Today's Word: Loft

From One Word

A nest for artists to hide themselves in to cultivate their masterpiece or throw wine bottles at their muses, who left them an hour ago to take up residence in a penthouse suite. Better views, and it doesn't always smell like pot noodles or desperation.

Body Count

860 words.

Last night, at about 11 p.m., after we turned off the lights, my lovely wife rolls over in bed and asks me in the gentle darkness, "So, wanna crash a Harry Potter book sale at midnight?"

And I'm left with that horrible point in every marriage when your spouse has gone insane. But it's okay considering my minor freakout last night seeing some of my story ideas in Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake," and how my Potter-mad wife talked me off another nearby ledge.

To do this weekend

Pilates
Write another 500 words, at least
Check wife's mental status
Burn CDs for Heather and Cori

Just asking

With the explosion of blogs on the Web, and the emergence of premiere blogger celebrities (bringing you all the latest news, gossip and partisan political bomb-throwing), it makes me wonder when these amateur sleuths and journalistas are gonna get tagged with a slander lawsuit. I've seen some pretty incendiary things on different islands in the blogosphere, and (Michael Savage's idiotic thin-skinned litigation, notwithstanding) I'm just curious when the blogs are going to come of age and join newspapers, radio and television in rules governing what you can't legally get away with under the guise of free speech.

Namely, when is someone major like Instapundit or Atrios going to get dragged into court for something they posted?

Today's Word: Sparkle

From One Word

Superficial club paint...body stars to make yourself shine when the lights pass over you. You are a constellation of one, a heavenly body, rolling in the denizens' peripheral visions like a goddess in the nightclub

Deep End of the Emotion

It's not my best. I regretted it the moment I posted it. Not too proud of myself today. Blah.

Awoke at 5 a.m. on the boomerang snap-back of a bad dream involving shadowy figures hunting me and then segued right into a panic attack about my novel's ending, again raking myself over the coals for thinking that it wasn't original enough. It's like the Kevin Bacon game inside my head, I can eventually track any idea I come up with to something else. I become a purveyor of used intellectual property, a literary Dumpster diver.

And then my little freak-out in the late morning when I discovered that a word I was so proud of creating exists in Googlespace. There's a part of me that demands I create new words (you know, be the next inventor of the next "cyberspace"), and if I can't I don't deserve to be walking around. Yeah, my pressure on myself is that severe.

And it's all crippling, or it tries to be, forcing me to not write this, posting hurdles in front of me. If I can't be creative, I shouldn't do anything. If a word comes up that's not "mine," I'm worthless. Spiral down. Hide in the caves of my self esteem. Fun for everyone in my house.

My wife has stepped up to say, just write it, and, slapped into my senses, I'm struggling upwards again, as you do when you are deep underwater. The light from above is this shimmering disc with wavy concentric circles abounding with sleepy curves. You struggle to go up and up, swallow the air to last in your lungs just a while longer. Your arms and legs ache for fresh air and you can only hope you time it right to break through the surface, face baptized in the cool air, water flicking off you in droplettes as you crane your head back to suck in bucketfuls of oxygen.

And then when you do get air...when you are out of the underwater cave, your limbs turn to lead. You're weak and tired and exhausted from the stressors you put yourself under. You can't believe how many times you put yourself under like that. You think the pain in your arms and the regret in your heart, burning with like beads of molten glass that run down your throat....damnit, you'd think you'd know better.

But then be grateful. You're back in action. You're not the Incredible Sulk anymore.

P.S. I'm developing an aggressive allergy to hype these days. Currently, I have a Type 4 reaction to all things Harry Potter, and a Type 2 to The Hulk. I expect it to replaced next week with a medium-grade infection to the newly discovered strain "Charlicus Angelicus Sequelitis."

P.P.S. Song of the Day: "Into Your Arms," by Nick Cave. In the immortal words of Scott Bateman, it rocks all sorts of ass, yo.

Today's Word: Generation

From One Word

Nostalgia and disappointment, past and future. Depends who you talk to.

1461

Today is the fourth wedding anniversary of my wife and I. Precious little writing shall be done today to make way for the celebratory acts that must take place on such an auspicious occasion.

However, I am working on an essay about music piracy in my spare time at work. In case you didn't hear about Sen. Orrin Hatch's little tirade a few days ago, he suggested that anyone who downloads pirated Web music ought to have their computers destroyed by some technological means.

