Some Words

Well… with the computer out of commission, I found myself unable to get much work done on the big project. That was frustrating, as this week was supposed to be the big push to finish it, I should have been able to do that by the end of the month.

So I wanted to be able to get something done on that front while I waited to get my computer back, and was busy grousing to myself that the other computer was the one with all the software licenses. This gave me a chance to use Google Docs. I’d never done so before, and I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s not going to get me to abandon what I normally use, but it’s fine in the short term.

It also reminds me that I’m a little crazy for having a program just to do outlines. And despite that program, I’d let my outline of the text fall off in the past few chapters and I was flying blind. Without the main text though, I’m outlining the last eight chapters finally, which should speed things up if it is anything like when I was last working with an outline. Not my most efficient use of time, these past few weeks, if loosing my primary computer forces me to get cracking.

Also, as a PSA for the few people who read this in Minneapolis: (and some who may be coming into town for the wedding) Dreamhaven is moving. What does this mean? They’re not looking forward to having to haul all their stuff, so for this month there is a big sale. Used paperbacks are 75% off original cover price, with a minimum of 75¢. That means most books are under a dollar in their used section. A lot of the comics are 10¢. The other day I walked out with a pile I could barely carry for just over $15. You should check it out if you are in town.

There are very few times in life that you can look to and say, “Now I know that ‘x’ book changed my life.” Usually, whatever way a book might have changed you is subtle and insidious. You never notice the choice you made or the shift in your reactions.

Today was not like that. My reading of this BBC article was changed by having read Haruki Murakami, I’m not sure for the better. My initial reaction, upon reading that the knifing happened on the same day as another knifing from 2001, was to think that it would be a Murakami story in a few years. A lot of his work is about finding order and shape to the seemingly meaningless events that surround us. Once the matching dates came in, it just felt like one of his stories. Combine that with an increase in mass stabbings… and well, I start to feel a little guilty thinking that way.

One of the worst parts of writing, to me, is the fear that I’m just running along the same lines as some book that someone else published and I never read. I have been working with the idea for the current project for about two years now, while I finished up the last one and read for this one, and then started writing about a year and a half ago.

During that time I read Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Absurdistan. Both were pretty good books, despite frustrations and flaws that I had with them. Nothing is perfect after all, and I’m a fussy bitch of a reader. But I also spent an undue amount of time while reading these books thinking, “is this too much like what I’m writing?” Well, of course it isn’t, because I’m writing my own damn story, and while there are elements of the stories that I can’t help a little overlap with, that’s all of fiction. There are only so many things you can put in a novel, and any novel, sufficiently long, will have overlap with something.

Nevertheless, because my main character thinks he is a relative of Grand Duchess Anastasia, I have been feeling a little like the man in Ficciones who sets out to write Don Quixote from scratch.

Today I found out that there was a thriller published in 2004 that had the Romanovs as the central element, I had a long period of panic that I was sitting on over one hundred and twenty thousand words that were too close to this other one. I had to read the wikipedia entry on it to satisfy myself that it was sufficiently divergent, a standard antiquities/supernatural/thriller in the style that a certain Mr. Brown, not to be confused with the Browne who will be a groomsman at my wedding, has made popular.

And even then all I did was shift the worry from accusations that I’d stolen and idea to the idea that I’m working on terrain everyone is sick to death of. That may be due to the fact that everyone is a little tired of the Anastasia stuff. Hell, I’m tired of it, but I tell myself that it’s not such big part of the plot that it sinks everything.

Today, after poking at it for a while, and spending a bunch of time outlining plot points, I got back to the big writing project.

The words came fast and easy as I sat there. It was quite a relief. Over the past few months I’ve been working on getting into grad school and getting married. Now, with a lot of that off that taken care of (though both of those things are far from done) I’ve cleared away enough time to hopefully finish this before school starts. I was quite nervous at the start. For a while I had been quite regular about sitting down and writing. I had tracked the rate at which I produced words and dropped other tasks when I wasn’t making my count. When I needed to study for the LSAT I abandoned the writing for a while. I probably should have done that earlier, but it was what it was.

