Work In Progress

I have this bad habit of starting blog posts and then not finishing them.  Last week I got into full-on rant mode about a letter to Dear Carolyn, where this lady’s husband was disabled (as in, on disability/SSI and unable to work) and her family not only didn’t believe he was disabled, but kept asking him when he was going to get off his lazy ass and get a job.  I mean, excuse me?  They don’t just put you on disability if you walk with a limp, you know.  You have to apply (often more than once) and there are hearings and doctors are called in to testify and, you know, it’s kind of a big deal.

Mind you, the closest I’ve ever come to that situation is where I had sprained my ankle really bad and was limping around on crutches, and I went with my family to dinner and the bartender (really no idea what prompted this) suddenly yelled, “Faker!  She’s faking!” for the whole restaurant to hear.  He’s lucky I didn’t sail a crutch right into his wall of nicely decorated bottles.  I can’t imagine having to deal with that kind of cr@p every DAY.  Much less from family members.  So I got all into a rant about it, but I fizzled out two paragraphs in. I kind of Didn’t Know Where To Go With That. So that was it for that blog post.

Another time I started a blog post about the Buddhist Five Precepts and how they did and didn’t relate to the Ten Commandments and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Five Mindfulness Trainings, but that was just a tiny bit esoteric and it was so boring it put my teeth to sleep.  So that one didn’t get published either.  I don’t think this sort of thing is unique to me; I’ll bet Stephen King has lots of stuff he started writing and then bailed on when he realized he was never going to be able to hook the monster up with the protagonist without a lot of mental gymnastics and an apologetic phone call to Bram Stoker.  (Incidentally, did Bram Stoker answer the phone? Because THAT would make a really good Stephen King story.)

Let’s take painting, for example.  I was just at an art museum a few days ago, and whenever I go to an art museum I invariably want to go home and paint.  I’m working on a picture of an iris (the flower, not the eyeball) and it’s not going to be great; it’s still kind of a work in progress but I can tell that nobody’s ever gonna pay $1.4 million for it at a Sotheby’s auction.  That’s okay, though.  I like painting, it’s fun and I’ve done lots worse.  Once I was taking a class and we had a nude model come in and pose for us.  I was so embarrassed that there was a naked woman in the room that I couldn’t do much more than peek at her every ten minutes or so, and what I painted ended up looking kind of like a gargoyle with a bad case of mange. You can bet that one got gessoed over really fast.  Years from now, after I die, they’ll X-ray my copy of The Beheading of St. John the Baptist by Rubens and find this really bad nude underneath it and wonder what I was thinking. I was probably thinking about how much I wished the model was wearing a dress.  (And speaking of John the Baptist’s head, I did Salome’s nose so many times trying to get it right that she looked like Michael Jackson.  My instructor had to come over and fix it for me.  Imagine, getting a nose job from a painting instructor.)  

The thing about failed first attempts at anything is, you tried it, right?  Lots of people don't bother trying anything (and criticize those who do, for reasons I'm a little unclear on.)  If your first knitted square looks like something the cat threw up, or your first silver white cake collapses in the middle, or your first painting looks like, well, a gargoyle with mange, there's no need to freak out or even show it to anybody.  (Sometimes failed first attempts are good for getting a laugh, though.)  The point is, you did it.  Maybe the next attempt will come out better.  Maybe there won't be a next attempt, because you figured out you never really wanted to learn how to knit in the first place.  But you won't know that unless you give it a try.  I didn't want to write a blog post tonight, for example, but darned if I haven't done one anyway.  Which is a good thing.  And now I'm going back to my painting.  Cheers, all.  

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: Giving Up, Giving In

It is not a gloomy topic.  Well, it can be, but it doesn't have to be.  Giving something up can be great.  I gave up sugar (again) ten days ago and darned if I don't feel pretty good.  Fewer dizzy spells, fewer mood swings, and many fewer hot flashes.  I didn't give up all sugar, of course.  That's practically impossible; there's sugar in everything. But I gave up recreational sugar, the kinds of foods that are supposed to be sweet, like candy and ice cream and Pop-Tarts and most especially, cake.  Cake is like crystal meth to me.  The frosting, in particular.  If it were possible to freebase cake frosting I would have done it by now.  My birthday was two days ago and we had ceremonial cake for me and the two other people in the office that had June birthdays.  I had a moment of total panic when I realized I was somehow going to have to not-eat-cake through this event.  I finally called a friend of mine, who told me that if I were to eat something else, like, say, an apple, nobody would notice.  He was mostly right.  I got through cake time with only one frosty look from the manager.  Not frosting, frosty.

