Some Words

I have yet to read anything by Zadie Smith, and that is increasingly looking like a mistake I have to fix. Mind you she’s been on the list, but so are a ton of writers, and their excellent books. Feeling like I don’t have time for all the great books there are to read is one of the dominant feelings of my reading life. Still, after hearing her talk about writing on KCRW’s Bookworm, which has the interview available as a podcast, and reading this article for the Guardian, I’ve started to think of her as a genuinely inspiring individual. Even if I weren’t a neurotic individual to start with, writing would threaten to reduce me to that state in short order. When I finished the article especially, I felt much more confident about my insecurities. Not that they were things to ignore, but that the insecurities were indeed good things to feel about writing.

So, going into the new year, I thought it would be good to have a program on hand that let me go into a little more detail than iCal. Sure, the real problem is that I have the attention span of a small rodent. I also have a touch of OCD. (I’m just as bad as everyone else, but isn’t it annoying as hell when people self diagnose like that?) I have a hard time writing when there’s anything in my RSS feed. That’s bad. Anyhow, I started digging into some productivity software. I looked at Task List and OmniOutliner. The end result was a lot of spent time, and the sinking sensation that this could take way too long.

It’s so easy to set out trying to become more efficient and then waste weeks not getting any goals done, but trying very hard to set up to get goals done. I’d really like something that has iCal, but a few of the functions of the two programs I just mentioned, there’s Kinkless for OmniOutliner, and that is almost there, but it doesn’t do it’s own calendar, yet still leaves you thinking, why can’t all of this be done in iCal. So I looked into 10.5. No deal. They’re adopting a bunch of stuff, and of course pretending no one gave them the idea. (Multiple desktops? We swear Linux has never done that…)

So I’ve decided to muddle through with iCal for a while. There’s no sense in learning a whole new system, when the old one was close. I’ll use that stuff… oh yeah, paper, and take notes in files. Maybe I’ll keep OmniOutliner around. that might be ok. Anyhow. I’m going to write.

All of this thanks to 43 Folders who curse/bless me with their productivity suggestions, I waste time.

It’s nice, in a warped sort of way, to know that someone has entered the new year with more frustration and anger than I have. When you’re banging your head against the keyboard, busy not writing, it’s nice to know you have company, even if the guy in the next room over doesn’t know your name.

Shalom Auslander gives me the goods.

I just finished Flaubert’s Parrot. It was a wonderful read. About thirty pages from the end, I started thinking about it’s length. The edition I had was only 190 pages long, which is in that range that is no longer a novella, but clearly a short novel. Most novels seem intent on achieving 300 or so pages, indeed project I’m working on right now, and hope becomes a novel, will likely be longer than that.

While I am writing something that long, I can’t help but think that there is something a bit presumptuous about a 500 page novel. Even if you’re a faster reader, and I’m not very fast, that takes a long time. One must be utterly convinced that the 500 pages are needed, or you have to admit that you’re wasting the reader’s time. Well, there’s no shortage of writers who are dead certain that 500 pages are needed. Is this because so many of history’s famous novels make 500 pages look concise?

I was holding that at the back of my head as I was reading. Then I realized that there were very few, maybe 10, short stories that I felt I could genuinely recall. I can get flashes of a story here, another there, but assembling, from memory, a short story I read more than two months previous? I recall one by Miranda July quite vividly, and another from the New Yorker about children swimming with a snorkel they think reveals ghosts.

So it seems, as I think about it, that the novella is the ideal length for a story, not taking up too much of the reader’s time, but still having enough time to create a genuinely memorable world. So I wonder, why is it the least published length of fiction there is? I remember reading somewhere that it doesn’t sell, so it doesn’t get published, but I don’t see why that would be. If anyone could help to enlighten me, I would be grateful.

I read quite a bit about Grigori Perelman this summer, and all the articles I read gave me an idea for a story, which I wrote. I was quite pleased with the result, and was starting to polish it before sending it out. There’s just one problem though. The main character takes a picture of himself every morning, which, while not wholly original, was not, I thought, totally cliche.

Little did I know, and how did I miss this, that there was a guy named Noah who had taken his picture every day for six years. He then made a video, which he put on youtube. And now I have to decide if he didn’t trump my story with his five minute video. He and I both use the idea of these pictures very differently, but I can’t help but feel that the story would forever be in the shadow of that video.

