Back to Sotto Voce
Oh Great, Another Mouth to Feed
It's Not Debt, It's Called Being Book Poor
All Your Camera Are Belong to Us
Some Odds and Ends to Start the Week
Reclaiming History from the Mississippi Mud
Tuesday is Off to a Good Start
Why the Year Just Doesn't Matter
The Long Reach of a Short Circuit
Where the Elite Meet to Beat the Heat
Giving "Type Pad" a Whole New Meaning
Better(?) Living Through Chemistry
The Other Half of the Coaching Exercise
2005 Updates.
December 30, 2005
Oh Great, Another Mouth to Feed
December 16, 2005
A Sense of (Be)Longing
December 13, 2005
It's Not Debt, It's Called Being Book Poor
December 8, 2005
Up and Coming
The website for my forthcoming book, Seeing Through Clouds, is currently under construction as a subdomain on this site. Take a look and let me know what you think.
The cover art is by Ron Blalock and the graphic design of the book is by Bill Gordon. The site colors and font are based on their work. I humbly stand on the shoulders of giants.
The plan is to launch the site under its own domain name when the book launches early next year. Lately I've been spending most of my free time (literally; as in, time I don't get paid for) working on getting the book, the website, and the marketing plan into shape.
Now I understand what the pros mean when they tell you that writing (and editing and rewriting and editing and rerewriting and editing and ...) is really only the beginning. And that goes double for those of us who are choosing the self-publishing route.
By the way, I hope some of you readers (all 3 of you) are wondering why a professional writer with a decent track record of stable freelance sales would choose to go the self-publishing route. I'm hoping this because I have some strong opinions that I'd really love to share, and Mary Jo is tired of hearing them. So since I don't have a comment feature, you'll just have to write me and we can have a nice one-to-one conversation about it.
And for those of you who intuit that a writer could decide to go the self-publishing route precisely because per has a decent track record of stable freelance sales -- you are blood of my blood.
November 30, 2005
It's All Downhill From Here
The debate over Thinly Veiled Christian Mysticism vs. God-Hating Liberal Atheistic So-Called "Science" Just Because Their Experiments Work Grumble Mumble has been joined on a new front. Case in point:
"Gravity played role in New Orleans' bridge failures"
According to the article, a team of researchers from the University of Missouri-Rolla "believes NewtonÂ’s theory of gravity can explain why the 65-foot concrete slabs dropped off their supports into Lake Pontchartrain."
Take that, Intelligent Falling proponents!
Now if the architects' lawyers can just figure out how to sue Mother Nature for contributory negligence...
November 14, 2005
All Your Camera Are Belong to Us
October 14, 2005
Filing the Buddha
" You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of Truth,' said the devil. 'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his friend. 'Oh, not at all,' the devil replied, 'I am going to let him organize it.'" -- J. Krishnamurti, "On the Dissolution of the Order of the Star of the East"
October 6, 2005
Naming Wrongs
October 1 and 3, 2005
September 29, 2005
I Feel Your Pain
September 26, 2005
Some Odds and Ends to Start the Week
September 21, 2005
Reclaiming History from the Mississippi Mud
September 20, 2005
Tuesday is Off to a Good Start
September 7, 2005
Hurricane Katrina
August 26, 2005
Whar Fightin'?
August 24, 2005
Why the Year Just Doesn't Matter
The twin golden rules of writing children's novels, as the editors from the big publishing houses constantly remind us at writers' conferences, are these:
- Spoon-feed 'em.
- Front-load the facts.
Apparently, the current crop of editors making the circuit all suffer from ADD and think that their audience does, too. The reader can't be trusted to be patient enough to discover, in due course, everything from the color of the protagonist's eyes to the precise date. All essential contextual information has to be presented -- without, of course, resorting to omniscient "gentle reader" exposition or contrived "as he stood before the mirror" scenes -- within the first two pages or you're somehow letting the reader down.
"You need to mention the year early on," I keep being told. But no matter how creatively I try to work it in, the result ends up being stilted. I've been able to get the characters to reference their location (Berlin), the time of year (spring), their ages (fifteen), and the general time period (one of the boys is wearing a Hitler Youth uniform). But they adamantly refuse to bring up the year in their conversation.
