Monday, March 23, 2009

I Call Do Over

Last week I had a not so good, fairly unproductive day at work. I came home and allowed as how I wanted a do-over. The next day I came in early and got lots done, so the do-over worked.

Now I'd like to call a do-over on the last five days. I didn't write and I ate a ton. A ton!

Instead o' writing, I watched Serenity and Firefly and a doc on Hulu about the folks who dress up as superheros and take pictures with tourists on Hollywood Boulevard for tips. I enjoyed it, but new stuff ain't written, and drafts ain't revised.

The eating thing... I had a sales lunch on Wednesday. Salesfolk have a budget for wooing clients, and said wooing involves swag and taking clients out to lunch at nice places. Our salesman took us to Clyde's, which has an extensive and delicious menu. Calamari was ordered, and while I could have had a nice salad, I opted for the cheesy shrimp and grits, cuz I don't get free lunches that often and I'm not going to waste them on lettuce.

Then on Friday the hobbits invited me to go with them to Outback, cuz they had a gift card. Bloomin' Onions were ordered, and cheesecake for dessert. It seems I have no bravery in the face of restaurants.

Saturday was pancakes with Atomicate day. We went to the O.G. Pancake joint, and come on. Like I'm not going to have pancakes at the pancake place.

The final straw was seeing Watchmen on Sunday. Lil' Italiand Redhead snuck in a bag of Cadbury chocolate eggs and I got a bunch of popcorn. I have no justification here, other than I was hungry and I like popcorn and those chocolate eggs are rilly good.

So this week is going to be a do-over. It's back to nightly writing and salads. So say we all.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

8 pounds and 3 pages

Hmm. My weight loss appears to be progressing faster than my draft revision. Doctors, scientists and MFA grads will have to combine forces to research this phenomenon.

On the weight loss issue: I usually have 500 calories left when I go home for dinner, and dinner is usually 300 calories. However, what with it being lent and all, sometimes it's more like 200. It seems crazy but it's true - when you have vegetable soup and sweet potatoes for dinner, that's about the right number. Stupid minimal-calorie vegetables. Anyway, I am not one to let 300 extra calories just go by the wayside, so I've been eating them in the form of cookies. Girlscout cookies, to be exact, and Samoas to be even more exacter.

It occurred to me, looking back on a week filled with late-night samoa snacks, that this might not be the very best thing to do, seeing as how I'm actually eating more cookie calories than healthy foods calories. But, they are awesome, and I'm still losing weight, so I'm not going to worry about it. Viva las cookies!

On the writing issue: I intended to write an alternate ending to my story last night. I haven't gotten there yet, though. I found that there were many dialogue problems to correct, and that led to cutting more words. It's amazing how comfortable I'm getting with cutting stuff. Once I was able to part with a few beloved paragraphs, I found there were many, many words that didn't need to be there. It still takes a while to do, but I'm thinking I can definitely make this a 5000 word story. Unfortunately I think I'll be getting to the hard part tonight. I did have a flash of 'arrgh, can't do this, everythign sucks' last night, but I brushed the feeling off and got back to work.

And then I watched two episodes of Firefly on the intertubes. Because I have solid priorities in life.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Rewritey

I finally got back to the story draft last night. As usual, I was scared of the idea of starting, but everything was fine once I started. I focused on cutting the first page. It's a whole page of the setup, so I got comments that it started slow. I took an axe to it, and now the story starts 2/3rds of the way into the first page. So, it wasn't crazy successful, but it's a little better.

So right now, it's 6000 words. I will be very happy if I can get it under 5000, for the simple reason that 5000 is usually the word count limit for longer short stories in most of the online lit magazines I've looked at. I'm not sure if I'll get this story in shape to the point where I'll want to send it out, but even if I don't, I'll probably send it out, because it's just never too early to start collecting rejection slips. It's been a while since I've put myself out there for rejection, and it's something that requires constant practice.

