Thursday, May 15th, 2008
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8:35 am
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I’m writing this on my brand new MacBook, and I still feel a bit like a traitor.
My brother the tech nerd has preached the Gospel of Apple for years now. I held out, though, because I didn’t like the whole one-company-develops-all-the-hardware-and-software idea. Quite frankly, it smacked of Communism.
I mean, this is my computer. I bought it. How come Steve Jobs still gets so much say what I can do with it? Sure, everything Apple makes looks sleek and shiny, but know what? Those military parades Kim Jong-Il is always putting on look pretty sleek and shiny too, don’t they?
The world of PCs is an open market, though. Different companies competing to build a better whozit, and everybody getting to decide for themselves which whozit works for them. That’s democracy. That’s innovation. The type of innovation Patrick Swayze used to fight those filthy commies in Red Dawn.
Then my computer picked up a nasty trojan last week. I ran three different anti-virus programs, including one I bought just for that problem, and none of them could root it out. The fucking thing almost completely bricked my computer, and I was reduced to groveling in front of the screen, begging it to please just work, and finally, punching a wall and splitting my knuckle.
I never act that way when my truck breaks down or my alarm clock doesn’t go off; there’s just something about computers. In my head, I know that it’s a mindless, heartless machine, just a bunch of switches turning on and off. But maybe because it all takes place inside that humming grey box, it feels like magic, like the thing has some fickle personality. I start acting like some South Seas native who sees a volcano erupt and thinks the gods are angry. It’s all I can do to keep from sacrificing virgins in front of my printer.
So anyway, I finally call my brother for help, and during the course of the conversation, I ask what sort of anti-virus software he runs. He tells me--this IT guy, this master’s degree in computer science guy, this guy I go to when my machine breaks down--that he doesn’t have any. Macs, he says, don’t need it.
I really wasn’t in a good emotional state to make major purchases, but I did anyway, plunking down a hefty chunk of my last advance for a MacBook. I didn’t even want a desktop computer by that point. I wanted one box with one cord and the least amount of clutter as possible.
It arrived fresh from Shanghai (from communist China, of course) yesterday, and so far, I’m pretty impressed. Connecting to my modem through a router took all of three minutes. (Instead of the three days it took with my PC.) iWord seems a lot easier to navigate and more intuitive that WordPerfect. In fact, it’s probably the only word processor you’d ever describe as “cute.”
What I’d never considered before is the fact that the sleekness and shininess goes all the way down. Because one company develops everything, everything fits and works together with a minimum off fuss. I’m not saying Apple isn’t Communist; I’m just saying maybe Communism isn’t that bad after all.
My MacBook isn’t perfect. I’m really missing my second mouse button right now. At the same time, though, I’m starting to think that Our Beloved Leader Steve Jobs knows what's best for us. If he says right-clicking is a sickening capitalist indulgence, I will believe it.
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| Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
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8:56 am
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Unleashed has been out in the wild for a couple months now. Readers had sent me emails and said some really nice things about it, but one question keeps coming up:
So after they turn into wolves, what happens to their clothes?
In the rough draft of Unleashed, the pack’s clothes stayed when they shifted into wolves. Sometimes they shifted back to human form in a different place, though. That meant I had to go through long passages describing them finding new clothes, sneaking through the city naked, etc., etc. But none of it really added anything. They were paragraphs full of nothing, puffing the story up like a cheese curl.
So in the second draft, I washed my hands of the whole business. The pack’s clothes disappear and reappear by magic, specifically, by editorial pixie dust. I figured readers would appreciate me cutting out the parts where their eyes would blur over anyway. But now everybody keeps saying, Hey! Love the book. But where do their clothes go?
Keep in mind this is a werewolf story! My readers are willing to accept a bunch of high school kids transforming into wolves, but for whatever reason, vanishing clothes bug them. If I’d written a story about, say, dust bowl sharecroppers who’s clothes kept blinking in and out of existence, I’d get it, but come on...
Still, the people demand answers. And since J. K. Rowling decided to make one of her characters gay after wrapping up the Harry Potter series, I figure I can add a new wrinkle to my story too. Ever wonder what those blank pages in the back of some books were for? They’re for situations just like this.