Oh, did I mention it was my birthday two days ago?  It was.  I'm 43.  I had this big birthday blog post planned, full of all the cool stuff that's happened since I was born (The collapse of the Berlin Wall! Men walking on the Moon! The Statue of Liberty!  No, wait a minute--I'm not THAT old.)  But my firm softball team had practice, and by the time I got home I really didn't feel like doing much more than going to bed.  Yes, I said "firm softball team."  I forget how I got talked into this.  Our first game is next Thursday.  I actually did hit the ball a few times, so maybe there's hope.

Here's where I get weird on you guys and start talking about a third-rate horror film called "The Mist." Well, actually it's a pretty decent horror film, for all that it was made on a low budget, and it's based on a Stephen King story.  (Major spoilers ahead.  You have been warned.) If you're still there, what basically happens is that a creepy fog takes over a town and traps a bunch of people in a supermarket.  There are creatures out there in the fog.  Creatures with tentacles and long insecty appendages and big wings.  In short, giant bugs.  We only gradually get to see them, and I'm pretty sure we don't get to see one full-on until about halfway through the movie.  Conditions in the supermarket deteriorate, people start going crazy, one woman starts a psuedo-religious cult and the few that are still sane decide it's time to make a run for it.  They get as far as a car and escape onto a deserted road where they can't see more than ten feet ahead.  Are there giant bugs everywhere?  There are.  Does it seem like all the humans have been killed?  It does.  Has civilization been wiped out?  It looks quite possible.  The people in the car start to bicker, then get into a heated argument, then finally decide if they don't find safety before they run out of gas, they'll commit collective suicide with the one gun they have between them.

Well, this being a Stephen King story, the ending's not that simple. (In fact the ending changed slightly from the story to the movie, but I'm not going to tell you how.)  The car comes to a halt, night starts to fall, and the intrepid travelers discover they don't have enough bullets for everyone.  So the brave hero guy offers to kill everybody, including his young son, and take his chances on the road.  He shoots his fellow passengers in the head, saving his son for last, and then gets out of the car, fully expecting to be eaten by a giant bug.  Instead, a cordon of Army troops marches out of the fog and "rescues" him.  And after all the stuff with the mist and the giant bugs and the psuedo-religious cult and How People React In Very Tense Situations, it turns out that what the movie was actually about was giving up.  When do you do it?  Why do you do it?  And how do you live with yourself, if God forbid, you give up ten minutes too soon?

Obviously I'm getting to something here.  I should stop messing around and just address the frick'n point, already.  I'm talking about Mindbender, kids.  I sent query letters No. 106 and 107 this morning.  Is this a big deal? No, not really.  Having apparently worked through most of my query letter anxiety, I think I can keep writing query letters until the cows come home, or until the giant bugs attack, anyway.  But let's consider: I wrote the book in, I think, 2001.  (When did I have my breakdown?  I think it was late 2001.  Didn't everybody have a breakdown in 2001?  It was not a good year.)  So, okay, it might have been 2000.  And then I had the breakdown and did nothing for three years, and in 2004 I started writing the new draft, and then we moved to Dallas, and a bunch of other stuff happened, and I wrote another draft, and then I met Kellum and Sally, and I started writing Spellbinder and Soulmender and then I went to that thing in New Orleans and--okay, I think we're caught up.  If Mindbender were a human being it'd be demanding a Nintendo DX and a new ten-speed.  It would be almost five feet tall.  It would be angsting about starting middle school next year.

You're getting the idea, right?  I'm wondering if I might be Wasting My Time.  Or somebody's time, anyway.  I'm wondering if the Time For Getting Mindbender Published has come and gone.  Or if it never came in the first place.  Look, I string words together pretty well.  I don't doubt I can write a publishable novel.  I just wonder if I've done it, this time.

Or if I should go back to the proverbial drawing board and, you know, give up.

