Some words on my influences the past few months:
The Detective story and its many variations. I've been reading Chandler's The Big Sleep. It's the first book I've read in ages that I feel like I can recommend to my father, but I'm sure he's read it already. This is the prototypical Detective novel; Colombo, Matlock and Dick Gumshoe have Philip Marlowe to thank for their existence. In reading it, I've been trying to cull from it some influence in its movement. The language is very quick, and descriptive passages are deceptively simple.
I also just recently finished Twin Peaks. It's easy to see why it was so popular. It's also to see why people stopped watching in Season 2. Still, it's interesting to see how Twin Peaks took the "straight lawman" character and played around with it. Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) was placed into the quiet town of Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). During the course of the investigation he discovers that Laura had a hidden life, and the hidden lives of everyone else in the town are revealed, leading to an escalation in action that shatters Twin Peak's former reputation as a quiet, peaceful town.
One of the questions the show asks is "What was the real reason for this escalation?" Was it the murder itself, or was it the arrival of this outside lawman? If Dale Cooper hadn't have been here, would everything have returned to normal after a week or so? Perhaps it would be better if the mystery hadn't been solved?
After the show I realized just how similar it was thematically to PAM. Sometimes, this discourages me, but in the case with Twin Peaks I feel like I can use it as an example of "what not to do." Do NOT forget the main mystery, or get lost in imagery, or give away the reveal too soon.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
3-29-11
Oh right. The blog. Yeah, I suppose I can write in that.
I blew the whole thing up. There was a fundamental flaw in the premise of the PAM novel that needed to be corrected. Uninteresting beginning! I need to set the initial action of the book in a situation that is inherently tense. I've fast-forwarded the novel ahead in two months "novel time" so that Anna has already left and Dan is living in the house with his Uncle. The first chapter features Dan on his first day of work at the Orange House. A new character has been born out of this new setting, Nora's caregiver, who has yet to be named. I'm thinking something elegant and old-hat.
OMS is also in progress still, and it's become less a novel in my mind than a "short story mixtape." A collection of short stories with recurring characters that follow along a loose chronology, set to music. The track listing so far:
Teenage Riot
O! My Soul
Taste
Here Come the Warm Jets
More to be added as I see fit.
In other news, I hardly ever leave my apartment anymore. I have not had a cigarette in three months. I have not been drunk in half a year.
I blew the whole thing up. There was a fundamental flaw in the premise of the PAM novel that needed to be corrected. Uninteresting beginning! I need to set the initial action of the book in a situation that is inherently tense. I've fast-forwarded the novel ahead in two months "novel time" so that Anna has already left and Dan is living in the house with his Uncle. The first chapter features Dan on his first day of work at the Orange House. A new character has been born out of this new setting, Nora's caregiver, who has yet to be named. I'm thinking something elegant and old-hat.
OMS is also in progress still, and it's become less a novel in my mind than a "short story mixtape." A collection of short stories with recurring characters that follow along a loose chronology, set to music. The track listing so far:
Teenage Riot
O! My Soul
Taste
Here Come the Warm Jets
More to be added as I see fit.
In other news, I hardly ever leave my apartment anymore. I have not had a cigarette in three months. I have not been drunk in half a year.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
8-26-11
I've been given an assignment. The goal is to write a poem. The theme is "disasters". I suppose this could entail many things. Actual historical disasters like the Titanic and personal tragedies are up for grabs, but so are less dramatic things, like fashion disasters. Or the Monster Omelet sandwich. I can write about bad decisions I've made, injuries that have befallen me or my loved ones, car crashes, break-ups, missed opportunities, terrorist attacks, deaths. The world is my oyster.
As I write to this subject, the first lines that appear are:
I was shooting with my father, we were wearing
Heavy winter coats and I could see his breath
Climbing up the gray fire of the sky
It was just target shooting, there’s not much else
Inside this memory but gray fire, permafrost
And a target I never hit.