I won't get into the violent asburdities of Sen. Hatch's alleged mental clockworks, but I'm thinking long and hard about this. There has to be a solution to music piracy. I like Apple's Music Store, but it, as a solution to a problem that's been brewing for years, only goes so far. Long story short: It's going to take a massive change on the part of everyone (consumers, corporations, artists) regarding how we view the sales of music.

If you're interested in the essay, let me know. I'm trying to live up to my vow of "all my fiction, all the time" on this blog...so, no posted essay for you.

And to my wife, I love you so much. I'm glad you married me and, most importantly, not smothered me in my snoring slumber. Yet.

On Edit

Yet another cool Internet error message.

400 Bad Request
Your request has bad syntax or is inherently impossible to satisfy.

So there.

Today's Word: Spin

From One Word

The turning of a world, the turning of a lie. Physics and emotions, both intersecting as we go about our own agendas. There is no such thing as a selfless act, she told me once. Everything is crafted for your gain, whether you mean it to or not.

Organic billboards reloaded

I would be remiss, in a “dirty old man” kind of way, if I didn't mention the mostly topless woman who showed off her assets at the recent U.S. Open to get some exposure for a certain Web casino, the name of which was scrawled on her torso.

You can find the story yourself. Just tool around with Google, and you'll stumble over it I'm sure.

So what?


My wife hugged me yesterday and asked in a very sweet voice, "So, what makes your new blog different from your old one?"

"It's about me writing."

"Well, I see an essay. I see you linking to another article. You said you went going to do that anymore," she said.

And like an expert chess player, she nails me in a bare minimum of moves.

She's right in all sorts of ways. She can see what I do like footprints in fresh snow. I said I was going to talk about writing more in on this new blog. I'd drop all the ranting, all the hit-and-run linking of stories that plagued my first blog.

I told her that I would regret the linking of the "organic billboard" story in the morning. Something in it just spoke to me, though...something neo-Dickensian, and I'm very much in a neo-Dickensian state of mind as of late. That, and thanks to the virtual seas of "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker," I feel myself swaying as if I'm on a boat rolling up and down in the waves.

So what. Or, so what now?

My wife is reading "On Writing" by Stephen King, a book I steal glances at while my wife is in the bathroom or doing something artsy-crafty, like making a quilt for a friend. The book is a part-memoir, part-writing guide and it's equal parts insightful and the boasts of a self-aggrandizing asshole. My wife reads aloud from King's tome that a first draft of any book should take three months. That's it.

And then my wife pipes up that Donna Tartt took 10 years to write her follow-up novel. Ironically, King recommends Tartt's decade-long ordeal in the back of his book, so either he values the hard work she put into it, or he's talking out of his ass. With King, I don't know, so I'll say both.

As a side note, I enjoy when my wife pops in a good riff on something an author wrote, especially if there's a snarky commentary packed in there somewhere, springing open like a menacing jester from a overwound jack-in-the-box.

What gets me about King is a comment (that my wife relays) he makes, something like "a thousand pages about Hobbits isn't enough." An obvious crack at Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," which took Tolkien 10 years to write, brewed up from source material he'd been studying and writing up in some form his whole life. Definitely not a three-month binge at the ol' workdesk.

But here's King, a guy who wrote a thousand-page tome about a plague, the end of the world, and the survivors...and he has the gall to take on "The Lord of the Rings"?

And it's not like King is anorexic with his books after "The Stand." Oh heavens no. Drop by your local bookshop and glance at King's hardcovers, the size of dictionaries. Granted, the guy can turn out a lot of books of sizable length, but there are vast wastelands in King novels that just drag. At least in Tolkien's epic, you meet the Ents and Gollum, witness the siege at Helm's Deep, watch Gandalf smack Saruman off his evil pedestal, enjoy the friendly barbs and an evolving kinship between polar opposites Legolas the elf and Gimli the dwarf. There's the ring's oily corruption spreading over Frodo, and Sam faced with a terrible choice in the caves of Shelob. Something's always happening in Middle-earth. Kick over any rock and there's history under there...the site of a terrible battle or the outskirts of some dreadful swamp where the dead glow with sickly little lights. In King's world...well, it's marking time for the Big Ugly to rear its head in Final Boss Battle form, picking off main and subcharacters until the Precious Magical Device/Personality Quirk established midway through Act 1 is used for its proper, divine purpose.