That was months ago, and all the little tasks had kept writing on a back burner. The story was still there, but I hadn’t given it the time it was due. Writing is at its best when you can fall into a sort of a trance. The editing doesn’t work so well that way, but the first draft is always more fun when it happens. I didn’t get there today, but I did manage to get solid work done without staring at the screen wondering what came next. So that was nice. I’ve only got a few more weeks of work and then it’s nothing but the writing and the wedding before grad school.

In other news, the latest update of Wordpress seems to have broken the old url for this blog. Before I got ianmacleod.net, I just had a subdomain on my friend’s deepthought.org. I’m looking into how I want to fix that, as it seems to be related to how the new version handles the database. While I work at an ISP, that’s not something I generally work with. In fact I never really touch them. It’s a whole branch of computer knowledge that I’d always meant to get involved in. The current job did not really work for that though, and it seems I’m likely to remain ignorant about it for the foreseeable future. The writing projects feel more pressing to me now than the computer skills. Then, for the next five years or so, I’m probably not going to want to use what little spare time I have on more enjoyable things.

In a few weeks, my subscription to the New Yorker runs out. This has left me wondering if I should renew it. In the past, I had been getting gift subscriptions from my parents. A while ago, I hinted heavily that I wasn’t sure they should bother. They obliged and I did not get a renewal notice this time around. At this point I’m getting the tail end, from when Conde Nast decided my address had changed without me moving. It didn’t come for a whole and when I called up they said that it was undeliverable, which was of course odd, as it had been delivered for months previous.

Regardless, that gave me a backlog, and now I have to do the math on this thing to see if I really want it. It’s a harder choice than I had realized. Most New Yorkers have one or two articles I find interesting, and catty movie review, and maybe a profile of an artist or two that perks my interest. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, as was the case with this last issue, almost the entire magazine is interesting.

But that is a lot of time sunk. The New Yorker has its style. That style happens to be one that leads to a lot of extrea reading. People are introduced, given hundreds of words of background, and then given a single meaningful quote. I know why they do it. I think it works quite a bit of the time, but I don’t know that I have time to read it, especially since I’m going to grad school. So, now the question is, do I resubscribe? How much of that paper is going to be wasted?

Over the past few months, I have read three Poirot novels bby Agatha Christie. It took me a while to get over how racist they are. In Murder on the Orient Express, a man is stabbed. While they are trying to figure out the case, someone advances that it must have been the Italian passenger who did this. His only reason? He feels that Italians are a stabbing people. That would be one thing, but the other characters all take that at face value. No one questions it. In the other two books I’ve read, characters who love money have pointedly been called Semetic.

At times I don’t know why I keep reading. She wasn’t a particularly good writer of sentences. There are plenty of bits that read like bad fiction workshop stuff. That may be a result of her success, or it may simply be a reliance on cliche. I mean, God, she wrote how many of these things?

But I keep reading them, and I’ll probably read a few more, at least the one where Poirot dies, and the rest that are in the binding of five novels I have. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about how formulaic she was, and indeed she is. But, as I started in on the latest one, I realized what kept them entertaining. She knows how formulaic she’s gotten. A few pages into The ABC Murders, Hastings, Poirot’s requisit foil, turns to Poirot and basically announces that this mystery is unlike any of the other they have worked on. Poirot agrees with him. For all I know it’s true, but who are they trying to convince? I like the feeling of watching a writer trying to derail the train to get the spark of life back into things. I like that the stories all feel shopworn before I’ve even read them. I like using them to put off the end of 1984. I don’t want to read about poor Winston getting tortured by rats.

1984 related note. On this, my… I think fifth attempt to read it all the way through, I have now gotten farther than before. Previous attempts left me grumpy and depressed about halfway through. This time I’m over two thirds through. I see why so many high school students fall in love with it, but I wonder if mayby I missed the window to really love this book.

