Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

Welcome…

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Greetings to recent visitors to Metaphor from Bulgaria, Saskatchewan, and Mountain View, California. Could it be that the Googlers from Google dropped by to see what’s up? Maybe they’re checking the blogosphere to see what’s being said about the g-mail outage the other day. I think I said it’s no big deal, and it’s not.

Hey, Bulgaria, bogdaproste, dudes! That’s Romanian, it’s phonetic, and it’s probably wrong, but I’m just a provoslavny kid from Carpinteria, so my tricks are limited.

Keep coming back. Take what you like and leave the rest.

If You Dream

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Nothing makes sense like sleep.
If you dream, the girl will come
and lie by you, as she was
at twenty, voice like a bird
just below the salt line
of the cognitive. In a yellow
pavilion on a field of deep grass.

Creative Commons License
If You Dream by J. Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Yes, it’s a picture of a small stone. My nephew got a handful of them from a kind docent at the LA County Museum of Natural History, and he gave this one to me. You were expecting maybe a yellow pavilion on a field? Video capture in my subconscious is on the fritz. It’s called g-Dream, and it’s still in Beta. 

zoom in docs

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I like Google Docs. I use it pretty often for notes, lists, etc. I don’t use it much for serious writing because it lacks many of the advanced features of software like Microsoft Word. And usually, when I upload a document I’ve formatted in Word, all the line breaks, paragraph indents, and other formatting is vaporized. Not cool. But the whole idea of cloud computing, and becoming less dependent on files and software on one’s own hard drive, intrigues me.

Fiddling with Google Docs last night, I decided one of my least favorite things about it is that there’s no  zoom in function. I usually have to zoom in to 125% to 150% in Word to keep from going blind while I write.

I found a work-around, when it suddenly dawned on me that you can always zoom in on any Web site, and that’s what Google Docs is.

I use Firefox. To zoom in and enlarge the text on any page, you press Ctrl and +. To zoom out, press Ctrl and -.  In other words, press the plus (+) or the minus/dash (-) key while holding Ctrl.

Sometimes it’s also good to get toolbars and stuff out of your way, to concentrate on what you’re writing, right?

In Google Docs,  go to full screen and hide the g-Docs toolbar by pressing Ctrl shift F.

To full screen your browser window and get everything out of your way, press F11.

Now you’re one rung of the tech ladder closer to the clouds. And since you’re connected to it now, you can watch a bunch of geeks talk in the cloud, about the cloud.

just another uh oh

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“Gmail, Google (NSDQ:GOOG)’s Web-based e-mail service, is back up and running after the site suffered yet another outage that blocked users’ from accessing their contact lists.”

[Link]

Oh well, it was about 20 mintues for me, 2 hours for others. And whataya want for nuthin, ya know?

Here I am, blithely blogging about it, on another free Google service. Actually, I don’t think I will.

I got some editing done this afternoon, despite the weather in here. It’s hotter than a biscuit where I live.

How was your day?

not rootbeer?

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I guess it’s been a while since I posted, huh? I was really on a blogging kick for a while there, then not so much. Maybe I ran out of steam, or content. Both.

It’s root beer, not rootbeer? I want it to be one word. I’m writing a scene in which the characters have root beer floats in a drive-in joint in 1971. Working personal memory for all it’s worth, and more. But according to www.rootbeer.com, it’s two words. Oh well.

I’ve been working on my novel quite a bit. Over the past week, I’ve edited several chapters, organized most of my manuscript files, and some of my notes. I wrote a new outline too. Lots of work. Want to see what a novel looks like before it gets finished, when the files are just sitting in the computer? Sure you do.

click to view

33 Chapters, all nice and neat. Just under 94,000 words in Draft 5. Up until this afternoon, I had it all in a single MS Word document, with headings and sub-heads, and I used document map to navigate.  I decided to try working in singe chapter files for a while, because Vista  – on my new computer – has tagging and stacking functions that let you sort documents by tags, or labels. Keywords, in other words. That might come in handy. Besides, the file was just getting so damn big, ya know?

Each file has an abbreviation, STH, and a number, 01-33. Those are the chapter numbers and STH stands for Someplace To Hide, the working title of the book.

Want to see the whole archive, all the drafts? No. You really don’t. There are hundreds of Word files in a bunch of folders. To get my current 94,000 words, I’ve probably typed a quarter million. E’gads.

Things are always changing. For example, chapter 30 is called Military Honors, because one of the characters is a veteran. Since I wrote that, I’ve decided that guy never did get drafted for Vietnam after all. Now what am I gonna do when I get round to Chapter 30 this time? We’ll see. Right now, I’m working on Chapter 7, again.

I’m interested in how other writers keep their work – projects, notes, files, etc. – organized. How do you keep track of your themes and problems? Network with me!

do something

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All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause — there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once.

– Joss Whedon, writer and film director (b. 1964) 

Now how could anybody disagree with that? I would add one caveat: do a little reading and thinking first.  Try to clear off a small plot of mind for the task at hand. Stupidity is one of the most contagious diseases threatening our species. Here’s a particularly serious case, by the name of Mark Williams. Seriously, wow.

Reading Announcement

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“Fused Realities”

Two accomplished local poets and writers, Joseph Gallo and J. Kyle Kimberlin, will share the podium, reading from their work in poetry and prose.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

4:00 pm

Presidio Springs Community Center

721 Laguna Street, Santa Barbara

 scroll down for links to media

Joseph Gallo

    August

    Late birds flush the bush, streak
    beaks across a bruised horizon.

    Nightfall knows better than we
    precisely what to do with itself.

    Wild dogs skirl ritual like Pawnee,
    their plain song sere against the sea.

    Fluters hoot the winged oaks and every
    mouse shadow stands its still ground.