(On edit: "The Lord of the Rings" also does this, if you think about it, but you know...that's the whole point of the story. It's a quest. It's all laid out what's supposed to done to the Precious Magical Device. How it's done is hidden in shadow, with the ring nearly its own character. King, IMHO, practically holds up billboards with objects or quirks, telling the reader "THIS WILL BE USEFUL LATER!")

King also says people want a good read to take with them on airplanes. Um. No, Stephen. Don't go blaming the invention of airplanes for what you write. I want a story, densely packed, fine with nuisance, telling me something I didn't know before whether it be good or foul. I don't want a distraction on a mid-morning arc from Seattle to Chicago. I want a slice of a writer's soul. something crafty and honest and hearffelt. King's great in novella or short story form, and I'm grateful he survived his horrible accident with a van a few years ago, as well as his torrent of alcoholism and drug abuse.

Yet, I get more advice on how to write from Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird" or by (what King even suggests) Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," along with taking it upon myself to be an avid reader. His book, in the brief sideswipes I make of it is a well-crafted but ornery dissertation (occasionally repetitive and self defeating) on how to write and what it is to be a writer. Or, better yet, what it's like to be Stephen King (in the beginning, it sounded like really shitty work). Stephen King's a great airplane read, I guess (if that's what you really want to aspire to becoming), but I would love to hear tips on writing from, say, Chuck Palahniuk, whose forthcoming "Diary" pulls off what Stephen King does but with only a visceral third of the page count.

Either way, I felt a strange pull with "On Writing," and then realized that my blog was nothing more than a real-time version of King's book, which spelunks deep into the grind of writing, a grind I found a bit self-indulgent and whiny when I could finish a paragraph and look over my shoulder to survey the terrian.

So what?

Thanks to Mr. King and my far lovelier wife, I have to (again) figure out what I'm doing with my blog. In my heart I know I have been pussyfooting with the text here. I should stop whining about time and distractions and give you all a brief update on the magic going on behind the curtain. I'm sorry.

Another vow

No links.
No goofy pictures.
No politics.
No whining.
No more rants/essays/ramblings (as above).
Just writing, from me or One Word or updates.

But before the vault door closes

I do have to mention this Internet error message I got today, if just for its inherent, fortune-cookie philosophy.

You have requested data that the server has decided not to provide to you. Your request was understood and denied.

I'm gonna be thinking about that one all day.

What I'm working on

Three novels. One nonfiction book. Three graphic novels (including one ongoing piece). At least six short stories.

That's off the top of my head. I'm sure I'll come up with more when I decide to go back through my journals.

So, I guess I better get going.

I'm going to sign up for this "how-to" graphic novel program that's touring in and around Seattle. It's making a stop at my local library, so, there you go. Ought to be quite interesting, since I can't draw a stick figure. Whatever. Got ideas all over the place. At the very least, I'm hoping to take away the knowledge on how to write a graphic novel script and/or know how to talk to my future artists about what I want to get across.

Ugh. Getting sick of work draining all my energy. Worn out. Don't want to write, even though I feel better for it afterward. Keep moving, Marine. Started a Pilates program and my stomach and sides feel as if someone's been beating me with a baseball bat. Hurts to breathe if I inhale for anything longer than a five count, stinging for the sweet release of the long merciful exhale. The pain fades, and I imagine this is what it's like to die...as the pain receptors die off and the brain begins it's long, slow fade out. Probably feels like a gentle caress by unknown hands when it happens. Unless it's preceded by a grand mal seizure or a major coronary, of course.

Body Count: Over 200. Some forward motion has been achieved.

Useless note: It's been 22 hours since I last played "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker." Mark of improvement.

Today's Word: Hill

From One Word.

I grew up in the flat Midwest. The closest we ever got to elevated plains came one of two ways: on-ramps from the nearby interstate and when the town snow plow would streak by at 3 a.m., sculpting an instant mound of packed white snow. The street turned into a canyon, walls on either side to climb and sled down.

Organic billboards

Instead of going Dumpster-diving for maybe a half-eaten sandwich and some cold fries, Peter Schoeff, a 20-year-old homeless man, was served a slice of hot pizza dripping with cheese.

All he had to do was hold a sign for about 40 minutes that read: "Pizza Schmizza paid me to hold this sign instead of asking for money."

