Tuesday, October 31

Zero days to go

It feels like Christmas eve and New Year's eve all wrapped into one. Well, it is All Hallow's eve, after all, so there's plenty of excitement around, but I'm talking about the big crazy/ambitious NaNoWriMo, which starts in less than four hours here on The Edge of Nowhere time zone.

We happen to be dog-sitting my in-laws's two canines as they (the in-laws, not their dogs) have just jetted off to Europe for a two-week river cruise, so it's a madhouse here trying to answer the door for the trick-or-treaters with five dogs (ages 1 to 14, weights 32 to 80 pounds) barking their fool heads off. Plus, our boy C is living-room-couch-bound recovering from oral surgery yesterday to remove his wisdom teeth, so we're trying and failing to keep things kind of calm around here. We've put a candy bowl outside by the pumpkins with a note. A very straightfoward note: please take one piece. And yet, nearly every kid in his excitement to get candy walks right past the candy bowl and jabs the door bell, which sets off the fool-headed dogs barking like banshees again. We're tempted to change to the note to say, "If you can read this, please take one piece of candy... and stay away from the freakin' door bell" but instead we've just blown out the candles, turned off the lights and are now hiding in the back half of the house, listening to creepy organ music on the local public radio station.

So you'll find posts below where I've pasted a couple of background pieces for my NaNo novel, which is going to have a working title of "TLA Corp." or maybe "TLA Inc." or maybe just "TLA." It revolves around TLA, a privately held firm. Remember? An unhinged workplace comedy? Over-the-top satire? Etc. etc. Last night at Margie's I set up the text file on my laptop, and wrote two sentences, about 25 words, which I'll delete tomorrow night and retype so I can count them for real.

I'm still not sure where this story is going, besides it featuring a reclusive dot-com billionaire who hires a failed novelist (who had one hit 20 years ago, which the dot-com billionaire read and loves and which changed his life) but who for the last couple of decades as been sinking in failed screenplays out in LA. So the billionaire will offer the failed novelist a job at his company, TLA, to come write its history, or to write stories about it, or to do something I haven't quite settled on and, more importantly, to act as his spy inside the company walls. See, the billionaire is so reclusive, he hasn't and won't publicly admit he owns the company. Sure, there are rumors he's associated with it somehow, but it's all mysterious and shrouded in rumor and innuendo.

So the failed novelist takes the job, and finds himself working on some sort of special projects team, who have their own work, but also are hot on the trail of the reclusive billionaire. This is where it all gets a little murky, so I suppose as usual I'll have to write ten or twelve thousand words to see where its headed. But I see this team of smart, wacky, weird and dedicated people as the core of the novel, with the story spinning around these six or eight or ten people.

Which all begins tomorrow: Zero days to go.


What's TLA about?

As I've said, over the next month I'm planning to write "an unhinged workplace comedy about the meaning of life, American business and world domination."

Some background: It's about this group of employees at TLA, a global consulting firm based in Utopia, Colo., with more than 2,000 employees serving clients on six continents. Integrating the full range of consulting capabilities, TLA is the one firm that helps government and commercial clients solve their toughest problems with services in strategy, operations, organization and change, and information technology.

TLA is committed to delivering results that endure. TLA's clients are the world's largest corporations, emerging growth companies, government agencies, and institutions, associations and individuals that want to change their organizations and the world for the better.

Its clients — in every industry sector and every country — face daunting challenges. They need to manage ever-deeper and faster change. They need to understand how mega-trends like globalization, industry consolidation, and discontinuities in traditional markets and products affect their organizations.

Since 1996, TLA has helped business leaders address their greatest challenges, from reorganizing for long-term growth to improving business performance and maximizing revenue. While TLA has earned a reputation for having a certain "mystique," there is no mystery to how we serve our clients. We apply a handful of core principles to every client engagement.

When you come to TLA, you will take on challenges that matter with people who matter in organizations that matter. You will find the choices you want and the experience you need to grow faster than you ever thought possible.

TLA team members work directly with clients, addressing complex problems for which there are no simple answers. We bring unusual, innovative, imaginative and even imaginary solutions with long-term impact on our clients’ most pressing issues.