Anybody?  Hello?

(crickets)

At least I hope they're crickets and not, you know, giant bugs.  Like in a Stephen King story.

Talk Thursday: Jealousy

This is Lyn's topic, and I'll get in big trouble with the grammarians of the world if I don't immediately point out that when most of us say "jealousy", what we really mean is "envy."  "Envy" means wanting something that someone else has, and being righteously p.o.ed when you don't get it.  Jealousy, on the other hand, means resenting someone else's success or advantages.  So unless Bob symbolizes success or advantage, you're not jealous of Susan for dating Bob. You're merely envious; you want to own Bob.  (I don't know if anyone's checked with Bob as to how he feels about this.  Bob?  Are you there, Bob?)  Still, the words get used interchangably enough to where if you say you're jealous of Mitt Romney because he's so open-minded, most of us will get that you're really envious (and slightly out of touch).  Most of us will probably also want to follow you around on Election Day, to see if you actually vote for the clown or get lost in a supermarket somewhere and end up spending the night in the produce section, engaging in constructive dialogue with a bunch of zucchini.

That said, however: My first experience with the-kind-of-jealousy-that-is-really-envy came about when I was a little tyke, and it worked like this:  If you had chocolate, I was jealous of you.  If you had more chocolate than I did, I was jealous of you.  That was pretty much it.  If you didn't want me to be jealous, you would hand over all of your chocolate immediately.  That rarely happened, however, and even when it did, the chocolate didn't survive long enough to make peace in our time, or even Mountain Standard Time.  Still, everyone has a price and it's good to know mine was, at least once, nice and low.

Fast-forwarding to adulthood, I was once in a band.  Actually I was once in several bands, but this particular band was in Arizona and the primary instrument was bagpipes.  One of the other bagpipers always made me feel a little funny when he was around.  He was an engineer--engineers always make me feel funny; it's probably the tinfoil hats--and he had a nice house outside of Gilbert, a pretty wife and two twin daughters that were, I think, about eight years old.  I think it was the daughters that got me.  If I were ever to have children, which I'm not because I haven't the slightest idea what I'd do with them and I have a sneaking suspicion it's too late now, twin girls would have been the way to go.  Get it it all done in one pregnancy, zip, zop, you're history.   Anyway, one day I finally figured out that I envied him his life.  Which was strange, because I actually didn't want it--I'd be a crummy engineer, and what would I do with a wife and twin daughters?--but I envied him for having it, if that makes any sense.

Well, you know this story's gonna have an O. Henry ending, and it does; the engineer and his wife split up, it turned out their home life was a disaster, they fought all the time, they spent their money as fast as they made it, the house had to be sold, they fought over custody of the girls for years and, well, it didn't end happily.  But from the outside it all looked so nice and, you know, Norman Rockwell.  You just don't know as much about people as you think you do.

People have asked me have I been jealous of other writers.  Answer:  Yes, on very rare occasions. Usually I'm only jealous of something somebody else is doing until I start doing it, too, and then I'm fine.  In the case of writing, that's just writing, not publishing.  Would I like to be the next Stephen King?  Sure, but I'm busy writing over here.  Yeah, he got the multi-bazillion dollar book contract and the high-powered agent and all that good stuff, but he got all that for two reasons.  One, he really is that good.  Two, he was really, really lucky.  I only have control over one of those factors.  Anyway, I'm busy writing over here.

But, again, there are exceptions.  Let's talk Hunger Games. Not only was that the first book in years that made me cry, it's the first book in years that I've put down and wished I'd written it.  I don't think that's happened since Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, and that was in high school, just to give you an idea of the time span.  Oh, sure, there's books I think I could have written better (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, for one; I'd have knocked out the first fifty or so pages, lost that chunk in the middle about the multibajillionaire, moved the stuff about Lisbeth's first guardian closer to the beginning--Jen rewrites Larssen) but that's different.  That's playing armchair editor, which is kind of like playing Monday-morning quarterback.

Hmm, maybe I missed my calling in life.  Maybe when I was a kid staring out the window at the distant stars, I should have said, "And when I grow up, I'll be an editor at Harper & Row" instead of "And when I grow up, I'll be a paralegal at Jackal and Jackal."