Over the past week, I’ve gotten to read quite a bit more than usual. That means mostly that I’ve put off reading some of the things I’m stalled on, and focused on other books that grabbed me on the spur of the moment. One of those books was Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis of Transmet fame.

It didn’t take long to read, I’m not a terribly fast reader and it lasted all of three hours for me. The book clocks in at 245 pages, very small pages. I’m glad I borrowed it.

It’s not that this book offended me, though the whole point of it seems to be either getting offended at it and shouting, thus boosting sales, or proving to your friends how edgy you are by liking it. At this point in our society (can we call this P.H. for Post Hunter or P.T. for Post Thompson) shock is not a novel thing. Crooked Little Vein is a book built to shock, and make that shock feel novel. All the quotes on the cover are supposed to verify its edgy credentials, and all its testicular saline injection and “you live in a police state” crap is supposed to shock. There is only the barest thinnest wisp of a plot. It’s function is to move the protagonist from one “shocking” person to the next.

The protagonist is a detective. A caricature of the corrupt behind the scenes evil politician gives him a job. That job is to find a crazy thing that shouldn’t exist. On his way to find the thing, a path written in large letters with spilled glow stick fluid, he meets a lot of strange people who want him to realize that strange is normal. Is there anyone who reads Warren Ellis who didn’t decide that strange was normal in the mid to late 90s?

But what, dear reader, is the payoff? Well, Mr. Ellis informs, the internet has changed everything.

…

Well Fuck. The World is Flat.

So, the payoff here is a Thomas Friedman op-ed. On the way I get some very pro-porn pseudo edgy writing. Friedman plus porn… aside from the fact that I don’t every want to think about those two things in context again? Meh. The book was meh. It was candy for three hours filled by an after void of meh. Oh my God it’s full of meh.

It’s not that I dislike Mr. Ellis’s shtick. In fact, I normally quite like it. But without illustrations to bring some of the madcap crazy to life… it falls a little flat. Rising to the level of solidly workmanly is a bit disappointing. At least it was only a few hours…

Recently I finished More Equal Than Others, Godfrey Hodgson’s historical survey of America from 1975 to 2000.

It is rare that I feel a book should be read by absolutely everyone. This book might go on that list though. With the election season in full swing now, I cannot help having large swaths of the coverage tinted by my having read this book. As a history of the last quarter of the twentieth century, with some references sneaking in as late as 2003, it does an amazing job of outlining how we got here. My political memory of that quarter century is handicapped by being under the age of 12 for much of it, you might begin to see why I liked it so much.

There are limitations of course, the book came out several years ago, and does not know about the decline of the Republican party that seems to be going on right now. But on the whole, it does a fantastic job of summing up twenty five years in three hundred pages, which is an admirable feat in itself. It also pulls off the deft trick of not being too dry, despite a healthy dose of facts and figures supplied as the basis of Hodgson’s arguments. Of course, that dryness comes with the territory, but Hodgson is a talented enough writer to keep things moving at a very brisk pace.

I’ve already begun lending it out to any co-worker wiling to read it.

When it comes to science fiction, I am a forgiving reader. Philip K. Dick, despite his amazing imagination, wrote amazingly flat prose. It has a way of just sitting on the page, not doing anything much on its own. This is usually compensated for by the fact that almost every idea that came out of his head was interesting. For years the man just churned out novels like some of us take a long shit.

Almost all of those novels have a hero confronting the disintegration of what they think of as their reality. So, I was was saddened when I completed Confessions of a Crap Artist, his realistic novel. Without the science fiction element, I can’t say there was very much to recommend it. The lack of broad ideas highlighted how much he relied on simple character archetypes to populate his books. There are also numerous characters who fail to act in a believable way. That would be fine, if Dick could sell me on why they did it, but he can’t. At one point a character contemplates how he is acting irrationally, and concludes that it is because he wants to. Even he does not sound convinced. The fact that he is trying to get a way from a sociopath and deciding she is worth staying with, even knowing she isn’t right in the head, puts a big neon sign over his head.

