Sunday, October 30

Time's 100 novels

Here's another list of the best 100 novels of the past century, from Time.com: http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html
 
Less than 36 hours until NanoWrimo '05 begins!


Friday, October 28

Just a few days left

Still have some troubles with my computer, my net connection and my Blogger account. I'm e-mailing this post to my blog to see if it works for a short-term work around.
 
The good news is I'm mere days away from starting my next novel. I have no idea really what it'll be about, which is exciting and daunting at the same time. The bad news is I'll spend the first two days of Nano in Arizona on a business trip, putting me about 4,000 words in the whole before it even begins.
 
OK -- here comes the test.
 

Thursday, October 27

Six days to go

National Novel Writing Month looms. Starts Tuesday next. I hate computer viruses. And I'm having trouble with my blogger connection. So this post will be short to prove I still exist and to see if I can get it posted.

Friday, October 14

Winners

British playwright Harold Pinter, who juxtaposed the brutal and the banal in such works as "The Caretaker" and "The Birthday Party" and made an art form out of spare language and unbearable silence, won the 2005 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday.
Irish writer John Banville was also presented this week with the Man Booker Prize for his latest novel "The Sea." As well as receiving £50,000 in prize money, the award guarantees him huge sales for the novel and for his previous work.
Here at home, E.L. Doctorow's "The March," his novelization of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's bloody Civil War campaign, and Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," her memoir of grieving for her late husband, were among the nominees announced Wednesday for the National Book Awards. Other fiction finalists are Mary Gaitskill's "Veronica," Christopher Sorrentino's "Trance," Rene Steinke's "Holy Skirts" and William T. Vollmann's "Europe Central."
I, of course, was not nominated for any of these awards. Then again, I still haven't had a novel published. Or reached out with any serious effort to try and get mine published. But: Someday. A guy's gotta dream. Now back to work.

Monday, October 10

Booker Prize winner

Irish writer John Banville was the surprise winner on Monday of the Booker Prize, one of the literary world's most prestigious awards, for "The Sea," his poignant and dark novel about childhood memories. News story: http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-10-10T213006Z_01_MCC024889_RTRUKOC_0_UK-ARTS-BRITAIN-BOOKER.xml


Wednesday, October 5

NaNoWriMo 2005

I reupped a few hours ago for the 2005 edition of National Novel Writing Month, which begins at 12:01 a.m. on November 1 and ends at midnight on Nov. 30. This will be my fourth attempt: I've written crappy first drafts of novels in 2002, 2003 and last year. I know who I'm going to write about [don't see the long post below that I deleted accidentally last Saturday before posting it -- I'll rewrite it soon so you can keep track of what's happening in my head/novel].

Or, rather I at least know who I will start to write about. I have no idea what's gonna happen to these people and the people who show up around them once I start. That's the joy of writing crappy novels: the discovery during the process.


Howl at 50

Allen Ginsberg hurled his shattering poem at a San Francisco audience 50 years ago on Friday, and it proved to be the kickstart for the Beat movement. SF Chronicle has the memories. Link:  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/04/DDGKPF12031.DTL

Go, go, go: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night ..."


Nobel Prize for lit on tap

In literary news: Nobel Prize watchers hoping to find out who will win the 2005 literature prize will have to wait at least a week. With the other Nobel Prize announcements already in full swing, the Swedish Academy suggests the coveted award will be announced Oct. 13. Ahead of the academy's likely announcement, several authors, including Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates have been touted by Nobel watchers, along with Margaret Atwood of Canada and Nuruddin Farah of Somalia. Other perennials include Peruvian-born Mario Vargas Llosa. Europeans have won the literature prize in nine of the past 10 years, so the experts think the academy may look elsewhere this year. My vote would go for Roth.


Tuesday, October 4

Utopia's motto

Do you know the town motto of Utopia, Colorado? Believe it or not, it's this: "Utopia: The edge of nowhere." Oddly coincidental, if you ask me, considering.

It happened back in 1974. Swept into office with the Nixon Watergate scandal undoing the old guard Republican city council, three young newcomer hippies were elected to Utopia's city council on a platform of new ideas. The following summer, with the two remaining old timers on summer vacation, the kids proposed and passed at an August council meeting the new town motto as a joke.

Unsurprisingly, it triggered a wave of media interest in the town, and then some locals made money selling t-shirts and the Chamber embraced it and then it was forgotten. It was never rescinded, and to this day it's still the town's motto, proudly carved into wood signs on two of the town's four boundaries.


Monday, October 3

Utopia, Colorado

So all my novels are set in a legendary, mythical place called Utopia, Colorado. It's a small but booming residential town about 20 minutes south of where I live. It was founded, in fact, in the early 1870s by refugees of a sort from my hometown, Greeley, Colo. Greeley itself was founded as a sort of modern utopian society by a band of religious, clean-living temperance-loving New Yorkers and their pals and families. They came west in the late 1860s as the Union Colony with the support of New York newspaperman and one-time presidential candidate Horace Greeley.

They set up their model town near the confluence of the South Platte and Cache La Poudre Rivers. Well, among the Union Colonists were a group of about 20 or so progressive religious families with ties to the Boston area. Once here, they became somewhat unsatisfied with the fundamentalist fervor and direction of the town of Greeley, and, thinking they could do it better themselves, they moved south along the South Platte River and started their own town, which they named Utopia after their high-minded ideals. This was two years before Colorado achieved statehood as the Centennial state in 1876.

Utopia was a small, dusty, depressed farm town for a long time, not nearly as prosperous as some of the neighboring towns and villages like Greeley and Longmont and Brighton and Denver, primarily because a vocal minority refused to put the town on the east side of the river, which is where the railroad from Denver to Cheyenne was located. Instead, they vetoed every attempt to do so and eventually bargained the compromise that put the town on the west side of the river, which in addition to being away from the railroad was also prone to minor flooding during high run-off years.

Still, the town hung on through the many typical Colorado booms and busts through the years until it was discovered first, in the early 1970s, as a very affordable haven for the poorer hippies and beatsters who couldn't afford to live in the foothills around Boulder, and then in the 1990s when commuters discovered the charm, access and low cost of living there. It's been a boomtown every since and is now crammed to the curbs with planned residential communities and two-story, 2200 square foot homes.

It's also been the home town or current residence of key people in all of my novels so far, and it will be the residence of my next main character (who I explained to you in some detail in the 'lost' post below).

more later.


Saturday, October 1

Ouch

Oh man, I just wrote a long 15 paragraph blog entry on Utopia, Colorado (the site of my novels) and the process of writing the next NaNo novel, and I went to spell check it and it was gone. Poof.

Maybe I'll try again later, but right now I'm just too bummed to type it all again. I'm gonna go rake the lawn instead. October, you know.

Shoot.

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