When the pack shift into wolves, their clothes go to Yonkers, New York, to the basement rec room of a sweet old lady named Agnus. Agnus doesn’t know where the clothes come from, but she’s happy to wash and iron them while waiting for her favorite American Idol contestants to perform. (Currently Jason Castro) Agnus also replaces lost buttons and, if there are mittens, pins them to the sleeves of the pack’s coats.
There. It's official cannon now. Please stop bugging me.
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| Thursday, April 24th, 2008
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8:03 am
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The best writing advice I ever got came from Miller Williams. He was completely drunk at the time.
Several years ago, Mr. Williams did a reading at my college. Because I was part of the English honors society, I got the–ahem–honor of helping out at the reception afterwards. Being one of the only two students there who was over twenty-one, I wound up in charge of the wine bar. I learned two very important things that day.
First, nobody can say the word merlot without sounding, at least a little bit, like a douchebag.
I learned the second thing after the man of the hour had stumbled up to my station for his fourth or fifth refill. I can’t remember exactly what the crowd of English professors and folk artists were discussing. I think it was how great it was not having actual jobs. But suddenly, Miller Williams raised a finger in the air. “The job of a writer...” He paused a bit to let the sloshed Lyceum lean close, then, “Is to improve upon the blank page.”
They all laughed. I’m pretty sure it was a joke. But I already had one failed manuscript under my belt and was spending all my free time pounding out another one. And it wasn’t like any other Prix de Rome recipients were beating me over the head with advice, so I took what I could get and ran with it.
The job of a writer is to improve upon the blank page.
Up to then, I had written tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of words. But how many of them had actually improved the blank pages I’d started out with? How many times, eager for a high word count at the end of the day, had I snatched for the first metaphor that popped into my mind or used a fancy, five-dollar word instead of actual description? (Beware the seductive treachery of indigo, my friends. Beware!)
Heading back to my tiny apartment that night, every corner piled with notebooks and half-corrected manuscript pages, I felt haunted by the ghosts of the trees that had died for all that paper. We could have been dictionaries,” they wailed. We could have been something...anything...useful. Tax forms! Chinese take-out menus! Oh, to be a Pampers coupon!
Since then, I’ve had a new goal whenever I sit down to write. A high word count is great, and nothing feels quite like typing in the header for that brand new chapter. At the end of the day, though, the question I ask myself is, Did I write anything worth reading? Did I improve upon the blank page?
Even if my writing got slower after that, it became better too. And more enjoyable. Two novels in, I’m still astonished when, halfway through a police blotter-dull description of character A moving from point X to point Y, I stumble on some wonderful little something: a bit of alliteration that dances on my tongue or the perfect way to tuck a reference to Fenrir deep inside my werewolf story.
Not too long ago, I had to leave school and my days of getting nationally renowned poets drunk behind. I even had to get an actual job. Recently, my writing has slowed to a trickle. I work second shift, four to twelve. Coming home after midnight, it’s good if I can produce two handwritten pages before every part of my brain shuts down except the one that likes YouTube videos and reruns of Hell’s Kitchen.
But even now, I can usually find something I like. Yesterday, it was a particular character’s reaction to a particular plot twist finally dawning on me. The day before it the description of a river looking like tarnished silver. Tonight, it was a character being lectured that, to get a nice girl, he needed to spend time with her, listen to her, and take her nice places, only to brush it all aside with, “I’m not gonna do all that! Come on, I fast-forward through porn.”*
And I figure if, at the end of the day, I can still say I improved upon the blank page–even if it’s only one or two pages at a time–then that’s enough reason to get up and do it again the next day, the next, and the next.
* Some people have argued that my humor actually ruins perfectly good blank pages, but damnit I think it’s funny.
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| Thursday, April 17th, 2008
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7:00 am
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During an email conversation about book criticism, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cdennismoore sent me a link to his review of The Worst Book Ever Written.
About halfway through the review, I started feeling bad for laughing. Sure, the guy wrote a lousy book; I’m not doubting that. But then again, plenty of people think I write lousy books, and it hurts when they lay out with surgical precision why they're lousy.