I could forgive this, if only there were an interesting technology or some general conflict, but I have just outlined what is probably the biggest moral dilemma of the entire novel. Other than that, the characters just sort of float along, letting things happen to them, or not. The climax happens four fifths of the way though and then it takes forever to finish up.

Usually these things are crazy little gems. Maybe I’ll read Electric Sheep again to cleans the palate.

How quickly one can fall behind on just about everything. I’ve spent the last couple of months stressing, to various degrees, about the LSAT. For better or worse, it’s done now. I spent the last few days relaxing, and then started to dig myself out of the large pile of crap that had accumulated. There is still the business of actually applying to the schools, but that seems small in comparison to the three hours of tension.

And in all of that, the writing fell by the wayside, which was frustrating. Over the next couple of weeks I will be finishing the applications, and that will free up even more time. With that, I plan to put a little more on that second page here, the stories one. Short term, I will be putting a story up there and sending a few out to people who may put them in print. Long term, if I get into a school that I feel is worth the time (and that is not certain), I will be taking several months of to do nothing but write. Going off to law school would get in the way of getting much writing done, for quite a while too, and I’ve wanted to take the time to really bear down on a few projects.

With that in mind, it was good to have a crazy productive day. The cocktail blogging that I would occasionally do here has been moved over to Eric has been putting me to shame on the day to day front. We shall see what happens.

And now to relax, my back hurts from shoveling.

I don’t look to sports writing for the best that the language has to offer. These people have to churn out text, frequently after a late night game, with the bed calling out to them. Often they got into the industry through the sport, rather than a background in journalism. So I’m pretty forgiving when a place like ESPN has a poorly constructed sentence, or a weird metaphor or simile. Sometimes though, I can’t pass it up without comment. Today, I saw this:

“It was like a post-graduate course in Leadership 101.”

I just sat there for a moment. I mean, sure, you could have a school where they renumbered the graduate courses to start in the hundreds again, maybe some of them even do. But everyone uses 101 for the basics. Why would you try to fight that? Why add 101 to the end of that sentence?

Last night I found myself 48 pages away from the end of the Cairo Trilogy. It was a bitter sweet feeling. As I had first started in on the novels, I had been frustrated at almost every turn. I only liked one character, and he was barely a character by the start of the second novel.

It’s a long slog, 1,313 pages in the Everyman edition, and while I pride myself on not giving up on novels, at around page 350, I have to admit I was thinking about it. Then, something happened around page 800. I had made in through 450 pages that I didn’t hate, but didn’t really love. Suddenly, I found myself rethinking the entire book. I came to love it. I started worrying about the characters. I hadn’t felt this involved in a character’s hopes and dreams for years.

I have harped on the values of keeping narratives short. Even at 350 pages, a novel is long enough that a movie must condense it. That is is good. A novel exists to give form to narratives so long that they cannot be contained in any other form. More than any other form, the novel is allowed to sprawl.

Yet, the Cairo Trilogy does not sprawl, not really, and for once, I think that was what frustrated me from the outset. As the novels grew and more characters were introduced, the scope of the action opened up. Large portions of the first novel take place in a single house. As the work continues, greater and greater portions of Cairo are opened up. Likely the feeling of place is greater in Arabic, but eventually I did get a feel of the world that the characters were in.

And over the course of those thirteen hundred pages, I came to care about the characters who annoyed me. I couldn’t avoid them, so we made peace. By the end, I was thinking of starting over from the beginning again, which I don’t think I’ll do. But I’ve surprised myself by thinking I may come back to this book.

And so I was left with a feeling I had not felt in a long time. I had read a novel over 800 pages, and didn’t feel like I had wasted my time. It was almost enough to make me rush right into the Brother’s Karamazov. I think I’m going to pace myself though, so I settled for David Copperfield divided into 411 discrete chunks… I’ll probably be grumbling about it by around 21.