Wax Banks

Noveller.

Brutal. (And a fine Twitter spoof to boot.)

Provisional access to one's gifts.

It's helpful to be able to talk about 'access to one's abilities' or gifts, and to describe different grades of that access: in particular, to talk about provisional access to one's gifts, as Robert Penn Warren did to David Milch (speaking of e.g. Ezra Pound and Coleridge). I believe this helps our discussion of creativity because it sets up inability to create as a problem whose parameters are theoretically knowable, and whose solution can be approached systematically. In short, talking about 'writer's block' and its equivalents as discrete states into which we move is unhelpful: this is like describing 'not yet having gone to the store' as a disease, the cure for which is the state of being at the store. I'll stick to writing for the moment, though the following discussion pertains to many creative endeavours, indeed to a creative cast of mind. 'Writing' is a complex process, and one of its early steps is 'overcoming the seeming inability to write.' If that initial step seems complicated, we describe ourselves as having 'writer's block,' some unique thing. A Big Problem. But writer's block is like shyness: it labels as an inability a transitional state that differs only in degree from what we label ability (getting the writing done).

We shouldn't, in other words, confuse evaluation with pre- and proscription.

My own writing process is variable, or rather it seems that way because I have only provisional access to my own gifts. Mastery would be (seemingly) effortless recall of the creative state. Call it what you like: 'flow' state, tapping your inner writer, a visit from the muse, etc. 'Visions come to prepared spirits,' Milch is fond of repeating. But the preparation can itself be systematized. Indeed, that is mastery. The length and complexity of the systematic process is what separates normal people from genius: one suspects that Michael Jordan needed less warmup time than his compatriots to access his extraordinary physical gifts, as did George Best - that they would dominate a pickup game as easily as a professional match.

But then, they did warm up. Every game.

For the first twenty days of November 2005 I wrote nearly 2,000 words per day; by the end of that period I'd fallen into a productive routine, in which the heat of inspiration motivated me to complete a daily warmup ritual. The inspiration made the ritual bearable; the ritual made the inspiration knowable. (I repeated the daily ritual a year later, which consisted incidentally of a half-hour to an hour of writing in a particular form, interspersed at times with abstract or mannered readings to limber up my verbal faculties. Nothing extraordinary, but then the substance of ritual rarely is.) So many things are that way. In long-term relationships, sexual pleasure loses its primacy among reasons for being together, but the pleasure itself deepens; the lengthening lulls between fits of passion in so many relationships don't mark the fading of lust, only a commitment to systematization instead of fancy. The lust itself is still lust, and something else as well. When the shock of the new wears off, what you're left with is self-knowledge: I am in a new world with this thing (the desire to write, a text, a lover, the desire to make love) and I must find a better way to live with it. Every day rather than today.

You might say that believing in tomorrow, building for a future, means recognizing that today is not the very last day: which is a partial or beginning recognition that we are alive and will go on living. Which is a recognition that we will die. Young love and lust, the need to write or paint felt more strongly than the desire to create (to give away - perhaps that is creation), these feelings deny that tomorrow will arrive. Well, and if you're lucky you'll finish this story or this painting or this perfect kiss tonight. And if you're unlucky - if your faith in transcendence (escape from the future [death] through the moment) turns out to have been misplaced - then you weren't going to die or turn into a pumpkin in the morning. And you'll be poorer until you get back to that perfect moment.

Provisional or incomplete access to your creative gifts: this is a lack of faith.

* * *

Lust consumes, of course, and one key myth of artistic creation is that it works the same way. But that heat isn't the central element in the creative process. Or rather: inspiration is necessary but not sufficient.

When I get what I take to be a great idea, I generally write it down somewhere; if I'm at my desk, I'll type it on my computer, else I've got notebooks to hand wherever I go, for that purpose. 'Ubiquitous capture' is the currently fashionable term for this ancient practice. Maintaining a 'prepared spirit' is another way of putting it. The more you accustom yourself to writing down idle thoughts, the more your mind will train itself to think verbally. Similarly, if you accustom yourself to thinking and responding to the world in pictures, or in melody, then your idle thoughts will begin to come to you in that form. 'The whole time I've been working on this project I've dreamed about it at night.' Well, yes. Of course. Practice makes perfect; your mind interprets this immersion as practice, of a sort.

Eventually, immersion prompts a feedback loop (or several), whereby we confront problems entirely in a certain set of terms and begin to respond to them 'instinctively' in the same terms. This is only a rough definition of learning, and this 'insight' has certainly entered broad awareness, but its implications for creativity seem to be widely overlooked. Let's put it another way: a ball atop a hill and a ball at the bottom of a valley are both at equilibrium: they're both where they want to be, standing still. An object at rest will tend to remain at rest.

But obviously the ball at the top of the hill won't return to its resting place if nudged, whereas the ball in the valley will (if unimpeded) roll back to its original spot when kicked (unless it's kicked hard enough to clear a nearby hill). The ball on the hill, in other words, rests in an unstable equilibrium; its valley counterpart is at a stable equilibrium. But both are resting. And here's the thing: the two situations are identical, from the perspective of the balls themselves.

A person unused to accessing her creative gifts sees herself as resting in the valley: she has no sense of how much effort it will take to get out, and when she succeeds, what she learns (or believes she's learned) is: I got out. I can get out. But how? She can't assess the ground on which she's resting. Her counterpart on the hill only needs a nudge: gravity takes over and she starts to pick up speed. It takes only recognizing your motion and accepting it. Which is partly self-analysis and partly (seemingly) open-ended risk-taking.

What the 'uncreative' person can't do is recognize when she's rolling. She doesn't know how to immerse herself; she doesn't know which internal forces are beneficial, creative, unless they're of enormous magnitude. (And that is a learned or acquired state.)

And yet we know when we're having a good time; we know when a story moves us, recognize when we're immersed in a narrative or social situation. We know what it is to be transported. It remains for us to link creative action with this feeling of immersion - to find a way to rest at the top of the hill. Sometimes that's as simple as carrying a notebook around everywhere you go. Sometimes it means going to a writers' colony, or taking a class (carving out a portion of each day or week to devote to creative activity - ritual and sacred spaces again). Sometimes it means warming up your writing mind for 30-60 minutes before taking up your novel for the day. Sometimes it means nothing more than finishing the day's work in midsentence, so as to facilitate picking it up again tomorrow.

Creativity isn't just rolling; creativity is picking the right hill.

* * *

More hills to close, just to confuse myself (and quite possibly you, faithful Reader(s)):

Andrea DiSessa, in his extraordinary book Changing Minds, talks about creative exploration and intellectual inquiry as a roller coaster: a tough problem is a steep hill to climb, and enthusiasm gives us the velocity to get partway up without too much pain. Solving the problem means letting go and tumbling down the other side of the hill. Self-directed learning means choosing which hills to climb, but it also means responding to the dictates of gravity and momentum - i.e. if you're rolling fast enough in one direction, you'll keep going because it's easiest, and importantly because it's the most fun. DiSessa intends a lesson about curricular and instructional design (about the importance of harnessing student enthusiasm and allowing free inquiry to direct pedagogical structure), but we can take another lesson: if we don't find the process of preparation and structuring-of-creativity enjoyable - in metaphorical terms, if we don't enjoy climbing the first hill - then we'll have a hard time adapting to the dictates of our in-the-moment imaginings. 'Provisional access to our creative gifts,' then, also means not yet having found the pleasure and freedom in creative work.

Creative play yields smarter, more flexible, more adventurous, more daring creators; but creative work is what turns out creations. The one bleeds into the other when you learn to treat the work itself playfully, coming to a more 'adult' relationship with the mechanisms of creativity instead of just the feelings of satisfaction and engagement they breed.

Or rather: when you stop thinking of creativity as all about you, you'll unlock something in yourself. It may be paralyzing at first, but openness and generosity will come, as will the sustainable energy and strength that come with doing great works on behalf of others. Dopey? OK, dopey. 'Quit playing around.' There's fun for all on the other side of just playing, if you'll only make it.

Elementary principles: writing.

The reason no one is impressed by your stream-of-consciousness writing is that you actually wrote it as a 'stream of consciousness.' Which is to say you didn't structure it, give it a dramatic arc. Never mind that Frederic Jameson book you barely remember or understood, the way you write doesn't determine the nature of the prose; you write flowing prose as you would any other prose. Only you work to make it flow instead of __________.

After time away from a piece of writing you lose track of the in-your-head pathways you followed in the writing, and are more able to measure its worth as prose. That's a crucial thing: you don't wonder whether it was true to what you thought you wanted, you measure whether it's written with conviction and (structural) integrity. Does the writing cohere, is its setting believable? Those are the questions you ask yourself. As you get better you learn to ask those questions earlier in the process. Someday even as you write.

The passages you like most in the writing will almost certainly have a great deal less value later on; the things that appeal at the end will have seemed workmanlike or laboured. The reason for this switch is precisely that: labour. Which is how ideas good or bad turn into good prose. It takes you out of the emotional groove you're occupying in the writing itself, to which the contours of the story might momentarily correspond. The reader comes to the text as part of a readerly contract, more open-minded, and has a different set of preconceived notions to dispense with and conform to. Which is to say, because writing is interactive (assuming you know how to find the delete key), you measure your satisfaction with the text in merely natural ways (does this represent how I feel?). But when the Reader appears, she enters into an artificial stance; the fictionality of the exchange prompts her to be accepting of a wider variety of aesthetic gestures.

Which is, maybe, to say: you write a paragraph and it feels like a key to you. But what you really want to write is a skeleton key.

Lengthy self-criticism and -justification, including several smileys, and a brief mention of Jerry Seinfeld.

From the NaNoWriMo fora. I was carrying on about writing in a considered way, premeditated to an extent (versus freewriting for 30 days and calling it a novel), and was asked: 'Not that I disagree with any of this, but I'm just curious: has this approach in fact led you to produce enthralling prose?' For some reason, talking about myself brings out unquestionably the best of me, Reader(s). Would you have guessed? Self-obsessed? Yours truly? It's almost too much to imagine. Anyhow there's a little bit of pith in here and a couple of other four-letter words too, for colour. Could've been worse.

