Thursday, September 28

Five pages

So it's under way. I've written about five pages so far. Feels good to get back in the saddle again. Oh, and I've created about 150 character names. I think I'm going to need 'em all.

Wednesday, September 20

Meet Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys

As someone learning to play this kind of music (or, said more accurately, learning to keep a steady guitar pick/strum while my son[banjo] and daughter [fiddle or mandolin] play this kind of music), this is a treat: Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys over on YouTube.

Meeting Andy Warhol

Meet Andy Warhol for the first time again, tonight on PBS (or check local listings).

Tuesday, September 19

An idea with promise?

This workplace comedy idea has legs. I went to sleep thinking about it, and woke up thinking about it, and made more notes sitting in the Element outside the mothership this morning after dropping the kid at school (just one; the other stayed home with a fever flu). This idea might just turn into something with promise, at least I think so now, so early in the thinking and pondering and note-taking process.

Here's what I'm thinking: I picture an eccentric, reclusive, mysterious dot-com billionaire owner who disappeared before the crash and now has come back and started a company. He reaches out and hires a one-hit-wonder '80s novelist who's now floundering and failing to repeat his once-upon-a-time success to undertake some sort of (not-yet-defined) secret(?) mission inside the walls of the billionaire's new financial or business services company, which isn't at all what it appears on the surface and which might just turn out to be some sort of hugely ridiculous practical joke or performance art piece or maybe a sinister money-laundering front involving thousands of people. I don't know yet, obviously, and even if I did I might not leak the ending so early in the process.

So this newly hired writer -- who maybe sees this assignment as a way to get his mojo back, or at least the seed to access back into the real world which fueled his one success -- is befriended by a small circle of cynical co-workers who at first distrust him as some sort of spy (which they don't really believe but which, of course, is true), and then like and trust him and decide to use him do their bidding, something (very undefined here and not even considered yet) maybe even ominous or suspect or maybe criminal after they find out he has had contact with the actual eccentric billionaire, who until now has only been rumored to be involved with the company. Or I don't know. We'll see. I sense there's big, deep layers of both sinister motives and cynicism at work here, but also a whole host of funny, sympathetic, innocent co-worker types who amusingly and cluelessly go happily about their everyday lives on the edge of Utopia, Colorado.

See? I'm pretty jazzed about this idea. I'll let it simmer some more and report back.

While it does its slow cook, on the back burner of my brain for the next few weeks, let me tell you that one of those first notes pages lists some inspirations, those things I've been thinking about over the past six months, things I like or that I'd like to aim for with this story that might on deep background influence where this story might go: the greats Vonnegut and Pynchon top the list (both had semi-brief stints working for very large companies, if I remember their bios correctly, and then obviously Dilbert and The Office (both BBC and NBC versions) which I enjoy too much probably, and then Max Berry's and Douglas Coupland's workplace books and Nick Hornby's people and, from reading all summer, Christopher Moore's over-the-top/off-the-wall humor. The word 'unhinged' has been in my mind for weeks because of Moore; as in, I need to make my writing more unhinged and purposeweird wierd. And finally, of course, are my nearly 18 years of corporate America cubicle dwelling and all the many things I've seen and heard and endured and the people I've come in contact with, including recent brushes that just fuel some of my already healthy workplace paranoia.


Write what you know, y'know?

Meeting Chuck Palahniuk

Hey, check out this post on my brother's blog, about sitting in on an interview with the author Chuck Palahniuk. Fun!

Monday, September 18

An unhinged workplace comedy?

So I was walking past the elevators at work today, strolling from my cubicle to the break room to feed four quarters into the vending machine for my third or fourth 20 ounce diet cola of the day, when this thought came to me: "What if it was a workplace comedy. An unhinged workplace comedy."

Yeah, what if?

It, of course, is my next project, since I'm always about moving on, moving forward, starting something new. And it is fall, the "new" season. So since my brother noted a few weeks back that he has idea for this year's National Novel Writing Month, and my pal Jared's been slowly talking me into doing it again, I've been pondering 'it.'

Ideas come to me all the time, and I let 95 percent slide away into oblivion. Of that five percent, I'll write them down and see what happens then. Usually, they just fade away, failing to catch my attention or imagination.

Like this, from last Thursday: "What if the narrator is taking part in the first moon based society: "I was 12 when they announced Libertyville, the first permanent moon settlement."

