Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Write-a-thon, Day 8: Don’t stop ’til you write enough

Posted: June 30, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Also by the author 1

I was up until 1:30am in the wake of our party, and then I had to get up relatively early to reassemble the house and garden and take my Little Brother to see Monsters University (which I recommend) and then to lunch at Taco Bell (which I don’t). The temperature topped 90 here in Portland, and Deshawn, who just turned 17, suddenly saw the wisdom of getting a summer job in an ice-cold movie theater.

When I got home late this afternoon I wasn’t exactly at my best. In fact, one of the first things I did, after thanking Special D for all the party clean-up she did, was fall over on the first comfy horizontal surface. But I rallied after dinner and put in my hour.

I may only be getting one workable page each day, but in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway was usually quite happy with one good page. I’m not doing all the drinking he was doing, but the principle is the same. “Write it the way you see it and the hell with it,” the man wrote, and though he’s nowhere near my favorite writer, who am I to argue?

Box score
I believe I’ll only do the box score on Sundays.
– I’ve written for 8 days out of 8
– 9.5 total hours
– Current word total: 19,300 (I was hoping to hit 20,000 by tonight. Not far off!)*
– Here’s the Clarion West Write-a-thon
– Here’s my first post on the Write-a-thon
– Best movie Deshawn and I have seen: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
– Worst: Hop

* 19,300 since I started writing this book, not since I started the Write-a-thon.

My sponsors (all hail):
Karen G. Anderson
Mitch Katz
Laurel Sercombe

Random Pick of the Day
Camper Van Beethoven, Key Lime Pie (1989)
If you could plug in one of the bands that accompanied the Union army during the Civil War, you’d about have Camper Van Beethoven. Key Lime Pie includes the band’s gorgeous cover of ’60s psychedelic classic “Pictures of Matchstick Men” and the bizarro drama of “Jack Ruby.” Camper Van can be hilarious, as in their 1986 masterwork, “Take the Skinheads Bowling.” Co-founder Dave Lowery later formed Cracker, who were a lot less amusing.

Write-a-thon, Day 7: Who’s to blame when parties get out of hand?

Posted: June 30, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Dinos 1

Trying to write on the day when you’re holding a twilight garden party is probably not the best idea, but I somehow managed an hour of working on my book. A character I had mentioned in passing appeared again, this time with a betting game he liked to play. I was surprised – I thought he was just a name in the middle of a sentence. I didn’t write much in that hour but I liked what I wrote.

The party turned out just fine. Even the mosquitoes noted the occasion and stayed away, although it could be that we’re in debt to the bat colony next door.

Rejections: Plague or pestilence?
Today’s cartoon looks at the number-one killer of writers: rejection. The elite writers always seem to skip this stage, but the rest of us have to learn acceptance and humility pretty quickly. I had 64 rejections on the day I sold my first short story. I remember that because it’s the number of squares on a chess board. I stopped counting in the mid-1990s, because by then my total had surpassed 500 and it was way too depressing.

I don’t know where I am now, but I do know that the two magazines that have rejected me the most are The New Yorker and Fantasy & Science Fiction. I’m guessing they’re tied at about 50 each. Many of their form rejections came with a “Sorry” scribbled by a human. I take some consolation from that.

How do you survive rejection? Everyone says not to take it personally, but of course you take it personally. What else can you do, alone at your desk, with the vision of your byline in your favorite magazine suddenly gone kerflooey?

Well, you don’t get angry at the puny editor who couldn’t detect your brilliance if they gave him the Hubble Space Telescope. The editor might be myopic, or has maybe seen 15 stories this year with the same plot, or maybe you’re still not good enough. All you can do is send your story off to another place and keep on writing. Yes, I want to be successful. But being successful is beyond my control. The only thing I control is the process of writing. So I keep on writing. It’s taken me years to learn that.

Weird places where I’ve been published
American Window Cleaner
Classic Toy Trains
Computer Games Strategy Plus
Postcard Collector
Rubberstampmadness

Random Pick of the Day
Lords of the New Church, Killer Lords (1985)
You would’ve expected Lords of the New Church to be a vicious punk band, as everyone in it came from a vicious punk band, particularly singer-songwriter Stiv Bators, who started life in The Dead Boys, who made The Ramones look like the cast of Glee.