Actually, I said, "And when I grow up, I'll be a high-powered political assassin," but I don't think the stars ever took me seriously.  Which is too bad.  The health benefits aren't as good, but the pay scale rocks. Or so I hear.

Talk Thursday (on Wednesday): From That Moment Forward

Hope y'all don't mind a Thursday post on Wednesday, but I have Other Plans for Thursday night. Yes, this means I'll miss my meeting, and what's worse, I'll miss the World's Greatest Pita Bread. But for once it'll be worth it; I'm going to a book signing. Yes, I know the last time I went to one of these, things got a little lachrymose, but I don't think that's gonna happen this time. You see, the book signing, for which I had to buy a $40 ticket weeks in advance (rather, Joan bought it for me; thanks Joan, you rock!) is for the King.

No, not the King of Pop. The other King.

Big Steve.

Yeah. Stephen King.

Okay, yes, it's taking place at the Majestic Theatre, and I'm in the cheap seats, and the odds of actually getting my precious volume of 11/22/63 anywhere near the Sharpie marker of the Master of Horror are extremely small. Arguing, for the moment, that I even have a volume of 11/22/63, because I don't at the moment and I don't think I'm funded to pick one up between now and then. But still. I'll be in the same room with the guy who created the Walkin Dude and Johnny Smith and Delores Claiborne. Blockade Billy and Leland Gaunt and Dr. Louis for Godsake Creed. I think that's worth missing pita bread, don't you?

So here's my Talk Thursday column, a day early and a little bit beside the point. The actual topic, from the Topic-O-Meter, was too long to fit into the title bar; it was something like, "If I had to go back to one event I've experienced and relive my life from that event forward, it would be..." See what I mean? But I think "From That Moment Forward" covers it. In any case, I thought about it for all of about five nanoseconds and knew exactly what moment we were talking about, here. We were talking, of course, about the night Stuart Adamson kissed me. And the happy-go-lucky days that followed.

Normally I don't smooch and tell, but since the other pair of lips is no longer in this world, I figure it's okay. Anyway, it's not the actual smooching I want to talk about. It's the happy-go-lucky days that followed, or hours that followed, or all the stuff that happened afterward. To make a long story short, I was in Birmingham, England at the time, which, if you've never been there, is kind of the British Detroit. I think they actually do make cars there, or did at one time, and it's a rough town where bad things happen to people sometimes (though, of course, never with guns). I was at a club, where a concert was about to happen, and a poll tax riot broke out (if you don't know what a poll tax riot is, ask someone). In the ensuing chaos I got whacked on the head with something and knocked cold for somewhere between several seconds and several hours. When I came around, a bouncer was holding up his hand and saying, "How many fingers? Who's Prime Minister?" I got the first one right but not the second one (Ms. Thatcher having retired some years before), so he figured I was fine and turned me loose.

Here's a news flash: If you're hit on the head hard enough to lose consciousness, you almost certainly have a concussion and possibly something even more serious. There are three things you need to do in this situation: You need to not drink alcohol, not go to sleep, and seek medical treatment immediately. What I did instead was chug a few beers, sing along with the crowd and then crawl back to the hostel where we were staying and fall fast asleep. Doctor? Nah. Never even occurred to me. Now this is the moment we freeze-frame so that I can go back in time, fix it and have everything turn out differently.

Instead of drinking, singing and sleeping, this is me going to the hospital and explaining I was just knocked unconscious. This is me, hanging around in the E.R., bored out of my skull, being observed by medical professionals until the following morning, when they've decided I'm not in any immediate danger. Instead of spending the next two weeks hanging around in England and Scotland and acting increasingly weird, I'm accepting the very wise suggestion of one of the medical professionals and going home early. Not the end of the world. I've already kissed Stuart Adamson; what else do I expect to do, knock boots with Sinead O'Connor? Oh hey, this is me, going to my Regular Doc once I touch down in the States. This is him, examining my X-rays and discovering -- gasp! -- a greenstick skull fracture above my right temple. This is the MRI I'm having that discovers the damage to my right temporal lobe, which has either caused (a long shot) or made worse (much more likely) my bipolar disorder.