Or this. from last month sometime: "What if it's a story about a guy who totally does not believe in heaven or hell or the afterlife, but then he dies and it's all real, from the tunnel of white light to the big guy with the flowing robes and long hair and angels, and he turns himself into a ghost angel and goes back to earth to try and prove the spirit world still exists, but nobody believes him."

Or maybe this, from earlier this year: It's a world where the dogs are actually the smart, sentient beings and they keep the humans for pet; tell the story from the dogs point of view."

Mostly, they're lame. But sometimes...

So I had an hour to spend thinking about it, from the time I left work until I had to pick up my son after his drum lesson, and I sat with a notebook at the Borders Cafe and wrote three pages of brainstorming ideas around this what if. When I got home, I ran the dog for a couple of miles through the growing fall twilight here on the edge of nowhere, and thought up several more aspects of why this unhinged workplace comedy might just work, and came home and wrote out a fourth page of notes/ideas.This might be one of those ideas that carries me.

It feels like it right now, but then its only been about five hours, so I should sleep on it. I don't want to jinx it. I'll let you know what I'm thinking tomorrow.

Sunday, September 17

Arrrrrrgh

Don't forget, Tuesday is Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Thursday, September 14

Big league authors

And while I'm here at the computer, let me brag a bit: If you like listening to authors talking, check out the upcoming line-up of big-time writers on my newphew's lit radio show on WNUR radio out of Chicago. You can listen live on Sunday nights, or (I believe) stream them after the fact.

And I thought 50k was a lot of words

How about 390,000? Edited down to 250,000? Whew! Thanks to Dial M... for the outward loop.

Wednesday, September 6

Here we go again?

My brother wrote me last week saying he has an idea for starting this year's National Novel Writing Month, without telling me what it was (and expressing joy that he doesn't know where it'll end up, which is much of the fun of NaNoWriMo). I wrote back saying I'm going to have to be talked into doing it again this November. Granted, it probably won't take much to talk me into it. It's what I do.

Still, I've got so many drafts of unfinished novels laying around various computers and desks, I'm not sure I want to add to the collection by writing another first draft in November. Then again, maybe I can make the Guinness Book of World Records as having the most unpublished first drafts of novels. I'm at six -- or is it seven? -- and counting.

Hey, this will be fun: In order, my novels (and years written) are "Les Dempsey Falls in Love" (1984-5, 1990), "The Great South Dakota Novel" (1991-92), "Messiah's Sneaker" (1996-98 and 2001-02), "Balance" (2002-2003), "Left Field" (2003-2004), "The Edge of Nowhere" (2004-5) and "Les Dempsey Tries Again" (2005-6). I also hand wrote in a spiral notebook a novella-length story during my daily half-hour lunch break sitting in my old Mazda truck in '88 and '89. I have no idea where those 150 pages are now... But I recall it was a pretty good story....

Something is wrong with me. Seriously wrong.

Speaking of which, maybe it's related to this: I'm reading Jonathan Franzen's "How to Be Alone," a series of essays from the mid-late 1990s including his famous (infamous?) "Harper's essay" about the state of the American social novel. In it he quotes a Stanford researcher who's one of the few to actually study novel readers, and says we become one in two general ways (I'm super-simplifying here...) one, by seeing your parents as readers of novels, and/or two, as loner type nerd teens who escape into books. It's this latter group that often grow up to be novel writers.

She describes these loner/reader-writers in the second person to Franzen as, "You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world." In the essay, he admits he takes this description personally, as if she was describing him personally. I do too.

I see a lot of myself in that quote. While I didn't grow up in a novel-reading household or as a childhood/teen-age loner/reader (I was always outside playing or inventing sports), I did grow up among readers, more or less: not my dad, who read the newspaper and the occasional magazine article, but my mom was an avid reader, mostly of non-fiction from the philosophical and alternative spiritual-religious book store sectors. My sister has a great bookshelf, and my brother is a writer-reader-librarian (as is my mother-in-law), and my wife is a voracious reader of 5-10 novels a month. I became a reader and a writer over time as I became more socially isolated and aware and self-conscious of my inability to talk semi-normally. For those who don't know me, I tend to talk softly and very fast and mumble/stumble over words and phrases, the result being I'm generally misheard or misunderstood, which naturally leads to a further reluctance to talk aloud, which in turn of course leads to further social isolation. Yes, it's the perfect skill-set for a public relations person working for a Fortune 25 company, which is exactly what I am in my 8-5 day job.

