Tuesday, December 27

And now: the future!

OK-doh-kay, folks, the primary holiday is over and while the kids are still home from school for another week, it's time to get back into the writing routine. Remember, this is the year it happens (with the solstice behind us, I'm already counting it as the new year, the new solar year at least) and this is the year I'm going make it happen. No more hemming and hawing. No more making excuses. No more lollygagging. We hate lollygaggers here at the edge of nowhere, and so it's upward and onward and a whole host easy-to-achieve writing, editing and seeking-an-agent goals are making their way onto my resolutions list. And I'm happy to report that last night I spent about an hour organizing my laptop and cleaning up a bit in my home office (which quadruples as the music room and the library and the Xmas-present-wrapping room among other things) so tonight I can get started. Until then... (slogan goes here)*.

* I just noticed it would be nice to have a theme or slogan for the year, the kind of pithy, targeted cliche-type message ("Success in 'Six"; "Keep On Keeping On!") that sums up my attitude for accomplishment that I could use to wind-up pointless posts like the one above. "Attitude for accomplishment" would actually work, if it didn't make me want to barf. And so I'll ponder that today and tomorrow and I'll take suggestions in the comments section.

Friday, December 23

Holiday break...

Taking a shortish holiday break right now, but have big new year's resolutions goals, dreams, hopes, plans, goals, etc. This is the year. THIS is the year. This is THE year. This is the year I make it happen. Thanks to Shaw and Jeff for the strong, motivating words in response to the last post. They help, dudes, thanks.

So, despite four inches of snow last weekend, it's been in the 50s this week and we're looking at another brown Christmas on Sunday with plenty of sunshine and highs in the low 60s even.

I'll be back next week with my year-end best-of lists.... until then, have an all encompassing holiday weekend.

Tuesday, December 13

Back at it, sort of

So I wrote for about an hour tonight -- ok, let's say I edited about five pages of Les Dempsey Tries Again -- at the Borders coffee shop while my son took his weekly percussion lesson. It felt good. But in the back of my head was bit of sadness. Here's why:

(but before I do, let's remind that the point of this blog is to capture the feelings and state of mind of a writer in real time (at least real time from my point of view; I understand you the few readers often come to it in a compressed frame of ref) and to track the progress, and to some degree spur progress by reporting back to the few regular readers on how it's going here on the edge of nowhere not far from Utopia, Colorado, that yes, in fact, I'm still working on my books and making progress, such as it is.)

What's sad is how hard this is, not from a process standpoint (which feels somewhat remarkably easy for me, what-I-was-born-to-do-easy in a way), but from a results standpoint. So my frame of mind these days is iffy due to the nature of what I try to do. I write long perhaps unpublishable fiction, and that prospect is grim. If I were a musician or an artist of some sort, I could get feedback and see where I'm at. I could play a song on my selected instrument or sing a song and watch you listen and bob your head along to the beat or smile at my clever lyrics or even get up and dance. If I made art, paintings or sculpture or photographs or acted or danced or whatever, I could lug around a portfolio or break into character and show you, make you look and in an instant or two I could see you wrinkle your nose or nod appreciatively or go pale or whatever. The process would be the same-- hours of effort and thought and practice and Pursuit of Art, but the response would be vastly different. Or so it seems.

Since I write novels that seem to exist only in a manuscript form (and draft manuscript form at that in which I can't seem to get much past second drafts before I move on to a new project), I can't just show it to you and get the feedback I'd get from nearly any other form of art. You'd have to commit ten or twenty hours spread over several days or weeks to read it, and I couldn't sit here and watch you read it. I'd have to wait for a response of some sort and likely be disappointed in the shortness of the response, because you'd say wow that's good and be polite but I'd want to know details, what worked, what didn't, who did you like who didn't you believe, what's the problems and what do you think if I did this or that, or what did you think of this choice or that?

And even then, you'd have to be someone who was interested in reading the genre I'm writing to commit that sort of time, which genre isn't mystery or horror or western or detective or chick lit or young adult or fanfict or scifi or.... but boring old ordinary run of the mill general commercial fiction with aspirations of literary fiction or great american novel 'tude (based on my huge writer's ego which will either prove to be humbly prophetic or grandly delusional), a genre that includes very few willing readers (just look at the best sellers list) particularly when the author is just another semi-over educated middle-age suburban middle class white guy. (And I'm not seeking readers, because several of you have offered (and I'm very appreciative of that) and I do have plans to dump a manuscript of a few of you one of these days).

