, somewhere, among all the thinking and post-post and psychology and theory and philosophy and meta-whatever, tell some kind of story.

I guess I have the same complaint about 'Old Friends,' the Stephen Dixon novel I picked up at the same time and finished before 'The Mezzanine.' Dixon's book is about two writer friends who grow old and is some sort of retelling of their conversations and letters and phone calls, eventually via the wife of one of them because he ends up in an institution with Alzheimer's like symptoms; it got old for me and I found myself wanting to skim and read only the surface over the final third of the book. It features no chapters, very long (multi-page) paragraphs and a completely out-of-kilter timeline, skipping around and around and around in time over the course of what may be 30 or 40 years (I'm not totally sure….and/or it's not completely clear.) Nothing happens but ordinary everyday life and growing old, and growing old miserably at that, and not much of a story or characters that are compelling -- for me.

Again: Tell a story. Tell some kind of story.

Wednesday, February 9

Four truths for writers

My brother shares what's hanging on the wall next to his writing space:

Four Noble Truths for Writers:
1. Writers write.
2. Writing is a process.
3. You don't know what your writing will be until the end of the process.
4. If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is to not write.

From One Continuous Mistake, by Gail Sher.


Tuesday, February 8

This week's goals

Okay, self, here's last week's writing goals and what we accomplished:

1. Move the laptop out of the bedroom and into the blue room -- did not do.
2. Set up the new bookcase in blue room -- done!
3. Finish organizing all my mom's paperwork -- done!
4. Start the paper copy edit/proofing to my current untitled novel -- done! (some 10-12 chapters on paper, some three chapters on the e-file).

So here's this week's goals:

1. Move laptop to the blue room, find the phone jack (behind one of the bookcases).
2. Paper edit/proof 25 pages of the novel.
3. Make changes to three chapters of the novel.
4. Gather all my old fiction into one file/box in blue room office (this is the stretch goal…) Getting it all in one place (out of the various boxes and files in my closet and in the garage) and think about sorting it. I'm only going to think about sorting it (ready to send out, need final clean copy, needs another draft, first draft, half-finished first draft, piece of crap to review for trash file, etc.) because I'd rather work on my novel than building my office, but building the office feels like progress too, so maybe I'll get to it.


Sunday, February 6

Soup or Sunday

An overcast Sunday morning here on the edge, we're just back from taking the dogs for a walk along the Poudre River just down from our house, snow falling on cottonwoods and the dreary February winterscape, dead brown grass, piles of fallen leaves, little round grains of snow, like sand through the hourglass, ticking away the hours until kickoff. Made good progress on the blue room yesterday, cleaning much of it up, building the bookcase (check that off the list), moving books from the double-stacked shelf to it, and started the final sort of my mom's estate papers to turn over to the estate attorney's accountant later this week (with luck). So instead of watching the commercials and the accidental football later (meaning I'm not really ticking down the hours until kickoff), I'll likely duck back into that room and work for a couple more hours.

I also spent a good couple of hours last night working on the paper copy of the novel, editing a couple chapters. Kristen and Connor were at the high school play, a Neil Simon comedy about the Book of Job from the Bible. Weird, eh? God's Favorite. One of Connor's good friends had a lead part as a freshman; he and Connor have made a few movies together, too, and Connor and he always talk about putting together a band (Ben plays bass). Reade was baby sitting for Ben's littlest sister, so she had I had seen the play Friday night. I'm rambling. I need to spend some time making edits here, but a priority right now is finishing off the blue room and moving this laptop and net connection into that room, which is actually just behind the blue wall of this here bedroom. So they're both blue rooms now that I think about it. Alright, alright. Later.

Friday, February 4

On this day

In 1968, the inspirational genius of the Beat writers, Prankster Neal Cassady, collapses and dies along railroad tracks outside San Miguel De Allende, Mexico. And on this day tomorrow in 1914: William Burroughs is born in St. Louis, Missouri.


Progress report

Stunning morning here on the edge of nowhere. Ice blue cloudless sky, very mild temps, plenty of early morning sunshine casting deep high-relief shadows on the snow covered peaks to the west. Amber fields of corn have been reduced mostly to stubble now and little puffs of steam were rising from the Kodak plant down in the river valley before the purple mountains majesty as I drove to work. What a swell day. Plus: it's Friday.

So it's been a good week on the writing front: worked on paper on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, working through eight or nine chapters and made edits/changes on the computer on Tuesday, Wednesday and this morning (I took yesterday morning off to finish prepping for an internal job interview, and took last night off to enjoy the film Garden State). So: Three chapters finished; 47 to go.

I know, I know, it feels silly reporting this like this, but it's an accountability trick I'm going to try this time since my other practices and habits over the past 20 years have failed to result in a published book. So onward! Shut up and write!


Wednesday, February 2

Old Friends and new books

Here's the sleeve blurb on "Old Friends," by Stephen Dixon, the thin (my theme of the year so far) novel I picked off the new releases shelf at Farr Library: "The end result is an absolutely beautiful work of art -- a moving homage to the writing life, to friendship and love -- that's certain to be recognized as one of the celebrated author's very best books."

Dixon, who's twice been nominated for the National Book Award, examines the friendship of two writers, both with hermitic tendencies and an intense devotion to their craft. Perfect timing. I can't vouch for it, but judging this book from its cover, I checked it out and started reading it.

Other thin books I picked up on Sunday's library trip: "The Old Man and The Sea" by Hemingway (one 'm', after hearing Nick report how laugh-out-loud funny The Sun Also Rises was -- this one wasn't that funny but definitely Hemingwayesque (one 'm'), "Siddhartha" by Hesse (not to be confused with Sidd Finch by George Plimpton, one of my favorite sports books of all time [note to self: that's a topic for a future list] and, in hindsight, Plimpton himself being one of the early reasons I wanted to be a writer -- you mean you get to try all those sports? And then write about them? Cool!), Walter Kirn's "She Needed Me" and, on reserve the next in my ogoing reading of the ongoing saga of Nicholson Baker's quick reads, his "stunning" (?!?) first novel, "The Mezzanine," in which the entire novel supposedly takes place in the time it takes a guy to ride an escalator up one floor.

So, what's your favorite thin novel (less than 225 pages)? Anyone?

Tuesday, February 1

Mid-week update

OK, I've so far totally skipped the first three things on my to do list this week (the setting up of the office steps), but I'm celebrating progress on item four: shut up and write. I've edited about 25 pages of my current work-in-progress working Saturday, Sunday and last night, and this morning I fired up the laptop and made the paper edits to the original copy of the first chapter. It's amazing 1) what a good mood I start the day in when I spend even a half-hour working and 2) that I forget how good it feels when I fall out of the regular habit. The glass is half-full today! One chapter down, 50 to go to a solid first draft. Onward!


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?