And then it hit me why they are being so stubborn, and it's not just because "1937" means precisely squat to the characters as well as to kids today. The story is set in an ambiguous time, and I want the reader to feel the unease of that ambiguity. Is it wartime? Is it peacetime? There are times that it feels like one and then a page later it could be the other. There are uniforms and secret police and block wardens, but where are the bombing raids?
I want the reader to know that it's not always possible to tell when you're at war and when you're at peace. Today's kids are probably more keenly attuned to the tensions created by that kind of ambiguity than at any time since the late 1930s. And if Erich, my protagonist, found the strength to face these problems, maybe my readers can too.
August 20, 2005
The Long Reach of a Short Circuit
August 17, 2005
Justice Tuesday
August 14, 2005
Where the Elite Meet to Beat the Heat
August 11, 2005
Giving "Type Pad" a Whole New Meaning
July 17, 2005
A Couple of Metaphors
July 5, 2005
New Journal Coming
I got out of the habit of writing a morning log on my laptop a few months back. It had started out being a very useful exercise, but it was becoming forced. When the iBook had its near-fatal seizure and I ended up losing about six months' worth of logs, that proved to be the final straw.
Recently I've found myself missing the activity, though. But since I spend all day on the computer, I don't feel the need to see it first thing in the morning. (It's bad enough I see it just before going to bed most nights -- like tonight!)
So I've bought a journal. It should be arriving Thursday. I'll keep it on the bedside along with my Parker Vacumatic. Pen to paper is a much more relaxing way to write in the morning. I could have just used my ubiquitous yellow legal pads, but that's not the right medium for this sort of writing.
I also keep a "philosophical journal" (where the "Diary Entries" at left are taken from) for stuff that's more consequential, or at least more developed, than what appears in the morning log. Up until now, the other big difference was that one was in electronic form while the other was pen to paper. But since even that distinction is going away -- to the point of using pens filled from the same bottle of ink for each -- the disinction will disappear as soon as I finish filling the current "philosophical journal." At that point, the morning log will assume the duties of both. So expect to see scans from the new journal here on occasion.
Thinking things through like this is important to me.
July 3, 2005
A Writing Exercise
July 1, 2005
Better(?) Living Through Chemistry
According to the Food and Drug Administration, taking antidepressants increases one's risk of committing suicide.
Ummm . . .
(*raises finger, thinks better of it, lowers finger*)
Just let the implications and scenarios play out in your head for a little while. Trust me, they don't get any less absurd the more you think about them.
Having lost my brother Michael to depression-related suicide, I'm a little sensitive about psychiatry. Though I'm not prepared to go all Thomas Szasz on it quite yet, I've seen enough to know that it's hard enough managing the chemicals we're born with without dumping all kinds of poorly-understood, manufactured-for-profit ones in there and stirring vigorously while hoping for the best.
June 28, 2005
The Other Half of the Coaching Exercise
June 22, 2005
A Coaching Exercise
June 17, 2005
Instant Gratification
You gotta love the Internet. There I was writing, listening to Musical Starstreams (I write better to so-called "ambient" music) when I hear, as backdrop to a song, the unmistakable voice of Alan Watts giving a lecture (For those who are interested, the song was "I Know That I Know" by Capsula, on the compilation Chilling Goddess).
Well, in it he riffs this absoutely great limerick that just goes right to the heart of my TTS dispatch on cognicentrism. So after a quick Google I find the text of the limerick, copy it, paste it in the dispatch (with proper attribution, of course), and post the tweaked file -- a wonderful connection made possible by the people who live and share in the wonderful Internet Commons.
I hope you find my little "value-added" contribution a fair return of the favor.
June 9, 2005
Pen to Paper
Even though I have been writing a fair amount lately, it's in a different format -- pen on paper. I have a thing for fountain pens, though I am not a "collector" in the same sense that I used to collect coins and lapel pins (by the bushel). I have only a few and I rotate them in and out of daily use. None of them are particularly rare or valuable, but they are all wonderful writers. Except, possibly for the Rotring 600, a solid-brass behemoth which looks like it was designed to pry open car doors at accident scenes.
Anyway, I recently purchased a Parker 51 Vac-filler from the market board at Pentrace, and it has been such a joy to write with that I find myself constantly jotting down ideas, thoughts, and extended rambles of all kinds on any paper surface I can find -- the ubiquitous Ampad yellow legal pad is the handiest surface. I actually look forward to writing bills because I can use my recently reconditioned Parker Vacumatic.