Friday, March 13, 2009

TV helps me read books

TV gets a lot of crap. I know someone who likes saying "Theater is art, movies are craft, and TV is furniture." Funny thing, but this person and I are not close. It's a bs statement. TV is a medium, like theater or film, and what's on it can be art or it can be crap.

I will always defend TV, particularly in this here golden age of awesomeness. Here's one reason: TV helps me read books. Example: Stephen King's The Stand. In my youth, I loved me some Stephen King. I read every book of his I could find as a kid. (I still read him, but I remember discovering and then devouring his books back then.) With one exception: The Stand.

It's a huge book, firstly. It chronicles a plague apocalypse, and then the survivors battle it out, representing the forces of good versus evil. Now, plague apocalypse: SO up my alley, especially when I was a kid and was obsessed with the end of the world. So I read the first section, no problem.

Then we get into the survivors battling it out. Ok, there are too freakin' many of them. There's like, fifty characters, easy, and we're expected to care about all of them. I had issues. Also, I believe the post-plague part deals with my least fave character - the one who's starving in jail before the devil shows up to barter for his soul. And the devil barts with him for a while, and I'd get bored, and stop reading.

Then, some time in the 90's, the powers that be decided to make The Stand into a four-part TV series. And it was effin' AWEsome. The opening credits pan over the military super-flu creators, who are all in various poses of ACK-BLAH-dead, while Don't Fear the Reaper plays. Kick-effin'-ASS!

And then the fifty or so important characters are played by actors, who all look different, so I know who they are. I don't have to work my tiny brain to visualize. And then, mirabile, I went back to read the book, and was like, Oh yeah, that's the character played by that chick from Just Shoot Me, and that's the one played by that Gary Sinise, ok, ok, I got it. And I read it all and loved it.

Maybe I'm dumb. But if so, it doesn't change the fact that TV helped me read that book. So there. Suck it, haters!

Next up: Lord of the Rings. I got never read past the endless elf-poetry. Elf-poetry that was notably ABSENT from the kick-ass movies... Maybe I can finally get through it, nay, enjoy it, now. So let us all bask in TV's warming glowing warming glow.

Sleeeeeep

I think I finally got enough. Yesterday I went to bed at 8pm, and actually woke up just a couple of minutes before the alarm. Sweeeet!

Getting enough sleep is muy importante to me, because ever since Back Pain: The Sequel, I've been cutting calories to lose weight. And sleep-deprivation = more feelings of hunger. Yesterday I was esstarvink, and ate more than my allottment of 1500k. Good thing I passed out shortly after dinner or I'd have kept on eatin'.

I had been doing Weight Watchers online, and it wasn't working for me because I was doing it half-assedly, so I got and read Carol Lay's The Big Skinny. It's better than most diet books because it's a graphic novel. So anyways, rather than counting points I'm counting calories, and eating 500 less than it takes to maintain my weight, which is 1500 per day. Now that I'm ok'd for exermacise I'll be doing that too, starting... tomorrow. Not today. Tomorrow sounds good. Anyways, without daily exercise, I've lost 6 pounds int he last 3 weeks.

I am trying not to think about it too much, as thinking about it gets real tedious real fast. I'm happy with my progress so far, so I'll say no more about it for now.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

So tie-tie...

I got critiqued and survived. Yaaaaay! Well, I had my story critiqued, not me myself, but same difference.

It went well. I got some useful comments in terms of things that I absolutely need to change (confusing dialogue, continuity errors, formatting issues) and also some thoughts of things that maybe probably should be changed (lots of back story on the first page, story-story doesn't start until second page) and then thoughts on what people think I should change but I may or may not change. Did I just use the word change like a million times? Yes. Yes I did.

Happily, there were at least four people who said they really enjoyed reading it, which definitely didn't happen with the first story I brought to the group. One dude really really liked it; he said he was reading it and had to stop to pick the kids up at the bus stop and then was running back to read the rest. And what more can you ask for than that? That's an amazing compliment. I was gratified and apparently my subconscious was THRILLED cuz I went home and fell asleep and totally had a dream about a three-way with him and one of the ladies from the group. The dude is married and the lady is probably not bi-curious so I woke up feeling the like the biggest perv in the universe. Go me and my crazy brain!