Better too: more work might have gotten done. :)

Sitting up straight; dour thoughts; trying to end the third chapter with something like grace. Or at all.

The military-planning word to describe what's going on with the third chapter is 'mission creep': a desire to get to all the characters in some capacity has set in and now I find myself having to serve too many objectives, so that truly fulfilling even one is gonna be tough. Again, this is a planning failure. The initial ch3 idea (a nasty bit of Lord of the Flies meets Bonfire Night) was jettisoned for not covering enough new characterological ground, which shook the ch3 structure up, since that was what the first two chapters were building to. Then the focus was on character relationships, as it to a certain extent should be; the symbolic structure was set aside almost entirely, and an increased depth of person-to-person was achieved at the expense of narrative velocity. Hmm. Meanwhile a new end for the chapter was thought up and foreshadowing and narrative connectors were laid in to wrap the emotional byplay up more tightly in the chapter's rising action. OK then, and a state of relative balance was reached between the mechanism of Plot and the needs of the Story, and I thought that was alright.

But it's all a bit long and a bit slow and a bit just somehow not y'know exciting, and the moments of integration of plot and character can be a little uneasy, to wit:

'I love my parents to death - probably literally to death, based on how last year's Thanksgiving dinner turned out. But we seem to have skipped the "friend" stage entirely, and I think I liked it better when I could just be a ch -

'Fuck me, is that a riot?'

And by all appearances, Mitch had to admit, it was in fact a riot - spilling noisily out the double doors and down the front steps of Rutherford B. Hayes Lewis High School, serving the minds and souls of local children since 1961. Hell, someone had even broken a window, and that's not nothing.

I'm not displeased with the moment, am amused by the image, and it makes sense on a bunch of levels in the context of the story. (Plus the lines leading up to this moment are strong.) But it's also not in there, you know? The conversation between these two nominally serves to illustrate the speaker's character, but really it's a way of getting out of explaining exactly how the riot started. Because it'll be more enjoyable and natural for me to do an 'And this is what went down...' passage after the fact than to actually build a riot, sentence by sentence. Not now. Maybe later, when worse things happen with more personal resonance. But it makes sense for the riot to be seen first in long shot, and its roots filled in later, which handily lets me abdicate some of the responsibility for details that is the whole goddamn reason to be writing a novel in the first place. And in any case we're three chapters in and nearly 30,000 words to the good, and really we should be a lot farther along, and I can't shake the feeling that if I just stuck to the action I'd cover much more ground in much less space and get my character stuff on the side. Would have to.

And that confidence, building that, is the reason I'm writing this novel now. We'll get there, and in the meantime I'm content to say, the first eighty pages will need a solid rewrite. And the purpose of that rewrite, in part, will be to determine whether the story wants to be the semi-funny character drama I appear to be writing, or the goofy satire I thought I was writing. Nothing is ever easy anymore.

But it comes back to: it's better than it's ever been. On a longer timescale than ever before, the work is good and strong and made with care. That's not nothing.

Where we stand.

I'm happy with this, I'll say, but happier still - OK this is sappy - that today I was reminded of two things I'm sometimes prone to forget: dear friends stay so even through long silences; and I'm dating a damned fine writer in her own right, whose writing method is 180 degrees different from mine, and who produces such strong work - a bracing realization for someone given to declarations about the One True Path to literary effectiveness. That's TextMate in the image, by the way, one of the two indispensable apps on my Mac desktop (the other being Quicksilver, of course).

Tuesday, warmup, go, try, now, yes!

The writing wants to be more fleet than it has been, less laboured. The work behind the work is obvious thus far - a given passage needs to bring these people to this point to make this point. The evolution of the characters is thus far insufficiently organic. But I am trying also to remain rock-solid in my belief that this shortcoming isn't a problem with the characters as such, nor with some external notion of the story, a Muse, some kind of inspiration.

It is merely a problem with the Story, and the Prose. Both of which are wholly in my command, both of which I can fix.

So how is this problem manifesting?

Hopefully the last long rants about NaNoWriMo - but they're good'uns, if that's your thing.

[I'll just tuck these little pretties below the fold right here where they won't bother anyone. Two long posts and out. The topic at hand, as you can guess, is the Culture of Enforced Mediocrity - which you might know as Therapy Culture, or 'Me' Culture, or 'the soft bigotry of low expectations.' The manifestation of that culture in question is, of course, NaNoWriMo. And I won't fault you for skipping this one, Reader(s). I will do my best to say something about something else soon. Perhaps about my three - yes, three - attempts to watch the final two episodes of Evangelion last week. Back to the woodshed for Mr Anno, I'm afraid.]

Long morning lost, an Act Two redux of sorts.

Back in summer, when working on an ill-starred feature script called Temps that was at times a delirious joy to write but which yielded very, very mixed results and is in first draft form utterly, depressingly unacceptable...back then you may recall me whining about the 'Act Two problem,' which Alex Epstein explains here. It is roughly this: enthusiasm will get you through the setup and first intimations of a story quickly, but there invariably comes a point where the rapidly-accumulating imperfections of the story and the diminishing satisfactions of writing the Act Two mechanism - answering questions instead of just raising them, in other words - combine to make you think the work is shit. Epstein calls it the 'page 40 sucky point,' page 40 being a couple of scenes into Act Two of a traditionally-structured screenplay.

I was hit hard by this lack of confidence while writing Temps; Epstein says the way out is to work hard on an outline, so that the fallback state while writing the first draft is simply translating the outline beat-by-beat into short scenes, but I had no outline at all then. I had something I pretended was an outline, which was really a list of notions - and let's state a maxim here: A list of 'neat ideas for scenes' does not constitute an outline, no matter what order you put them in. There was no positive precedent to fall back on, as every story problem I encountered was new to me. It was a neat experience at the time but one that yielded diminishing returns starting (you guessed it) not far from page 40, about the time I first wrote something about which, as I wrote it, I thought, 'I'm gonna have to rewrite this bullshit.' It was a confrontation, in other words, with the fact that I wasn't capable of getting it right the first time, and in a sense with the possibility that I would never have a chance to get it right. Which if you want to hop on the reductio train you can ride it all the way to 'All such moments are confrontations of our fear of death,' but why would you take that train? Why would you visit that town now, on a dismal rainy positively British Sunday morning? Don't take that train!

(I had a strange dream about a long bus ride into nowhere, and the Abominable Snowman was in it, and I attacked him with a piece of chalk. The big kind, like teachers use. I believe he was not impressed.)

Yesterday I encountered a similar feeling. The current project, a novel that in its first draft is going to be a good deal longer than I'd anticipated, has been quite a different experience from Temps, indeed different from anything I've attempted to write before. It's loaded with characters, for one thing, and I'm finding it difficult to let them be the objects of satire I'd originally intended. So they're getting rather more human, and so more demanding to draw. The upside of that is that the main characters and narration aren't simply overrunning everything around them (like, ahem, last time I tried to do this). But since I'm trying to keep the narration focused on the characters - avoiding show-offy prose digressions and so forth - some of my favoured stylistic crutches are unavailable to me. Who knew it would be so hard to restrict myself from breaking the fourth wall in a straightforward piece of realistic fiction? But it gives me a headache every day.

In any case we've come to the third chapter - of nine or ten - and have already seen the (for lack of a better phrase) 'inciting incidents' that will push the plot. Chapter One was a long setpiece, building to a scene I'd had in mind for weeks while outlining, in a style that I knew well, and came quickly and assuredly. Chapter Two, all intimation and commentary, was straightforward to write, but I shanked its ending - ending it abruptly out of a combination of fatigue and fading confidence, substituting an appealing but uncomplicated image for the more ambiguous climactic scene I'd been thinking about. I also realized, as I typed 'CHAPTER THREE: NOVEMBER,' that I was going to have to rewrite the latest work more extensively than the opening, laying in all kinds of material to make Chapter Three's major plot advancements feel organic, inevitable. The novel's premise is the formation of a grotesque and dangerous microsociety at a high school in the wake of a Columbine-style school shooting; because the story's predicated on an unpleasant and improbable what-if?, I have to buy the reader's investment in my narrative world at a slightly higher price than usual. Again, I'm working against myself somewhat: if I had been able from the start to stick to the tone of ghoulish broad satire I'd envisioned, the whole thing would be easier to swallow, and I could've gotten on with the damn comedy (it is to be a comedy of sorts) on page one. As it is, there's to be a tonal shift of sorts, and while I think that's justifiable, the mechanism of justification is just one more goddamn wrinkle to the already fraught turn into (the prose-fiction equivalent of) Act Two.

The point of all of this being: yesterday I couldn't get it up to write no matter what I did, and things are running so much longer than I'd intended that I worry about not finishing before the new year (which would be quite slow, given the free time and the Story I've got), so there's a bit of a nasty confluence happening. The work remains interesting, but right now I find myself caring a good deal about things which are conspiring to slow me down somewhat, to make the path ahead less clear. These warmups help, but since I don't want to talk about the story itself in too much detail, I still come to the material - when I start in again on the prose, about five minutes from now - a little tentatively. I don't have enough outline to work with. Certainly this chapter is less clear than the previous two, though I have a much stronger idea of what it needs to accomplish; i.e. the mechanism is undecided but the constraints are more serious than before. And tonally we're moving to firmer ground - ludicrous slapstick bullshit of the lowest sort. Which if you've read my Masters thesis you know that's my specialty, yuk yuk yuk.

My accidental Wednesday morning warmup in the form of a refreshing back-to-form rant.

It's about NaNoWriMo - in which, by the way, I'm doing more and better work than ever before, ever. I couldn't be happier with the progress of the work I'm doing. I look forward to fixing what's wrong with it.

Meanwhile, I record here for 'posterity' some beliefs I seem to hold about the craft of fiction. It ends strongly, I think, but the ending gets its percussive value from the long runup. I'm not sure the payoff is worth it if you don't already have a bug up your ass about the topic already. Still, a cool refreshing glass of my inimitable genius-cocktail might be just what you need, Reader(s), to start your day off right! Huzzah!