It should be obvious by now that I have a thing for Parkers.
So I've been busy writing, even though it hasn't been in electronic format. And since transcription is boring and scanning is fun, I may start putting some of those notes up here as graphics.
Be warned: my penmanship would never have been approved by Sr. Bernadette at St. Anne's School in Bristol. Fortunately for me, she was not the type to whack knuckles.
May 28, 2005
Artella!
The latest issue of Artella: the Waltz of Words and Art just arrived in the mail, and boy is it beautiful! I'm really excited to see my short piece "Hunting the Power Animal" appearing with the mixed media art doll by artist Anne Mayer Hesse that inspired it, along with some of my better answers to the contributor's questionnaire. Great job as always, Marney!
You can order a copy here. Do your part to keep this wonderful project -- a venue, a forum, and a sane asylum for creatives of all kinds -- going.May 15, 2005
Faint Praise
A full-page ad for a new crime thriller in today's New York TImes Book Review leads with this quote from a Publisher's Weekly review:
"Michael Connelly comes as close as anyone to being today's Dostoyevsky of crime literature . . . one of his finest works to date."
[Boggle].
The thing that really gets me is that some publicist out there actually thought that a quote in which the author is said to be no better than anyone else at writing books in a style completely unsuited to the genre is a compliment.
Note to self: Never hire that publicist.
April 14, 2005
That Thing You Do
In a Washington Post article titled "IPod Devotees Rocked by Thefts", staff writer Del Quentin Wilber discusses a new and unexpected form of identity theft -- loss of musical expression. Having experienced a similar loss recently, I can sympathize.
My loss was not due to theft, but rather to some nameless careless-ass Apple subcontractor assembly line flunkie in Tennessee (am I bitter? Nah.). My iBook G3 has been plagued with motherboard problems as it passes gracelessly through its middle age (at three years old), and the latest seizure caused the computer to lose touch with its RAM. This meant that I couldn't back it up on MJ's G4 using Target Disk, so I made sure to get at least three second opinions as to the likekihood of a hard drive wipe -- which Apple techs always duly warn you is a dim but statistically non-irrelevant possibility. All were universally confident that the problem wouldn't require messing with the hard drive at all.
Note to self: don't believe Apple techs anymore.
My faithful, hardworking machine came back with not only the hard drive wiped, but no OS. Plus, Technician #316354 didn't even fix the damn CD-ROM drive either, so I couldn't boot off the restoration disk. Back to the shop for another round. This time it came back with an OS -- 10.2.0, to be precise. So on top of everything we had to spend hours bringing it up-to-date as well as reloading everything.
Gee, thanks for all the hard work, Apple Subcontractors. Next time I'll just get me a big electromagnet and do it myself.Long story short: I rebuilt almost all of my work files on MJ's machine from backups, but my music -- a huge chunk of which were painstaking recordings off cassette tapes that I will have to redo -- lots of photos, and files I've been carrying around for countless generations of computers are irretrievably gone. (Don't ask about the files on the iPod -- you can guess.) On the upside, the old G3 has been reconditioned and is going to MJ's brother to use in law school and I have a Power Book arriving today on the slow boat from China.
But I know the pain of e-loss (or perhaps iLoss). The long sessions of hunting for, loading, de-duping, and arranging files and folders so that I wouldn't miss a beat with my clients' projects were good opportunities for me to meditate on the meaning of attachment and the clinging aggregates. And despite the loss of those things -- and they weren't even "things" in their own right, but virtual copies of things, arranged from digits on a hard drive -- I am still here and whole and functioning.
Damn right I'm going through a grieving process, but even in the midst of it I recognize that it is just the dance of separation that the ego must perform. Doesn't make the feelings any less real, but it doesn't make them any more real, either. Know what I mean?
March 30, 2005
Zero-Sum Game
A Conundrum in the Style of R. D. Laing
You are right so
I must be wrong but
My heart says I'm not and
What I feel is what I feel but
That can't be right because
Both of us can't be right and
Your argument sounds better and
I can't really explain what I'm feeling so
You must be right because I'm not but
My argument seems valid to me but
You don't see its validity so
That means it's invalid so
I am wrong and
You win.
Go to 2004 Updates