So, anyway, long story short, I'm just kind of bumming I suppose about all this effort I can't help making in this weirdly ambitious hobby of writing long narrative fiction.

Go figure.

And now, three more hours til we go to the midnight first showing of Kong, which has been printed boldly in blue on our calendar for about six months now. It's finally arrived.



Monday, December 5

Best books of 2005?

Another New York Times best-of list, another year without me on it. It's just this kind of ego-sized semi-outrage that will one day land me on it (or in a delusional ward at my local state hospital). At least that's what I keep telling myself.

Thursday, December 1

The scoop on where I'm at

OK, alright, back in action. I feel a big post coming, multi-items, much to say so let's get right to it, shall we?

My brother wants to know if I finished my novel. Short answer: no. Longer answer: no not so much. And yes, it's white tie and tails to the afterparty.

The long answer: I would estimate that this current novel, the piece of ... stuff I wrote over the past 30 days, or more accurately, about 19 of the past 30 days, is maybe 35 percent complete. The actual plot is probably through the first act and on the edge of the second act. Although it must also be said that I wrote a good chunk of the third act, too.

In other words, as I told Krell, I wrote this in a nonlinear fashion. At least so far. It's an experiment, of sort, I guess. I've also mentioned below and talked to a few of you about how I was borrowing from the music world by "sampling" things: the news, advertising, slogans, jingles, lyrics, thoughts, dreams, movie quotes, visions, lists, stream of consciousness and so on. I was capturing small collections of words that appealed to me as I went about my normal life trying to channel or 'be' my main character.

I did this many ways: carrying around a digital recorder and dictating into it while I drove or watched TV or walked through a grocery store recording all the visual/media/advertising inputs my eyes could absorb, and then typing them down as fast I could. I copied/pasted the first sentences of news headlines. I flipped through magazines and typed slogans, advertising, phrases, etc. Same with lyrics. And movie quotes. And I surfed the web and typed up long lists of things: cereals, favorite TV shows, advertising slogans and so on. I also mined my old journals and e-mail files for dreams and particularly catchy batches of text. I was trying to catch and some how deal with the vast flow of information that crosses our brain pan each day if your sentient and living in 2006. And I was curious what it would do to this novel and how I might be able to use it.

Then, I dumped and retyped and repurposed much of this copy/effluvia into my novel. I wasn't sure what would happen at first, but slowly this stuff started to become the words of the voice inside the head of my lead character, the running play-by-plan man in his head, the creature looking out of his eyeballs, which I guess is just another way of saying his consciousness, him. His internal monologue. Whatever. And this voice slowly also became the narrator, I think it might, and I'm interested to find out where this voice goes in the next month or two of writing. Because I don't really know. I'm curious.

So this morning, I pulled out all the 'sampled' stuff and dumped it into a new file and tried to organize or separate the main "real time" plot stuff so I can work on that in a more traditional fashion. And I plan to spread out and reuse all the sampled stuff in a more purposeful fashion, now that I think I know what's happening.

So work will continue. I'll report back here.

Then, my friend Jeff asked me a very, very good question, or made a statement really that kind of made me pause and think. He wanted to know why not, or maybe he phrased it in a 'you should try' sort of comment, to take the idea of NaNoWriMo (a fixed deadline and a fixed goal) and apply it to finishing another project.

Because if you've been reading this for the past year, you probably know I'm good with the grand idea, and I'm good with writing first drafts, and I'm something of a dreamer, but I'm not so good with actually finishing anything. With this latest work, I now have first drafts in various states of seven -- SEVEN! -- novels, four of which are probably mostly complete (aside from a final proofing and a clean print). And yet I still fumble and mumble and hem/haw about doing the hard work of preparing them for an agent, or of making the effort to type the one-page pitch letter to an agent about any one of them, much less all seven.

So Jeff has a very good point. And while December is no good for this sort of project, maybe January or February is perfectly good for some sort of Get Your Act Together Anderson and Do All Those Things You Need To Do To Pitch Your Novel Month, or GeYoAcToAndDoAllThoThiYouNeToDoToPiYoNoMo. So thanks Jeff.

By the way, Jeff's also the guy who points us to this interview with a really, really smart person. I like really smart people. Smart people like you, the reader. And you can listen to his music in the 'Jeff'' link over on the right side there.

That's it for now.

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