And even writing a lousy book takes a lot of time and effort. I mean, the guy put himself out there. He took a chance. He’s the man in the arena, his face marred by dust and sweat and so forth. Doesn’t anybody willing to do that deserve at least some credit?
But then he dedicates his book to Satan.
Yeah... he's going to lose a few sympathy points for that.
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| Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
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1:35 am
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 Maybe it’d been different once. Maybe there’d been a time when Ms. Bailey loved music and children, and had a passion for teaching.
Maybe.
But by the mid-80s, when I went to St. Ann’s Elementary School, Ms. Bailey, the music teacher, had already spent a decade or two trapped in a small basement room with twenty third-graders banging on tambourines. That’s enough to break anyone.
I remember a skinny woman in peasant skirts and flyaway hair. Her face was so thin, her eyes seemed to bulge out of her face. Or possibly that was the stress. Twice a week, we were trooped down to the music room to ritually slaughter the New American Hymnal. While Ms. Bailey lead us through Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore, her voice would turn halting and stammery. While the term “going postal” hadn’t entered the common vernacular yet, we all understood on some deep level that Ms. Bailey might knock the lectern aside at any moment and stab one of us in the eye with her conductor’s baton.
Being as tense as a herd of gazelles, ready to bolt the moment the lion lunged from the underbrush, didn’t improve our melody or senses of rhythm, and so the whole thing just became a vicious cycle. She was a nervous wreck because we were horrible singers because she was a nervous wreck, and so on and so on.
And just in case all this wasn’t enough emotional torment for all involved, every year, Ms. Bailey would be put in charge of the Christmas play. There were no sign-up sheets for this play, and no try-outs. The teachers rounded up all the kids who sucked at kickball and told them they’d spend the next four weeks being yelled at while dressed as sheep.
All this pretty much explains why, after leaving the Catholic school system, I never touched a musical instrument again. Sure, I enjoyed music. During my teenage years, there were bands I lived and would have die for. And what kid doesn’t have rock n’ roll dreams now and again? My twenties dovetailed with the rise of MP3s and Napster, and my musical tastes only grew deeper and more expansive. But the thought of actually learning to play music would immediately bring back that shrill voice from the darkest corners of my memory, screaming, “Every good boy deserves fudge! What do I have to do to make you remember that? Rip my hair out! Do I have to rip my hair out of my scalp for you to remember that!”
But then two things happened. First, the book I was writing started to have more and more to do with music, with a main character spending the middle part hiding out at a struggling band’s practice space. That made me really want to understand exactly how music was put together. And second, I turned twenty-nine. There are lots of reasons I would advise someone against turning twenty-nine. Getting to go to bed early makes you more excited than getting to stay up late. Those bands you lived and would have died for have long since broken up and are now starting to do reunion tours. (Fuck you, Billy Corgan.) The slow, steady development of “old man nipples.”
But one of the upsides of turning twenty-nine is that you no longer have to be terrorized your elementary school music teacher. So after talking to some friends who play and doing a little research online, I finally bought my very own guitar.
It’s a Washburn D10S. I don’t really know if it’s a good guitar, but it’s black like Johnny Cash’s, so I like that. And honestly, I haven’t spent the last few days “practicing” so much as “walking around with my Han Solo blaster in the guitar case and pretending to be El Mariachi.” But I’ve kinda, sorta learned the scales on it and kinda, sorta figured out how to tune the thing. And not once while playing have I collapsed into a quivering heap, sobbing, “But I don’t wanna be a sheep anymore. I wanna go home!”
All in all, I consider that a victory.
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| Monday, April 7th, 2008
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11:33 pm
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Okay, follow me here: One day, after I’d spent the afternoon working on Unleashed, I spent some time trying to figure out what the pack’s sign should look like. It didn’t really matter that nobody else would ever see it. It was becoming such a big element in the story, I wanted to visualize it.
I poked around Google Images for awhile and found a site that sold Celtic jewelry. After seeing their wolfhead bracelet, I decided a Celtic-based design would be both simple and striking.
Eventually--and partly because I liked the image so much--I came up with a plan to give Val her own blog. So the bracelet design went from this:
To this:
With me so far? Good. So while I was putting Val’s blog together, I decided to add a post about Val trying to figure out what the pack’s sign should look like, her poking around Google Images, and her getting inspiration from a piece of Celtic jewelry.
By the time I wrote all that, the bracelet image had sat on my hard drive for months. I didn’t even remember what website I’d found it on. But, not only did my brother recognize it as coming from Crafty Celts, he also knew the designer Danny Hansen through the SCA. And so for my birthday, he suprised me with this:
All this is to say thanks to my brother and give some overdue credit to Danny Hansen. I haven’t worn Celtic jewelry in public since high school, so the bracelet probably just sit on my shelf as a conversation piece with a cool little story about how fantasy and reality got tied into their own Celtic knot.
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| Sunday, March 30th, 2008
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10:16 pm
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It’s tax season, that time of year when I take stock of my pitiful financial existence. I’m pushing 30 and don’t own my own home. I don’t have a 401(k) or any stocks. In fact, my portfolio is almost entirely made up of change that’s fallen between the couch cushions. (Stale Cheetos and bottle caps? Diversification!)
The Wall Street Journal readers out there might shake their heads and call me short-sighted, I’ve spent my life reading comic books and science fiction novels, and I contend my investment strategy is actually very long-sighted. It can be summed up as: Why bother investing? The machines are going up and destroy all humanity anyway.
While the talking heads on CNBC babble about what the Fed raising interest rates .04% is going to do to the housing bubble, all I need to do is watch this YouTube video of BIGDOG, Boston Dynamic’s “dynamically stable quadruped robot” that will soon be hunting you and your loved ones down at the command of its hive queen. Just try to worry about your Roth IRA while watching this video. Go ahead, I dare you.
Those insectile legs, the way it sidesteps when the guy tries to kick it over, that horrible, horrible droning... from these and other market indicators I predict thazt humanity is about a decade or so away from being “processed” for the trace amounts of bauxite and uranium in our bones. And after that, you’re whoop-de-doo fully-vested pension plan won’t seem so impressive, will it, Mr. Smarty-Pants?
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| Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
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6:02 am
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| Friday, March 21st, 2008
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1:25 am - Badges
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I clock in and learn I’m on a 1-to-1, when one staff member spends the entire shift shadowing one particularly disoriented/violent/suicidal patient.
Wonderful. Just wonderful.
My 1-to-1 has mental retardation along with bizarre compulsive behaviors. When I walk onto the unit, he’s rocking back and forth in a chair, occasionally dipping down to brush his nose and lips against the table. When he does, two clip-on badges flap on his shirt, one from our hospital and the other from Decatur Ambulatory Surgery Center. I’m told he wears the badges every day, even when he’s not in the hospital. Also, he bit the tech who was watching him last shift.
( My day just keeps getting better. )
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| Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
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10:02 pm
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I’m getting emails that books from the first batch I sent out are arriving. The rest should get to their destinations in the next few days. (In the U.S., at least. As for the international ones, only God and the Bulgarian postal service know when they’ll show up.)
 And Pulse BlogFest is coming! Here’s the idea: A few weeks ago, the smart monkeys over at Simon Pulse took questions from teenagers ranging from What is the strangest thing you have ever gotten inspiration from? to How did you survive being a teen? They sent the questions to more than 120 YA authors, who answered them, then sent them back. Starting March 14th, one question will be posted on the Pulse website everyday with all the authors’ answers following. Both readers and writers will be able to leave comments and, hopefully, start a few genuine conversations about books and literature.
I generally cringe from PR hyperbole, but this is a really cool idea, and I’m excited to be a part of it.
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| Monday, March 10th, 2008
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8:42 pm - Red in tooth and claw
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Over at Fangs, Fur, and Fey, they're apparently starting a new question of the week-thing, where everybody writes a post answering the same question. This week's question was, How do you pick the sort of creature/being you utilize? Here was my answer--
I write about werewolves because they’re real. That gives them a big advantage over fairies, which don’t actually exist. Elves, kelpies, and bunyips don’t either. Vampires, all silky smooth talk and wain beauty, are as much make-believe as fashion models. But werewolves stalk the dimmest corners of every subconscious, waiting for the chance to tear free.
 The first inkling that I wanted to write a werewolf book came in 2005 during the riots in France. An entire underclass lashed out against the society it lived in but never felt a part of. Watching news footage of the violence spreading from Paris to the rest of the country, reading emails about burned cars and prowling packs of teenagers from a friend living there at the time, I started scribbling down notes.
Everybody hates civilization just a little bit, somewhere deep, deep down. (And really, wouldn’t you be more afraid of someone who bought the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel.) How far would me or you have to be pushed before we finally bit back? Do the norms and mores of society keep us obedient, force us to act “human,” or can humanity be defined some other way?
So I gathered up all my notes and questions, scaled back the violence, moved it from France to Birmingham, Alabama (A city with its own long history of civil unrest), and added a love story. Three years later, Unleashed hit the bookstores.
So, I guess the true answer to the question is, I wrote about werewolves because, even though they aren’t real, they were excellent mythical stand-ins for real stuff I wanted to talk about. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll want to talk about something else, go groping for an apt metaphor, and grab an elf. Or maybe a kelpie or even a bunyip.
But never a vampire.
Never, ever a vampire.
How anybody can respect a monster that cleans under its fingernails, I’ll never know.
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| Thursday, March 6th, 2008
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5:49 am - LOLCRITICZ
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A couple weeks ago, tezmilleroz emailed me a photo of her cat Manny posing with a copy of Unleashed.
At first, I didn't really know what to do with this except wonder--yet again--why all my friends are weird and/or so easily amused. (A question I have yet to figure out a satisfactory answer to.) But then Tez kept taking pictures of Manny with various book on or around him. I finally realized this was no eccentric new hobby of hers. Tez and Manny have created the first revolutionary break-through in literary critisicim of the 21st century: LOLCRITICZ!
( Read more )
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| Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
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6:43 am - A slide show essay from Slate
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| Monday, February 25th, 2008
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2:45 pm - Art is a lie that tells the truth. ~ Pablo Picasso
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I always get my grandest ideas around 2 am. The problem is, I can never tell if those ideas are really brilliant or really, really bad.
A couple months back, after the line edits for Unleashed were done, and I didn’t have anything left to do but worry, (2 am is also when I tend to worry the most.) I got the grand idea to have one of my characters start a real-world blog.
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| Friday, February 15th, 2008
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6:18 am
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Unleashed will be... well... unleashed in less than a week, and the first reviews are trickling out. Both Lynn Crow from Teens Read Too and Tez Miller over at Urban Fantasy Land found nice things to say about it.
Also, awhile back, a friend from work named Robert told me that he’d gone to the near-by Book-A-Million and seen Unleashed advertised as part of that teen book club thing I mentioned in January. Quite excited, I made a special trip down to Decatur the next day to see for myself. I couldn’t find any mention of Unleashed, though. I did see Amanda Marrone’s Uninvited, the February book, prominently displayed, and decided Robert got the two titles confused. That doesn’t actually make any sense, but it does point out what a miserable pessimist I am.
I trudged off to work, once again reminded that hope is the groin of the soul, and for whatever reason, life keeps hitting me there with footballs. I told all this to Robert, who listened, gave the occasional sympathetic nod, then said gently, “You noticed that there were two pamphlets, right? One for March and another for April?”
So I made a second trip to BAM and returned with physical evidence, that yes, Unleashed will be the April title for their teen book club. (Reproduced below, fig 1.) Also, the universe probably doesn’t hate me–at least not me, personally–which is always nice to know.
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| Thursday, February 7th, 2008
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7:31 pm
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Tonight, I took out my piercings. It seemed like a good way to kick off my twenty-ninth year.
I pierced my nipple during my days as a paramedic, using a 14 gauge IV needle in the “comm center,” a never-cleaned back office piled with radio equipment and old Taco Bell bags. Tommy the Evil Dispatcher made me do it. He’d bought the ring, and I was supposed to pierce his nipple that night. But every time the needle touched his skin, he shrieked, “NONONO! STOP! STOP!... Okay. Okay, do it. Seriously, just do it this time... AUGHH! STOP! STOP!”