Murakami, like so many of the successful artists in this world, comes from money. Small yawn. I remember a friend in college saying that he wanted to bring back the age of the patron. I’m at work now, so I can’t say that I blame him. The sad fact of the matter is that making art takes time. No one ever reads the first, second, or third draft of a novel. Most art forms are like that. The time you need to work on it has to be, in effect, bought. And now, back to work.

Ian McEwan took parts of Atonement from another source and credited it, but not well enough. It’s a tricky one, and I’ll admit that the water is muddier because I liked the novel, a lot. The old adage goes that good artists borrow, and great ones steal. I’m in total agreement with that, but while I think McEwan is clearly good enough to steal, he doesn’t seem to have done so here. First off he sighted it, but the passages are close enough that he hasn’t made them his own. I disagree with Jack Shaefer, in that I like the scanning of the McEwan sample better, of the stuff sited directly in the article. But clearly he didn’t rework the text very much, such that I feel a novel I very much enjoyed was tainted. Obviously this woman’s story was not the same as the novel, I won’t go into why, in case one, or both, of my readers hasn’t read it yet. Still, a little more mulching of the text, to turn it into loam, instead of bits of old vegetables, would have prevented this.

Ah, but the evil thieves are all around us. Why fight?

So, I tried putting the Pitchfork rss feed in my aggregator, and it gets every article five times. No other feeds do this. It might be my reader’s fault, but I choose to blame Pitchfork, as they’re such a tempting target.

I also managed to pop out of bed today and write letters to a bunch of people. While that was great, writing a lot of letters tends to reinforce the realization of how little goes on in an average person’s day to day life. I find myself repeating the same anecdotes if I write more than three letters in a single day. Its a weird broken record kind of feeling.

One of the hardest things, I think, when trying to write while holding down a regular job, is holding yourself accountable. I’ve set many goals over the past few years. Few of them have been met. It might be that I was setting my sights to high, it might be that I’m lazy. I’m not sure which it is. I think part of it is that sometimes I sit down, start to write, and the world falls away for a while. I come back a couple of hours later with somewhere between one thousand and four thousand words from that. Generally speaking I find it better when it’s less. The few times I’ve done four thousand words in two hours it has not been very special. Anyhow, I’m digressing, those times when I just sit down and write are great, but I have the attention span of a lemur most of the time.

To this end I’ve tried setting myself a goal that has a solid deadline, 60,000 words in the main project by the start of 2007. I then figured out what that meant on a daily basis, and set up to track how I was doing against that number, so that if I fell behind I would know how much slack I needed to pick up. So far it has been… less disappointing than other methods. As an experiment in productivity, I will have to wait until the new to see if it bear fruit.

On an just slightly related note. 43folders makes me wonder what the balance is between being productive, and just thinking about being really productive. At least I’m thinking.

It is a little unusual for me to say that I feel like the writing is going well. I haven’t been quite as productive as I sometimes dream of being, but the draft is coming along at a nice clip of about 1000 words a day right now. There are other projects that I’ve been playing around with, but they haven’t been going quite as fast. In my writing fantasies I have a main project that I get about 1,500 words of solid work out of every day, and then do another 1,500 on other shorter projects. I don’t know that many writers actually get that much going on a daily basis, though I’ve heard of a few who do 4,000. Yeah… that’s not going to happen while I’m working 40 hours a week, so it remains a pipe dream.

I think it was Heinlein who said that everyone has one million words of bullshit in them, but then I heard that filtered through Neil Gaiman, and I can’t track the quote. Anyhow, no matter where it comes from, I like the idea. If I’m lucky and I get to count my papers in college, I’ve maybe managed to get something like a third of my bullshit out. I wake up every day thinking about that.

If I can keep this pace up, then the next thing will be editing some of the short stories I find I have sitting around. They could, most of them, use a polish. Then it’s back to rejection slips on the road to perdition.

Well, thank God I’m not in college any more, I don’t know that my heard could handle all those tazerings, and the threats of tazerings. I have a fragile constitution. I mean, I know they’re for my safety, but after my doctor ordered three martini lunches, I just don’t know how my system would respond. The saddest thing is that this story is the second time I’ve found myself ACTUALLY THINKING that L.A. would be better off with vigilante justice. Here’s an article on it from people closer to the source. I’m not going to link the video from YouTube, as it makes me sick to watch. No one I am related to will ever go to UCLA, or maybe even vacation in L.A., if I can help it.