Stars and garters, here's me at the tender age of twenty-one, seeing a psychiatrist for the first time instead of waiting until I'm forty. Here's me getting prescribed a sheepload of medication and adjusting, slowly, over the next eighteen months or so. Here's me not getting confused at work and wandering off; here's me not mouthing off at all the wrong times in front of all the wrong people; here's me not dealing with crushing migraines my whole last two years of college. Hey, see that tornado that started ripping up my life right around this time? Well, here it is not happening. Here I am getting out of a lousy relationship and being happily single. Here's me getting a decent job right out of college because I never screwed up all the jobs I had before that.

In short, here's me having a halfway normal life.

SCREECH!!! That's the needle skipping across the record and bonking against the metal thingy in the middle. (Do they even have record players anymore? I have one, but, you know, do people? Does anyone under thirty even know what one is?)

The fantasy just doesn't go that far. I may be halfway something, but normal isn't it. And let's face it; isn't normal a little--ya know--boring?

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.

Wet Wet Wet

Meters swum today: None. 1700 yesterday.
Playing in the background: Uh, nothing, at the moment. Just the fan.

The winter rains have pounced on Dallas. It's been raining on and off for a week and raining steadily for the last two days (though it seems to have stopped for the time being). What a great week for my parents to visit, they'll be here today at two. Oh well. In this pause between the deep freeze and the blast furnace that the naive among us call "spring", we gotta be grateful for what we get, even if, all together now, "it doesn't make a dent in our current drought," as the weather guy says over and over and over and over and over. Why does he say that? He always does. Maybe there's this pathological terror that if he doesn't say it, everybody in town will walk out into the middle of the rainstorm and, I dunno, turn the sprinklers on full blast or something.

It's been fabulous for my garden, though. Yes, I've made an attempt at a garden. We have peas, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, onions, cilantro - an entire salad, really, all going great guns. Except the celery. Haven't heard anything from the celery. I'll post a picture as soon as I figure out how to work Joan's cell phone camera.

Oh, and I have good news on the unemployment front. Despite certain shortsighted gubernatorial posturing, I am indeed eligible for the COBRA reduction in premium thanks to Pres. Obama. This means my COBRA payments are about $150 a month, which beats hell out of four hundred and something. Hey, Tracy, this means you too are eligible. Remind me to show you my documentation so you can show up at the office, present it to you-know-who and demand equity.

The other good news is that the logjam in my brain has finally given way and some chapters of Soulmender are getting written. I dunno if I've been filling you guys in on this, but with the first two it was like I couldn't stop writing and this time it's like I can't get started. Sally (Hi, Sally!) suggested it had something to do with this being the Last One, the long story about to get wrapped up and all that, and me not wanting to go there just yet. Which may be. For some reason, though, I got this idea that Roland, my bad guy, liked classical music, which led to this bizarre mental image of Roland listening to Handel's Hallelujah Chorus in an underground bunker during a remodel.

Don't ask me where that came from, but if I had to guess, I'd say it probably has something to do with this video, sent to me by Uncle Bob, and my recent experiences with power tools. Well, whatever, it broke the logjam and things are rolling again. I have lots of free time at the moment, might as well get some writing done. Yes, there you have it folks. The next time Stephen King asks you over to dinner and you ask him where he gets his ideas and he says something sarcastic like "Utica," know that he's fooling you. The truth is that he gets his ideas from viral videos and power tool accidents. Or at least I do.

Okay, I'll go look for work now. King of Kings! And Lord Of Lords! Hallelujah, Amen!

A snippet from Spellbinder

Look, things are just starting to settle down, Cameron said. I mean, it’s, you know, there’s a house and I live there with some people and they’re nice, and I’m in school and I have some friends, and, you know, it’s–it’s–

Roland pushed the walker around and looked at him, the one green eye reflecting endless patience.

Normal, he managed. Just, you know, ordinary.

The single eye watched him, unmoving.

And I don’t know what I want to do. He didn’t mean to say this much. He couldn’t seem to stop. I mean normal’s okay. Normal’s fine. But what we did was so–

Again Roland waited him out. Not a flicker of expression crossed that scarred face.

Cool, Cameron finished, a poor choice of words for everything he felt.

Then you have a problem, said Roland, which was a relief; for a while there Cameron wondered if he was talking to himself. You cannot be ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, as I’m sure you know.