At first glance, the consulting management business hardly seems to be in need of any serious retooling, or even being the subject of a NaNoNovel. Still, consultants profits are growing at a double-digit rate and earnings performance remains rock-solid. The results of TLA's most recent benchmarking study reveal that consulting asset managers generated an average pre-tax margin of 31 percent in 2005, an impressive 5-year high.

But below the numbers is a different picture. Our research shows that a full 41 percentage points of operating margin now separates the top- and bottom-third players, a disparity that has widened significantly over the past 3 years. Moreover, an increasing proportion of asset managers are now earning margins under 20 percent, as the bottom tier performers fall further behind the rest of the pack.

Unless these players move quickly to revamp their business models, the profit gap is almost certain to expand even further. TLA is here to help those underperforming organizations. And its here to help me write a satiric comedy of immense proportions. Or at least of over the top proportions.

TLA shares a common vision and mission. Its vision is to become the preferred provider of products and services that foresee and satisfy the needs of customers, balancing the highest level of satisfaction consistent with maximizing returns to stakeholders. Its mission is to monetize wealth as quickly as possible.


TLA Departments

Here are just a few of the departments and divisions you'll find on the TLA org chart:

+ Accounting Services
+ Administration Services
+ Auditing Services
+ Branding Services
+ Business Technology
+ Client Relations
+ Client Intelligence
+ Compliance Management
+ Communication Services
+ Corporate Relations
+ Customer Call Centers
+ Creative Services
+ Data Management
+ Diversity & Inclusion
+ Education & Training
+ Enterprise Services
+ Executive Services
+ Financial Services
+ Government Relations
+ Human Resources
+ Internet Services

+ Inclusionary Differences Services
+ Jurisdiction Services
+ Knowledge Management
+ Law Services
+ Learning & Development
+ Loyalty Marketing
+ Marketing Services

+ Magicology Marketing
+ New Markets
+ Operations Services
+ People Services

+ Quantum Leaps
+ Research Services
+ Strategic Resources
+ Systems
+ Treasury Services
+ Underwriting
+ Vaccination Marketing
+ Vatic Research Services
+ Wandering Thoughts Department
+ Warrentology
+ XenoGenesis Development
+ X Team
+ Yield Maintenance
+ Zone Relations

One

Only one more shopping day until Chr-- I mean, the start of this year's National Novel Writing Month. I'm looking forward to it now, on some level at least, having spent about 90 minutes down at Margie's Java Joint typing up a list of some 150 names to use in the novel. Names like Jeff Meeker and Ross Early and Cookie Corazzi and Kenny Russo and DeAnne Mader and Vicky and Nancy Villacci and Erin Wills and Lori Bailey and so on. I have no idea who these people are, but my goal is to work them all into the book at some point. I think there's a dozen or so main characters, plus their circles of friends and families and work teams, so 150 might not be enough. The good news is we'll find out starting tomorrow night.

Monday, October 30

Two

I spent some time this morning and plan to spend more time tonight fleshing out much of the behind-the-scenes information about the upcoming novel project: department names, mission and vision statements for the various business units, and, mostly, names of people, the cast of characters who might show up over the next 30 days. Trying to get everyone case into the major roles that I know exists (the main seven members of the unit, some of their management and their friends, husbands, wives, significant others and so on) and a little bit of each of their personal biographies, plus the names of another hundred or so other people to have on hand in case I need names as I move forward.

Yesterday, I would've told you I was pretty unexcited about doing this again. Today, having spent a good deal of time pondering some of this stuff, and actually clicking fingers on the keyboard capturing that pondering into a reusable format, I'm getting a bit excited. Not sure how I'll find the time, but I think I'll try to use some of the time I'll be waiting for my kids -- C is in the final two weeks of rehersals for his school play, so that's two hours a night I could sit in the library and work while he reherases, and R just found out she's been selected for the regional big high school all conference honor orchestra (as a freshman!), so she'll have some rehersal time over the next three weeks, including the next 90 minutes or so so I better go fire up the laptop and take her downtown.

Two days to go.

Sunday, October 29

Tom's paper dolls and drumming

Thomas Pynchon paper dolls, in honor (?) of his new 1,000 pager "Against the Day."

