Category Archives: writing

on disability

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“The Authors Guild, of which I am a member, has done zilch to secure disability protection for writers. In my line of work, disability comes down to two things: memory loss and something else, I forget what. You lose the vocabulary retrieval skills you had when you were 30 and interesting words such as ‘parietal lobe’ and ‘sedimentary rocks’ flocked to your brain, and now you sit inert at the laptop for a number of horrendous minutes trying to remember the word for the thing that if you picked it up and dropped it on your foot it would be very, very bad — anvil! This is a disability, and a writer should be able to receive payments, and also for the other thing, whatever it is.”

– Garrison Keillor, Where’s my disability check? | Salon

Carpal tunnel, Garrison! The other thing is CTD – carpal tunnel disease. It’s either that, or maybe AAS – anvil ass syndrome, which develops from years of sitting. It turns to solid iron, but not in a good way. See when you’re an English Major – pictured here – they tell you that the secret to success as a writer is AIC – ass in chair.

He’s not doing it right. I don’t see a chair, do you? I don’t even see a desk, just a dog. Oh well.

I’m very good at AIC. Regrettably, the computer in front of my C where I sit on my A is connected to NET, which stands for something else, I forget what.

on writing – a.l. kennedy

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“Sitting alone in a room for hours while essentially talking in your head about people you made up earlier and then writing it down for no one you know does have many aspects which are not inherently fulfilling. Then again, making something out of nothing, overturning the laws of time and space, building something for strangers just because you think they might like it and hours of absence from self — that’s fantastic.”

– A.L. Kennedy

sunday night

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I’ve been trying to get a post up on the blog for days. The arrow of time has me pinned and wriggling on the wall.

I started a post on Sunday night, by writing:

Well it’s been a quiet weekend here in the Fortress of Solitude (FoS). Actually, I got out a few times, which seems antithetical to the premise of the hermitic existence to which I have consigned myself. But I guess I won’t berate myself too much; I did get a little reading done. And I managed to get the bathtub pretty clean. That’s something.

I’m so cute when I’m typing stuff.

I started a fourth draft of the novel. I’m making progress. Can’t wait, right?

on turning human

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My work as a poet and writer has occasionally been accused of trying to find some elusive, perhaps illusive, commonality between the lowest denominators of human life and the grim objects of our material lives. What essence does a man share with his coffee cup, his clock, or for that matter his pen? What does a woman share with her hairbrush, with the fog beyond the window, or the buttons of her husband’s shirts?

I maintain that everything participates in Being with us, and that we see ourselves in the furniture more readily than in the future. No poem of recent memory embodies this concept better than this spare and lovely piece about a cat which is not a cat, and neither is human nor is not.

thunder, intoxication, and discontent

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Well, that was a pretty productive day, for a Saturday.

I got new brakes on the pickup truck.

Reinstalled Windows XP on this geriatric Dell desktop.

Did my volunteer thing to help a doggie in Florida get surgery.

Which is all nice and good, but I didn’t do any writing. I’m a writer. Writers write. So I sure wish I could get motivated in that direction. It’s been hard lately.I get home from work and I just want to zone out.

I recently, finally, finished a chapter in the novel. It’s pretty dramatic. Thunder, intoxication, and discontent abound. Want to read it? OK, if there’s any interest maybe I’ll post it. Leave a comment on this post. But I’m not going to post it if no one is interested.

I feel like I ought to have something to say about the fires. Over 200 homes lost here in my own backyard, and many hundreds more across southern California. All that comes to mind is Why? What on Earth has changed to make these firestorms happen? Again. I mean, besides the drought and the winds. There has to be a reason. Or not. If you know, please share.

solitaire

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Ever notice how much writing has in common with playing solitaire? You can play your way into a game for quite a while, building your sets or whatever they’re called, and things are going fine. Then not so much. Skunked again. The card you need to keep playing is under that card you can’t use, can’t move, unless you by God cheat. Other times, you can tell write off – I mean right off – that you’ve got a lousy deal. Might as well shuffle and try again.

That’s what it feels like to me tonight. I had this cool idea to write a vignette – a really short story – about a guy who goes through life thinking it’s totally bizarre that people want to build cemeteries close to, or within, the towns and cities where they live. Why do the living want to keep the dead so close? And whose city is it, anyway?

So I’ve got what I think you’ll agree is a cool premise, especially this time of year, with Dia de los Muertos just a week away. But I can’t seem to lay a groundwork to introduce my character and his setting that will get me to my premise with any sort of alacrity or art.

Skunked again.

Merd.

and with that

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Quotes for a Friday evening:

And with that a sob broke from her, and she turned her back to him again, her shoulders shaking in the exquisite evening dress by Trigère.

– Danielle Steele

I’ve had an unhappy life, thank God.

– Russell Baker

…She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.