Jen speaking: I'm closing in on the end of this thing. I think it's gonna end in a bad spot and I don't know what to do about that. When Big Steve wrote the second or third part of The Dark Tower, he ended it with Our Heroes on a train, which just happened to be possessed by a psychotic computer that was hurtling them all toward certain doom. (Flashback: This must have been 1991 because I'd just graduated from college and was on my way to, or from, California with my then-boyfriend, Noah. It was my turn to drive and I only had like twenty pages left. Somehow I talked him into reading me the rest while I drove. After a few pages he kind of got into it. He started doing different voices for the different characters, including this dull monotone for the psychotic computer, and when he got to the non-ending, he said, "Well, that sucks.") The ending I have in mind may be just as sucky as far as being nonconclusive. Will it be as bad as Smilla Jaspersen hopping from one ice floe to another in the far north of Greenland, hoping to find other humans before she freezes to death? I dunno, but I'm afraid it's not going to make anybody happy, including me.

What do you do, when you're in the middle of a trilogy and there's no good place to go from Book Two to Book Three? Or Book One to Book Two, for that matter. Ol' Tolkein picked a hell of a place to end The Fellowship of the Ring, with the good guys split up and the bad guys in charge, but somehow you had total faith that Frodo was gonna make it to Mordor with Samwise, Aragorn was gonna catch up with the orcs that made off with Merry and Pippin and kill all one hundred and thirty of them, by himself with no help, and Gondor was going to stand up against the forces of darkness for a little while longer, or at least long enough for Gandalf to show back up from wherever the hell he'd been. Course you had total faith because Tolkein wrote the whole trilogy in the 1950s and this was 2002. I hain't written part three yet. I think I know where it's going, sort of, but I thought that about part two and it hared off in this totally unplanned direction. Fiction does that. It's got nerve.

I mean, I guess I could push it a little bit farther. Invent some cliffhanger or other with the misbehaving psychiatrist or the obnoxious drug runner. Give the mousy accountant some moral dilemma where he could do the right thing-again-and doesn't-again. I could even force the whole story another hundred pages or so to the big betrayal at the Manhattan Bar and Grill in downtown Chalchuapa. But I think that'd be a bad idea. For one thing, I haven't found a publisher for the first one yet. For another thing, every time I push something past where it wants to go it has this bad habit of dying on me. Eight hundred pages into a trilogy is no place to drop dead. For a third thing, I'm tired. It's not easy, this God game. In case you were wondering.

Am I whining? I guess I am. Okay, I'll shut up for now. But if you're one of those people who watched the end credits after The Empire Strikes Back and thought you might have to kill yourself immediately if you didn't find out what happened to Han Solo before the three year intermission, you might wanna just wait until I get all three of 'em out there. Forewarned is half an octopus and all that.

Salacious Details Not Forthcoming. Maybe.

Playing on the iPod: Band of the Black Watch, "Will Ye No Come Back Again" from The Sands of Time
Meters Swum Today: A mighty 1900, baby, canya gimmee Halle Berry?

Ha! And you thought you were gonna get the dirt on my premarital foolings-around! No such luck. I've already written the letter for one of the books I'm flogging around, formerly titled Annie Sipkins, Accountant to the Gods, recently retitled No Accounting For Reality so as to better fit on a book jacket. The only big question left is where to send it. I was gonna send it to Daw, only to discover much to my dismay and chagrin that it was too short. Like about 50,000 words too short.

I gotta tell you, too-shortness is a new one on me; Mindbender is like 150,000 words (500-600 printed pages). No Accounting for Reality is only like 32,000 words, which is about 120 pages. The Conventional Wisdom holds that the longer a book is, the more expensive it is to print. Steve King's The Stand, for example, is rumored to have given his chief editor at Viking a mild coronary. It was almost 1200 pages and it had to be a phenomenal bestseller to make its printing run back. Well, of course it did. Seventeen printings or something ridiculous. Howsomever there's apparently some point of shortness beyond which it's not worth printing at all. Waste of decent wood pulp or something like that. I mean, hell, 120 pages is more of a longish short story, don't you think? Or maybe a novella. To quote Stephen King again, "Welcome to Novella, senyora. Sit down and get comfortable. You gonna be here long time, yes?"