Still: I think I have something to say, and no way to say it. And so writing lets me say it, I suppose. And maybe that explains why I have seven nearly finished drafts of novels sitting around various drawers, closet floors and hard drives (not counting the lost spiral-bound scrawled story). And why I continue to post to this blog in a vacuum.

And yes, even why I'll probably start and finish the first draft of an eighth novel come November. Now, if only I had a few colorful characters and a situation to drop them into to see what happens to them over the ensuing 100,000 words.... Like I said: It's what I do.

Tuesday, September 5

Culture watch

So the beloved Fall TV Preview issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived today, and in the preview of The Simpsons 18th season, this episode caught my eye: "Moe becomes a poet and this delightfully dubious proposition features the voices of Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen."

And I just want to report for the record that I'm being a dutiful and responsible dad (or, inverted: pop) and bought tickets to take my 15-year-old son to see Bob Dylan down in Denver to support his new album, which by the way is pretty solid.

Starting a new year

A pretty great summer is coming to an end. While I didn't write or edit very much fiction, and the blog postings have been pretty skimpy as you may have noticed, I had two awesome vacations, plus a pretty fun third trip out to Hollywood with my son and father-in-law. We also got a lot of work done in the backyard, and I've been able to keep up a fairly active schedule of running and bike riding and live music.

The big vacations included that very rewarding and emotional week at a theater camp for developmentally disabled people in Washington, and then a personally-fulfilling second week getting the first real music lessons of my life at the Rocky Mountain Fiddle Camp.

Peter Pan: Besides hanging out with my brother's family and my son and doing cool summer vacation things like jumping off a bridge into a river and mountain biking in the Cascades, I got to experience everything it takes to put on a play, and to actually make my stage debut as the Crocodile in Peter Pan. And what a cast! Amazing!

Fiddle Camp was a blast. Taking lessons, going to the nightly dances and concerts plus the total mountain-top, off-grid isolation from the 'real' world and hanging out with the family was plenty of fun. But the best part has been bringing the music down off the mountain.

Writing is a pretty lonely and solitary activity, particularly when you (read: me) don't make much of or any effort to find an audience. So I've been looking for something for a few years now that isn't so lonely but still allows me to communicate what's inside my brain, and I've fooled around a bit with art (or, more accurately, thinking about art) and plucking a guitar and writing songs, because at least with a painting you can show someone what you've been doing alone in your room and they can see it and touch it and take it in and comment in 30 seconds or so, and a song, obviously, can be played in three or four minutes.

It's not like that for writing novels: It takes a very devoted, special kind of person who's willing to read the rough draft of a 300 page novel, which itself is the result of countless hours of my work, and my nature makes it very hard to even ask anyone to take on that reading chore until I'm sure it's ready for the world, and my other (perfectionist) nature makes that very unlikely to ever happen.

But I think I found what I'm looking for with music. I'm no musician -- yet -- but I'm no longer a beginning guitarist either. Now I consider myself a novice. And that's a big difference. At fiddle camp I learned enough to be comfortable with my ability to strum a few key chords in the right way in the right time and now I can sit in with my very talented teen-agers on their fiddles and mandolins and banjos and my wife's cello. Three or four times a week since we got back, in fact, we've been sitting down and jamming, playing songs for an hour together instead of watching television or sitting alone in our bedrooms reading/playing video games. In fact, last night we had some musically-talented friends over and we were able to make music with them. What a treat! What a gift! What a great summer, in other words.

But now, like so many people, I'm tuned into that "fresh-start" attitude thanks to all of the back to school fuss and the energy around the new television season, and the already coolish fall-like mornings here on the Edge of Nowhere.

And so my self-imposed summer writing hiatus is now behind me, and I'm looking forward to a productive final three months of the solar year. Onward!


Monday, September 4

Confluence

I've been again spending time over at the Confluence site the last few days, taking a look at the world and being amazed all over again how big it is. It's a photographic and story-telling site trying to nail down visits to everywhere a latitude and longitude line cross. Some of the stories are fun to read, and I get a kick out of seeing all the photographs of the world (but then I've always liked looking out the windows of moving cars and airplanes and I would lose an hour or two to GoogleEarth every day, if I let myself). What's this got to do with writing? Everything. And nothing.

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