* * *

mtjtree wrote:

Waxbanks, I think your post goes against one of the main points of this whole thing and that is that you don't have to be a novelist to write a novel.

For me, nanowrimo is about trying something new, challenging myself, beating myself, and seeing in the end what I've made of my first attempt at noveling. It's about being given permission, for a month, to say "I'm a novelist" even though I've never written a word of fiction in my adult life.

I'm confused as to why you think that's important - calling yourself a novelist. As opposed to the desire, the need, to tell stories, I mean.

But I suspect your desire in that regard goes a long way to explaining why you're talking about people's 'right' to write rubbish.

Getting started again after a long writing night.

Last night's blog output including quoted exerpts totaled ~2,500 words; I didn't get to bed until 3am, and my sleep was racked by weirdly horrible dreams (in one all my friends and I were soldiers trapped in a bunker, dying horribly one by one; in another I was assaulted by an enormous brute and blinded with a knife, then hid underwater only to be attacked by a shark, plus there was a segment with the police interrogating a different group of friends and the detective was well-meaning but there was a darkness to the whole thing, we were in a large country manor and the world seemed haunted). So today things aren't looking terribly hopeful from a writing standpoint. The Patriots game involved some Jameson whiskey on our part, and lately I'm learning the lesson that at age 27 it doesn't matter how much water I drink, the day after the whiskey is going to be a little bit rough. My love of bourbon notwithstanding, it might be time to consider whether boozing at all is worth it - or in any case whether a hard limit should be placed on consumption.

Unqualified, untrammeled.

It was such a good day that two defeats - one for me, one for the New England Patriots - can't upend the happiness right now. Nothing to say about the Patriots. That many turnovers, that many fingertipped passes and unlucky interceptions, things just go the other way once in a while. (Madden was right - the running game was working so well at first, but they started outthinking themselves in the second half. Manage your luck, guys.)

The more personal defeat? We were denied a ping-pong table. Which isn't a big deal except it's probably a mile walk each way for me, and if my cold-weather fortitude is undiminished (Snow Belt citizens unite!) my pointless-walking-around tolerance is lower than it would be in summer. I mean not pointless; time with the GF is time well spent, but I mean goddamn I could've watched this week's Galactica, be serious now...

The important bit, sustained personal (in-)love aside, is that Chapter One stands complete now in first draft form, nearly 10,000 words long and sweeping from goofy comedy to teen drama to something like horror, and an ending that delivers a solid out-of-nowhere left hook. Or so I hope. The first reader has sounded approval. Now it's back to flying under the radar for as many days as, say, Chapters Two and Three will take. I suspect they'll be shorter pagewise; they have less ground to cover, and some of the characters can be sketched in more concisely now that the groundwork has been done. I haven't been posting excerpts in part because the Headless Blogman felt those were the least appealing posts last year, in part because the work wants to stay a little private right now. Last year's NaNo schtick had the passive-aggressive ostentation of a public diary; now there's a story to serve, and too many expectations will only draw focus from the world of the work. Suffice to say the work is worthwhile, has always been, and remember as a kid you'd discover something and it would never occur to you that you weren't the first to find out? Everything was new and you were guardian of the secret places, wanted so badly to show the hidden shape of your world to family and friends and everyone. That feeling is only hidden. The stroke of pen and ink leaves behind a trail and takes away for you the memory of faraway and within and always. The paper is the translucent skin of other worlds.

Sunday warning warmup/rave-up: rather a downbeat recollection masquerading as self-aggrandizement of the most passive-aggressive sort.

No idea where this is going.

Of course the purpose of the last few morning entries has been to get ready for the day's writing work; it makes sense to systematize this approach to readiness, and the tempo has been more or less the same from day to day once I've made a certain commitment. The idea: you're better off writing a guaranteed 80-90%, with the focus and discipline to revise (however long it takes) up to 100%, than taking shots at 100% and occasionally getting, y'know, nothing. If the output is to be sustained then that's the minimum requirement. I was better off with a day-to-day schedule, as the time pressure did some of the work of the warmup. Amazing what time-comprehension does for human beings, how the invention of the clock - of discretized 'time' - has prodded humans toward uncontemplative creativity. As a kid I tended to lose my sense of time's passage when I was working on something I really loved, writing or drawing or a game - not least because from my old Apple IIgs you couldn't see a clock, and by the time we got a Windows machine I was accustomed to living without time...

...but it occurs to me that we did have a high-wavelength measure of time, the sitcoms, 30-minute chunks of useful time. You turn down the volume and occasionally look at the TV and can say, 'Oh, A Different World is on, it must be between 8:30 and 9:00.' That might be the ideal. Indeed the 80's sitcoms marked the end of two-act standard sitcom structure, as I recall, so you got two long periods of programming with relatively brief commercial interruptions.

All I'm doing is seeing a thing and pointing at it. Not describing. See?! I worry sometimes I have no knack at all for that kind of description. Or no affinity for it anyhow, little enough desire to undertake the project of 'This is how this thing looks.' In 9th grade I took Mr McCord's 11th grade English class; we were required to hand in a journal with daily assignments. I never, ever did them. (Ha! The students called Mr McCord 'Goober' or 'Goob' for short; he wore an ineffective toupee and almost never lost his temper. Only once - and I remember it being scary. There's a picture somewhere of two students in that class holding me upside down; damn, I even remember their names, Clem and Chad. I don't often revisit those times, it's a strange feeling. I liked those guys exactly as much as they liked me - with the added bonus that Clem is the one who introduced me to Phish. When I got my first Phish shirt, a bootleg 'Vermont's Phinest' that was just like one he had, he was irritated that I was 'copying' him. And I was. It was also the best shirt the store had. You do what you have to. I wore it to an Academic Challenge competition that we won handily.) Naturally I did the first two weeks' worth of work in a night - each day was supposed to be a page, so this was ten handwritten pages, no sweat. You knock that off in a short afternoon of blogging! Monday was description of a thing, Tuesday depiction of an event, and so forth. Friday was What You Will.

I liked Fridays best.

I neglected the assignment for the remainder of the school year - perhaps you see where this is going - and when the work came due in May I had done nothing at all beyond the initial two weeks. The school year is 180 days long; I was responsible for roughly 130 pages of material, to be written in a single night.

I type a great deal faster, on average, than I used to - back in my full-time Zorking days I could hunt-and-peck at 60wpm or so, and touch-typing has nearly doubled that. But 9th grade was a real youth's-full-flower kind of time, and I had yet to encounter my first in-school failures then (i.e. first semester of college. First exam, actually). I started before dinner - which never happened if I could help it, such a lazy kid - and typed at a demonic pace until somewhere in the vicinity of midnight. Maybe later. For me this was unprecedented in a number of ways, not least that I never stayed up past midnight for any reason back then, not even New Year's Eve...

Well let's not dally here. I came into school with a gargantuan stack of paper and handed it in, eventually receiving an A for the assignment. I hadn't finished all the work but had made a real go of it. The equivalent of nearly 100 handwritten pages. Perhaps half that, in single-space type, perhaps a bit more or less? And lemme say, writing two semesters' worth of descriptive passages - meant to come from direct observation - sitting at your desk keeping your brother awake with the keys smashing, such an awful keyboard, awful, made by Acer, I mean no wonder I came out of high school with tendonitis - I'm just saying, that's no bullshit. McCord told me that in the 15 or 20 years he'd been teaching it was the best work any student had handed in. At a small rural public school - I graduated with something like 53 or 54 other students - that's not a huge thing but not a small one. But even then I loved hearing it and at the same time it didn't mean that much. (It meant something that he said it and felt it. But not really that it was true.) Of course it's the best, I figured. Even at that age I had figured out that growth and learning would require a rather different metric for evaluation. I was and am an egotist, yes. But I wasn't wrong. About other things sure but not about that. I feel almost guilty telling you this but it is what it is. And being the best little high school freshman isn't such a damn big deal.

Anita Desai, for instance, never said anything like that in response to the stories I wrote for her fiction seminar at MIT. No sir.

A handwritten page is, what, 200-300 words? Give or take. (For comparison, the story currently stands at 7,500 words or so, and comes out to 20 pages with little formatting-jostling.) Let's say 250 for the sake of argument. Meaning I seem to have written somewhere in the neighbourhood of 25,000 words in a single night of freshman year of high school. Hell, let's kick that down to 20,000...15,000 even. Currently I'm struggling to put together 2,000 in a day. They're better words but what's lacking is...a childlike eye. I seem to have such difficulty getting back to that un-self-critical state.

This is roughly 1,200 words, just over. It's killing me. I want so badly to give you something worthwhile but a recap is in order. My pleasure is not your pleasure. The story as I experience it, in the writing, is not the story you experience in the reading. And the story is meant to be read. Can you see it? Can you imagine what that felt like to hear, 'the best' this or that, from the story above? I don't know. Maybe some memory is triggered of receiving praise yourself, but my proclivities wind away from the kind of evocative description that novels require. In another time, if I hated everyone, I'd've been a wannabe William Gaddis. The formalism appeals to me. Or in any case it used to. What appeals to me now is something I can't fucking do and don't know how to fucking learn and it's time to calm down I think and write this story. It wants to be written. Today the first chapter wants to finish, I think. With an explosion and a display. First we have a requirement or two to meet. I think I can rise from this mock-supplicatory posture and meet them. Which is to say enough for the blog for the moment for you for us. Reader(s), I need you. 1,400+ and I need you more than at the start.

Warm morn: dumb Frum.

David Frum, you're an idiot! But then you (everyone but the NR subscribers) likely knew that. Here's his latest spew:

A sensational but to-date unsubstantiated allegation has been hurled at a major American religious figure. On much of the left, the reaction is gleeful delight: See! He is no better than anybody else!

The reaction on the Left has actually for the most part been, 'This hypocrisy is grotesque and undermines anti-gay credibility further - but fucking other guys is no crime. Certainly it's less morally damaging than preaching lies for a living, no?' The lying and cheating are wrong of course but the interest in the scandal isn't in his behaviour, it's in the politically-charged space between Haggard's deeds and his 'teachings'. What Haggard does publicly is very, very bad for this country. What he does privately is no different from what most men do privately - only it involves a male whore instead of a female one. It gets worse, of course. With the Frumtrellescent one it always does:

Consider the hypothetical case of two men. Both are inclined toward homosexuality. Both from time to time hire the services of male prostitutes. Both have occasionally succumbed to drug abuse.