In a tactic that calls to the mind the hiring of unemployed men during the Depression to wear sandwich-board advertisements, a Portland pizza chain has hired homeless people off the street to promote the product. They are paid in pizza, soda and a few dollars.

"I think it's a fair trade," Schoeff said. "We're career panhandlers, that's the only other way we can get money."

The signs were meant to be humorous, said Andre Jehan, founder of Pizza Schmizza, a 26-restaurant business in Oregon and Washington.

"People don't have to feel guilty, while still appreciating the person is homeless. It's a gesture of kindness more than anything," he said.


Story here.

Read through it. The story is really about "ad clutter," not helping the homeless population in Oregon. Cheap labor, indeed.

Words I wish I'd invented

Part of an ongoing series.

Militainment: noun. 1) The practice of covering military actions in a way that are more like entertainment than news. 2) The blending of the entertainment industry with the military to create a genre of television shows with a heavy accent (including 'reality' programming, as well) on soldiers, the world of the soldier and/or combat activities.

Weaksauce: adjective. A generally unflattering term, mostly casting a negative light on a person's skills or an activity. Example: "You better not bring your weaksauce moves against me in deathmatch because I'll end up owning your ass with my plasma rifle."

Not enough, too much

Nothing new written. Body count still at 144. Currently, I'm absorbed in the epic quest of "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker." Lousy virtual world, all addictive yet fruitless in the end. It's a distraction on top of a bunch of others, pulling me away from the fragile strains that tie me down to my chair in front of my computer to write. I'm amazing at coming to find a distraction to keep me from writing. Currently, it's the video game, but I've taken to convincing myself that I love to wash dishes. Our dishwasher has gone south, and my wife and I have no choice (until we break down and buy a new dishwasher) to revert back to the 1960s when the whirring squat beasts weren't as popular in homes. And, along the way, I've found some kind of Zen calm in the humbling process of washing and drying dishes by hand...the meticulous care with the brush, the sponge and the dishtowel, the balance of water and soap, the sense of accomplishment to shoving your hands in hot, soapy water and rubbing stains off plates and cups At the end, all the clean dishes stacked in the cupboard. A clean sink. Hands pruning and slightly stinging from the hot, sudsing lagoon you drowned your cutlery and dishes in. A more holy man would call it a baptism. Born-again china. Knifes and forks saved from the damnation of eternal peanut butter and pasta sauce stains.

Back up a second. I do write, but it's at work when I'm indirectly warmed up during my data-entry job and it's in fragments...small, inspired pieces of orphan fiction that make some sort of sense, or will one day when I find it a good home. To me, writing these small islands of fiction is the opposite of what the French call "l'esprit d'escalier," where you think of the witty comeback when it's far too late to use them. In my case, I'm going to have this descriptions, these bits of dialogue, or whole plots just sitting around at the Big Dance, waiting for a proper suitor to ask them for this waltz.

The thing is, I have bits and pieces for the novel, but I'm only adjusting the body count when I make forward motion on the novel, starting from the beginning, or when I get the point where I can take on of those pieces and find it a good home. Tomorrow, I'm writing. I need to go through one of my scraps of paper I bring home from work, tattooed with ink stains in the form of ideas. I need to get Rayelle running for her life again.

Speaking of Rayelle (or main characters, in general), I'm planning on writing the novel based on the first-half format of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath": However, instead of switching back and forth every chapter between the Joads' travels and the third-person narratives, I'm going to have Rayelle take the first chapter, Patrick (the other main character) the second, then back to Rayelle for chapter three...and so on. The whole idea is going to have their exploits playing as a mirror to each other: One who is one her way "up" (socially and economically speaking) and the other on his way down. There's a temptation to place them in the same sort of situation, only to have them view it through their own attitude-prism, but I can't see it happening through the whole novel. Too tedious of a trick, I figure. Could turn into a gimmick if done wrong. It's on my mind, though...how to make their viewpoints compare and contrast...one belonging to a piece of gutter trash, the other to one of the most prized corporate possessions in future Seattle.

Again, so many ideas, so many distractions.

Vow

Seeing my collection of CDs, DVDs and books stacked in ordered rows about my house, I'm starting to feel a bit...I dunno...unseemly. I used to be a lot more active in Amnesty International when I was in college...back when, you know, I didn't have the money to buy music or video games, lusting after pre-release dates on gaming Web sites, groaning audibly when "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic" would be pushed back again.