These words appear in my mind effortlessly, and stop abruptly. Poems are such teases. Now comes the hard part of continuing the initial image and developing the narrative of the poem. Before, I would have strained to try and figure out what "happens" next. This time, however, the approach I'm going to take is a more linguistic one: What are the connotations of these words that I've chosen? What am I trying to say here that's outside of the poem's setting? Obviously it has daddy issues,possible impotence implications, but other than that, why did these words appear first under a topic heading of "disasters"?
From here the poem needs to take some surrealist leaps in imagery, breaking free of the setting ("gray fire"). Nobody cares what happens after this. The father and son see a deer, the father shoots the deer, whatever. Instead of following the characters, let's follow the author for a little bit. I'm kidding about the impotence by the way.
As I write to this subject, the first lines that appear are:
I was shooting with my father, we were wearing
Heavy winter coats and I could see his breath
Climbing up the gray fire of the sky
It was just target shooting, there’s not much else
Inside this memory but gray fire, permafrost
And a target I never hit.
These words appear in my mind effortlessly, and stop abruptly. Poems are such teases. Now comes the hard part of continuing the initial image and developing the narrative of the poem. Before, I would have strained to try and figure out what "happens" next. This time, however, the approach I'm going to take is a more linguistic one: What are the connotations of these words that I've chosen? What am I trying to say here that's outside of the poem's setting? Obviously it has daddy issues,possible impotence implications, but other than that, why did these words appear first under a topic heading of "disasters"?
From here the poem needs to take some surrealist leaps in imagery, breaking free of the setting ("gray fire"). Nobody cares what happens after this. The father and son see a deer, the father shoots the deer, whatever. Instead of following the characters, let's follow the author for a little bit. I'm kidding about the impotence by the way.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
8-24-10
Today I was pleased to find it ten degrees cooler than it normally is when I wake up. The good times roll! For whatever reason, this summer has been particularly difficult; I've always been more of a cold weather person, but my aversion to heat has never made me ill before this summer. Unfortunately, the nice weather seems to be a one day thing. I'll be relieved once the heat breaks and autumn proper begins.
I wrote a little bit of some poems today. Submission season is approaching and I'd like to send some stuff out this year. The University of Tampa, in particular, is holding a contest. A couple days of revisions and coffee shops are in order, I think. The "poems" today - and I use the term loosely - were mostly nostalgic warblings about people I haven't seen in years, and how these people are now forever locked in my memory as they were then. There is Meacham parties, discussion about Caravaggio, smoke breaks on the patio. There's bicycles and collared shirts whipping in the wind. Those were the best days of my life.
I wrote a little bit of some poems today. Submission season is approaching and I'd like to send some stuff out this year. The University of Tampa, in particular, is holding a contest. A couple days of revisions and coffee shops are in order, I think. The "poems" today - and I use the term loosely - were mostly nostalgic warblings about people I haven't seen in years, and how these people are now forever locked in my memory as they were then. There is Meacham parties, discussion about Caravaggio, smoke breaks on the patio. There's bicycles and collared shirts whipping in the wind. Those were the best days of my life.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
8-11-10
I have two new roommates now, bless their hearts. Ethan and Lorin are shacking up in my "office" now, living in sin together and having tickle fights. It's been nice coming home to people again. After such a long period of living by myself, I sort of acclimated to the solitude, and in the process forgetting to feel alone. However, it will take some time for me to get used to them enough to where I can write comfortably. Their quiet voices and occasional music are nagging distractions.
I took the last week off with intentions to travel and write. Fate intervened in the form of my beat-up and broken down Toyota. I planned on trading it in, buckling down, and biting the bullet on a new car, but I couldn't find my car title. So in the end, I ended up staying in Chattanooga doing nothing for a week, which was in and of itself relaxing and more of a vacation than I could've hoped for. It was fortuitous, as it enabled me to help Lorin and Ethan move, and allowed me to catch up on some much needed reading.
As for the writing process, I did a third wave of revisions on the early chapters and worked a bit on some chapters involving the "second" protagonist. Not as much as I hoped. Whenever I set aside extra time for writing it rarely leads to increased productivity. Lately I have been feeling the pressure to get to finishing a draft of the entire thing - I would like to have people read this before they die or grow senile, after all.
I think I'm coming down with something. It's either from Lorin's moldy couch or some bug one of them has. I'm going to try and kill it with Sudafed and exercise.
I took the last week off with intentions to travel and write. Fate intervened in the form of my beat-up and broken down Toyota. I planned on trading it in, buckling down, and biting the bullet on a new car, but I couldn't find my car title. So in the end, I ended up staying in Chattanooga doing nothing for a week, which was in and of itself relaxing and more of a vacation than I could've hoped for. It was fortuitous, as it enabled me to help Lorin and Ethan move, and allowed me to catch up on some much needed reading.
As for the writing process, I did a third wave of revisions on the early chapters and worked a bit on some chapters involving the "second" protagonist. Not as much as I hoped. Whenever I set aside extra time for writing it rarely leads to increased productivity. Lately I have been feeling the pressure to get to finishing a draft of the entire thing - I would like to have people read this before they die or grow senile, after all.
I think I'm coming down with something. It's either from Lorin's moldy couch or some bug one of them has. I'm going to try and kill it with Sudafed and exercise.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
July 22 2010
I was able to write only briefly today, in a chapter I'm thinking of calling "Witness to the Moonlight Mass of the Tardigrades". The tardigrade is often called a "water bear" and is a microscopic animal that lives on mosses and on the underside of some leaves. Seeing as how at some point the protagonist must talk to the ghosts of dead plants, I figured he might as well be able to see tardigrades also. Whatever, right! I'm going out of my head here. Writing this fantastic, supernatural stuff is so much easier than the counterbalancing domestic passages. I could write for pages and pages about this mythical microscopic subculture but trying to write a conversation between a dude and his boss is just torturous. I should also mention that in this same chapter the murdered neighbor appears and beats the **** out of the protagonist. Yeah, it'll all make sense eventually.
When I saw Michael Chabon speak at AWP this year one thing that sticks out from his talk was the notion that in writing, ideas are easy to come by. The job of the writer is to funnel those ideas that sound so fantastic in your mind into something palatable for someone other than yourself. ADD is killer to novel writing. I keep getting so many ideas for new projects, even though I'm nowhere near to being done with what I'm working on now. All I can do is just write them down and come back to them later and hope they're still good ideas.
Other than tardigrades ("slow walker" in German) I also did some light reading on chemotaxis - the direction of cell movement using various proteins. Researchers grow human neural progenitor cells ("stem cells") and throw proteins at it, hoping to direct these cells to bone or brain damage, in hopes that diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's can be cured. A lab headed by Dr. Steve Stice (one of the scientists who cloned "Dolly") was researching this in Athens, GA the last few years to negative results.
This is what I do all day.
When I saw Michael Chabon speak at AWP this year one thing that sticks out from his talk was the notion that in writing, ideas are easy to come by. The job of the writer is to funnel those ideas that sound so fantastic in your mind into something palatable for someone other than yourself. ADD is killer to novel writing. I keep getting so many ideas for new projects, even though I'm nowhere near to being done with what I'm working on now. All I can do is just write them down and come back to them later and hope they're still good ideas.
Other than tardigrades ("slow walker" in German) I also did some light reading on chemotaxis - the direction of cell movement using various proteins. Researchers grow human neural progenitor cells ("stem cells") and throw proteins at it, hoping to direct these cells to bone or brain damage, in hopes that diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's can be cured. A lab headed by Dr. Steve Stice (one of the scientists who cloned "Dolly") was researching this in Athens, GA the last few years to negative results.
This is what I do all day.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
July 21 2010
I've been going through the journal bit by bit each day, slowly transferring it from its current Microsoft Word state into something called a "Scribus" - a free online publishing program I downloaded. It appears to be used mostly for posters and magazines, but I'm sure the difference in quality is negligible. Neither me nor my boss expect this to come out looking like a Modern Library Classic or a Vintage International or anything. Scribus is a Linux-based program - what that means exactly, I couldn't tell you - that involves me creating "squares" and then deciding if it's supposed to be a "text square" or an "image square".
The journal itself is surprisingly detailed, and the prose is flowing. Such wonderful names also! I must steal them for my own. It describes RCJ's journey from Chicago to North Dakota aboard the Great Northern railway. Here's a sample:
By Sunday night I was back in St. Paul and left there at 10:45 p.m. on the Great Northern . The train whisked me through Minnesota during the night, but when we struck the border of North Dakota I was wide awake.
What struck me was the peculiar aspect of the state at that time of the year. Everything was of the same dull, brownish hue. Not a speck of green to relieve the monotony, not a tree or shrub in sight. Besides I noticed that, in spite of the advanced season, nearly all the grain was still standing in shocks, that very little threshing had been done. It was noticeably colder than St. Louis had been. I found that most of the pools and creeks we passed had a thin coating of ice.
The train from Williston to Snowden Mont. was a wretchedly slow affair. But it was heaven compared to the train from Snowden to Watford , N. Dak. This latter train consisted of a series of freight cars, with an antediluvian passenger coach in its rear. I subsequently learned that this train ran only every two days; that on other days they had freight trains only.
As I approached my destination I began to feel wretchedly blue. Everything was so strange and a peculiar sense of loneliness stole over me that was very apprehensive. Judge my joy, therefore, when I saw that good old “Daddy” Roettger was at the station to meet me. “Daddy” had been in charge of this place since Rev. Frey left it in the middle of Sept., and he had been due to take charge of a school in Gardena, N. Dak. on Nov. 1st. Loyal as he always was, he had waited for me, however, and he helped me load up my trunk and took me over to Schafer, the county seat of McKenzie Co., although it was not situated on any railroad. The home which I was to occupy during my stay here, was not in Schafer at that time, although the people intended to move it soon. It was two miles in the country in the bleakest and loneliest spot imaginable, so it seemed to me.
The pictures provided are mostly desolate expanses of prairie and clouds, but there are a few diamonds.
All the work on the diary has left me precious little free time here at work to write Novel 1. I put in a vacation request for August 2-6. Think I'll disappear.
The journal itself is surprisingly detailed, and the prose is flowing. Such wonderful names also! I must steal them for my own. It describes RCJ's journey from Chicago to North Dakota aboard the Great Northern railway. Here's a sample:
By Sunday night I was back in St. Paul and left there at 10:45 p.m. on the Great Northern . The train whisked me through Minnesota during the night, but when we struck the border of North Dakota I was wide awake.
What struck me was the peculiar aspect of the state at that time of the year. Everything was of the same dull, brownish hue. Not a speck of green to relieve the monotony, not a tree or shrub in sight. Besides I noticed that, in spite of the advanced season, nearly all the grain was still standing in shocks, that very little threshing had been done. It was noticeably colder than St. Louis had been. I found that most of the pools and creeks we passed had a thin coating of ice.
The train from Williston to Snowden Mont. was a wretchedly slow affair. But it was heaven compared to the train from Snowden to Watford , N. Dak. This latter train consisted of a series of freight cars, with an antediluvian passenger coach in its rear. I subsequently learned that this train ran only every two days; that on other days they had freight trains only.
As I approached my destination I began to feel wretchedly blue. Everything was so strange and a peculiar sense of loneliness stole over me that was very apprehensive. Judge my joy, therefore, when I saw that good old “Daddy” Roettger was at the station to meet me. “Daddy” had been in charge of this place since Rev. Frey left it in the middle of Sept., and he had been due to take charge of a school in Gardena, N. Dak. on Nov. 1st. Loyal as he always was, he had waited for me, however, and he helped me load up my trunk and took me over to Schafer, the county seat of McKenzie Co., although it was not situated on any railroad. The home which I was to occupy during my stay here, was not in Schafer at that time, although the people intended to move it soon. It was two miles in the country in the bleakest and loneliest spot imaginable, so it seemed to me.
The pictures provided are mostly desolate expanses of prairie and clouds, but there are a few diamonds.
All the work on the diary has left me precious little free time here at work to write Novel 1. I put in a vacation request for August 2-6. Think I'll disappear.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)