One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.

The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution.

Which man is leading the more moral life? It seems to me that the answer is the first one. Instead of suggesting that his bad acts overwhelm his good ones, could it not be said that the good influence of his preaching at least mitigates the bad effect of his misconduct? Instead of regarding hypocrisy as the ultimate sin, could it not be regarded as a kind of virtue - or at least as a mitigation of his offense?

Let's be clear here: this is not an interesting or reasonable argument. It is in fact an insane quasi-argument - a knee-jerk rationalization for closeting as a morally upright response to homosexual desire, coupled with the insistence - apropos in Frum's case of, um, nothing - that homosexuality is somehow morally destabilizing to family and society. His defense of Haggard consists of 'At least he didn't throw it in people's faces.' The appearance of rugged, windblown strength and accordance with God's/Reagan's laws, as substitute for any kind of moral complexity or in fact honesty.

He really thinks these things. Gets paid to write them as well.

David Frum, you are our moral idiot of the week. (Good work! There was stiff competition.) And William Buckley? You get an honorary such award for inflicting this drooling imbecile on the world. Shame.

Morgen in America!, plus thoughts on discipline.

Despite the bracing chill in this apartment - and the pleasant mid-autumn light wandering in the windows - I feel sluggish. And that after a long night of sleep, even. Maybe because of it. New Galactica tonight which is something but damn, I don't want to burn away the morning unable to slap words on a page. The count is 4,500+ already, which in purely numerical terms is a good enough thing. The first thousand felt awkward; the next came more easily but no less effectively; something happened on the back half of the work to this point, and by the end there was funny and there was meaningful and they seemed to be willing to coexist.

See I'm noticing something, which is: discipline is only required after an opening period, right, in which we're powered by pure enthusiasm. Discipline being, roughly, the mechanism by which we bring ourselves from a state of rest to a state of readiness and regularize that transition. The idea is to get to the point where if I do X or Y for ten minutes, or twenty, then 90% of the time I'll be ready to do solid work on Z. The pre-disciplinary period is more fun but less valuable long-term: X and Y aren't required, some days you're ready instantly, other days you simply won't get there. At least that's how it is for me. Getting ready to write in the mornings is just exercise, not pleasurable really, but necessary. And the question, I'm finding, isn't 'How can I maximize the pleasure of Real Writing?' I trust that it will be pleasurable, that the work will be worthwhile. Or at least I can behave as-if, in Vaihinger's (to me) really interesting formulation. The question is: 'How can I raise my appreciation for the muscle-flexing of exercise, to regularize the onset of acute Writerly Pleasure?' So I want to locate a kind of adult pleasure in the ramping-up.

Now I don't see physical exercise this way. (I'm feeling good, by the way, a physical sensation - like the 'Welcome to Macintosh' screen has come on in my head and things are spinning up.) Sure, I love physical exertion after the fact, am invariably grateful and glad that I've done so. But I don't seem able to get over that activation energy problem. Because I have no discipline: physical exercise is for me a crapshoot in terms of in-the-moment enjoyment, so I can't trust it. In other words can't trust my own ability to engage. Discipline is a matter of faith - entrusting our hopes to precedent and a thrown-forward notion of ourselves. As I was fond of saying snarkily when the Red Sox were in the 2004 playoffs: Faith isn't watching and waiting, it's building. Which is to say that I have no faith where physical exercise, the growth of the body, is concerned.

Writingwise I do. Even undertaking to write a long story demonstrates some small measure of faith. But finishing it is the greater measure, and that remains to be seen. One thing: this story is getting a great deal longer already than I'd expected. The first chapter - a 'panoptic' tour through a school, introducing the cast a pair or trio at a time - is likely to consume another few thousand words if I'm not careful. Weirdly I worry I haven't spent enough time with the characters yet. I take that worry as a good sign - I might be wrong about it, but my incorrect assessment of the work would in that case be motivated by the desire to know more about them, and better. Which will make later revision and correction that much easier - hopefully because familiarity will enable concision.

The feeling of the story is coming. Best to move there now. A quote from Steinbeck for along the way, from his Journal of a Novel, letters to his editor with which he began each day's writing of East of Eden:

Now I warn you - in this section you will see and hear some strange things. And now I will get into it and may the words be very clean and sharp like good knives.

Worse things than blood move in our veins. See you later.

Eko.

Last night's episode of Lost was, well, what you'd expect: a bit of a ludicrous jumble in which a once-interesting character was sacrificed for reasons that seem to have more to do with the writing and production staff than the characters. Ach, spoilers for last night's Lost follow, so enter only if you want that special brand of bitchery, as I try to get into the writing mood for the morning.

NaNo06: nearly here.

After all the ranting and raving it's nearly time to begin this next story. Tonight I finally (finally) sat down and made the notes I'd been meaning to make for a while, about the daily lives that make the central events of the story-to-be meaningful; I've had lengthy outlines and whatnot sitting around for a while, but they've dodged when they should've delved, and something of the school's texture was filled in today in my notebook. There's reason to be hopeful, at least (at last).

I'll try not to make this blog 100% NaNoWriMo in November, but just so's you know: it's what's on my mind. I apologise in advance.

Making people feel bad about themselves; the use and abuse of fiction; offhand bathhouse comment.

Goddamn, I'm such a downer sometimes.

That's the cost of being right about everything.

Survival.

Last year several housemates and I took regular trips - twice weekly for a while - to the MIT Climbing Wall for indoor rock climbing. A friend - artist/scientist/bon vivant Solar O., which by the way if I'm an exotic dancer on a moonbase in the future my stage name will be 'Solar O' - anyhow Solar's one of the keepers of the Wall. He's in freakishly good physical condition for an MIT graduate student, all biceps and posture and so forth; his condition is made all the stranger by the fact that the only exercise he gets, apparently, is rock climbing. No aerobics as I recall. (He used to row for MIT's Crew team, but those days are gone.)

So we climbed the Wall, and while suspended from a horizontal surface a couple feet off the ground, I mulled over this state of affairs.

I could do it, you know. I'm not much of a climber - my form was horrible - but after only a couple of trips to the Wall I had noticed a tremendous increase in strength and dexterity, and in calm. Solar recommended traversals - horizontal trips around the 3-sided Wall, rather than up it - and his advice paid enormous dividends right away. Rock climbing, it would seem, is an activity at which rapid meaningful improvement is the norm. I loved it but haven't been back since doing something nasty to my lumbar region one day and taking a couple weeks off to recuperate. It's fine now; I should return. God knows I need the exercise. (But don't go too often; the pads on your fingers will thank you.)

Hanging there, my back to the earth, straining muscles I didn't know I possessed to reach a 'rock' large enough to fit three fingers half-bent, part of my (too-great) weight held up by the curve of one foot, knee hypercompressed, akimbo, off to one or another side - like a monkey in fuzzy still-frame - I had a flash of insight, among other things.

Months later I've had another. It has to do with near-death experiences, and the possibility of Heaven; tangentially it concerns National Novel Writing Month, and video games. This is to say, it is about the value of terror.

[Warning: uninformed airy speculation follows. Probably there's a 101-level CogSci textbook out there that'll clear all this up for me. But I like writing it and I have the time, so no matter.]

The New American Man: NaNoWriMo, fulfillment, satisfaction, and other (loosely-)related matters.

A couple weeks ago I wrote a longish thing, and here's a little picture of its front page, which you can click on to read the thing. Its title is 'NaNoWriMo and the New American Man', which is kind of an arch title but it's a bit late for such worries. It clocks in at ~10 pages of largely single-spaced 12pt prose, and its complete tonal turnaround is the result of shifting aims on the part of the writer: I thought it was going to be a shortish essay for submittal-for-cash, but it turned out to be something very different. The last few days I've written more concise posts that cover some of the same ground, but this is the private very late-night outburst that that's probably closest to my head-and-such. It pained me but pleasantly. Enjoy, if you're that sort.

NaNo: Why is Year Two so difficult? (Fair warning: my answer is slightly judgmental.)

[Long, angry, all things considered not worth going into. Not coherent nor convincing. Soul Coughing on the stereo, it's cool but not helping the vibe. Short version: the 2nd year of NaNo is hard because committing to NaNo means committing to learning nothing. To learn is to erect a new value system in motion. NaNo is for moving without traveling. It's a hamster wheel. See? Bad mood, you asked for it!]

On the NaNoWriMo forums you find an odd consensus: the second year is much harder than the first. This boggles my mind; I found the first year quite difficult, and contrariwise am much more excited about my Grand Idea this year than I was a year ago. Why this consensus? Apparently because the second year brings with it expectations that the NaNo kids are ill-equipped to meet.

I've been mulling over this fact for a couple of days. And tonight I realized what's happening.

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, it involves the inability to learn anything at all.

Too. Much. Information.

I recently wrote (in a long essay unlikely to see the light of day for some time) about a girl whom I taught in a pre-orientation program at MIT a few years ago. She was...odd. I wrote this about her:

I once had a writing student [...] who wrote dozens of stories - in a first-person voice that was a heightened version of her own - about powerful young female wizards, whose frustrated sexual urges (always repressed by foolish old authority figures) manifested in ranty monologues and acts of melodramatic (self-)mutilation. That’s actually fairly standard fantasy play for neurotic geeky intellectuals of a certain age; the impressive, slightly terrifying twist is that she composed these diaristic screeds in a runic alphabet of her own design. In class she once showed me one of her journals: page upon page of unreadable Tolkienesque gibberish. She was overflowing with pride and glee at that moment; in retrospect I believe that the act of creation was important to her, as was the therapeutic transference of the subject matter, but her biggest thrill might have been that she made something that no one else could understand. Revenge of a kind, I suppose, and escape into forcible privacy as well; her constant cheeriness was the negative image of the attitude of her writing, a kind of passive-aggressive rationalization of unresolved anger.

[...]

As if specifically for my amusement and disgust, my student also wore a velvet cape to class and carried a gnarled Gandalfian walking-stick. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Welllllll, tonight I found...her LiveJournal. Kill me.

In for a pound, in for a pair.

The purpose of writing; or, Outlines and outliers.

[This is a sequel to and expansion of the foregoing. It is quite long. The second title applies only tangentially to this post, moreso to the other. But I am lazy and so it stays. Quit complaining, I run the joint.]

Why write? To give.

Well, to understand, yes, and the process of writing does expose certain structures or contrasts that might not make sense in one's head. You keep a diary in part because seeing your life in plain print affords a certain perspective. But just putting it there...the act of writing is not the same as 'deep reflection', it's an opportunity for it. To write we have to see, and seeing is a reasonable goal.

So: yes. Obviously you write in part for yourself. And as a scholar, for instance, you write in part because the accountability of writing and signing your work gives an edge to your thoughts and a wholeness (in theory). Which is to say, you write socially.

Which is to say you write because there is a Reader, and if the diarist writes for an audience of one (and painfully familiar), it's still a projection, still a creative act, still an offering (just as enrolling in therapy or proposing marriage is a kind of offering), and so even the diarist faces a low-pressure form of the same responsibility, and so we can say with confidence:

Why write? To give of ourselves.

When it comes to National Novel Writing Month - an activity expected to draw 75,000 participants this year - that's a bit of a goddamn problem.

NaNo: Further exhortation to OUTLINE, OUTLINE, OUTLINE for God's sake.

[X-posted here from the NaNoWriMo fora, a mini-rant on the importance of outlining - which is to say, the importance of finding creativity in all parts of the writing process, and coming to understand structure as a creative aim rather than a miraculous accident. Which is to say: a short essay on what I think it means to be, to a greater or lesser extent, an adult.]

Outline.

[Just skip this post. I'm tired as hell and it's dull. Really it's one of those 'Wally, look what you did today and feel good about yourself' kind of things. I'm serious! This isn't one of those faux-humble introductions I sometimes stick on posts. This is honest-to-God bullshit, Reader(s), and you're better off just checking out my 'Top Ten' sites instead. That's how far we've sunk. I'm recommending a for-profit links blog over an autobiographical post about writing. We'll try again tomorrow, promise.]

More rants at the NaNo forums...

Advice to NaNoWriMo fantasy writers: Read less fantasy.

I just posted this to one of the NaNo forums, and would like to hold on to it.

***

Strong, strong advice:

Read less fantasy.

If you want to write good fantasy - compelling speculative fiction ordered in some way differently from our own world - then you need to let go of the bullshit that's come to define the genre today. This isn't to say 'stop reading fantasy altogether.' Rather, try to shape your reading habits (and preparation for novel-writing) by returning to the cardinal virtues of storytelling regardless of genre.

What you want to do is make a world that works according to a compelling logic, right? Well that has nothing to do with the trappings of High Fantasy or steampunk or urban gothic or any such thing.

Why is Dune a great novel? Because it's a compelling tale of families and tribes responding to political, scientific, ecological imperatives. There are fantasy elements, yes - but they just extend the basic reality of the story.

Why is Lord of the Rings a great novel? Because it tells a story steeped in thousands of pages of backstory assembled by a literary scholar and longtime student of myth-systems. And because it's written with careful attention to tone, a singular voice to which Tolkien was totally committed. He had a tale to tell about his world, and it happened to...a hobbit. He didn't start with a Mary Sue and then pile indignities upon her to justify personality-projection. The world was everything. It could be real. (Notice how little magic there is in LotR, how much history.)

Why is Ulysses a great novel (and indeed a great work of fantasy)? Because it's about real people doing merely human things, and it invests a richly-imagined setting - Dublin, 1904 - with a quality of magic. (Remember that there's a 200-page hallucination toward the end of the book.) The magic springs from the world and the day-to-day work of just living in it. Ultimately it's a story about a guy with a dead son whose wife is fucking another guy, and this other guy wandering around looking for a father figure. The High Modernist trappings come afterward.

By now you've probably read enough fantasy novels to be far too familiar with the genre conventions to which so many such tales slavishly adhere. Now: forget them. They're like grammatical conventions. You learn them to be competent, forget them to be good, and come to them afresh to confront greatness. And maybe NaNoWriMo isn't about any of those things, but it could be. If you want to write a Decent Book as well as a Passable Imitation of the Other Fantasists, you've got to remember that the conventions of fantasy come after the conventions of serious storytelling.

If people tell you your two-paragraph summary of your novel sounds dumb, there are two things probably happening: (a) they're jerks; (b) they're right. And 'It's fantasy!' isn't a valid excuse. A decent fantasy story can be summarized - its meaning captured - without recourse to the silly tropes and trappings of the genre.

After all: 'A student comes home from college to deal with his father's death and mother's remarriage; revelations about the family lead him to a crisis of confidence, and eventually to violence.' Name that play?

Or: 'A charismatic believer lives by an archaic code of honor in a changing world; he and his pragmatic friend go wandering and learn both the limits of such fantasies, and their transformative power. He dies disillusioned and broken, but having learned.' Name that Spanish novel?

Or: 'A bourgeois peasant village is caught up in a war between a resurgent imperialist power and the free people of the continent; and when one of those peasants is charged by a multinational coalition with an espionage mission, he finds that even world war is just one form of change, and that myths always give way to the brute facts of conquest, of power, and the danger they bring.' I imagine you can name that midcentury (anti-)modern English novel.

Or: 'A band of Nixonian thugs engineers the overthrow of a representative democracy and the establishment of a dictatorship, veiling a religious agenda shared by those at the top. But the son of one of these negative charismatics, adherent of an old religion emphasising strength through sacrifice and inner peace, joins a band of democratic rebels. After a period of civil war, a new order is established - and the state asserts the proper place of religious organizations, as its servants.' What's that sci-fi movie trilogy?

(Consider also the George R. R. Martin books, which are almost magic-free for the first several hundred remarkable pages - and are based on the War of the Roses. The fantasy is meaningful because it affects a real society, the details of which aren't just fudged. That's good writing, regardless of genre.)

Don't tell the conventions. Don't tell the plot. Tell the story. Serve your characters and their world. Magic comes after. Fairies and 'faeries' and whatnot, they come after.

Long, long, long after.

Good luck!

Your...characters told you to do what? (And you listened for God's sake?!)

It's common to hear novelists talk about their characters running away with them, suggesting new storylines, overgoing outlines, spouting unforeseen dialogue, etc.

Bullshit, of course. Utter bollocks. The fantasies of passive-aggressive attention-starved introverts who spend a large portion of every day in freakish solitude trying to put words into the mouths of nonexistent people to gratify their selfish urge for an aesthetically satisfying continuity and meaningful texture to an ultimately pointless (and pointlessly short) life.

But it happens you know. Or something does.

So what happens, when that happens?

The great all-over-the-world Amen, a single voice in parts, uplifted as if to shatter the vault of sky.

The problem, or rather one of the many problems, with undertaking a task that you know to be merely beginner's work - that is to say, with the conscious acceptance of a process by which discipline-in-craft is to be acquired - is that it becomes hard to take in great artworks without feeling inferior. Once you accept a circumscription of import and ambit you accept new notions of ambition, which is to say, you accept great works as a valid personal measuring-stick. And at that point you finally face up to your limitations wholly, honestly (one hopes).

I'm saying only: at the point which I should be taking the most inspiration from great work, I'm finally in a position to be intimidated functionally rather than grandly, abstractly. I have outgrown some small part of my expectations, finally. The proximate cause: viewing The Singing Detective and feeling a crushing shame at the triviality of my own writing. I know that I can do funny dialogue and pleasant enough prose. But thus far I don't feel I've produced a morally serious work of fiction and it's embarrassing. Last November's project - a novel in 30 days - came to a skidding stop after only 20 (I have no real regrets in this case), but in truth it would have represented a success only of habit, of time-limited self-mastery. The writing itself is of little consequence except personally, and even then it shows no growth, with the exception of maybe a half-dozen short passages in which I thought past myself. If only a paragraph at a time. There's no attempt to outstrip my former selves in emotional terms, so the prose is only a show - readily apparent from the first word, even if my enthusiasm is apparent as well. (Not enough.)

I have yet to fully inhabit the consciousness of a character. Watching The Singing Detective I'm reminded that Dennis Potter had, by the end of his long career, found it in himself to go out in spirit to a whole ensemble of characters, to grant them the courtesy of voice and want.

He was old then, and near enough to dying. It's foolish to compare first fictions to culminating masterworks.

But that's not the worry.

I lack confidence in my ability to learn how to reach such all-around awareness. I can articulate what I lack, can imagine an expanded awareness, but can't conceive of a discipline that might lead me to its threshold. I fear death even at a distance and am unsure how to set about growing new consciousnesses in conversation. I can not imagine what the craft might consist of.

I am acting, then, in the absence of dream. Which may serve as a definition of faith, coarsely, but I've not become convinced I want any part of such a suspended state.

Willful triviality is a victory of sorts but not final.

I'm a dumb bastard; also NaNoWriMo.

I left my cell phone in my rental car, which promptly drove off with the Avis guy to Logan. They tell me the phone wasn't found. I don't know whether to believe that. Regardless, I've put a stop on the phone, and ordered a replacement (I knew there was a reason I got insurance on that thing). Should reach me tomorrow or the next day at Pendulous Publishers.

If you're trying to reach me, please use email. The gmail account ideally.

Also: I've pretty much decided to set aside the NaNoWriMo project for now. The month is about to end and I have no way of finishing the 50,000 words; if the story appealed to me enough I'd finish it or at least press on until the 30th, but honestly I don't really feel much attachment to the story or the characters. (At least not to the presumptive protagonist, who's like a dickhead Mary Sue and has precious few good lines, intriguing shifts of character, or interesting motivations). The topic certainly appeals, for lots of reasons - the weird work of mourning, the confusion of a certain age, mixed relationship signals, people switching bodies, the usual 20-something first-time novelist bullshit - but this just isn't a great story in its current form. I could do it justice perhaps some other time.

But holy shit just let's say it. This experience has been fantastic. I've enjoyed NaNoWriMo no end, and I want to get to work on something else right away. In my personal Purification Tour (inspired by the Mutantor and my persistent friend Bob 'The Terminator' Lennon) I'm taking up some changes next month. One of those will be the making-permanent of my dayshifted schedule: this whole I'm-happier-when-I-work-in-the-morning thing is no fluke, and so I want to spend some time working on a couple of other writing projects that've been burning holes in my brain of late. If I can't seem to keep my mind off these other projects, maybe they're what I should be working on.

So yeah, I'm now yet another asshole with an Unfinished Manuscript sitting in his digital desk drawer. But let's take stock:

• Writing habit: growing, deepening, thrilling
• State of mind: happy (surprising as hell)
• Confidence: increasing by the day, by the word
• Midsection: about to undergo fundamental reevaluation and aggressive downsizing
• And in November of 2005 I think I wrote about 100 pages of prose fiction of highly variable quality while holding down this lame job and taking a week-long vacation to see family and dealing with a dead friend and deepening new friendships and new relationships and new commitments and beginning to restore old and forgotten ones so precious I'd have died to lose them though I didn't know it, so though I have nothing but praise and best wishes for my man MRhe (who'll make it, I wager), I just gotta but look here see: to even the barest shred of self-doubt burrowing in my clattering, hollow, monumentally self-absorbed brain/heart/etc. this evening I hereby send a heartfelt nyah nyah nyah.

Go forth, Reader(s), and have a wonderful evening.

Almost 35K!

Depends on whom you ask though. wc seems to think I'm at 34,900 or so, but Ulysses (the interesting writing program I'm using, with its delectable fullscreen mode) puts me in the lower 34K range. So I don't feel bad reporting it as, say, 34.5K. But the title stays, damn it!!

Today's writing: why the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice should probably be entitled 'Narcissus: First Blood, Part XXII', and why Lester Bangs was right about mourning. (In reading we all oughta be omnivores, I think.)

I have a (rental) car for the week! Driving to Buffalo tomorrow, and home for Thanksgiving. Good to see the family again, but good also to have lots of hours alone in the car, me and the road and a pocket tape recorder for dictating sweet sweet chapters in this boring, derivative saga of self-discovery and tortured prose I call my 'novel in progress'. Did you know you can rent a car from Avis for $200 for a week? No shit.

Plus the car's got a CD player, so I can take with me the superb Trey Anastasio 'Midwest Soup' soundboard compilation up at eTree - recent performances of his revitalized '70 Volt Parade' ensemble, featuring two backup singers (a helpful addition) and some outstanding new songwriting from the main compositional force behind Phish. Anastasio's tunes have reached an interesting middle ground between the complexity of earlier Phish songs (through Rift but up to 'Guyute') and the stronger rock textures of his stuff starting with roughly Billy Breathes; his playing right now is superb, and this ensemble is really tight and energetic. The sound on the SBD compilation is what you'd expect; if you follow Trey at all, this is a priceless find. The band's definitely at its best now, and his songwriting is just frighteningly strong, even if his vocal performances aren't always up to snuff anymore.

Can anyone recommend a good Blur album? I'm thinking of taking one on the road. I can't really take the fantastic Keith Jarrett recording I've been loving lately (the Koln solo concert), because it'll likely put me right to sleep (it's good but serene, maybe too much so for driving), so I'm thinking that when I hit the dissociative stretch of afternoon/evening around sunset, I'll need some appropriately mind-wide-open music. If Blur's tunes are as atmospheric and involving as 'Tender' I'm into it like the Inuit. (Gorillaz' second album, the superb Demon Days, is on that level.)

So: a goodly bit of writing this morning, plans for the week, a rough direction in which to travel for this National No Excuses Month project (west - everything always seems to be west, doesn't it?), and I'm freezing my damn nipples off here in this kitchen without a shirt so thank you I'll go shower now.

Hail the Mutantor!!

Like a flag waving on a windy day.

32,993 and feeling pleased with tonight's labours.

I have a car rented for this week's Thanksgiving trip home.

I haven't written about Frostbyte; I don't know what to say that wasn't said eloquently and lastingly this weekend by people who knew Frosty better than I did. Writing has helped immeasurably. (And I'm nearly on schedule for this November Project.)

Reader(s), this time together is good, it's good.

30,769 and let's be honest, slightly depressing!

The nice thing is, a lot of words have come today. 3,000+ in the story; 2,000+ on the blog (and the latter made the former possible).

The other thing is: heavy, damned heavy writing. Turns out I have rather a dark view of the sexual transactions between men and women, or at the very least I'm quite happy to write such a view. Hey, I think the whole thing's kind of neat, y'know, boys and girls doing that cool thing with the naked and the heavy chemicals, whatever, but there's more than a bit of Machiavelli there to leaven more than a bit of Freud in the ol' SEX CHAPTER of this lametacular 'book'.

I'm so glad there's a sex chapter.

New excerpt.

Thinking about these people - who are of course in essence the people from my hometown in WNY - is weirdly comforting, and gives the all-too-rare feeling that maybe by the end of this month I could get at something true or real through this writing project. If not, that's OK - just as important to develop the ol' toolbox, as Stephen King insists. (On Writing, if you are into such things, is an inspiring and in places moving book about writing and the Writing Life. Like a gruff male tonic to Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird, which is New Agey Crazy Aunt vibe.)

If you've met my family you may recognize one of these people. If I've written this alright, and you've lived in a small town, you may recognize several. Yes it's a single long paragraph.

Laura the bookshop keeper is seated on the high riser in the back of the old school's gymnasium between her friends Jo and Nicole, blonde brown blonde hair in a close huddle, cheeks red smiles beaming eyes clear. The morning passed in relative peace and ease and they feel the Festival has started extremely well this year; in high school they shared boyfriends, which everyone knows and still finds funny, and Nicole and Laura kissed in the woods after prom and all summer long, which no one knows or will ever ever find out. On the riser below them are Eszter and Gregor, nearly 80 years apiece, likely only sticking around for the afternoon's festivities before retiring early to the house on Jefferson St where they've lived all their adult lives. Her hand rests on his, weighs almost nothing; they've had a good life together and the Festival, every two years, is like a vacation. In 20 years they haven't been on a trip together, since Gregor developed his bad knee, and even then his business travel had accounted for the largest part of their journeys beyond the village limits. A year from now Eszter's other kidney will fail and she'll slip away from him, in her sleep - a year after that, he'll follow. Their breaths are steady and calm, heads inclining toward one another, and her hand weighs nothing at all. There's Karl, Laura's fiancée, hanging back by the emergency exit, smoking a cigarette; and there are Mr and Mrs McAllister, whose son died last summer while camping with friends - they need this almost more than anyone; and Dick Waters, the schoolteacher, his hearing aid no doubt lost again; and there's old Dutch, the merry Englishman who moved to town with his wife and children a few years ago - he's in his usual outfit, a tailored suit still in fine condition after 20 years in his closet ('for safekeeping - it's too good to wear just any old time, you wear a rubbish suit to church of course, but feel the quality of this'), making jokes that were old before the kids in his small audience were born. Even his laughter has an accent - and his accent gets mysteriously thicker when he's talking to American women, of course. There's the Mayor, Mary Waters, the teacher's eldest daughter, who caused a scandal when she didn't take her husband's name and caused another by being quite a competent though obviously frustrated Mayor on the whole. She wears a blue pantsuit after a certain fashion, her hair short and streaked with red-blonde highlights (after another), and the start of the Festival of Permutation is the day she looks forward to most - never moreso than since she took over the Mayoral post, with its litany of zoning discussions and unanimous procedural votes and favours granted not to friends but to their Families' Good Names. Her husband Isaac clings to a graduate degree as one sign of his worth, and Mary as another; they met at school, and she stayed in their college town for him so long as he promised to move back with her to take care of her mother in her last year. Like anything else: the last year lasted five, and they're permanent residents now, though mercifully not living with father in law Dick anymore, with that fucking hearing aid he's always losing and his constant comments about gays or Arabs or whoever it is he's 'just joking around' about today. Isaac gets to sit at the front of the gym with her but instead sits on the bleachers with everyone, making idle chatter with Laura's younger sister Lynn, back home from senior year this week, sitting maybe a bit too close to her, meeting his wife's eyes maybe once or twice too often, too quickly. The smallest of things. When Mr Waters dies Isaac will cause a little scandal all his own by leaving Mary and moving back to the city; she'll take only the smallest hint of satisfaction in knowing that, in his life, he'll never be happier than when they first met and fell in love, over the heaviest gnocchi either of them had ever eaten or even heard of, Jesus! with that olive oil drizzled on top and the capers, do you remember? Of course I do, honey, how could I forget?

And that's more or less that. We're well past 29K and steaming toward and through 30,000 tawdry and hackneyed words today, folks, inspired by a nice breakfast fajita plate at the B-Side and the brilliant fall weather.

I closed comments on that last long post, but I don't suppose it's too big a deal. Still if you want to upbraid me for something in there, stick it here I guess. And props to the mighty MRhe (no accent because I'm lazy) for busting through 30K as if through a papier-mache glass ceiling. Excelsior and so forth.

27K+, moving on; Fbyte; some relationship stuff.

The MIT Chapel has in my time never looked better than it did at Frostbyte's memorial service yesterday, lit by his LED art. I wish I had more to say about it just now, but it's hard to focus on it. This weekend cleared my head a lot about Frostbyte, strengthened bonds, brought this extended tep family closer together - and between the talk of Frosty's own artwork and chats with other people about writing, I came away inspired. Which, I imagine, is exactly what Frosbtye would have wanted.

I have a lot of words to write, and personally I'm doubting I'm going to be able to make them all up today. But it's worth a try. That said: I passed the 27,000 mark yesterday, and if I can find a way to unmoor myself from this need to nail everything down the first time in prose, this Ridiculous November Project might just come off alright in the end.