Yesterday, I picked up a copy of "Dark City" on DVD, an unbelievably gorgeous and enthralling piece of sci-fi, if you haven't seen it yet. To me, it's the thinking person's "Matrix," and yet it came out a year before the Keanu Reeves too-stylin'-to-make-sense actionner. Watch "Dark City" and check out all the themes that in the film that everyone only picked up on when Carrie-Anne Moss showed up a year later in a skin-tight PVC catsuit. From the lead character emerging wet and naked in a strange world to a frantic phone call by a mysterious guide/father figure to the final reality-bending fight between the psychically charged hero and the lead overseer, it's all there. And yet. "Dark City" went unnoticed while "The Matrix" inspires college courses. It's a crime.

Well, okay...right there. I'm going on about a movie. About $16 invested in a DVD. I've been hunting for this film for a while now, even since I got some extra money in my pocket, space on my shelf and a DVD player looking for fresh bits to scan and play at my whim. And I think to myself, "Well, this is all good...but."

But. But I should do something else. I'm becoming surrounded by distractions…toys and games that go blip and bloop and will be obsolete by 2005 when the next-next generation game systems come out. I'll watch "Dark City" maybe once a year. I have it as a trophy for friends to notice.

"Oh man, I forgot about that movie. That film rocked...like when that creepy kid bit into the guy's hand as he was hanging a million feet off the ground."

It's time to give this all up. Granted, I'm not going to the WWJD thing and toss out all my stuff. No, like all Americans, I'm trying to have my gear and be karmically balanced. Or something. Reverberations of Catholic guilt in my soul saying to do something more useful. Stop pining for a Playstation 2. Do something better with your life.

And as an American, that means: Give money to someone you don't know. Give it to some organization to do something you want to do, but don't have the courage or skills to make it happen. You think it's enough to send a check. Let them figure it out. After all, you grew up in the proxy wars played out by two superpowers with conflicting ideologues, but big checkbooks. They gave cash to smaller, hungrier countries that would carry a flag for their benefactors. It's a war that's not a war. The superpowers play real-time Risk in Latin America or Central Asia, but don't get their own hands bloody. No sirree.

And you think the same thing. You write a check. You put said check in a postage-paid envelope, and you send your cash feed into some little morality army trying to free political prisoners, save some endangered species or stop some godawful disease that your tax dollars going to your government could stop except the walking dead in the country the disease is in are unlucky enough to not have any oil under their feet.

But you feel good. Somehow. For this moment, you chipped an Unselfish stone off your soul statue. You feel more pure, dosed on a Jesus-bliss for saving a little, tiny bit of the world (although you turn your head to the obnoxious fact your donation can't begin to pay for the carnage done with your tax dollars by your oil-hungry, power-mad government). You feel.... like you can see beyond the whole consumerism meme. You've beaten the system this once, and you are just one step closer understanding this whole "global village" idea that seems to have been crushed and thrown aside in the lockstep to a cable-news war. You did this because it felt right, not because you were told to. Feeling compassion for people in other parts of the world is a revolutionary act these days. We're supposed to be scared, supposed to be locked in our shells because of people across the sea who are trying to kill us. Sending a check and a note of support on behalf of a democracy activist in Beijing is the closest you'll get to affect foreign policy. You marched in peace protests and called your senators about Iraq, and whiz-boom look at the rockets fly over Basra. So, here you go. Make your plan to save the world one check, one letter at a time. Maybe you alone won't save a village, but Oxfam could use your help. So can the folks that work to ban landmines.

From here on in, whatever I spent on music, DVDs or games, I'm giving the equal amount to charity. Whatever games or CDs I sell back, the money goes to charity. I can't go through life buying something and not giving something back somehow. It's probably going about it all going, but my energy is in the right place. The money has to do some good. After all, I feel better when I finally do something charitable compared to when I buy something. That positive energy has to go somewhere.

Maybe Lennon was right. All we really need is love.

And "Dark City." It is a superb flick.

Today's Word: Basket

From One Word

Cradle the world in your hands. Take the belongings of a million years with you, past the ghosts that haunt you, past the expectations of generations, and deep into a secret place where the wind is quiet. No words come to you, but your own. You aren't commanded; you aren't forced. World in a box.