It was a nasty looking day outside. I went and bought four kinds of bitters from the liquor store. I had intended to buy six or more, but they didn’t have all the brands that I wanted to try. It’s sad when you don’t have all the bitters you want for winter.

Mark went with me, and he bought some lillet. When we both got home we mixed drinks, 20th Century coctail, Sazerac, and Manhattans. It was good, except for the drink I mixed with amaretto. I don’t know why I bought that. It really did seem like a good thing to get. Then I wasted scotch mixing it into this horrible drink called a godfather. Mark poured it down the sink when I wasn’t looking. That man saved my life.

I also went to see Stranger Than Fiction, which was pretty good. It didn’t change my life, but I did enjoy it. I was a little intoxicated while I was watching it, see the previous paragraphs, and there were a couple of moments where I had ideas for things of my own to write, but alcohol swept them away in the great mass of other thoughts, that probably weren’t worth writing in the first place. I was frustrated for a moment when I was walking out of the theater. That was followed by me remembering how many of my ideas I did remember had not been fully written yet.

I did at one point lean in and chat with a friend of mine who’s at the University of MN for creative writing. We agreed that the movie made writers and publishers look hunormously more wealthy than was realistic. I wish I lived in a huge apartment with wood flooring and modern furniture. No, wait, I like my apartment. It’s cozy.

OOPS

Tonight I started a new project. This is usually a dangerous thing for me. I start new projects too often and as a result not enough of them get done. My computer desktop has dozens of little digital sticky notes all over it, reminding me to do this or that.

This project was to write my friends using paper and pen. It seemed terribly old fashioned, but there is an appeal to that. I’m also horribly bad at writing them emails. Letters will hopefully feel special for both parties. It might even get me out of writing as often as I should, but I dont want to think of it that way.

The first thing I learned while trying to write, is that I no longer have good cursive skills. About six years ago I switched to printing all the letters. This, combined, I think, with my mild dyslexia, is conspiring against me. It is not that my penmanship is simply bad. I will actively think of a letter and write another one. I tried to write a capitol H three times tonight. When I failed to concentrate on my intentions fully, it did not look like an ‘h’ at all. Eventually I retired to printed letters in defeat. I even had to use lined paper. It was a sad moment. I felt like I was in grade school again. However, this has only strengthened my resolve.

I was also thinking, just before I started writing this post, that I was not doing what I wanted to do with this web space. There is a second page, marked stories, which contains some small part of my writing output. I do intend to continue to place things there. The posts on this page, on the other hand, are likely to undergo a substantial change in content. I have been trying to write down my thoughts on current events. This was a fool’s game. I keep up with what is going on, but trying to write about it as well was only drawing me away from the fiction. I had been afraid to write posts that seemed like a diary, or contained on any frequent basis things that would make it sound like a diary. I told myself this was done to prevent myself from looking like the thousands of other blogs out there. The thing is, that is exactly what those other blogs are doing. This web space isn’t going to draw anyone who isn’t either looking for stories, or a personal friend of some sort. A writer of political commentary I am not. I might touch on things like that, but not in any way I intend to be insightful. If you’re here for that, well let’s just hope you weren’t, because I wasn’t helping you. There will likely be less linking in the future as well, though in some ways writing personal observation frees me of having to think of a reason for a link to be relevant. Hopefully this actually leads to better, more enjoyable, posts on the site.

With that in mind…

On my commute several days ago, I was listening to the latest album by Hem. I was driving down 94 and for once I wasn’t in a traffic jam. The sky was overcast and there was just a touch of haze in the sky. I was wondering if listening to Hem stuck me in a demographic with reasonably thoughtful milquetoast middle managers (likely it does). As I hit a rise in the highway, a rush of unrelated memories came over me. All of them related to Canada. I was walking in the Beaches neighborhood of Toronto, listening to jazz. I was doing down a street in Oshawa toward my grandparents house. One of the rides on the Toronto islands came to mind. Then I remembered my grandmother’s funeral and several other wonderful memories which I had forgotten about, all in the space of six or seven seconds. This sort of thing is not unusual for me, but I had not previously associated Hem with any of these things. I have been leery of listening to the album since. It is, never the less, a good album.