Wednesday, September 28

Good question

Technology is helping aspiring writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers go from amateur to pro. Who needs an agent when you've got the net? Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9378645/site/newsweek/ (Tip to Jeff)


Saturday, September 24

Remember my idea?

Down below somewhere, I was talking about "sampling" text for my next novel. I may have even posted a big chunk of an example. Once again, I've been beaten to the idea. Here's a bit from a review in Time magazine for the novel "Wickett's Remedy" by Myla Goldberg: "...Additionally, she excerpts actual news stories of the day..."

Which is exactly what I'm doing in my coming Nano Novel. Curses. That's what I get for sitting on my copy and never trying to publish it. Time for action! Time for an agent!

Saturday morning on the edge of nowhere

It's Saturday morning on the Edge of Nowhere. Kristen's at her cello lesson; Reade's at a friends waking up (likely) from a sleepover; Connor's still asleep downstairs. I've already taken all three dogs for a couple mile walk and gone for a three-mile run myself. The cat is sitting here watching my fingers type. The three dogs are all asleep on the floor within 20 feet of me.

I've caught up on the other blogs and posted below a couple thoughts I've collected over the past week. I've got a guitar under my arm and a pick in my mouth (which I play while the computer slowly uploads stuff to the net). Later today, after I mow the lawns, we're taking Connor over to the University High football game so he can play with the pep band, and tonight he plays with his church band at a Harry Potter Party for the other church that shares our building. In other words, just another day on the edge of nowhere. (Ouch OUCH -- the cat has moved to my lap, ducking under the neck of the guitar and digging her claws into the bare skin of my knees for traction.)

My brother noted the lack of posting going on here. And he notes that it's only five weeks till National Novel Writing Month. Both are accurate observations, and the latter partly explains my lack of activity on the former. I've been thinking and collecting and working on ideas for Nano.

Haven't been writing them down, of course. But thinking is also good. It's the next best thing to actually writing.

I'll try to think here over the next five weeks.

Friday, September 23

Advice from Princess Leia

Here's some writing/life advice about talent and its relationship to fame (OK, way premature in my case, but a guy can dream, right?) from Carrie Fisher's new novel (yes, Princess Leia writes fiction too!) "The Best Awful." The "she" here is the main character, Suzanne, who's resentful (but finally accepting) at having to pose for the paparazzi (because she was once famous) at a funeral for a producer friend, convincing herself thusly:

"The only part of fame she understood was the thing that had purchased it -- talent. She figured the acting or writing or singing or talk show hosting you did for free because you at least at one point you had liked doing them. All the by-products -- being reviewed or scrutinized, signing autographs, and posing for pictures--those were the things you got paid for. The photo ops and sound bites you delivered as requested, those were actually the things that paid the rent."

Tuesday, September 20

Quote of the day

My good friend Murray the Champ shares this quote of the day from W. Somerset Maugham:

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

Friday, September 9

More on process

So two more things have been floating through my writers brain the past week or 10 days that are clearly shaping the novel that's taking place in my gray matter.

1: Sampling. Hip-hop and rap artists have been sampling others' work for 25 years now, borrowing (taking? stealing? looting?) beats and rythmns and what not for their music. A few months back, I read a review of video artists who are now sampling and recombining elements from movies into new works of art (for example, one couple when through 60 years of Hollywood films about Las Vegas or with Las Vegas settings and then recompiled or recut scenes in dozens of new ways to create a work of art).

So why not do that with novels? Sure, it's plagerism, but it's also an accepted process of art in other mediums (collage, music, film/video, etc.). So why not fiction? Why not collect or steal or sample bits and pieces of current nonfiction (or, for that matter, fiction) and sort and resort and run it through the novelists blender of a brain and come up with something new?

Why not indeed. So I've been pondering this, wondering if I could make it work while collecting for the past weeks potentially "sampled" text to use. And something interesting is happening. Something I will pursue.

2. We watched a film -- Kitchen Stories -- about Swedish efficiency experts studing the kitchen habits of Norwegian bachelor farmers, a quiet, touching look at solo male relationships. Which made me start thinking about solo guys -- perhaps in conjunction with the timing of the release of the Steve Carrell vehicle The 40 Year Old Virgin -- and for some reason the image of a middle-age suburban corporate bachelor sprung to mind.

I thought about him for several days and he slowly became someone who had love as a young man but then lost it and slowly settled into a very happy (he thinks) life as a creatue of routine, giving up much of what most of us think is important to a happy, healthy, well-rounded life in exchange for a clean, simple, almost zenlike monk's life (in 21st century America, of course, most likely a resident of my fictional town, Utopia, Colorado (the eventual setting of all my novels, when I get around to rewriting/fixing them). But then the world crashes in around him in the guise of a potential lover who would have to have a very messynormal personal life, etc. etc. Stick these two people into the same chapter and I guess I'll see what happens.

So I see these two things -- sampling, happy bachelors -- working together some how.

And then, of course, Katrina hit and depressesd the hell out of me, on a karmic level, just like the big funk I sunk into after 9/11 from all the death and destruction, but doubly pissed by the government's lack of a response and doubleNEWspeak media relations. And I woke up again. And so we write. We must write to survive.

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