The downside to writey group is I have a hard time winding down afterwards; it takes me a while to fall asleep and so now today I'm all kinds of tired. Boo.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Excuses excuses

So, tonight my 2nd short story is being critiqued at writey group. I posted the draft last week, and have been studiously avoiding writing anything ever since.

I want to work more on this story. I like it more than I liked the first short story attempt. Maybe I like it too much. Who knows, but my thinking was I'd see what everyone thought at writey group and then go back and work on another draft.

According to most professional/awesome writey writers, this is the wrong thing to do. What you're asposed to do is put one thing aside and immediately start working on something else. So in other words, you should still write every day. Because I haven't followed this advice, I think it'll probably be hard at first to work on another draft. Such is life. I'll still do it and everything, I just think it'll probably suck for a while.

In other news, I went to the back docker and he told me to go ahead and do any kind of exermacise whenever, since I can't make the herniation worse, and it'll go away in a couple of years. My first reaction: AWESOME! My second reaction, ah, crap, now I really do have to exercise. Starting an exercise routine again after doing nothing for months is going to suck much more than taking a week off of daily writing. Look for me to be sore and grumpy for a while...

Monday, March 09, 2009

Writey Update

I ain't been writing. I have my current short story posted for critique this week, and have been getting feedback back (and bringing sexy back) from various friends, and I want to work on this story more but I'm going to wait until I hear what the writey group says first. Right now, I've got a few readers who understood what was going on in the story and a few who didn't, so some clarification work may be in order, and then more work on dialogue, prolly.

I have been reading some. I read Jeanette Winterson's Tanglewreck thanks to Mrs. Pinchloaf, who loaned it to me. It's YA scifi, and I enjoyed it.

I'm currently reading The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1999. It's edited by Ursula K. Le Guin, and starts with a really excellent discussion by her of what science fiction is and isn't. I've read two stories so far and liked them both. So that should keep me busy for a while.

Friday, March 06, 2009

Confession

I downloaded the Barbarella opening song, and now I need to hear it over and over and over.

Barbarella, Ba-Barbarella!

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

A Really Grood Thing and Two Kinds of Work

So, I sent my first short story to Circus Jeff to read'n'comment on. It's a scifi tale set in a scifi world (with a scifi giiiirl, laughing plastic, it's fantastic! Ok, weird swedish Barbie song interlude over) and in discussing said world, I mentioned that it'd be cool of C.J. wrote a story in that world. And he totally did! And I totally loved it! What a grood thing.

He writes about the creative handover better than me in his blargh: www.jeffwills.blogspot.com. I agree with what he says, so go read it. (If you want to.) To sum up: throwing ideas/assignments back and forth is awesome.

Now, it took me like a month to write my story, and I think it's just ok. Circus Jeff wrote his in a few days, and it's great, and I don't lie about that stuff. And, unless there's something he's not telling me, he's kind of in the same place as I am with writing; in other words, neither of us has been consistently working on it much in the last five years or so. So what gives? Why come did I agonize and throw my laptop across the room, and why come did he tear out a supremely awesome first draft?

I would like to think that I did some of the heavy lifting in coming up with the alternate future world, so I had a set of parameters to hand over. However, I also think there's a more complete answer.

Since college, I have been: spending most of my time in an Office Space kind of environment, and the rest playing/singing backup in bands, watching TV with friends and roller skating. The closest I've come to creative work has been songwriting in Cuddle Party (holla, Atomicate!) We did most of that via IM and didn't put a ton of thought into it. (That was kind of the draw for us.) I avoided theater like the plague and while I read a book or two, I mostly watched TV.

Circus Jeff has been: acrobalancing, auditioning, acting, traveling to Italy to learn commedia, and extensively blogging about his artistic work and relationship to same. He has spent a large portion of his free time working towards growth as an artist, and when he was acting, a lot of the time it was in never-before-produced work. He did lots of staged readings too, which is what you do with an infant play before you go back and fix it before staging it.