Speaking of challenging works, last night we went south to Somewhere and saw So Percussion (I can't find the little straight line to draw over the o in So, so so be it) in Denver, a foursome of drummers out of Yale who gave up the presidential career track to hit stuff with sticks. I'd like to say it was music, and I'm sure it was intended to be impressive, but it was trying to say the least, long repetitive mostly non-musical rhythms.

Living with a drummer as I do, I can claim to know a little bit about percussion concerts -- we troop over to the local university twice a year to see their drummers put on their recitals -- and can appreciate musical percussion or even capital-A Art drumming, but the second piece So played last night "Drumming" by Steve Reich ("One rhythm, four movements, one-hour...") was certainly an endurance test. A third of the audience had fingers in their ears (literally!), a third had fallen asleep, and a third were totally into it. I've never seen an aged audience run for the exits as fast as they did last night.

Still... you have to appreciate an artist who just goes for it, does what they want. Right? Right?

Three

Three days until Tuesday.

Friday, October 27

830!

In the community of competitive Scrabble, Michael Cresta's 830 point tournament game Oct 12 has been "heralded as the anagrammatic equivalent of Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game in 1962 or Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series: a remarkable, wildly aberrational event with potential staying power. Cresta's 830 shattered a 13-year-old record, 770 points."

If you love Scrabble, check out Stefan Fatsis' play-by-play recap on Slate. (And if you haven' t yet, read Fatsis' book about the Scrabble world, Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, and then go watch Word Wars.)

Five

Five days to go. Or is it 35? Should I be counting the days til we start, or until we finish? That is the question to ponder as I go about my work-a-day "real" life today. That and thinking about a couple of the missing characters.

Thursday, October 26

Six

More than 818,000 people in the US share my first name (the 52nd most popular first name), and another 932,000+ people share my last (tied for 10th most popular). I've always known I had a common name (when I was a sophomore in college, there were four of us at the school, including a wide receiver on the football team, the student body president, and me, who was the sports editor of the campus paper and another guy, who I'd known since junior high), and according to How Many Of Me.com, there's 2,547 Americans who share my name.

I enjoy Aaron Sorkin's televised shows, mostly, and I've loved baseball since 1969. So, what if Aaron Sorkin wrote a baseball show? From tv writer Ken Levine's blog.

Less then a week until we start writing a novel.

Wednesday, October 25

Seven

How about the "101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived." It's a book about, well, the 101 most influential people who never lived. Fictional types, see? Turns out that link is for a book; save yourself the cash (gasp!) and get the whole list here at USA Today. Then: Debate.

Or perhaps you like short stories. Very short stories. Like six words each. Nick says it's worth reading the stories in the paper verison of Wired for the design/layout.

Also, my brother (who -- ahem -- is skipping NaNoWriMo this year to actually rewrite his novel, "The Origami Master," from last NaNoWriMo) who last blogged about meeting Chuck Palahniuik a month or two ago, sends an e-mail about Chuck following up on his offer to send Spanish language versions of his book to Paul's library (see his blog for the whole story). (Update: You can also go listen to Nick's interview with Chuck).

Well, Paul writes that last week "a box arrived from him. Inside it were 7 of his books, in Spanish, all different titles. Also included were cheap toys, bouncy balls, a box labed pirate crayons and a cheap pirate coloring book, confetti, sparkly streamers, glow-in-the-dark stars, flower seeds, tattoos, Whitman's Sampler candy, Junior Mints, Poprocks and a small plush cow. It was a real party in a box. There was a nice personal letter from him. Written in red pen on that was "Your Power Cow is enclosed!" He complimented my column. This is a guy who'll sit at the head of an autograph line for 7 hours; that he took this time for me is very appreciated."

(Now maybe my brother will see this and keep his blog updated more often, with stuff just like this....)

Oh yeah, why I logged on: Seven days to go until I start writing the next novel. I think about it every day, in great detail. But do I work on it? No. Do I jot notes? No. I'm watching a freaking Oklahoma dog show on TV right now, instead of the World Series, waiting to see the sporting group. Sigh.

Seven days.