But Lords of the New Church were nowhere near vicious. Their songs are about freedom, same as punk, and while they are played with urgency and sincerity they are not played with anger or to gross you out. “Dance With Me” is actually danceable, as are their loving covers of Creedence Clearwater’s “Hey Tonight” and The Grass Roots’ “Live for Today” (almost a hit for them), and even “Open Your Eyes,” though its lyrics are straight from the Gang of Four playbook:
Video games train the kids for war
Army chic in high-fashion stores
Law and order’s done their job
Prisons filled while the rich still rob.

This is my Saturday, June 29 post, BTW. Our party got out of hand, by the clock, and I couldn’t get this in until after midnight. I’ll be back this evening. Thanks for following along!

Write-a-thon, Day 6: “A player on a streak has to respect the streak”

Posted: June 28, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Bildungsromans 1

Bildungsroman

After hours of wrestling with customer service and how to teach it to people who spend their days testing oil viscosity and tracking down Mason jars sent in by irate customers, the last thing I wanted to do was light a fire under my brain. But Crash Davis was right. After five consecutive victories (every day I write is another victory), why settle for a defeat?

So I dragged myself into Chapter 6, where I’ve been dumping misfit paragraphs since Monday. It looked like my parents’ basement in there. But after an hour I felt I brought about some order, and if I keep this up through the weekend I’ll have a milestone to report on Sunday night.

Speaking of my parents: They just celebrated their 59th anniversary! Three cheers to Irving and Gloria. You crazy kids!

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care
Loyal Reader Linda brings up a good point in her comment on yesterday’s very exciting post. Sometimes, staying awake is the hardest part of thinking and writing. Geniuses and other productive people typically sleep less than eight hours per night (Edison only slept on national holidays), and I’ve read that as you grow older, you require less sleep.

This is bullshit. My Personal Sleep Quotient, which is approximately 10 hours per night, hasn’t budged since I was a teenager. With less than 10 hours stored in my head, I don’t feel like I’m at the top of my game. Very few people have made a name for themselves while spending that much time unconscious. The only two I know are Calvin Coolidge and Tony Conigliaro. Coolidge wasn’t much of a president, but Tony C still holds the record for most home runs as a teenager (24 at the age of 19, in 1964). It doesn’t help that I’m the only human being in Portland or Seattle who doesn’t drink coffee. Somehow I soldier on.

Box score
– I’ve written for 6 days out of 6
– 7.5 total hours
– Here’s the Clarion West Write-a-thon
– Here’s my first post on the Write-a-thon

Random Pick of the Day
Big Head Todd & The Monsters, Stratagem (1994)
Stratagem isn’t very good at all, but it has the only two songs I like by Big Head Todd: “Shadowlands,” one of those rare rock songs that builds a mood of approaching menace, and the title track, which sounds like a Pink Floyd ballad with a heart. Todd Park Mohr doesn’t have a great voice, but with what he does have he can move some pretty big hills.

Bonus: “Turn the Light Out” on their first album, Sister Sweetly, is a bouncy update of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man.”

Random Musical Fact of the Day
Donna Summer (“Lookin’ for some hot stuff baby this evenin’ ”) was discovered while singing back-up for Three Dog Night (“Jeremiah was a bullfrog”).

Write-a-thon, Day 5: Write another day

Posted: June 27, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Wordstock Oct 2011
(Image borrowed from the 2011 Wordstock Festival.)

This morning I had a job interview and this afternoon I worked onsite for a freelance client. In one day I went from health care to lubrication analysis to trains in the mountains in 1947. You have to be flexible if you want to survive in the novel-writing game.

Today I followed William Stafford’s direction to “lower your standards and keep on writing.” I’ll never type “The End” if I simultaneously move forward and return to rewrite. I’ll return later. So I forced myself to finish Chapter 5 already, even though the ending is lame, and plowed ahead in Chapter 6. In Chapter 6 we get somewhere, literally, and I’ll have some real scenery-chewing. I have to agree with Ms. Mukherjee:

“I remembered loving Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady when I studied it for my Ph.D. comps,” Bharati Mukherjee said. “This summer I tried to reread it. I soon abandoned the book, screaming, ‘Enough complex interiority, just give me a couple of big head-butting scenes!’ ” (“Read It Again, Sam,” The New York Times Book Review, 4 December 2011)

In real life, I’m too well-behaved for big head-butting, but in fiction I can be someone else (a big head-butter). I’m warming up the exclamation points right now!