After twenty minutes of this, he was pale and twitchy. I was laughing my head off. Finally, I told him to man up one too many times, and his snapped back, “You want to do it? Go ahead.”
Suddenly I had a challenge on my hands. So I pulled off my uniform shirt and did it. The pain was worse than breaking a bone, but only lasted about two seconds. Still, afterwards, I was dizzy and nauseous. I wouldn’t let anybody touch me and stumbled around the office with this needle jabbed through me and a trickle of blood running down my chest. My hands were shaking too bad to thread the ring through. When a call came over the radio, it took the collective effort of three people to get the ring in, put my shirt back on, and drag me out to the ambulance.
Another time, Tommy the Evil Dispatcher decided to shock himself with the defibrilator “to see what it felt like.” The whole office smelled like burned chicken that night.
Over the next couple years, I got a larger ring in my nipple and two in my ball sack. I did all the piercings myself, and all were as well thought out as the first one. They fit who me and my friends were, half medical professionals and half pirate crew. Sure, the doctors looked down on us, the nurses knew more, and the cops got paid better, but they all thought we were a little crazy, and we liked that. There was a lot of pride in having the best tattoo, the fastest run down to Birmingham, and the biggest clusterfuck, those horribly absurd moments that reenforced our us-against-the-universe attitude.
But those days and nights of running wide open are long gone. Tommy the Evil Dispatcher got his paramedic license, got married, had a little girl, and finally the job ate him. Heading to a call, he tried to beat a train. Both him and his partner were killed. The clusterfuck to end all clusterfucks, and brought down on the scrawny, squirrely, open-mouthed-laughing maniac who relished that life more than any of us.
And I haven’t felt like a pirate in years. Now, the piercings feel more like a curiosity than any sort of symbol of who I am. It’s not a numbers game. I know plenty of people get their first piercing or tattoo when they’re older than I am now. Some much older. Still, I think if you reach a point when you can’t really imagine yourself getting another piercing, it’s time to take out the ones you have.
Still, I wouldn’t mind if they left scars, a few tiny marks that maybe nobody would ever notice except me. Even if I’m not a pirate anymore, it’d be nice to remember that I had been.
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| Saturday, February 2nd, 2008
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1:37 am
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I write out my rough drafts in longhand.
Lots of writers do this. It makes them feel more connected to their stories. Hunched over pen and paper, writing is more intimate. The words have a tactile feel and shape. Watching them weave together–not entirely under the author’s control–into characters and entire worlds is magical.
I, on the other hand, just find throwing my notebook against the wall a lot easier than throwing my computer.
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| Thursday, January 31st, 2008
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1:30 am
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A little over a year ago, I got a terse letter from Bono. He pointed out that, since I had a book published, I was technically a celebrity, and as such, I was required to have a celebrity cause.
Unfortunately, all the good celebrity causes like Darfur and the whales had been taken by then. (Stupid Ricki Lake and her stupid home birthing movement.) Anyway, I had to settle for saving the golden-rumped elephant shrew.
I haven’t written much on this odd yet oddly noble creature lately. Quite frankly, it’s been a pretty slow news year for the golden-rumped elephant shrew. (Of course, when you spend your life snuffling through the leaf mold searching for tasty insects, I imagine every year is a pretty slow news year.) Rest assured, I’m still wholly dedicated to saving the golden-rumped elephant shrew, who’s brilliant ass-beacon–like Lady Liberty’s torch–shines with the light of freedom and self-determination.
But one of the side effects of having a bargain-bin celebrity cause like the golden-rumped elephant shrew is that you become the go-to guy for all of God’s more Dada-influenced works. Since speaking up for it, people have told me about other bizarre animals they’ve stumbled across, including the aye-aye, the pink fairy armadillo, and most recently, the naked mole rat.
My uncle sent me this picture a couple days back. In the email, he wrote, Going through life is hard enough, but imagine going through life looking like a penis with buckteeth. What I particularly love is the sly leer on its face. It’s a leer I’ve seen on countless bar creeps. It’s a leer that says, Not only do I have no clue how ugly I am, I have somehow convinced myself I’m a total player. And damnit, when you’re a buck-toothed penis, there’s something admirable about that.
The naked mole rat, also known as the sand puppy, is the only known member of the genus Heterocephalus. Luckily, unlike many other evolutionarily distinct animals, it doesn’t need any celebrity shoving it in the face of politicians.* It is unthreatened and widespread throughout the African desert regions. In fact, since there’s a naked mole rat named Rufus on the cartoon Kim Possible, it probably has a higher public profile than I do.**
Rufus: Famous naked mole rat, Scientologist
And that gives me a warm feeling deep down inside. Because not only is life hard, it’s also pretty boring. We get up. We go to work. We snuffle through the grocery store for food. Then, in the middle of our daily grind, we suddenly remember what a prevy little tosser the naked mole rat is, or that there’s actually a creature called the golden-frickin’-rumped elephant shrew. And suddenly, the world seems a little stranger, sillier, and much more fun to be in.
* Although I wouldn’t be against shoving it in the face of politicians just for fun.
**Maybe it would consider taking me on as its celebrity cause.
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| Friday, January 25th, 2008
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2:19 am
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Over at Life on the Periphery, Constance came up with an interesting writing game I’ve been doing for the last few days. Basically, while you’re writing, set your iPod to shuffle and let it play.
First off, I just like writing with the iPod plugged into my skull. Unlike the stereo, the earbuds block out all the other little noises and distractions around me. Second, turning it to shuffle keeps me from one of my worst cat vacuuming habits, namely, stopping writing to futz around finding the perfect song, which often leads to building the perfect playlist, which of course, I’ve got to fill out with a couple more songs downloaded from iTunes, and by the end of the day, I’ve got Styx’s greatest hits but not a lick of actual writing done.
But the neatest result is that, like Constance says, “The juxtaposition of some of the music I get can be startling, enlightening, or annoying, depending on the whim of the Shuffle Gods.” Framing a scene in a different way than I normally would makes me think about it in a different way than I normally would. It drives me off the well-worn paths I tend to take through my stories if I’m not careful, that stock of personal cliches and easy characterization I end up reaching for over and over again.
You can’t write a kick ass barfight while listening to You are My Sunshine. It becomes absurd and a little pathetic, which is exactly what most real barfights are. And when your main characters visit the spot where their friend died, just try to make it weepy and sentimental when The Perfect Drug comes on. You start thinking about the dark, obsessive way the past can grind people down, blotting out the present or any thoughts about the future. And the White Stripes make all sorts of weird happenings just that much more weird and wonderful.
So thanks to Constance for such a simple, effective little trick. And I’d suggest all the other writers on my flist give it a try. Everybody needs to be knocked out of their rut sometimes.
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| Sunday, January 20th, 2008
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7:31 pm
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And while I'm taking this walk down vague memory lane, I need to get something off my chest.
Back when I smoked pot, do you kids have any idea how hard it was to find decent absurdism? That delicate balance of stupidity and simplicity it takes to keep a stoner staring blankly at the screen for hours? We would search across the triple-digit channels on the cable box for hours, hoping for a showing of 976-EVIL on Up All Night with Rhonda Shear or maybe one of Charles Bronson’s lesser works. And let me tell you, Buster, we were glad to get it.
We didn’t have the internet pumping strange videos and cheap laughs into our home 24/7. And we didn’t have anything even close the Columbian grade absurdity of Lasagna Cat. (Via The Comics Curmudgeon.)
On Lasagna Cat, live actors play out Garfield comic strips which then dissolve into musical tributes to Jim Davis. It’s entirely pointless, but it approaches such an awesome density of pointlessness the whole website is in danger of collapsing into an ironic black hole.
Do you have any idea what we would have done with something like Lasagna Cat back in my day? Well... Just stare blankly at the screen; we were a bunch of potheads, but that’s not the point.
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What I was wasting my time on while I should have been writing a blog post for you guys...