So it occurs to me that there are two kinds of work: there's the work you're currently working on, and then there's the lifelong work. I think Circus Jeff's time contributing to new works, working in theater, and generally gearing his life to support his art has made a big difference in how he works; he knows the rules, he has the discipline, and he's laid the groundwork to be able to build something relatively quickly. Whereas I've been, erm, watching TV. (In my defense, TV's gotten REALLy good. Truly it is a golden age!)

It's gratifying to know that all that crap you're supposed to do as a life-long artist actually pays off. There's no manual for how to do the crap either. (Well, there are many, none are very useful.) You just have to throw yourself into it and figure it out, which Circus Jeff has done and continues to do.

And uh, lest this seem like TOO much of a Circus-J love-fest, let it be known that he is extremely picky in his eating habits, so living in the food capital of the world is SO wasted on that guy.

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Revisifications and where do we go from here?

This past week, I gave my second short story attempt to a few folks to read and offer comments. Well, I say 'gave'... The first person to read it, Mrs. Pinchloaf, said the title bothered her because it was a line from a Phantom of the Opera song and the song got stuck in her head. I suck at thinking up titles so I sent it to Atomicate and was basically like, I need you to rename this now. And she did! Yaaaay!

So Circus Jeff, Atomicate and Mrs. P read it and said stuff, and last night I took all their comments and worked over the story again, and then posted it to the writey group for critique next week. I would have waited until Friday to post, but the queue was filling up rather quickly. So now, thanks largely to the above-mentioned folks, it's a reasonably solid first draft, I think.

I also gave the story to a few other people - a scriptwriter friend in LA, Mrs. Pinchloaf's sister, who is a noted creative writing scholar, and my very own seesterperson, an infamous reader, writer and editor. Scriptwriter guy hasn't read it yet, but I give him a pass because he's an editor/director on Nip/Tuck, and therefore I get to use him to namedrop, like this: "Oh, well my friend in LA was talking to Katee Sackhoff the other day..." or "Word on the street is cute Ryan from Oz is actually a huge pain in the ass to work with..." So that's cool.

Mrs. Pinchloaf and Seestor get a pass because, well, everyone gets a pass. I look forward to their comments even though they don't know as many famous people as scriptwriter guy.

So now I have tonight. I don't want to work on second short story, because I'm waiting on hearing the writey groups reactions, but I don't want to take the night off either. So I think it's back to the random prompt generators for me.

Monday, March 02, 2009

Writey Group: Also a Grood Thing

Despite my complaints about other folks' critique tactics and writers who seem to me too defensive, there are many wonderful people in and grood things about writey group, and here they are.

The group as a whole is very conscious of the writer's feelings, and I've never felt like anyone got attacked during their critique. Everyone is kind in the way that they give their critiques. At the same time, they are not too kind - they'll definitely let the writer know if they don't understand or like something.

There are certain people whose comments I always agree with. Is that a good thing? It doesn't mean they're right, but I definitely feel more comfortable knowing that some people think the way I do.

When you submit to this writing group, you know that your work will be read carefully. I was pleased to get copies of my story back all marked up; it meant that someone read the thing and took the time to write comments. It's easier said than done, too. I always find a critique day comes up faster than I think it will, and I'm sometimes scrambling, not to read the posted stuff, but to write comments.

To go into particulars of grood things, at the last meeting I talked to a new member who a) always says something interesting and to the point about work, and b) has a number of short stories published in various literary mags, and c) whose work I've read online and liked. He was super nice, and when I told him I'd read some of his stuff, and was interested in eventually trying to go the same route with publishing, said, oh, you need to check out Duotrope.com, it's a listing of all the online literary mags. He went on to tell me he's negotiating a contract with a publisher for a novel. This guy is pretty quiet compared to some folks in the group (ahem, me included, yes I've discovered I have That Guy tendencies.) He's really nice and not obnoxious at all. And successful, in the terms that I define success. I sort of felt vindicated by this.

So, to sum up: Writey Group - a grood thing.