    To move now would be to
    do the only human thing.


J. Kyle Kimberlin

    from Pictures of My Forgetting

    You know that life is hiding from us, though
    we caught a glimpse this morning, where
    it fell as light on the carpet by the door.
    It rose and flew like a moth down the long
    hall and disappeared. As a child I saw it rest
    that way. It would lie by the window while
    morning arrived and my grandmother
    was singing in another room. It fluttered
    by and rested a while on my hand. It spread
    its wings and loved me, whispering a psalm.

    The house is gone but not that room, not yet.

Links:

overflow

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One time when I was a kid, our family went camping. We went camping many times, you know. This time it might have been Shaver Lake, south of Yosemite and northeast of Fresno. I’m guessing. Anyway, the campground was full when we arrived and the first night they put us in Overflow, a part of the campground set aside for just such times. It was more of a dirt parking lot than a campsite; those closer to the lake were beautiful.
It was just one night, we made a happy family adventure of it, and Overflow was our term – for years – for any situation in which a person or thing was exiled and expected to wait off to one side. If your food wasn’t ready for take-out as promised, and you had to stand and wait while the cashier rang up other customers, you were in Overflow. You get it.

I thought about that today because I used to have another blog a different URL, and since I moved Metaphor to this address, all those posts – 1783 – have been waiting in Overflow, at a defunct address. I finally got around to importing them, and Metaphor now has all 2262 I’ve made since I started it in 2003.

Excited about being able to browse all that good old stuff? I knew you would be.

Anyway, here’s hoping you always get the main campground, close to the lake, close enough but not too close to the bathrooms.

Bad Beginnings: Slumdog Millionaire

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Imagine you got on an airplane and the captain said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we plan to begin today’s flight to Dallas by crashing into an avocado orchard about two miles east of the airport. But after that, the flight should improve, and the middle will be fantastic.”

Well it’s a funny thing, art. Despite all its yawning canyons of subjectivity, we are stewing in it together. And despite knowing that our tastes are so disparate, I still hope each time to like the things that other people have told me they enjoyed. But I keep encountering movies whose directors take that crash first, soar later approach.

Tonight I sat down with a cup of decaf coffee and the DVD of Slumdog Millionaire. It is a widely acclaimed, very popular, successful  film. Highly recommended to me, personally, it was.

Visually dazzling and emotionally resonant, Slumdog Millionaire is a fim that’s both entertaining and powerful. – Rotten Tomatoes

So I completely expected to be enthralled to some extent; at least, to muddle through in a few sittings, and decide that it was a decent film at the end. Here’s what happened.

Scene 1: We see two sweaty, fairly dirty men in close-up. One man is young and skinny, the other older and fatter. The older man was blowing smoke in the face of the other.

Cut to Kyle’s house, where he sits in his chair. Setting his coffee aside, he says, “OK, right off, I’m disgusted, repulsed. Great start.”

Scene 2: The Indian version of the Millionaire TV show, a nervous guy, the young guy in the first scene, is a contestant. Cut scenes back and forth to (scene 1) him being beaten and tortured by the big guy.

Scene 3: Turns out the big guy is a cop. Another cop comes in, and it’s revealed they’re torturing this young guy to find out how he cheated on the TV show. He won’t talk. They proceed to attach electrodes to him and give him a shock. Cut to …

Scene 4, Kyle’s house. He ejects the DVD with the remote, walks to the TV, retrieves the disk. He picks up the red Netflix envelope, slides the disk into it, seals the envelope and carries it to the table by his front door, to go back to Netflix at his next convenience. Returning to the TV, he takes another film from a stack of red envelopes.

Turns out I don’t care how great other people think a movie is. I don’t care how many times I’ve done this, only to be told later, “Thou fool! It gets better! … Sure, it starts off slow, but then it gets good!”

Thanks, I’m sure that’s absolutely true. I have no doubt that Slumdoggie was going to improve. I just don’t think that’s a good reason to expect me to sit through a bad beginning. The beginning of everything matters. There are no ordinary moments. Life is too short. I’m writing a novel right now, and I’m trying really hard not to leave any vapid, bland, lousy paragraphs in it.

Any writer will tell you that you get one chance to set the hook, when you have the reader’s attention and you’d better do something for it. It’s entirely likely that the reader hasn’t even bought the book yet; she or he is standing in front of the shelf at Barnes & Noble, and is just going to read a few pages first.

Movies with bad beginnings rely on an old, and probably dying, paradigm: that of the viewer who has already paid to get in, or to rent, and is willing to give it some time before he does what I did. The paradigm is dying because increasingly, people are like me: two more Netflix flicks on the TV, 70+ channels of crap on TV, the vast Internet at hand, and a small library of books in the house. Plus a stack of unread magazines. We are swimming in distractions and entertainments, and nobody is getting a mulligan in this game, anymore.

It gets better is one thing I don’t ever want to hear about the humble things that I create with the talent God gave me. If the beginning doesn’t merit your attention, the whole thing belongs in the shredder. And if the first scene of a movie blows chunks, I don’t care how good the middle is, or the end. Maybe the director should have started in the middle or at the end, and left the asinine beginning on the cutting room floor, in Studio City, or Mumbai, and saved us all some time.

My Work

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Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
Keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

– Mary Oliver

I have a resonance with this piece, along with my friend at camera-obscura.

So the question is, how did I allow myself to be astonished today? Well, there was that moment in the afternoon, when I went through the back yard gate to water the flowers, and found the place was a playground for scrub jays. They were wildly happy, darting in circles around each other and around the birdbath with its fountain spouting from a concrete squirrel. It took them a moment to see me coming, and to hear the sound of the gate, and then they darted off.

 
Would I lie to you?