Tuesday, October 24

Eight

Just back from taking my son to see Bob Dylan and His Band down in Denver at the Fillmore, a converted ice hockey arena that now serves as what feels like some sort of urban roadhouse, or downtown honky tonk. They've covered what once was ice with floor, and it's all general admission standing room under about six or eight big funky blue-purple gorgeous chandeliers. There are small bars all over the place around the outside of what would've been the rink, and an elevated platform for viewing the stage at one end. K and I saw Oingo Boingo there some 18 years ago, when it was operated under a different name, with the stage at the other end. (That was a great concert, by the way.)

The band looked great: Dylan in an all black cowboy suit, black boots and a black hat. His five-piece band looked cool in matching maroon cowboy suits, black boots and a variety of black hats. And they sounded exactly like you'd expect them to sound: tight, well practiced and like the best-ever house band, cranking through the country rock, country swing, rock and blues progressions, all backing up Dylan's wacked voice, his electric piano and the harmonica. When he played solos on his piano, he hunched over like a gunslinger. He's got a lot of songs to work with, obvioiusly, and they mostly played newer stuff, so it wasn't a particularly familiar set to us, but then we're not huge fans.

We hung around for about ninety minutes. We stood up close near the front on the right side on the elevated edges for the first five or six songs, looking over various shorter old people, then wandered backwards, ending up looking straight at the band and Bob from the far end of the house. Good people watching, from my 15-year old to old hippies and everywhere inbetween, skewing towards the older end of the spectrum. Everyone was talking to each other, and it was surprisingly loud, as if Dylan and his boys were just another house band, albeit high-end and superior sounding and as famous as they come. Outside, there were four big luxury buses and one semi-tractor-trailer waiting to take the band on to Lincoln, Neb., where they play tomorrow, then on to Chicago. They are tight. I think C had fun; if nothing else, he can one day tell his kids or grand-kids that he saw The Great Bob Dylan, live, once upon a time.

As can I, now.

Eight days to go 'til NanoWrimo.


PS, on a personal note, my mom died two years ago today. So if your mom's still with us, do me (and her) a favor and give her a call and tell her about your day.

Monday, October 23

Nine

When you disappear into a novel for a month (or more!), the social ramifications are obvious. So maybe that's why we've got so much happening in the next nine days before it starts: tonight, a chamber orchestra concert including my daughter on violin; tomorrow, I take my son to see Bob Dylan down in Denver, and next Saturday we've got tickets to some sort of groovy percussion concert down at Denver University. And then, of course, Halloween. Distractions now are good. They might have to hold me.

Nine days to go.

Sunday, October 22

Need to get out more?

Looking for the best novel about Zimbabwe? Or Wyoming? Salon's Literary Guide to the World will point you to the books that offer the best virtual tours around.

Ten

I spent the weekend walking the dogs and raking leaves, it seemed. I did other stuff -- mowed the lawn, saw a Norway travel movie, uh, watched baseball, read, etc. -- but the walking of dogs and raking of leaves is what I'm thinking of now. Because while the body goes through the motions, the thoughts are free to wander: free-range brain.

And so I thought of the coming month, National Novel Writing Month, and what a freak show it is. And how now it seems I can't help but do it again. I've done it four times before; I've signed on for a fifth. I've got a story lined up, and as my brain wandered while raking or walking or mowing, it pondered some threads in the story, added background threads, moved the story forward in my brain (and this afternoon, out of the brain and onto paper).

But make no doubt: NaNo is a freak show. It's no way to write a good novel, a novel that will be published, a novel that will help me land an agent. It's a great way to get the first draft, but the goal to complete it in 30 days is crazy. So this year maybe I'll start early, and try to write 50k during the month, but then keep going. Get the habit, keep the habit, but just the habit. Not try to finish the whole thing.

Who am I kidding. Ten days to go.

Friday, October 20

Friday night and it's raining

I should be hunched over my keyboard writing my novel, but I'm not. I'm half-watching Angel, a season four Netflix, and mostly surfing the web. Updating the right-side links -- check out my friend Jonathan's musicology blog featuring really smart people writing about music of all sorts and types. I don't think I understand half of it, but I want to. And if you like hearing authors talk about their work, check out Nick's Lit Show, broadcast out of the Chicago area, but streamed whenever you want. He's my brother's kid, and he's landing some big-name writers this fall. Good stuff. Beats working.