– Kay Ryan, from Turtle

The Writer’s Almanac

Brilliant

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Author Sells Shares of Royalties for Unfinished Novel

Poets & Writers: Tao Lin, the author of two poetry collections, a novel, and a story collection, last Thursday posted a rather unusual offer on his blog. For two thousand dollars, readers can purchase a 10-percent share of the royalties, including all U.S. serial, reprint, textbook, and film royalties, for his unfinished novel, which is tentatively scheduled for publication next year by Melville House, an independent press in Brooklyn, New York. Tao, who writes on reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com about how he recently quit his job and needs money in order to have time to write, is a poetry editor of 3:AM Magazine.

Why that’s brilliant! That’s the best idea I’ve seen in hours! I mean he came in, he threw it on the floor, and the cat licked it right up. That’s how great it is. All he has to do is get 10 investors, then he’ll have $20,000 to live on while he writes a novel. And they’ll own all his royalties, for a book which he projects will sell at last 13000 units, with a great chance of a lot more. You can do the math: this is so brilliant, I wish I was wearing rubber boots.

blog days of summer

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Well I haven’t been blogging much lately, have I? I’m in the blog days, so called because of the fact they don’t admit of blogability. It’s a paradox. Such days bespeak a life let slip deep into transition. A confluence of existential forces, in which the TV reminds us of the tragedy of chronic halitosis. And ooh, there’s a scuba diving cat, steeped in Wagnerian strains, no more submerged in mutability than me. My life is changing, is my point.

It’s all good. Obscurum per obscurius: the vagaries of the vague can keep us on our toes. I’ll be up for air soon. And I’m just messing with you guys. In the mean time, I’ve been working on rewriting a scene in my novel, in which the two brothers witness the accidental electrocution of their father’s handyman. The previous drafts had a more juvinile voice, much closer to the cognition of protagonist Marty’s eleven years of age. Now that the voice I’m reaching for is more an adult remembering the event, the scene needs to be more sophisticated, and compassionate.

Anyhoo, here’s a cool video of Al Gore’s challenge to the nation on eliminating carbon generated electricity. If he’d been inaugurated after we was elected, we’d all be far far better off.

submitting to the process

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For me, I’ve found that I feel more complete as a writer if I’m continually submitting my work. Whether I get an acceptance or rejection, as soon as I receive a response I send another one out and try to keep some semblance of movement in my submission efforts at all times. [Link]

Robert Lee Brewer, Editor, Writer’s Market, WritersMarket.com

I don’t do that. I don’t submit nearly as must as I feel I ought, or might like to, or as much as might tend to nudge my creative metabolism.

Your thoughts?

expectations and emergencies

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Back on June 7, I submitted via e-mail a piece of short fiction to the 2008 Noozhawk Fiction Contest. The prize, had my little vignette not succumbed to presumptive failure to thrive, would have been a scholarship to the SB Writer’s Conference, which starts this week. The conference has gotten so prohibitively expensive that I wouldn’t even consider paying to attend.

At this price, if they resurrected Faulkner and Frost to teach at the event, sure. But lesser mortals now holding forth have overestimated their message.

I won’t be attending the conference, and not because my story didn’t win, though it didn’t. It simply disappeared. Poof. Sucked into a void of abject indifference. Not so much came back as a “submission received and deleted, you hack.” Reminds me of a scene in one of the Star Trek movies: the teleporter malfunctions while people are being sent. Their molecules are scrambled horribly. Somebody says to Kirk over the communicator something like, “Sorry Admiral, but what we got back here didn’t live long.” Cracked me up.

I didn’t enter the contest expecting to win. I submitted just because writers write and sometimes you have to move something to the Finished pile. And I wasn’t expecting flowers in consolation when I didn’t. I’m just saying, it’s unprofessional. Inconsiderate. Regardless of their opinion of my story, nobody should be ignored. Besides, I know it’s OK writing, if they don’t. Know what I mean?

A boilerplate response text could be pasted into a reply and sent in seconds, free. I took the time and care to format and submit my humble piece as requested, and kept my covering e-mail brief and polite. Futility.

Any writer will tell you, get ready for rejection. I can handle it, but this isn’t that. And this isn’t my first rodeo, he said, channeling Bush. I have been to town enough times to know you don’t go to the whorehouse lookin’ for true love, and you don’t send your writing to strangers and expect to find it there either.

The weird thing is that I’ve searched the writers’ conference site and I can’t find any indication that judging ever took place or that a winner was selected or announced. Maybe things fell apart. That’s happening lately.

I saw a crazy dangerous possibly drunk driver on the highway the other day, so I dialed 911 on the cell. Nobody answered. Can you believe it? “All operators are busy,” at 911! That was a first for me. I finally gave up; the car was long gone, and I couldn’t have told them where to look anymore. Thank God nobody had stopped breathing or was bleeding to death.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre….