Paper Chasing

I hate to tell you guys this, but I never went to law school. (!)  I know, right?  You'd think, in this modern day and age, I'd have somehow coughed up the $90 grand (or taken out the student loans) and run the Paper Chase along with my 1,128,729 closest friends.  But no.  I went to paralegal school, which is like Law School Lite.  It only takes a little less than a year instead of three, it's a lot cheaper, and they actually teach you stuff instead of playing hide the ball, which is, I gather, what they do in law school.  (If you're a lawyer, and your paralegal can't find the ball, you are in serious trouble.  Luckily, I'm so good at finding the ball that even my cat, who knocks hers under the door to the HVAC quite frequently, meows for me to come get it for her.)

There's a guy in my office who desperately wants to go to law school.  He's actually been, but that was more than 10 years ago.  He was accepted to Fairly Prestigious Institution and waitlisted for Really Prestigious Institution, which isn't a choice I'd want either.  He wound up going to Fairly Prestigious Institution and lasted two semesters.  Would it have gone better at Really Prestigious Institution?  It's hard to say. He wants to go back and finish, but he's having trouble getting his LSAT score (that's Law School Admission Test for you non-legal people) up high enough.  Having not-finished law school once, he's being treated like damaged goods--never mind that the goods are ten years older now and he's been a paralegal the whole time.  Honestly, you want good prep for law school?  Work as a paralegal for a while.  There just ain't a better way to see how it all fits together.

Somehow, this has spurred me into an existential crisis.  Not that I want to go to law school; no, I like what I do and I'm not in any hurry to do anything else.  I like getting to go home at 5:30.  Well, okay, more like quarter to six most nights, but still.  Something about this whole conversation made me wonder what would have happened if I'd gone to law school right after college, as was the plan (it wasn't my plan, but that's another story).  Where would I be today, and what would I be doing?

Surprisingly, the answer my brain comes up with is broke and dead. 

Or maybe that's not so surprising.  The lawyer who talked me out of going to law school (isn't that kind of like a monsignor talking an altar boy out of joining the priesthood?) told me I was far too interested in truth and justice to be an effective attorney.  (He did say that.  He really said that.)  "You know what you'd do," he went on.  "You'd take all those battered-women cases, and the people who got fired from their jobs for unjust reasons, and the women who can't get apartments because they have a kid with Down's.  People who will never pay you and lawsuits that you'll never win.  Or worse, you'll become a prosecutor, and you'll be fifty years old and still living with roommates because you can't afford your own place."

Well, okay, he said something like that.  I have a good ear for dialogue, but it gets rusty over a twenty-three year time span.  Still, you have to admit he was a pretty good judge of character.  Most of that does sound like what I'd do.  The "dead" part is a little harder to follow, but I crashed and burned pretty hard in 1999 and again in 2001, and I can't imagine I would've somehow not crashed and burned if I'd have been an attorney when all that was going on.  (Although, I might have had better health insurance.  Maybe.)  I have a high-stress occupation as it is; if I were an attorney, it'd be even higher stress, and, well, yeah.  I might very well be dead, having driven my Lincoln into the San Diego Bay over a motion denied or a restraining order that didn't do a damn bit of good.

Roland, the bad guy in Mindbender, says to Our Heroine at one point, "Surely you cannot mean to be a librarian for the rest of your life."  (Yep, I've got a gun-toting action hero librarian.  You tell me why it's not published yet.)  She gets understandably annoyed and asks what's wrong with that, exactly.  He tells her she has much greater potential, and as Linus of Peanuts would say, there's no heavier burden than a great potential.  He is, of course, messing with her head, but the question is genuine and every now and then I have some stupid conversation with somebody that makes me ask it again.  Surely you cannot mean to be a paralegal for the rest of your life.  (No, only until about age 70, and then I thought I'd do some skydiving.)  In all seriousness, though, what if I'm supposed to be doing something else?  What if I'm floating around on a vast sea of untapped potential, in the paralegal lifeboat that I've somehow become deluded into thinking is a luxury yacht?  Well, okay, I'm a practical person here, so let's say a 38-foot ocean-going small vessel with plenty of foul-weather gear.  In short, what if I'm doing it all wrong, and ruining my life?

On the other hand, I am not a great believer in the ruinability of life.  I am, after all, 43 years old, and I've had my share of ruin-your-life level tragedies. I've flunked out of music school, ditched not  just a boyfriend but an entire gender, survived the suicide of someone I was crazy about, changed religions, changed political affiliations, changed hair lengths, changed favorite sports, got fat, went to Central America, had and lost a literary agent and watched a friend get her labia pierced.  I have also, just incidentally, worked in a library, and before I got lured into the sordid world of things legal I was pretty sure I wanted to do that for the rest of my life, too.

But that darn sea of untapped potential.  I dunno.

Talk Thursday (on Saturday): Talk Thursday?

Okay, I'll admit I skipped my meeting and my going-home-early-to-get-some-sleep idea and a bunch of other things so I could hang out in the desert with Lawrence (of Arabia) and Auda and Ali and the gang.  But look, folks, opportunities to see the big man on the big screen are few and far between anymore, and Just Not To Be Missed.  Larry has a special place in my life.  It's my favorite movie ever, for one thing, unless Star Wars is my favorite movie ever, a thing about which I go back and forth a lot.  (Actually, Lawrence is a lot like Star Wars.  It's Star Wars in the desert.  Camels instead of X-wings, that's the only difference.)  For another thing, it's one of the few movies ever made that refuses to lionize its hero, shows both his good and bad sides and eventually ends (spoiler alert!) not in triumph but in catastrophe.  And, yeah, it cleaned up on Academy Award nominations, and it's considered one of the best films ever made, and David Lean is a genius, and blah blah blah, but those are just other reasons to go see it.  The main reason is Lawrence himself, as played by Peter O'Toole.  He's both noble and psychotic, cheerful and unbelievably messed up, probably suffering from a pretty severe case of PTSD and at the same time believing he's a god.  He's a psychologist's dream, or nightmare, or something, and yet when he's onscreen, it's very hard to look at anything else. Besides, he helped me write the synopsis for Mindbender, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that he died in 1935.

Thursday was the 50th anniversary of the film's release, and also the introduction of yet another new! Improved! version of the film.  Unlike 1988, they didn't add any missing footage (and thank all the gods there are; the movie's pushing four hours as it is).  What they did instead was take a digital picture of each and every frame of the original film footage, which, being 50 years old, is in pretty sorry shape.  Then they took each digital picture and loaded it into something called 4k software, which I didn't follow very well, but if you're into digital photography, you probably know what that means.  The technicians then went over the digital photos of every single frame of this thing (remember, pushing 4 hours) and removed things like cracks and splits, deepened the color where it had obviously faded or stained, corrected the lighting where it was too dark, and did other photography thingys until they had a finished product that was as close as they could come to what David Lean originally had in mind.  The result:  You can see every pore on Larry's face.  You can count the hairs in the camels' noses.  I don't mean to be flip, here, but it's unbelievably clear.  Considering that half the movie is gorgeous shots of desert vistas, it sure is nice to be able to look at them and practically run your hand through the grains of sand.  A Blu-Ray of all this is being released in November, and if it looks half as good on a TV as it does on the big screen, it'll be worth every cent you'll pay for it.  Not owing a Blu-Ray player myself, and having a TV that's at least 20 years old, I can assure you that this is not a paid endorsement of any kind whatsoever.

Speaking of great undertakings that don't always end well, I'm not sure what's going on with Talk Thursday.  It's been a month or so since I heard from anybody at the Topic-o-Meter, and the last time we assigned dates for the topic, it was just me and Cele (though Shinsige dropped in at the last minute).  Since then, all quiet on the western front (and that's a different movie altogether).  So I'm not sure if we've dropped off the face of the planet, or what, exactly.  At the moment I'm forced to assume that we're at least on hiatus.

The point of Talk Thursday (and there is one! There is one!) was, or is, if I understand correctly, to encourage regular blogging.  There was also the whole "oh yeah, and we're all going to blog about this thing in particular" but I think that was basically arbitrary, because the topic could be "The Sock Drawer" and you could end up with a column about sex toys. Certainly it encouraged me (especially the sex toys).  So I'm kind of not sure what to do now.  Except to keep blogging on Thursday, since that seems to be one of the best nights to grab a table at Afrah and snarf down pita bread before my meeting.  (Anymore, you want to go to Afrah, the earlier the better; past about seven the place fills up so fast you'd think you were in downtown Amman on a Saturday night.  Okay, I'll admit that wasn't the world's greatest metaphor.)  Besides, blogging on Thursday means I have an excuse to haul my laptop somewhere, use somebody else's WiFi and look intellectual for a little while.  The chicks go for ladies who look intellectual in Muslim restaurants.  Er, or so I hear.

Talk Thursday: Failure to Launch

Well, this probably comes as a surprise to no one, but I'm taking a few days off from the swimming.  I'm just plain tired.  I'll probably be back in the pool tomorrow, though, because I'm starting to miss it.  I think I have a minimum level of chlorine in my blood, and if it drops below that I start questioning the reason for my existence.  Kind of like a fish out of water.  No, more like a fish who's been kidnapped by (human) aliens, taken out of the water, tagged, photographed, measured, and then dropped back into the water as part of some big scientific project it knows nothing about.  It will tell the other fish this story at the campfire later on (do fish make campfires?) and the other fish will say, "Tell us another one, Ralph" and "Did they give you the old anal probe?" before breaking up into crude fishy laughter and passing around another six-pack of Glorp Light. No one ever believes Ralph when these things happen.

Anyway:  I'm having, shall we say, a colorful week.  I've been covering cases for a colleague who was out on medical leave, and I just found out she's not coming back.  Yikes, what am I going to do with these cases?  I started a class, went to see an ortho. doc who pronounced my knee Not In Need Of Surgery, navigated the Chick-Fil-A boycott/celebration/onslaught and snuck out for frozen yogurt at least twice.  And I stared into the abyss that is what I'm writing lately and determined that it is, indeed, an abyss.  Or maybe a sinkhole.  Anyway, there's a void, and nothing to fill it.

I need a project.  I need a project like I need chlorine.  Without a project, I'll be the next Ralph, drinking Glorp Light and wondering what in hell an anal probe is, anyway.  Oh, I can write; watch this column come into existence every single week, whether I feel like it or not.  I need something to write about, is the thing.  The increasingly-inaccurately-named Mindbender trilogy (which has four volumes, and part of a fifth) is not going anywhere fast and I've yet to come up with anything to take its place in my head.  Joan thinks I should be writing comedy, and I do have this thing going about statuary and public art all over Dallas suddenly coming to life and proving problematical for law enforcement.  And it's okay--it's kind of fun, actually--but it's not, you know, Art.

Not that I have a clue what Art is (except this guy I knew in high school who always seemed kinda sleazy; years later I ran into him again, heard his side of the story and realized I had judged him too harshly, as nearly all of us do to other people when we are between the ages of thirteen and seventeen).  I want to write suspense/thrillers.  I wanna do sagas of intense complexity, with big secrets and car chases and gruesome murders and blood all over the place.  I wanna do more rapid page-turns than Big Steve and more plot twists than Kameron Hurley.  (And if you haven't read God's War and Infidel yet, get moving; Rapture comes out in November.)  I want explosions and betrayals and fast-moving conversations that you have to follow or your life will be in danger.  I just need, you know, some kind of, like, idea.

What do I have instead?  Living statues.  And some Norse gods.  Pretty sure there were a few Norse gods in there somewhere.

In the literary world, we call that failure to launch.

So I'm taking a class.  The class is based on The Artist's Way, a book by Julia Cameron.  It's designed for writer's block, which I don't think I have, exactly; writer's anxiety comes a lot closer. Or maybe we could say writer's void.  The thing is, it just looks like an abyss; in fact it's an underground mine fire, like in Centralia, Pennsylvania, and when a hole opens up to the surface it belches toxic gas, fumes and blasts of lethal heat.  The book is supposed to help with this.  Overcome writer's block, turn out prizewinning novels, stories, plays.  So far it's been creepily about feelings, which, as a former Lutheran, I have none of.  Just kidding.  Well, kidding a little.

Anyway, I hope it helps.  We just started Chapter Two, and since the mighty Law Dogs are sidelined tonight by extremely high temps and missing personnel, I might just go home and, uh, do my homework.  You know.  Like in high school.

Talk Thursday: Respect in the Morning

Hi all! We're introducing a new feature here at Buddhist in the Bible Belt for our legion of screaming fans. It's called Talk Thursday. Y'all might recall my four days in New Orleans and the much weirdness that ensued. Well, part of it was meeting some really cool people. Among them, JulieAnne and Kent. They're from Utah, my former haint (and for lots of reasons it's best that I'm not living there anymore), and they introduced me. So blame them.

Talk Thursday is a round robin of blogging. A topic gets introduced sometime between Sunday and Thursday. By Thursday, you're supposed to have your post up, so I'm kind of pushing it here. Luckily there are few rules. Just write something, check out what everybody else is writing and enjoy! Them's good rules.

So this week's topic is respect in the morning. I'm not sure what one is supposed to respect in the morning, but as somebody who's been hauling her sorry self out of bed at about 4:30 to Get the Fucking Revision Done for a month, I have no respect for mornings. They're cold and unpleasant and dark and even the CATS don't want to be up at that hour. Normally you get up, cat follows you into the kitchen, expecting to be fed. Nope, not these three. They crack a sleepy eyelid, yawn (I think they're really saying "Turn the light off, you crazy hooman," but we'll call it a yawn anyway) and go right back to what they were doing, which is to say, sleeping. Would that I were so lucky.

Ah, but here's a question. Do mornings have respect for me? They do, after all, show up with predictable constancy, right around the same time every day. So they are at least reliable. I can count on them not to abandon me after a night of wild partying, which at my age consists of maybe reading a few pages of Thich Nhat Hanh's "Happiness" before I pass out from exhaustion. Further, it's very quiet in the morning around our place. The a/c doesn't start chilling everything out until about six, Joan is still asleep, and frankly it's rather pleasant. If it just took place later in the day, I could get used to the idea. Maybe. Possibly.

The subtopic this week (sometimes there are subtopics) is Odds and Ends. So here's a bunch of stuff about which I will simply lose sleep if I don't tell you:

• I'm at Afrah, the world's greatest Middle Eastern restaurant, eating a kafta sandwich that is just to die for.
• I've read three quarters of The Girl Who Played With Fire and it's not as good as Dragon Tattoo but it's still pretty good. The Swedish film is playing at the Angelika and I might go this weekend (since too much Swedish ultraviolence is never enough).
• I started taking a new and exciting med this week. Much to my annoyance, it seems to be working. The anxiety level is definitely down and I seem to be more sociable.
• Because, honestly, as it is I almost rattle when I walk.
• I ordered some slacks from Lane Bryant and they're a bit snug but I'm keeping them anyway. Hope springs eternal and all that.
• I'm gonna have leftover pita bread and baba ganouj. Love that.
• There's a certain weirdness to going to dinner at Afrah right before an OA meeting. But hey, we all gotta eat.

Okay, that's going to have to wrap it up for now. Here are the other Talk Thursday blogs. I strongly encourage you to go check em out. Tell em Jen sent you:

Calista - http://ohjoyitsme.blogspot.com/

JulieAnn - http://www.ravingsii.blogspot.com/

Kent - http://mormonroth.blogspot.com

Krista - http://psamsrants.blogspot.com/

Colleen - http://spudlostinutah.blogspot.com/

Jeniphur - http://firstpositionparallel.wordpress.com/

Lyn - http://lynnblossom.wordpress.com/

Tandy - http://sandratfowler.blogspot.com/

Rodger - http://luciddreamerblog.blogspot.com/

Eddie - http://shinshige.wordpress.com/

So Our Kitchen Range Kind Of Blew Up...

It all started so innocently. Mikey the exterminator was here ("Call Mikey! He'll kill anything!") spraying around our kitchen to take care of some weird little black beetles that have had the run of the place for the last couple of weeks. I happened to notice that the rangetop clock was off. No nice soothing green digital numbers informing me that it was precisely 10:19 on a Sunday morning and all was right with the world. I turned around and noticed that the refrigerator was also off (some brilliant electrician back in the 1950s thought it would be just fine to have them both on one circuit; no idea why). So I dutifully went over to the switch where the range was plugged in and pushed the little red reset button. The black button popped out, then immediately popped back in, shutting off the fridge and the oven before they even had a chance to fire up. I tried it a couple of more times. Same result. The electrical outlet was not cooperating.

Not to be deterred, I went outside to the circuit breaker to see if anything untoward was going on. Didn't seem to be. All the switches were set to "on," everything looked copacetic. Just one annoying plug in the kitchen kept resetting itself. Strange.

So I went back inside while Mikey sprayed the yard and unplugged the range. This time when I reset the plug, it stayed on. Joan, intrigued by the mystery at this point, brought in a small appliance and plugged it in to the suspect plug. No problem. It switched on, buzzed contentedly, didn't disturb the fridge at all. In case you're not keeping score, that's Plug 1, Range 0.

It occurred to me we could plug the range in someplace else. Not that there's exactly a convenient spot apart from the plug that was designed for the range to be plugged into, but beggars can't be choosers and all that. I ran an extension cord from another plug across the kitchen to the range. Problem solved. At least for the moment.

(Joan will probably insist at this point that I mention we had a grounded extension cord with a triple surge protector, and that she had suggested, nay, strongly suggested that I use this for my electrical experiment with the temperamental range. For some reason, when the time came to actually plug in the silly thing, it flat out didn't occur to me. Instead I used an ordinary extension cord that Joan took to college with her some thirty years ago. This was probably not wise.)

Some time that evening I was down here on the computer, much the way I am now, typing away at an email, much the way I am now, when loud popping noises sounded from the kitchen. And Joan screamed. And there were more popping noises. And Joan screamed again. And I, lost on Planet Jenster like I usually am in the evening, just assumed that there must be a spider in the kitchen (the popping sounds, of course, being Joan's attempt to stomp on it).

I got up and went into the kitchen. Holy guacamole. The extension cord was jumping around on the floor like a snake. Sparks were shooting out from underneath the range. Joan was still screaming. The smell of ozone was prominent in the air. And the popping noises, complete with firework accompaniment, continued. "What do we do?" Joan asked. I had not one clue. But it did occur to me that if we could unplug the range, it would have less electricity with which to wreak havoc in the kitchen.

And so, completely ignoring everything I learned in Girl Scouts and first aid classes about how to deal with downed power lines and other electrical weirdities, I grabbed the extension cord and yanked it clean out of the wall. (In retrospect, it occurred to me that I'm kinda big for a girl, and 120 volts probably wasn't going to kill me. And, heck, Joan was right there with her cell phone.) As soon as the plug let go of the cord, the snapping, sparking range was silent. It stood there, looking ominous, its clock face once again blank. The smell of ozone seemed to take a long time to dissipate.

So after Joan stopped cursing me to my seventh generation for not using the grounded extension cord, we called an electrician. He showed up the next day and, surprisingly, pronounced both plugs solid and undamaged. The range, however, is "fried." As in, don't plug it in again, you moron. That way lies madness.

This morning at about 8:30 I got my pay check. This morning at 9:00 half of it went to Sears for a new range, setup, delivery, tax, title, license, dealer prep and options. It's being delivered on Saturday morning. But even the magnificence of a nifty new appliance is kind of dwarfed by the fact that A. we have to pay for it and B. somehow we've got to clean out all the gunk that fell between the counter and the range over lo these many years. I don't suppose Martha Stewart covers that in any of her books, does she?

Incidentally, I finished the revision of the Mindbender manuscript, only ten days past deadline, go me. 27,000 words bit the dust, which is a frick'n miracle. I've been physically and mentally wiped for the last three days, but I'm planning to have a go tomorrow morning at getting one of the packages ready for the agents who expressed interest at the Pen to Press retreat. That should be fun. Expect the return of Scaley the Paranoid T-Rex and all the happy go lucky days that will follow.

Also incidentally, we need a new water heater. I hope the old one doesn't blow up until next month.

A Week Past Deadline And She's Writing This?

Playing in the background: The air conditioner, punctuated every so often by the tympani roll of thunder in the background. It's going to pour like a sumbitch any second.

So where have I been for the last two weeks, you ask. Well, firstly, rumors of my having a bad cold have been greatly exaggerated. In actual fact I've been (gasp!) working. Not just at the ol' law firm, that would be too easy. I've also been working on the manuscript. It's been a massive time sink, but progress is being made. And, yeah, I was supposed to be done by July 1, but Rome wasn't built in a day and even if it was, my manuscript ain't Rome. Herculaneum, maybe.

Remember that writer's conference I went to? The one where I was in New Orleans for four days, having spooky coincidences left and right and hanging with F. Paul Wilson? Oh, yeah, and learning all this stuff about commercial fiction? Well: I left with a set of marching orders. Go thou home, take thy manuscript, go over it with a fine tooth comb, take out every single last darn extraneous word (like how I put four of em in this sentence just for effect?) and then send the thing to the literary agents who expressed interest. All three of them. (And one editor. We liked the editor actually. He was cool.) I also had the task of getting the thing down to something remotely resembling a normal word count. Like something under 120,000. I won't tell you how much over 120,000 it was, but let's just say it was up there.

So how does one take a manuscript one's been working on since roughly two ought ought six and make it into a salable product in two ought ten? I started out by reading over all my notes and typing them up. Hey, I'm a paralegal. It's what I do. I take notes and I type them up. I've tried not taking notes and I've tried not typing them up and believe me, they're both highly unnatural, to say nothing of overrated.

So I typed up the notes and I read them over and came to believe that I had not one, but two things to do here:

1. Take a look at every single scene and decide if it's actually germane to the tale.

2. Line edit - that is, take a look at every sentence in the manuscript and decide if it needs to be there in that exact configuration, with that number of words, and in that very spot.

All together now: "That sounds like a lot of work!" Uh, yes. Which is why I'm a week past deadline. But I can see the end from here. I know my screaming fans (both of them) are getting impatient, but it Just Has To Be Done.

See, I've kind of been in the habit of lackadaisically editing whatever I felt like editing. Starting on page 305 and just going backward and forward until I got tired. I've never actually sat down with a piece of work and gone over it with a certain methodical, scene-serial-killing callousness that I've now come to believe is essential. In short, I used to edit like I wrote. No. Can't do that no mores. Writing is writing. Editing is editing. Editing is hard. But it has to be done.

I will say, though, that line-editing is possibly the most tedious, frustrating, unrelievedly dull work I have ever done in my life, and I'm including my stint as a CSR at Bank of America's credit card division. But here's the thing. It's working. My word count is down by almost 25,000. That's not only significant, it's a freaking miracle. So I'm not begrudging the extra week (though I'm bemourning the lost sleep).

All right, I have to get back to it now. Everybody remember where we parked.

Mini-Post: The Wasteline Test

Writer alert! Check out this web site. It's called The Wasteline Test, created by genius Helen Sword of New Zealand. If you write in English and you can cut and paste a sample, this is a nifty tool to figure out how many wasted words you may be using. The software scans your sample for be-words, adverbs, adjectives, abstract nouns, prepositional phrases and words like It, This, Am, There - that you generally don't need. (Oops. Adverb.) For the record, Mindbender came out "Fit & Trim," the second highest category. Woot! No Accounting for Taste clocked in at "Needs Toning", mainly because of my use of It, This, Am, There - I was Flabby in that category but Lean in everything else. Anyway, check it out.

Breakfast in America

Playing in the background: The smoochie bird. I'm not sure what kind of bird it is - possibly a bluejay - but it has a call that sounds like "smoochie smoochie smoochie smoochie smoochie."

Saturday in Texas. The day dawns wet and cloudy. It's been raining off and on since the middle of the night, as those of us who are easily startled by thunder boomies can attest. I've crawled out of bed, into some clothes, put in the ear drops (I have an ear infection), meditated and fixed the all-American breakfast - bacon and flapjacks. (Eggs would be overkill.) I've had some coffee, Joan is still asleep, when she does get up there's plenty of food, and the house is nice and quiet. Perfect time to get some writing done.

Except.

I don't know what's wrong with me these days. Well, actually I could give you a list, starting just incidentally with being unemployed, but as far as writing goes I don't know what's wrong with me. I haven't been able to string two sentences together in weeks. Which is a pity because if there's ever a perfect time to write, it's during a period of unemployment - long stretches of unstructured time, occasional annoying visits to Monster.com to make sure you haven't missed anything - but otherwise perfect. I'fact last time I was unemployed (and yes, I'm appalled there was even a last time) I wrapped up Book Two and started Book Three. I even remember one particularly nifty three day weekend where I knocked out eighty something pages, which is even better if I don't then delete three-quarters of them the following day, as I sometimes do.

(Course I was also manic as hell, and it finally got a chance to show up because a. I wasn't working ten hour days and then coming home to write, b. I wasn't drinking anymore, either and c. the binge eating was pretty much under control thanks to OA. I'fact if it hadn't been for that particular lapse in workingdom I might have gone on undiagnosed for months or years longer, saving myself thousands in therapy and prescriptions, while the disorder continued to wreak havoc on my life and damaged my brain even more than it probably already is. Oh well. You gots to take der good mit der evil, as Lars von Trier would say.)

But here I am. Sober, binge-free, medicated, ridiculously calm compared to the swooping ups and downs of anxiety I had when I was working, and all set to dive into something big and complex in between looking for work, which, if one is honest, does not really take eight hours a day in spite of what those nice "how to land a job" guides tell you. And I am churning out absolutely nothing. This, for the record, sucks.

I even have a couple of works in progress. There's Book the Third of Mindbender, Soulmender, which is basically done but there's some denouement to wrap up at the end and explain What Happens To All The Major Players (and perhaps more important, who killed the sinister detective, because frankly, I'd like an answer to that one). There's the whole getting Mindbender published thing, which doesn't take concentrated writing but (oddly like looking for a job) does take a willingness to hunt down agents, write letters, follow up and be a pest in a nice way. And finally there's No Accounting for Taste, the sequel to No Accounting For Reality. During the last NaNo-go-round I got about a third of the way into this one; go back to November and check out some of these NaNo posts by way of example. So there's stuff I could be doing. I'm just not doing it.

What happens is this: I sit down at my trusty laptop (I love my laptop, in case I have not said that lately - I don't know what I'd do without my laptop). I open a file. Pick a file, any file. I read through the last little bit of whatever I was working on. I add a sentence. Maybe two. And then I get distracted. The TV is too loud or there's some new game on Facebook I just have to try or maybe instead of doing this I should be knocking out more query letters or more recently, I need to check Monster or Craigslist or Simply Hired, name your favorite, or there's a recruiter to call, a chore to do, a floor to sweep, dusting to accomplish. I go back to the file. I glare at it. Then I get fed up, quit, close the file (sometimes without even saving it) and flop down on the couch, watching whatever happens to be on the Discovery Channel and cursing myself for being a lightweight. Obviously I can't do this. Obviously I was fooling myself all this time. Obviously I've let everyone down again (though, as Dashiell Hammett allegedly said, "It's not like they're gonna miss you, Lily.") I've done this pretty much every day for weeks.

So is this that thing they call writer's block? For years I've been convinced it doesn't exist but I'm starting to believe in it now. Anyway, it's very frustrating. But perhaps there is hope. I did, after all, manage to knock out this entire blog post - and Joan is still asleep.

Who's Afraid of Ben Kingsley?

Playing in the background: An episode of House

I have a confession to make. My name is Jen (hi, Jen!) and I'm afraid of Ben Kingsley.

Look, I know this is silly. He was Gandhi, for cryin' out loud. It's just that he was also Dr. Roberto Miranda, and he left an indelible impression on my young brain. (Hey, I was a lot younger in 1994. We all were.) And that was before Sexy Beast. Actually, let's not even talk about Sexy Beast. The very idea makes me shudder, which is not a pretty sight.

Oh, in case you don't know what I'm talking about: In 1994, Ben Kingsley starred with Sigourney Weaver and Stuart Wilson in a scathing little sleeper of a Roman Polanski movie called Death and the Maiden. (Not to be confused with Iron Maiden: Death on the Road, which is completely different.) This movie takes place in an unnamed South American country that's almost certainly Chile. A respected politician (Wilson) picks up one Dr. Roberto Miranda (Kingsley) who claims his car broke down near the former's isolated house on the rocky coast. Wilson's character invites Dr. Miranda to spend the night. Trouble is, his fragile wife (Sigourney) hears Miranda's voice and decides that the hitchhiker is one of the torturers who victimized her years ago under another regime - another world entirely, really. So she goes all Carrie on his ass, minus the psychic powers, without ever once being really positively sure she has the right guy. And we're not sure either. And--well, I won't tell you what happens. You'll have to rent it. But a warning, this is a very hard movie to sit through for all kinds of reasons.

Mind you, my mother warned me not to see that movie. (We prescreen movies for each other, my mother and I. Well, sometimes.) She said it was too intense and would probably upset me. Never one for listening to my mother, I watched it anyway and found it positively riveting. And very unpleasant. And I had nightmares about Ben Kingsley for months.

If ever there was the perfect blend of creepy malevolence and wounded innocence, Ben nails it in this movie. Way beyond the question of did he do it or didn't he (which is, as you can imagine, a pretty significant question), you'll remember him in this part for everything he says and does onscreen, because it's just so damned good. Best acting since the five minutes Jose Ferrar was onscreen in Lawrence of Arabia, and if I didn't have my heart set on his son Miguel to play Roland in the big screen version of Mindbender, I'd want Sir Ben. Except for being afraid of him, of course, which could get awkward. And let's face it, I don't think I could afford the guy. He's kind of pricey with that Sir on his name.

Some years after Death and the Maiden, a movie named Dave came out. This movie was about an ordinary guy who ends up being President through a ridiculous confluence of circumstances that I won't go into here. Sigourney Weaver played the first lady, and Sir Ben played the vice president. Late one night, channel surfing, I happened upon this movie and saw Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley at the same moment on the same screen. My skin about crawled off my body and my first thought was that they couldn't possibly be running Death and the Maiden on TV, even late night. It's one of the few Rs that probably should have been an X and had absolutely nothing to do with sex. Then I realized it was Dave and had a moment of shuddery relief before the camera was cut back to Sir Ben and my skin tried to crawl off my body again. Yep, it's official; I'm afraid of Ben Kingsley. I skipped House of Sand and Fog, Sexy Beast and even an episode of The Sopranos just to avoid that skin-trying-to-crawl-off-my-body sensation, which is very unpleasant.

Reason I bring this all up is that Sir Ben stars in Shutter Island, which I just saw last week. And he's done it again, nailing creepy malevolence and wounded innocence in just the right blend. It was a scary movie anyway, but throw in Sir Ben and it becomes truly frightening. So go see it, but don't see Death and the Maiden first or the skin might try to crawl off your...yeah.

No, Really, I'm Still Here.

This hasn't been a good month for blogging. Not a lot going on. Well, lots of stuff going on but nothing to write about, really. I've done my anxiety fits to death. I knocked three query letters out of the laptop today, so nothing exciting there. I continue to swim and bead and do just about everything except write stuff. I seem to be in a lull. I hope it is a lull, anyway. Every time this happens I start to wonder if I've perhaps just dried up, if I have nothing else to say and I'll spend the rest of my life in complete silence. Then everyone I know starts laughing hysterically and even I have to admit this scenario is a tiny bit unlikely but seriously, what if I've dried up? What if I've run out of things to say and I'll spend the rest of my life in complete--yeah? I mean, the possibilities boggle the mind. Especially when you consider that I have at least five, maybe six decent ideas for novels, including one I tried to write back in '93 that kind of crashed and burned but left me with a fine cast of characters for Mindbender. I got all the way to page 240 before it crashed and burned, too, which for the record really sucks. I mean, if something's going to die on you, can't it do so on page ten? I've since gone back to it and determined that it's basically unfixable but it's still got this odd hold on me so I may try it again anyway. And then there's the five, maybe six other ideas that I've never done anything with but sort of want to but sort of can't figure out how to start. So it's not like I've dried up but more like I'm stopped up. Somebody pass the Ex Lax for the brain. Ew. How's that for a pleasant metaphor? On the other hand if this is the level I'm composing these days maybe it's best if I don't. I mean, it's not like I'm famous. As Dashiell Hammett once said, it's not like anybody will miss me. I'd miss me though. Next time, paragraph breaks. Promise.

Friday Frights (on Sunday) and Hyperfertility

Playing in the background: Episode of "House." The guy just never gets old.

For once I got Joan to come with me to a Friday Frights - mainly because I picked a Disney movie, but that's okay, she's good company. We saw Race to Witch Mountain at the dollar theater and it rates an AWESOME. (That's four stars for those of you that count stars - and yes, I've been known to go up to five.) Sarcasm, Star Wars in-jokes, Whitley Streiber appears as himself and, oh yeah, the movie was one long car chase. I'm liking Dewayne Johnson more and more as an actor. And was it a deep, profound, socially significant flick that alters our view of ourselves and our place in the universe? Uh, no. But it was tremendously entertaining. Highly recommended. I'm just sayin'.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it's the New Moon and yours truly has been hit with her monthly attack of hyperfertility. IF YOU ARE MALE AND YOU COME WITHIN 300 YARDS OF ME IN THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, THERE'S AN EXCELLENT CHANCE YOU WILL KNOCK ME UP. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Not having a male (besides Caesar the Neutered Cat) within three hundred yards of me, though, I've been writing like crazy. 11,000 words in the last three days. Three complete chapters and parts of a few more.

This is one of the more awesome things that could befall a writer, and it even picked a convenient three-day weekend to happen. (Yes, I've been unemployed for a while now, but I've had a temp gig for the past week and I'm going back on Tuesday.) I don't know if it happens to everybody, but I can pretty much set my watch on it. Stuck on a tough chapter? No problem, call me back in four weeks. And don't ask me to do anything more complex than minor editing two weeks after that.

In fact, my only real complaint with this hyperfertility thing is that I get high. What's wrong with getting high, you ask. Well, nothing, except that I like it, and I want to keep it going as long as possible. When it starts to ebb, I don't want to eat (except sugar) or sleep (except naps) because being speedy and sleep-deprived lets me hang onto it a little bit longer. Keep doing this long enough and you will eventually die. It's like, say, powering a laptop with lightning bolts. Fun while it lasts, but then you need a new laptop and I've only got the one.

Anyway, I've been knee-deep in Soulmender (Mindbender Part Three) most of the weekend which was why Joan suggested the movie. I think she was afraid I'd forget the rest of the world existed. So naturally we went to see a movie about two kids in trouble, running from law enforcement and a scary assassin. I mean, you gotta appreciate the irony.

BTW, like how I came full circle on that one?

It Knows What Scares You

Meters swum today: 1900 (go me!)
Playing in the background: The soft sounds of evening (and the occasional train horn)

I've managed to scare the sheep out of myself. This should not come as a big surprise to those of you who know of my penchant for horror movies, fast driving, loose women and roller coasters. Well, just horror movies and roller coasters. Okay, honestly, just horror movies. (And the latest recommendation in that pantheon is: The Uninvited, marketed as a supernatural horror flick but really a twisty suspense/murder mystery/thriller with a BIG SECRET at the end that explodes like a --no, I better not say anything else. Go rent it, it's awesome.)

What happened is that I wrote something that scared me. Not only scared me but physically repulsed me to the point where I want to climb into my brain, find whatever hole it crawled out of, nail that sucker shut and tape it up with that red duct tape that kept the ghosts out in Kairo. This is all Roland's fault (I like to blame things on Roland; he is, after all, the bad guy. Or is he? Hm.) When I wrote Mindbender I included something called the Infamous Cigarette Scene (and if I ever get this silly thing published, you'll get to read it, so hey, send your literary agent friends my way, willya?).

I remember the exact day, the exact hour and even what I was wearing when I wrote the Infamous Cigarette Scene. I was doing laundry in a seedy apartment building in San Diego. I remember that because I had to walk out of my apartment and down to the laundry room to swap stuff in and out of the washer/dryer, and so one minute I'd be writing this thing (darkness, gloom, horror, whatever) and the next minute I'd be outside (sunlight, birds singing, frisbees flying through the air in the nearby park, whatever). And I was horrified and disgusted and so on, and wondered what the hell kind of person could even come up with this sort of stuff and so on, and was I that kind of person and so on, but I got over it. Kind of.

Then I had to go and write two sequels to the silly thing. Which pretty much guaranteed that Roland would have to, sooner or later, come up with something to equal or surpass the Infamous Cigarette Scene. Boy, does he ever. And once again I'm wondering what the hell kind of person could even come up with this stuff and so on, and once again, I'm gonna find that hole in my brain and...

The truth is, I write about things that scare me quite a bit. Politicians scare me. Religious fanatics (of any religion) scare me. Tornado sirens scare me. "Y'all're gonna need to replace that there engine, honey" scares me. But they don't really scare me, if you get my meaning. They're all scary to one respect or another but I didn't actually create them, did I? Set them loose in the world and all that? No. To write about something is, on some level, to make it possible. Even if we're talking fictional characters in a fictional country (filling in for El Salvador, in this case), we're still talking about something I came up with. That means I'm capable of coming up with something like this and why in hell is that?

I'm a nice person. I'm a Buddhist, fer cryin' out loud. I grew up in a nice middle class home with nice parents and I have a nice sweetie and a nice career (when I'm not unemployed, that is.) Apart from a brief period in my life when I was, oh, thirteen or fourteen, and some later karate lessons, I've never been in a fight. So what went so horribly wrong with the growth of my cerebral cortex, that I can write stuff like this? And why do I know so much about stuff like this? Not so much all the horrible things that people can do to each other but the way they're thinking while they're at it, what they're feeling, and more important, how they can convince themselves (usually without a lot of trouble) that this is the right thing to do. Was it all those "Gilligan's Island" reruns? Cyclamates? Stephen King novels? Too many horror movies when I was a kid? Nah. No such thing as too many horror movies.

Just incidentally, my love for horror films does not include slasher flicks like "My Bloody Valentine" and movies that focus on interesting ways to dissect a living human, like "Saw." Not only is that kind of stuff just gross, it's not scary. It's gotta be supernatural to scare me. Or it's gotta be Roland. Roland scares me plenty. What really scares me about the guy, though, is that he's me. At least on some level.

Maybe I'm working out a past life issue here. Maybe I used to be the Blood Countess or Caligula or something. Knowing me, though, it's more likely I was a fluffy bunny, a conscientious objector or an obedient housewife. I'm still more or less convinced I was a crafty trilobyte during the Pleistocine. If I ever do find that hole in my brain, though, I won't really be able to nail it shut. If I nail it shut, all the words will disappear. The good things and the scary things and the scarily good things and the things I don't even know are good or bad, they all crawl out of the same damn hole.

Hey, in case you want your inanity 24/7 in sound bites of 160 characters at a time instead of however often I update this thing, I'm on Twitter now. You can follow me here.

The Day Warren Zevon Called My Bank

By Jen. All rights reserved.

Meters swum today: 1500
Playing on the iPod: Machine Love, "Olvine"

Just after I stopped being a lowlife college student and started being a lowlife clueless 20-something, I worked at Bank of America's Credit Card Service Center in glorious east Phoenix, Arizona. I was one of those annoying people that called you when you fell behind on your payments. If I ever called you, I apologize, but you have to admit I was a lot nicer than any of my colleagues. I never raised my voice. I never threatened to sue you, repossess your cats or paint "Cardholder X Is A Deadbeat" on the sidewalk in front of your son's school. (All of which is totally illegal but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.) I always believed everything you told me. If you said you couldn't make your payments because space aliens had abducted you and stolen your ATM card, I said, "I've heard that does happen, sir. Do you think they'll beam it back in time for you to send me ten dollars next week?" Seven-fifty an hour, in case you were wondering. We were supposed to get bonuses, but it never happened.

Anyway, when things were slow, we'd take regular customer service calls. We'd always ask the nice cardholder for his or her name, the last four digits of his or her Social Security number and one other thing - usually date of birth or amount of last payment. You'd be amazed how many folks didn't know either one. So one afternoon this guy called and gave me his last name as "Zevon". I pulled up his account and asked, "Uh, Warren Zevon." "Yes, ma'am." "Warren 'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner' Zevon?" A pause. "Well, most people say 'Werewolves of London,' but, yeah. That's me." "I've always been a Roland kind of guy," I said, and he laughed. (Aside: The bad guy in Mindbender, the psychic psychotic assassin, is named Roland. Coincidence? Yeah, actually. I named him after a synthesizer.)

So I asked him what I could do for him, and he told me, and I did it, and he thanked me, and before he hung up I said, "Would you mind singing me the first verse of 'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner'?" He said, "Sure. If I remember the words." He did, and for a second there we were off in Mombasa, battling the Bantu to their knees - to help out the Congolese.

I saw Warren "live" in 2001, just before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was kicking off his world tour at a club in San Diego where I once saw the Chieftans. I remembered thinking that he and his band were a little off but they were obviously new to working with each other, and by the end of the tour they ought to be great and I couldn't wait to see him again. Unfortunately, that didn't happen (see above re: terminal cancer). Word of warning: If you're a singer/songwriter and I like you, expect to die young and tragically. Warren Zevon, Stuart Adamson, Gordon Lightfoot -- oh, wait, Gordo just died on stage. Well, it was tragic.

Just Click "Send," Already

Playing in the background: Kitaro, from "Silk Road"
Meters swum today: 1600

After much staring at three small typed paragraphs, and after much prodding from David Isaak who started bugging me about this in February, I finally sent Mindbender to MacMillan New Writers. We'll see what they say. I'm going to drink an entire bottle of champagne and eat a buffet now. Oh, wait, I can't do that anymore. Dammit!!

Wetitude, Part II

Playing on the iPod: "This Moment Now" by 2002
Meters swum today: 2000
Kilometers swum in July, Swim for Distance Month: 18.9 km or 11.74 miles

Nope, I didn't hit the century mark yet. Very close though. Maybe tomorrow.

Swimming pools, on the whole, are not great places for enlightenment. Well, I suppose enlightenment in the Buddhist sense can strike basically anywhere, any time, but great ideas should pick better times to hit you than in the middle of a 400 pull descending. Why? Well, because when you gasp in delight, you're likely to inhale a mouthful of water, come up coughing, and maybe lose a hand paddle flappin' around tryin' to get stable again. It's always the left hand paddle, too. Dunno what it is with that. Kind of like I always get water in my right ear and not my left ear. What? Huh? Come again?

This is all the fault of an airplane book called The Wheel of Darkness, by Douglas Preston and somebody-or-other Child. What, you may ask, is an airplane book? Well, it's a book that you pick up right before you get on an airplane, when you realize much to your dismay and chagrin that you didn't bring anything decent to read. (I dunno about you, but to me, getting on an airplane without a good book is like crossing the Gobi Desert without a water bottle.) A true airplane book stands out from other fiction of its class in that you can leave it on the airplane half finished and never miss it. It's either that bad, that poorly written, or that uninteresting. In this case, all three.

In case you're not familiar with these guys, they apparently write books about a repressed FBI agent named Pendergast that gets involved in lots of investigations of weird arcane artifacts and folklore from places most Americans don't visit. In this case, Tibet. The artifact in question is an evil scroll that, when you look at it, kills all of your interest in your fellow beings and strips you of your moral sense. Kind of the anti-enlightenment, I guess; instead of realizing all beings are one, you decide that you're the only being that matters. There's a lot of Buddhist subreferences, which was why I picked it up in the first place. But don't be fooled. This book has as much to do with Buddhism as weird arcane artifacts and ancient folklore have to do with the everyday goings-on of the FBI. In short, it's the perfect airplane book, right down to the bad dialogue and forgettability. And there's all this plot about a luxury ocean liner and a frustrated captain and, I dunno, crashing on the rocks and killing four thousand people or something, but by the time we got that far I no longer cared. Hate to tell you this, but ol' Pendergast wasn't much fun even before he dealt with the evil scroll.

Getting back to this morning, though, I now have somewhat of a handle on where I get my ideas. I think they're amalgams of things I run across during the day and they just fall together in my head in such a way that I can Make It Work, People. In this case, the airplane book, two nine-volt batteries, something that Nicholas said in Mindbender and the basic interconnectedness of everything all fell together (in the middle of a 400 pull descending) and I suddenly knew why Roland was the way Roland was. What happened to Roland, that is, to make him Roland.

Backing up a sec: Who the hell is Roland. Roland is my bad guy. Well, kind of. He's not a nice guy, that's for sure, and he does some really nasty things, but once in a while I get the feeling he might actually be the only one in my group of characters that has any kind of grasp of what's going on. He might even be the hero. Anyway, nobody likes him except me, and I'm crazy about him, but that's mainly because Roland does whatever Roland decides Roland needs to do, and to hell with everybody else. For somebody who's so caught up in What Everyone Will Think Of Me most of the time, this is just unbelievably cool. But, something had to have happened to Roland to make Roland Roland, and that's been bothering me for the whole last book and a half. Then, today, this morning, I finally figured it out.

I called Joan on the phone from my car at the swimming pool's parking lot and asked her if she had a minute. She said, "Jen, I'm standing on the front porch with my keys in my hand about to leave for work. What is it?" I told her I had to tell her something before my brain exploded. Ever patient, she stood there on the front porch and listened to me rant about the evil scroll, the nine-volt batteries, something Nicholas said and the basic interconnectedness of everything. Joan is such a sport, she didn't even say, "So Roland looked at the evil scroll?" Well, no. Not exactly. But the evil scroll was an important part of the whole falling-together-of-things. Anyway, Joan's ability to let me rant and even say "Oh, cool" occasionally is just one more testament to her absolute goddesshood. Anybody who would put up with me is inherently a supreme being.

Anyway, I think I can finish the book now. It's about time, hey?

Home again, home again...

Playing on the iPod: Something from Celtic Solstice by our buddy Paul Horn
Meters swum today: Zilch. I got home a little before midnight and getting up at five was Just Right Out.

I'm back in Dallas. Not much has changed, except the pile in my in-box has mysteriously grown, and gas costs 5 more cents a gallon. Not that I'm complaining: We paid $4.47 in San Diego. Wow. The cats are all right, the weather is good (some blow and bluster earlier but no rain, darnit) and apart from being almost totally out of food, everything's fine. Tomorrow I'm back in the pool. It's "Swim for Distance Month" and I have 17 more practice sessions to make it to 25 miles. Ya know, if I showed up on time, it might even be possible...

Could somebody please explain to me why the most relaxing part of our vacation was the flight home? While waiting at the airport I browsed through Mindbender, removing -ly adverbs from page 400 to 500 (my God, will this mad crazy merry-go-round existence ever end?) Joan read Time Magazine, which was doing a special issue about Mark Twain (in a previous life, she either was him, or she knew him, we aren't sure which). Joan was in a wheelchair owing to her injured leg, so we got to pre-board, and on the other end there was a wheelchair porter waiting to help us with Joan and her luggage. The flight was only half full (American Airlines is so going under; you heard it here first), I didn't need a seat belt extender (a first in recent memory!) and I fell asleep a little after takeoff. That's my idea of a perfect flying experience. Only hot chocolate could possibly have improved matters. But then I'd have needed the seat belt extender.

Seriously, I love my family and all that, and my parents like totally rock for not freaking out six ways to Sunday that I married a woman, and they paid for almost everything, which, again, is totally cool, but being on vacation with them just stresses me the hell out. I dunno if it's that regressing-to-fourteen-and-surly thing that sometimes happens when I hang around a gang of relatives, or if it's just that I'm a lot more laid back than certain hyperthyroid others, but honestly, at the end of the weekend I felt like I'd been breaking rocks on the freeway. (You gotta admit that anyone who has a nice time flying commercial is either way stressed, or delusional, and I may be both.)

So, anyway, it's good to be home. And married. Did I mention married? Heavens, I'm somebody's wife.

Hello, Goddess, My Old Friend

Playing on the iPod: Something slow-moving with lots of flutes (that narrows it down...)
Meters swum yesterday: 1800

I was getting ready to write a post about how mopey and depressed I'd been lately when my old friend the Goddess of Fertility plowed into me like a tsunami. That's her on the left, preggers, nursing and surrounded by All Things Spring. And while it's grand to be staying up until all hours, writing my little heart out, flying along on not much sleep and dodging males for fear of quickening if I get too close, I gotta wonder if there's maybe something wrong with me. Don't normal writers just type about an hour a day and then forget about it? Or, by definition, is there no such thing as a normal writer? I dunno. To be sure, though, sometimes I'm cranking it out full tilt, sometimes I'm not not doing sh*t and sometimes (on a rare day) I do the type an hour and go to bed early thing. Honestly, though, not very bloody often.

In case you're wondering, I'm not bipolar. I've been tested. I have been depressed, and I may be depressed now, but damned if I can tell. As soon as the moon passes last quarter we may find out (tonight, 12:20 U.T.), but for the moment I'm just surfing away. Back in the old days I'd start snarfing sugar and caffiene right about now, to keep that high goin' as long as possible. Alas, I can't do that anymore. Maturity sucks.

The very wise Tammy told me that the reason Tolkein ended The Fellowship of the Ring in such a lousy spot was that the guy, being smart and all that, wrote the whole thing all at once. All 1800 pages or whatever the hell. The publisher had to arbitrarily decide where to chop it up, and that was just where the axe fell. So it's not like he chose to end it there. That's just what happened. Contractual obligations are ugly things sometimes. So here's my new plan; don't end Spellbinder. Well, sort of end it, but just keep goin', start Part the Third and let the publisher decide. This presumes I'm gonna find a publisher. Well, let's be optimistic about this thing.

Meantime, I'm taking suggestions about what to call the third one. Spellbinder got named by accident. Kellum was referring to Mindbender and said Spellbinder by mistake and I said, "Hey, I like that," and thus Part Two had a name. Reminds me of this unbelievably awful trio of vampire romance novels (unbelievably awful and vampire romance novels in one sentence; yep, that's redundant all right) called Confession, Possession and Obsession. My first thought was Mindbender, Spellbinder and Pathfinder, but there's not much about pathfinding in the third one (unless you count stumbling around lost, some of which will in fact happen) and let's face it, that calls to mind the unbelievably awful 2007 remake (unbelievably awful and remake in the same sentence; there I go again) of the 1988 Finnish stunner, Ofelas (Pathfinder). (Star Wars on skis. Find it. Rent it. Fall in love. )

So, seriously, I've been bouncing around titles for part three. Pretender. Left Fender. Return To Sender. My favorite so far is And the Nobel Prize Goes To...

Coolest Rejection Slip Ever

Dear Jennifer:

Thank you for submitting The Mind Bender's Apprentice to Wild Child Publishing. I have had a chance to read the first chapter and synopsis, and while I think you have a very imaginative and interesting story here, we will not be offering a contract on this manuscript.

The idea is a good one, but there are areas in the storytelling that need to be strengthened. Chapter one starts out in an almost omniscient point of view. It would be better to start out deep in Cameron's POV. Also, the I can't quite tell who the market is for this story--adult or young adult?

At times there is more telling than showing in the manuscript. I would suggest going through it and making sure it is as active as possible. You may want to find a critique partner, if you don't have one already, to help you hone your prose.

I still think you have a wonderful voice and great talent. Please consider us again in the future.

So how'dya like them apples? I guess I could snarkily point out that anybody who could confuse this with young adult fiction has not read the synopsis I spent a month pounding my head against the wall trying to write, but that's not the point. Rejection slips, by and large, are, "Thanks, don't bother us again, goodbye." When an editor takes the time to write you a personal note, you don't suck nearly as much as you think you do.

(Incidentally my "inappropriate content" filter on my work email catches the word "suck" and flags it as profanity. It also catches the words "Avis Rent A Car" for reasons I cannot explain. We have a case where a guy got s*cked into some machinery at work. We're going to have to start saying he, I dunno, Rented A Car. Hm, new Mafia euphemism for 'death'. "Yeah, ya know Vinnie? He rented a car. Real shame. Terrible for his wife and kids...")

Just to point out how little things have changed, I got the email in my box and knew immediately (from the typeface perhaps?) that it was a No. Rather than read it I forwarded it to Joan, who came back with, "Hm, those are good ideas. Have you thought about....?" It took me almost four days to read the thing. I still haven't responded to it yet, though I need to. You'd think somebody who tosses sentences around all day, at work and at home, would not be afraid of them. Well, ya'd be wrong. Sentences are scary. Check out this article if you don't believe me.

Other than that, things are kind of crazy around here, what with company and the ongoing audit thing at work and the Final Dash to Billable Hours for the month of May and just incidentally, I seem to be going through another hyperfertile phase with Spellbinder. I think I know how it's gonna end now. Should be interesting. More on Buddhism, bugs, Bentleys, babes and buttocks to follow shortly.

Lawrence of Arabia

Playing in the background: Suzanne Ciani, "Neverland"
Meters swum today: 2200 (WOW!!)

So I was looking at yesterday's post and I thought, "Ya know, if I wrote a synopsis about something I'm not emotionally caught up with, ie, not the creator of, I might be able to figure out how, or at least come up with a template to follow." Star Wars wasn't really a good choice, so I decided to attempt my second favorite movie, Lawrence of Arabia. Here's what I came up with. Warning, serious major spoilers ahead.

The story begins with the state funeral of English Great War hero Colonel T.E. Lawrence, who recently died in a motorcycle accident. After the funeral, American journalist Jackson Bentley, who once knew the colonel, is asked by another reporter what he thought of the man and describes him in glowing terms. When the reporter leaves, Bentley says to his companion, "He was also the most shameless exhibitionist since Barnum and Bailey." Overhearing this, an English officer takes exception, saying, "It was my honor to shake his hand at Damascus." The officer admits he didn't actually know Lawrence, however, and Bentley says, "I wonder if anyone really did."

In a flashback, Lieutenant Lawrence appears as an indifferent and sometimes insubordinate soldier at an English post in Cairo. Partly to get rid of him, the post commander sends Lawrence to check on Prince Faisal's "Bedouin revolt" against the Turks in what is now Saudi Arabia. When Lawrence arrives in the desert, he befriends his guide, and gains the man’s respect by learning to ride a camel
and tossing out his army rations in favor of Bedouin food. They stop for water at a well owned by the Harith, a rival tribe, where the guide is shot and killed by Sherif Ali, a minor prince and leader of the Harith. Ali offers to take Lawrence to Prince Faisal but Lawrence, horrified and grief-stricken by the murder, tells Ali that "so long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe they will continue to be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel." He then sets out to find the prince by himself.

Lawrence manages to find Prince Faisal's camp before he dies of exposure. He is surprised and upset to also find Sherif Ali, sitting at the prince's right hand. Some other English officers are also traveling with Faisal. One is urging the Prince to attack the distant city of Aqaba, thereby seizing a critical Turkish port. The other thinks the Prince can't do this without returning to Yenbo to pick up English
reinforcements and artillery. The Prince is curious about Lawrence and asks him what he thinks. Lawrence tells the Prince that if he takes on English reinforcements, he will also put himself under English rule. The Prince asks if all Englishmen think that the Arabs are "a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel." Embarrassed, Lawrence says he believes that the Arabs are and should be a free people. During the night, Lawrence comes up with a plan to take a small force to Aqaba and attack on the landward side. This will avert the need for artillery by taking the Turks' seawall guns out of the picture.

Sherif Ali denounces Lawrence's plan as "madness" but when it becomes obvious Lawrence means to try it anyway, he takes some of his Harith men and goes with him. Two orphan boys, Daud and Tafas, are fascinated by Lawrence and demand that Lawrence hire them as his "servants." The trek across the great Nefud Desert, called the "Sun's Anvil" by the Bedouin, is long and arduous. One of Ali's men, Gassim, falls asleep and slides from his camel during the night. When the lone camel is found the following morning, Ali gives Gassim up for dead, saying he will die within hours once the sun comes up; "so it is written." Lawrence says that "nothing is written" and goes back to find Gassim. As the sun gets higher in the sky, Daud, Tafas and Ali wait on the edge of the Anvil, each certain that Lawrence will never return. Just before noon, he finally appears, exhausted and depleted
but, miraculously, with Gassim, who is near death. Lawrence refuses water from everyone except Sherif Ali, who tells him, "Truly, for some men, nothing is written."

The next morning Lawrence finds that the men have burned his English officer's uniform and replaced it with Bedouin robes. They also give him a new name, El Aurens. Another tribal leader, Auda Abu-Tayeh of the Howitat, joins Lawrence's attack on Aqaba after Lawrence tells him there is much gold in the city. The next night a fight breaks out between two of the tribesmen, and a Howitat man is killed. "This is the end of Aqaba," Ali tells Lawrence as the two tribes prepare to go to war. To
save the mission, Lawrence steps between the tribes and says that he will execute the killer himself "because I have no tribe, and no one will be offended." Lawrence then discovers to his horror that the killer he must execute is Gassim, the man he rescued from the desert. After killing Gassim Lawrence throws the gun away and sinks into a deep depression, refusing to speak for days.

The attack on Aqaba is a triumphant success. The city is looted and burned, but Auda is angry because no gold is found. Lawrence writes Auda a promissory note "signed, in His Majesty's absence, by me" and sets off across the Sinai Peninsula to inform the Cairo command of the victory. During the journey Tafas falls into quicksand and drowns. Grief-stricken, Lawrence continues on with Daud, but seems to be losing his grip on reality; he talks about seeing a "pillar of fire" even
though Daud tells him "It is only dust, Aurens."

Back in Cairo, Lawrence realizes he no longer fits in with the culture of the British officers and their condescending attitude toward non-Englishmen in general and Arabs in particular. He tells his commander that he killed two men, and "there was something about it I didn't like. I enjoyed it." The new commander, General Allenby, sends Lawrence back to Arabia with instructions to disrupt Turkish railways and supply lines. During this mission Lawrence meets journalist Jack Bentley, who tells him that the Americans need "inspiration" to join the war effort. Bentley follows Lawrence on his exploits, painting Lawrence as a mythical hero, "Lawrence of Arabia." Lawrence, while obviously reveling in the attention, starts to believe his own myth; he tells Ali "They can only kill me with a golden bullet" and "I am invisible."
Lawrence's ideas of his own godhood are shattered when he is captured near the town of Derra and tortured by the Turkish commander. He escapes, but the experience makes him even more unstable and he announces to Ali that he's going back to Cairo. "I am just any man, and I'm going to ask for a job that any man can do."

In Cairo, however, the war in North Africa is winding down and the political situation is very different. Britain is concentrating on the war in Europe and France is now expressing an interest in the Arab territories. Lawrence learns about a secret pact to divide Arabia between France and England as soon as the city of Damascus is retaken from the Turks. Infuriated, Lawrence returns to Arabia again, this time to lead the Arab tribes to Damascus first and ensure their liberty.

The campaign is a military success but devastating for Lawrence personally. Daud is wounded in an explosives accident and cannot ride. “Salute Tafas for me,” says Lawrence, and kills Daud rather than leave him for the Turks. Later a retreating Turkish army crosses Lawrence's path, and Lawrence orders an attack instead of going around them. Lawrence goes on a rampage during this battle, killing men with their hands held up in surrender and finally collapsing next to a wagon, a knife in his hand and blood all over his clothes. Jackson Bentley finds him here and takes the famous picture of a world-weary Lawrence that causes a sensation in
the West.

The Arab army reaches Damascus several days before the British, but tribal infighting makes it impossible for them to hold the city. After days of trying to hold the feuding tribes together, Lawrence visits the military hospital where he finds thousands of wounded and dying Turkish soldiers without water, food or medicine. With no choice but to call in the Army doctors, Lawrence watches the British take over Damascus. Most of the Bedouin drift away from the city. Ali stays "to learn politics" and says of Lawrence, "If I fear him who love him, how must he fear him, who hates himself?"

Back in Cairo, Prince Faisal enters into delicate negotiations with the French and the British. Although the cause of Arab independence is lost, Lawrence can see that Faisal will be able to secure favorable terms for the Bedouin; "Someday," he says to Lawrence, "I must be a king." General Allenby promotes Lawrence to Colonel and gives him an honorable discharge. A jeep takes him to a ship bound for England. Rather than look forward to the ship, Lawrence turns around as they pass a tribe of Bedouin and looks after them. He has lived in two worlds, but he doesn't have a home in either one.

Pretty melodramatic, right? But it's readable. So let me give Mindbender another shot. I'm not procrastinating. Honest.

And The Father Is...

Meters Swum Today: 1700
Playing on the iPod: "Castles in Spain" by the Armoury Show (a classic!)

I had a dream last night that I was pregnant (!) I was working for some weird company that didn't allow pregnant women into one of its divisions because of some chemicals or something that might endanger the baby humans (the women were, I guess, disposable). They tested all the women every six weeks to make sure none of us were pregnant. It was kind of a joke because we were all gay, so I was chatting up the cute queeny guy who ran the blood tests when the machine suddenly went "Bing!" He said, "Congratulations, Mommy, here's your transfer to Division Six." (Presumably at the same rate of pay; UAW, et al. v. JOHNSON CONTROLS, INC. U.S.C.No. 89-1215 and all that.) I said, "Wait a minute. I can't be pregnant." (This is some of the old semi-lucidity again; there's always some tiny corner of my brain, in a dream or hallucination, that knows Something's Not Quite Right Here.) The guy said, "See that light? Means you're pregnant." I said, "Then it's a false positive." "Oh, no. We sometimes get false negatives, but never false positives." (More semi-lucidity. This is true of most over the counter tests.) He hands me a packet. "See you in nine months, Mommy."

So I go to see my doctor, the Anti-House. In real life she's like this, too. She doesn't like to run tests or play "What's My Diagnosis"; if you get better, that's just grand, and she doesn't much care what made you sick. She agrees with him that I'm pregnant and runs a sonogram. "See that?" she says, indicating a fuzzy blip magnified x100. "You're eight to ten weeks pregnant." "That's impossible," I tell her, which it is in real life unless I've been pregnant since the Summer Olympics in 1996, the vaulting finals. "Well, it may be impossible, but there it is. Who's the father?" "That's the million dollar question," I tell her, and go home to tell Joan about this.

Joan, predictably, hits the roof. Joan does not want kids. Joan has never wanted kids. By now I'm getting pretty upset myself. How could I possibly be pregnant? But it seems that I am. My pants are tight. I'm kind of roundy in the tummy. Later Joan comes in and says she's sorry, she didn't mean to yell at me, we can even keep the kid if I want to. I tell her I'm thinking of giving it up for adoption and we have this Big Discussion. "Who's the father?" she asks, and again, I'm kind of stuck for an answer. Isn't there a TV show like this? "Who's My Baby's Daddy" or something like that?

Anyway, I woke up not-pregnant this morning (whew) and I'm pondering What This Could All Mean. One of my friend's daughters just had a baby so I guess it could be something to do with that. Maybe all women who are pushing forty and haven't had kids and never will start having dreams like this. Sort of a biological wake-up call: "QUICK!!! Get knocked up or forever lose your place in the gene pool!!" Er, no thanks. Every time I've ever had the urge to give birth I've gone to SuperTarget during a big anniversary sale and that took care of it for quite a while.

It's probably about the book. Isn't everything? Wild Child sent me a "thanks but no thanks" on No Accounting for Reality (made it up to the chief editor, though, whoo hoo!) but said they'd take a look at anything else I might have. I never know if they say that sort of thing just to be polite or if they really mean it. Well, I decided to take them serial and I do have something else; Mindbender, to be precise. Genre-wise it's about as far from No Accounting as a book can possibly get (Light-Hearted Fantasy/Comedy, meet Darkly Serious Thriller, Darkly Serious Thriller, meet--etc) So I wrote them back and told them about it and they want to see it and part of what they want to see is Ye Olde Synopsis. Oh great. I wrote a synopsis for it once. It sucked rocks. I wouldn't send this thing to the Library of Congress. I'll have to write a new one. So that's my mission for today; write a synopsis that doesn't suck rocks. On my lunch hour. Yeah, that's kind of like giving birth, come to think of it. Hey, if anybody wants to be the baby's daddy, get in here and help me. I'm serious.