I wish this blog were more entertaining these days, but these updates on page counts do me more good than harm, I think, so please continue to bear with them, Reader(s), until the end of the month (or the limit of my ability to actually write this story, whichever comes first). As silly and undignified as NaNoWriMo is, it helps a lot.

OK, now in an unusual style for this by-and-large impersonal (though hopefully impassioned!) blog, some shit about ex-girlfriends and such below the fold. You're better off not reading it, I just want to get some things off my chest. So WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS FLAT-OUT LIVEJOURNALESQUE, THE FIRST-PERSON SINGULAR PRONOUN APPEARS ALL OVER THAT SHIT, AND IF YOU ARE FOR INSTANCE AN EMPLOYER OR POTENTIAL EMPLOYER YOU'RE BETTER OFF JUST STAYING THE HELL ABOVE THIS FOLD!! YOU CAN'T SAY YOU WEREN'T WARNED.

~25,400, pleased, moving forward, self-loathing!! Three under par.

Aargh, an earlier miscount! I had left ~100 words of notes in the main text.

That's OK.

In the course of these last few hundred words, thrown down surprisingly quickly (imagine that, having an OK time writing this bloody fiction), I realized something about myself. I'm not sure I like it, but maybe admitting it is the first step to overcoming it. Not certain I feel like sharing this little piece of in-fo right now regardless.

Not overall a perfect day. A number of personal things are in flux. I think I might be finally apprehending the purpose of my next couple of years. Death and dissolution on the brain this fine evening. Reserved at the Harvard Book Store: one copy of Vollmann's abridgement of his enormous and poorly titled Rising Up, Rising Down. He's an interesting writer; should be good. Any luck it'll be ready shortly for the sweet pickup at HBS. Waiting to be read shortly: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, even a glance at which has helped me this week to worry less about the demon Grammar and its devil cousin Sense.

Reader(s), let's stay salty out there, OK?

This is all changing. No longer for what it used to be for. Nor for whom, it seems.

25,030.

'It's your special day.'

No shit!! The halfway mark is reached, momentum has been all but lost. It's been hard to pick things up this week; the weekend was hard and the week has not provided comfort. I think perhaps this coming weekend could provide the break(age) I need.

In any case: that's something. Nothing too damn great but something. Plus now the Grim One Half has passed me definitely in word count, and as hard as it is for me to get these words onto the page, I gotta keep up!

Probably, as Sherv points out, 22,222 would have been appropriate to blog (doubly so this week).

But maybe I'll pass on to you word 44,444 on the way out.

W.

22,000.

And moving on steadily, if not happily.

Chris Baty, head of NaNoWriMo, thinks you should just give on beauty and concentrate on cranking out lame prose - just to have something done. He's probably right, though I'd like to think I'm capable of achieving both. I'm almost certainly not.

Anyhow: 22,000. Hoping for the best.

Seems like the thing to do.

I passed 21,000 words. It seems like such a small thing. All I could write today was about Frostbyte, of course. But I showered and got dressed and made ready to go out into the afternoon, and then just lost interest. I can stay home and eat, I guess. Maybe leftovers. I don't much feel like writing, or going out.

Me, me, me.

But in any case, 21K+ is nothing to sneeze at. I'm nearly halfway between 'nothing' and 'novelist', even in the most halfwitted, half-baked sense of the word.

All the emails I've written or received since 2001 might be lost. I hope not. I don't know.

Someone is fucking dead. Sitting here blogging about lost emails.

I would ask, 'What's the point of this writing?' But I know, I know. I know a lot of things that don't seem to help much, did you notice?

My life is in those emails. Live and lose one life at a time, please. Please.

Gone, just like a train.

A friend of mine died yesterday; his name was Frostbyte, more or less. Kevin, really, but I don't know that I ever called him that. I find that I don't know how to write about him. He irritated me no end, at times, and our lifestyles after he left tep were wholly dissimilar. But he was brilliant and messy and good, and I loved him, and I miss him now, the way one invariably does when it makes no difference. Last night a lot of old friends were brought together to mourn and celebrate; it seems right to thank them for that. We are lucky who know where to turn at such moments.

This story about a bus seems silly in comparison. But she had said: 'No, it's the opposite of silly,' and that's heartening. We are lucky too, whose only prisons we can write our way out of.

I always tell people I'll live to be 100, but I wonder.

Wow.

This is such an uncomfortable place to sit.

Tomorrow the computer gets moved out of the living room.

Resignation.

No, not in the sense of 'handing in one's badge and gun'. I've resigned myself to not getting any writing done today. Just not feeling it, and I don't want to waste this section of the story. I'm feeling a bit of stalling out, and I intend to make a run this weekend, but today is a notes-and-brainstorming day. I've now got a 'writing buddy' - whatever that means! - and am heartened by the progress each of us has made, but regardless of word count (which has been an invaluable tool for pushing me forward), I think the whole matter will be served by a bit of structure at this point. The destination is semi-clear - by the end of the weekend I'd like to have one more key conversation in place, and the arrival at the major location of the whole story (you're welcome to say it's a bit late if you'd like) rendered in prose - but the question in my head that needs answering is, 'Why are we going to this Festival?' Or to put it another way: 'What is this event going to show us about these people?'

They're not really people. Probably they could be but I've led them down too demonstrative and mannered a path. All these newcomer's mistakes. (And yet the feeling is glorious you know.)

Awful nightmares last night. I couldn't figure out why until I remembered the very creepy episode of Angel that Peter and Saurabh watched. Bastards. It was a serial-killer dream, you know. I ended up imagining myself on the roof, as I came out of it, waiting to be confronted, armed with roof tiles for throwing, more or less resigned to death. The part of the dream over which I had no control was markedly less optimistic.

Goodlyish, I guess: 16,091.

Acch! It's like I don't even give a damn about anything but the sound of my own voice. This morning there was some byplay in an industrial kitchen (at the taco stand), and a brief excursion into a basement wholly devoid of atmosphere (on account of, y'know, I can't serve the story with description if I'm obsessed with quasi-autobiography and masturbatory asides about racial epithets), and a too-long cheesy homage to Beyond Zork that probably six people alive would even recognise (that number includes author Brian Moriarty, I should hope).

Today I made the mistake of being impressed with myself. Tonight, obviously: notes, outline, a floorplan for the next bit. We're only a few hundred words off the pace, and there's a lot of rewriting already suggesting itself, and a lot of ground to cover. Better to leave holes and patch them later than to try to make up flaws now and have to rejigger the entire thing when (IF!!) a second draft ever happens.

Hell, it might not even be worth it. To revise, I mean. Worth it to finish, no question. I'm loving this and learning. But the 'artwork' itself is real newbie stuff.

Some of the sentences are maybe OK:

'Hey little man, come back!' And then muttered: 'You damn dirty ape.' (Afterward Pipi would wonder about the propriety of calling his little Indian friend a 'damn dirty ape'; though it was a reference to a well-known dystopian sci-fi film, the line carried a hint of racial condescension, and if our good liberal quasi-hero was alert to one conversational faux pas, it was hints of racial condescension. On the other hand, 'ape' has not traditionally been slung at subcontinental transplants in this country; 'wog' and 'camel jockey' (of all things) are occasionally pulled out, yes, but the particular animus at work undearneath ape in the contemporary United States finds roots in a centuries-old confrontation with (or, in more psychoanalytic terms, the centuries-old repression of a fascination with and failure to confront) our own personal super special favourite minority group, the cultural Daisy to Anglo-Saxon America's Donald, viz., niggers. So Sid felt a bit guilty, and blushed a bit red, and resolved to apologise to the first non-white he saw - heroic. It will come to have been wasted energy and introspection. It will come to have been irrelevant, for little bitty Sid will have long since disappeared from sight. It will come to have been a fruitless inquiry, like most trains of thought starting in guilt rather than shame. Plus nobody heard him say it, so lighten the fuck up will you.)

Big Sid looked around frantically, catching the eye of the taco guy and shrugging eloquently, and then - sprightly for a lazy office worker, or rather former lazy office worker, his resignation having been tendered roughly 18 hours previous - ducked under the counter as well, and wandered searching into the kitchen.

Then there's the bit with the moss and the dead person. Boring. I'm not sure the bit about racial slurs belongs in the text, but I liked the idea of Sid calling the kid a 'damn dirty ape' and then feeling bad about it, and working himself into a knot about how calling one minority by the specially-assigned disgusting name granted to another is offensive to quite literally everyone, even though no one was listening. We have a responsibility, I've always thought, to beat ourselves up a bit when no one will agree to do it for us.

To the showers!

Beyond Zork.

One of the details burned into my brain from my childhood:

My tines be long
My tines be short
My tines end 'ere my first report.

What am I?

The riddle is burned into the side of a mountain during a storm; the answer is of course 'lightning'.

Strangely enough, relevant to today's writing.

Starting the day: 14,207.

So yes, a little bit behind owing to yesterday's relaxation. But some work got done in the evening, so all isn't lost.

Bufu is writing about his fitness regimen, Holloway his testicular ups and downs (mortifying); personal-motivation blogging is the wave of the future, homeslices. Catch it!

And on the ninth day he rested a bit...

...because he slept in.

And lo, it was glorious.

Ahead again, slightly, and coasting oddly.

The second week of this benighted November project is starting out well but I'm worried - this is the week to pay the piper, and the prose excesses of Week One now bear some responsibility for setting up forward motion. Aaaaargh. I mean no seriously AAAAAAARRRGH!! I'm terrified. I'm also enjoying the writing, and tonight for the first time this month I got some semi-good stuff done in the evening. Even just 800 words feels indescribable.

You guys have got to try this or something like it.

What we've come to: we've come to 13,621. And:

Big Sid grabbed Little Sid by the hand and quickstepped over to the taco stand. 'OK what the hell is happening out there?' he asked, raising his voice over the growing din. The crowd had reached the doors, pushed into the lobby, and two dozen young soccer players (still in grass-stained knee socks and shinguards) and their parents were fast approaching in search of inexpensive faux-Mexican food. The room had been empty as a brand new tomb a moment before; now a riot of colour and noise (Dad won't be there when I get home) surrounded the two of them, and the now-somewhat-intimidating taco vendor.

'I told you, it's the morning rush!' The taco chap seemed quite jocular in spite (because?) of the onrush of people. When the wave of 14-year-old girls in pigtails and sweaty jerseys crested and broke upon his counter, he motioned for the Sids to either order something or step aside to let other customers through, and Sid was so flummoxed that conscious thought left him; his reptile brain kicked in, and he ordered a burrito con bistec with extra guacamole, and some papas for his junior partner, who protested that he had Lunchables but let's face it you can't stop certain behaviours in an emergency situation.

Where we're headed:

(Another thing to know about the Festival of Permutation: It starts in a few moments, and goes on for 72 hours, ending at sunrise after an all-night party to which even the children are invited. In a few moments they'll emerge from the dilapidated school building with its ancient wooden smell into a light rain and morning sun colourless at first, deepening to daylight. For the young children it's best for they have never had to let go of this feeling, never come to that sudden stop, have dreamed up their whole lives without the need for maintenance or make-believe.)

And so forth, Reader(s). And so forth. It's unclear where the ceiling sits but the floor is slowly rising, my worst is getting better I think, and that might just be something. Working over my worst, at fucking last.

12,891: at the taco stand.

In spite of a late start and no idea what was going to get written today, I've managed to squeeze out 1300 words on the subject of, er, what appears to be some sort of Taco Stand of Predestination out in the middle of nowhere. I know, I know what you're thinking, Reader(s): in God's name how does he continue to make this magic. You don't even lift up your voice at the end of the sentence, because it's not a question worth asking - it's a mystery. Rhetorical. I know, Reader(s).

Personally I'm not pleased in general with the writing today, though by the end there was a certain mix of levity and (because I am a pampered bourgeois office drone) affected melancholy that appealed to me, if likely no one else. I haven't ironed out a process for getting 'warmed up' in the morning - reading sometimes helps but sometimes hurts, writing on this blog can go either way - so it takes a bit of wandering around on the page before I can get anything that pleases me, if I can do so at all. Certainly just sitting down to stare at a blank page doesn't move the work forward. It's interesting to see in a relatively uninflected way my own shortcomings and destructive idiosyncracies re: writing, this thing that I've always thought of as a talent and am now forced to think about as a skill. The craft of writing is taking for-fucking-ever to come to me (or for me to come to it), and it's one of those things that won't come any more quickly just because I've (supposedly) a knack for turning phrases. Perhaps that's a sign that you're starting to follow the right career: that even though you can't bully or hurry your way into success, you still want to stick to the work. I find that I want to stick with this, even though the pace of improvement scales with work ethic instead of 'what God gave you' and frankly I have fuck all as far as work ethic goes.

Luckily there's a nice positive-feedback cycle in there, else I'd be dead in the water.

Starting from scratch is tiring though.

(Dave Sim talks about how he wasn't the most talented comic book artist even in Southern Ontario when he started, but he was the one who made deadlines and worked all day every day on his craft, so he stayed in business when the other guys petered out. What he doesn't say: he's now one of the most skilled comic book artists who ever lived, ever. It's like you have to include a disclaimer when you talk about Sim, though: 'Never mind the crazy men-and-women stuff, let's just talk about craft.' I admire Sim as a craftsman but I just don't have what he had. And I wonder if I can someday get it without sacrificing, y'know, my sanity.)

The thing?

Inside, Sid looked around, fake-smiling in the way people do when they want to demonstrate that they're not behaving badly and losing their cool even though Fate has surrounded them with incompetence, e.g. this vending machine full of goddamn devil candies.

Little Sid emerged from the bathroom and covered his mouth in authentic Victorian shock-horror while Sid delivered a soliloquy on the nonconsensual violation of those responsible for building machines that would dothistoaguylikeme &c.

There was a sound like every toaster in America popping simultaneously. Chuck looked up.

'You guys might want to get in line for tacos now if you're in the mood,' said the taco guy. Little Sid's eyes flicked to the door.

Unimpressive!

Your guess is as good as mine, Reader(s).

11,617 and happy.

A good morning, after a slow and choppy start. I hate to admit it, but I read some Camille Paglia to get the brain working.

Here's where we stand:

Picture the crowded sky. No time, no being, no sense of size, no sight. Some things are so big you can never see them; we see clouds and stars, painted on and peeking through the invisible sky itself. The sky is a colour scheme. Some things are so big they can never see.

The westbound bus is a single electron in a single current in a single thought passing through the mind of the sky. Its content are invisible. It marks the passage of time on a scale of which the sky needs no awareness. We think of a 'thought' but we mean a million billion collisions and transmissions and explosions in our heads. We wouldn't know what to do with a single 'thought', anymore than the sky concerns itself with a single drop of rain. It is the rain. It is the clock. The lightning is its sweeping second hand.

Time means nothing to the sky. And the westbound bus, which is about to make its first stop, means even less.

Monday, start over, grudgingly.

Independent investigation has confirmed the results of the latest survey: the new glasses, softcore-hipster in disposition, definitely look better when set off by hair, even only a couple of inches long. Currently yours truly sports a short head shave, trusty and efficient, aerodynamic, but the shocking whiteness of the ol' noggin makes the glasses look stark. A bit like I'm Trying to Send a Message, if you know what I mean. It's 6:30am and thus far not a single idea has occurred to me today. I've also written myself through to the end of the two scenes I had thought a bit about in advance. So now what?

We saw Sarah Silverman's movie last night: Jesus Is Magic! It's pretty funny, but Silverman's onstage persona is that of a blithe narcissist prone to racial caricature, and nothing peeks through that persona to indicate she isn't an actual blithe narcissist prone to racial caricature; I almost argued (there was a Q&A session at the MIT screening we all attended) that the real object of satire in the show was smug liberal complacency, but by the time the Q&A was over I was convinced of the opposite: she's smart, sexy (and sexual), has an interestingly skewed perspective on everyday cliché, and is a big fan of liberal complacency - since it's the source of her material, her audience, and her worldview. Make no mistake: it's a funny film, a very funny film much of the time. But there's a bit of South Park syndrome happening: she'll start with a sharp spoof on Broadway 'me! Me! ME!' ingenue numbers, when proceed to a shock-tactic joke about fucking babies, and your laughter is of the 'is she really doing something like that?' variety. Perhaps it was the academic setting, but by the end of the film the shock had worn off, with one exceptional scene retaining its power. (If it means anything, I found myself really wanting to see a Spike Lee film.)

Her bit in The Aristocrats is extraordinary; if you've not seen it, grab that movie, which is stolen by black and female comedians who see that playing dirty is sometime just dirtily playing nice. Does that make any sense at all.

OK, they're calling me out of the bullpen. I find that I'm not even in my own audience at this point; pitching for a crowd of zero. It's a deeply weird feeling that I can't explain, on account of it's 6:43am and words fail me.

NaSociologyWriMo.

A quick look at the fora for this November project yields some (slightly depressing) information.

At the NaNoWriMo homepage there are genre-specific fora. The total number of posts per forum breaks down like this (I've bolded what's surely the crucial number):

Chick lit: 1,097

Erotic Fiction: 1,584

Fantasy: 10,392

Historical Fiction: 1,275

Horror & Thriller: 1,761

Literary Fiction: 2,028

Mystery & Suspense: 1,220

Romance: 1,708

Science Fiction: 3,594

Spiritual & New Age: 601

Young Adult & Youth: 1,291

Other Genres: 1,449

When people caricature participants in this goofball project as fanfic writers with delusions of grandeur, that's of course reductive and offensive - I'm no fanfic writer, and my sense of my own grandeur is a sensible identification of mere fact - but there's more than a grain of truth in there. I hate to admit it, but the 'Fantasy' forum is exactly what you'd expect: fanfic writers, delusions, the whole mess, like a museum of 20th century fantasy fiction cliché without the irony.

Of course you can't blame the fantasy writers in the fora; they love the stuff, and they love talking about it with one another, love sharing it, love trying to snatch some of the glory of the books and authors that in their mind elevate them. If excessive filial piety and reliance on cliché are a problem for them, well...I'm a Catholic, who am I to complain? (And didn't my lightweight pomo story give me two characters named 'Sid' who meet on a bus bound for a mythical goddamn village? One of them unironically named fucking Siddhartha?!)

From one post, asking for character names:

I have a cheerleader with pink hair, a human spliced with a tiger who listens to jazz and spouts modern poetry, and a cyborg who has the traits of Superman. Also, there's a seductress punk alien girl who is way majorly hott who needs a good name.

Now I know if someone described the cast of Buffy you'd probably scoff (a superpowered former cheerleader, a lesbian witch who nearly killed everyone on earth when her lover died, the bumbling male sidekick who dates a 1,000-year-old capitalist former vengeance demon, a stoner werewolf guitarist, the stuffy English librarian)...but those over-the-top characters were all just hyperbolic versions of standard high school types (to wit: the pretty outcast, the nerd, the sensitive yutz, the proto-feminist, the secretly-smart stoner, the buttoned-up former bad boy stumbling into middle age surrounded by the young). So many of the posts in the Fantasy forum are about collecting characteristic fantasy tropes, not necessarily redeploying them, not reimagining them. And why should we bother reimagining the things that give us deep pleasure?

Yes. You're absolutely right, Devil's Advocate Voice. There's no reason why a Shitty First Draft should be more than than an exercise in slapping words together; it's not as if we haven't used that excuse ourselves, eh Reader(s)? But the question remains open for me: why do people do this? What are they trying to make, exactly? The story they want to read? The feeling of making a story? Is my personal vision of the 'big point of writing novels' so totally skewed, so arrogant and solipsistic? (Tangent: if you just don't think other people are relevant ultimately in your pursuit of wisdom, aren't you sidestepping the category of 'arrogance' into something else entirely? Should a solipsist give a damn about being accused of arrogance?)

OK there's no reason to carry on about this, and I feel guilty doing so. But I'd hate to think you're not supposed to talk about the weird preferences - when I have a stomach ache I call them 'pathologies' - of this culture I find myself dipping into, for fear of offending someone.

(ps. I'll stick a preposition there if I damned well please!)