Box score
– I’ve written for five days out of five
– 6.5 total hours
– Here’s the Clarion West Write-a-thon
– Here’s my first post on the Write-a-thon

Random Pick of the Day
Charles Earland, Black Talk! (1968)
If you love jazz and particularly the organ, you’ll dig Black Talk!. The title track is supposedly a variation on “Eleanor Rigby.” I can’t hear the dots connect, but nevermind. Charles Earland and his sextet transform the pop music of their era into something fresh and new. The standouts are their reworkings of “Aquarius” and “More Today Than Yesterday.” The latter is particularly astonishing, a soulful, funky romp that’s as light and joyous as Charles Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song” (1957) is dark and murderous. They’re even about the same length, 11:13 for Earland, 11:57 for Mingus. 

Random Pick of the Day 2.0
Foghat, “Take Me to the River,” Night Shift (1976)
And now a band that needs no introduction, probably because no one wants to meet them. Foghat sucks the phone, and yet detractors such as myself are unable to explain “Slow Ride” (1975), which I can occasionally listen to (if I’m in a car), or their stellar version of “Take Me to the River,” which is in the same league as the versions turned in by The Commitments and Talking Heads. Bachman-Turner Overdrive could only dream of rocking this hard.

Write-a-thon, Day 4: Train kept a-rollin’

Posted: June 26, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Refusing to read

Yesterday I promised you a guest blogger, mystery novelist Deborah Donnelly. Due to circumstances beyond our control, Ms. Donnelly will not eventuate. Not on Day 4, anyway. She says hi.

New kids on the block
I’m speaking now to the new readers I’ve just detected, thanks to the stats dished out by WordPress. Are you lost? You’re not getting your money back! What you’ve stumbled on is a blog about popular music, but right now I’m engaged in a six-week write-a-thon that ends August 2. I don’t want to abandon music entirely, so I’m finishing each post with the musical picks and pans I wrote over the past few months. I’ve already run out of pans. And people say I hate everything!

The writing cartoons have aged for years in my lifelong collection. The cultural references may provoke laughs but the themes are timeless.

I’ve cleverly hidden indexes to the first two years of this blog (November 2010 to November 2012) in the left-hand column under Blogroll. You’re on your own for Year 3.

Not all who wander want to find their way back to the freeway
Day 4 for me was like urban in-fill in most U.S. cities: packing more people into already established neighborhoods. Yesterday I solved the challenge of the chapter that goes forever on by breaking it up. Chapter 5 became much more manageable after I evicted a third of it. That section became Chapter 6. A few stray paragraphs became the opening of Chapter 7.

My task today was to write a real ending for Chapter 5 and a real beginning for Chapter 6. I didn’t finish either but I know I’m headed in the right direction because I was surprised by some of what I wrote. “Where do I get my ideas? I don’t. They get me,” Lewis Carroll said.

The problem with writing a novel the way I’m writing a novel, with a set of ideas rather than a set of ideas and a roadmap, is that I plunge into chapters without knowing exactly where they’re going or what they’re trying to accomplish. Everything takes longer than it should, even though I’m enjoying every minute of it. Maybe I don’t want it to end?

I wouldn’t recommend my method to anyone. Maybe someday I’ll listen to me.

Box score
– I’ve written for four days out of four
– 5.5 total hours

Random Pick of the Day
The Vines, Highly Evolved (2002)
These Aussies bow to Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots, but I suspect they would sell their souls to be a catchy little pop band. All the tempo changes and other experiments on Highly Evolved could’ve been Duran Duran reimagined as a grunge act circa 1992. This is especially true on my favorite tracks, “Outtathaway” and “Sunshinin.”

The real treat on this album is “Factory,” in which The Vines pretend to be Nirvana pretending to be The Beatles.

Random Rock ’n’ Roll Image of the Day
Aerosmith and J. Geils Band at Fenway Park, 14 August 2010: Steven Tyler in a Sox jersey at a white grand piano atop the Green Monster belting out “Dream On.”

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