Thursday, October 19

DIY vanity press made easy

They themselves claim BookSmart is the only start-to-finish publishing service simple and smart enough to make anyone an author with free software. So download and play all you want, then pay to publish your own professionally bound and printed bookstore-quality book. Got a book in you? Go for it.

Tuesday, October 17

Shelf space is limited

"Much like Hollywood, book publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest. A publisher has to find a title with huge potential and single it out for special attention. If the book gets traction, the upside is limitless. If it fails, there's a long way to fall. When a book doesn't sell right away, the large chains sweep it into the back room, making space for the next aspirant. With 172,000 books published last year, shelf space is limited.

A yikes-enducing against-the-odds story from the Wall Street Journal.

A blanket of snow

So the first snow of the season is falling here on the edge of nowhere. We're expecting one to three inches overnight. My brother writes to say he's not going to sign up for National Novel Writing Month this year, and he's the one who told me about back in 2002. He says he's gonna try to write a novel this year, but he's not going to sign-up. So that's a bummer. I signed up again. Here's my profile.

Since I lost my novel notebook, I've been in an unenthusiastic lull. I think I have a good story, one that should carry me through November and beyond, and part of me wants to start writing it now, and just try to finish it with 50k words during NaNoWriMo, but then I pull out a book and read, or pick up the guitar and talk the kids into playing with me, or wander through the televised channels, or click through my favorite websites, or walk the dogs an extra couple of miles. I'm a little worried about getting started this year.

Or maybe all that distraction is just my brain's way of psyching up, getting ready, putting on fat for the winter. And looking out my kitchen window right now at dusk, the snow is coming down harder. Winter is coming.

Thursday, October 12

Congratulations

Congratulations to Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who won the 2006 Nobel prize for Literature on Thursday. I have no idea who he is. Then again, I live in a cultural backwater known as the Edge of Nowhere.

Study time, kids

"For this year's Fall Fiction Week, Slate has invited novelists Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart to discuss a question that's been on our minds: What is the role of fiction in the age of the Internet?" Read, and discuss.

Tuesday, October 10

Stupid is as stupid does

Get this: on the plane trip back from Arizona on Thursday, I tucked the novel notebook into the seat back pocket, read the rest of the new Jonathan Franzen book, and then got off the plane and came home. Yesterday, I started looking around for the note book with a dozen pages of notes and plot outlines and the first scene pretty much written out and poof! Nowhere.

Oh yeah. On the airplane. Idiot.

Monday, October 2

Busy, busy, busy

Here's a catch-all post to hold y'all for a week or so: heading out on a business trip (it always cracks me up to call 'em that, because it assumes I'm a businessman, which I suppose I am since one of the world's largest corporations is paying me to go to Arizona for 60 hours) for a couple of days.

Over the weekend, in reverse time order, we saw: my son's band Objects in Motion play a mini-concert, saw The Fray and two opening bands (one a band called niece) at Red Rocks, saw The Lion King on stage in Denver and, Friday night, saw the University High variety show, featuring my son in about seven of the 16 musical and comedy acts.

I've also finished reading all of the Christopher Moore books, and liked them quite a bit both for their ridiculous, over-the-top plots, the fast pace, the characters and, behind it all, a fairly nice world view. Also read The Player, the novel the movie-industry movie was made from, and I was also impressed by it. Now reading The World is Flat by Friedman and, physically lighter read for the airplane, Jonathan Franzen's new collection of essays (which name escapes me at this moment).

TV? Been watching Earl, The Office and the Amazing Race and so far have mostly enjoyed Studio 60 on Sunset, Aaron Sorkin's new dramedy, which comes on here in about 10 minutes.

The last good movie we saw was The Illusionist, which was pretty well put together.

We've also been working quite a bit on the backyard: you should see it. A big new planter is done, big new swaths of mulch have replaced old lawns and all new very damp sod. Whew! Bring on winter!

And I've been writing a bit more on the new book, with good plans to write some more in the next couple days holed up on airplanes and hotels: my goal is it outline the first third of the book or so, and do some heavy thinking on what the *mystery/secret* thing this company is doing behind the scenes, below the surface, whatever it might be. I should know more by Thursday night.

End transmission.

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