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's longer than Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, which clocked in at 107. But I'm neither Big Steve, nor am I R.L. Stevenson. I'm better lookin' than both of them combined, for one thing. But here's what I'm thinking. Unless you were a regular reader of the Del Mar Times back in, say, 1999, you probably haven't heard of me anyway. So, like, what harm could it do, to publish this thing somewhere other than a trad book press? Like, say, an ebook or audio book publisher. 120 pages would fit pretty well on a Blackberry or a Palm Pilot. It's just long enough for an airplane flight to somewhere or other, and if you don't like it, you can delete it when you're finished.

Of course, this means I must do more research. Which means I can't send the letter yet. No, I'm just kidding. I'll send it somewhere before Sunday night. There's no mail on Sunday, a'course, but e-publishers usually take e-submissions, so I'll be okay there.

One publisher, one agent. That was the deal, right? Okay, I'll start working on the other letter. Just so's you know you aren't missing anything, though, I'm still in the single digits romantic-partnerwise. Yes, even at my advanced age. And I couldn't have told you anything about Joan anyway because she threatened to hide a dead cockroach in my swim fins.

She'd do it, too.

Kids, movies, dialogue, Spielberg

Playing on the iPod: Jean Michel Jarre, something from "Hong Kong"
I'm reading: Summer of Night by Dan Simmons. I got an introduction by way of his 2007 magnum opus, The Terror, and I've since become a fanatic. Dan, where ya been all my life?

I inflicted another chapter of Spellbinder on my writing buds. This from Kellum, whose most excellent blog can be found here: Juno Jinn, Mollusk Hero (Yes, there's a story behind that, and no, I'm not gonna tell you what it is. Ask him):

Very much like real kids. I have a theory . . . that the reason the critics hate Speilberg's and Lucas' children characters . . . is that they talk like KIDS. They say stupid goofy things and poke each other and do silly things like real children. People don't wanna see that. They wanna see little kids who are extra-precious and super precocious. When people don't talk like movie characters, the critics (and the geeks) get MOST unhappy. It's funny that when people act like real people, it seems strange...

Strongly seconded. It bothers HELL out of me when kids act like adults in movies, TV and so on. Kids have their own language, their own pacts and alliances and frankly, their own reality. Even when kids are in very adult situations (like monster hunting in IT, for example) they still think and act like kids (which is, of course, why they can perceive the monster and not just its effects on the town.) Sometimes I wonder if growing up is what kills us, spiritually, which is why so many of us troop into religious institutions that refer to a "God the father" so we can feel like kids again.

Kids feel things very intensely, especially anger and fear, which is why they scream sometimes and throw tantrums. All very unacceptable to adults of course. It's like if we can somehow murder our natural feelings and only have the nice acceptable ones (glee, especially when sinister, "fine", and mildly annoyed) we've arrived in the adult world. I guess it works, but my God (the father), what a price to pay. I wonder why real kids so annoy the moviegoing public. Are they jealous? Or just scared?

The word from here: When angry, scream. When scared, scream louder. Oh, and don't read The Terror unless you're somewhere warm and safe, wrapped up in a blanket with a cup of hot chocolate.

This thing I'm writing

Meters swum today: 1900 (I swim with Dallas Aquatic Masters)
Playing on the iPod: Something by Terry Oldfield

So I'm writing a book. It's my second. Well, actually, it may be my fifth, I'm not sure how many of the others count. I'm flogging two of them around to the Media, which is to say, I'm thinking about flogging two of them around to the Media, but I actually haven't done any flogging at all this year. I keep coming up with reasons not to send out letters. I need to compile a list of potential markets and do research and create an Excel table and and and. Procrastination and anxiety are my friends. And with friends like these...

Anyway, what I'm writing is Spellbinder, the sequel to Mindbender. Mindbender was/is about a twelve-year-old American boy, picking up about six months after his mother's mysterious death. His stranger-father shows up and whisks him away to a large Latin American city (the fictional San Sebastian, standing in for San Salvador, El Salvador, where I spent some happy time as a delirious idealistic twentysomething.) They're staying with an art collector who hates having a child in her very expensive home, Dad's away most of the time doing whatever it is he does, he's alone and at loose ends, and the whole thing would be plenty unpleasant enough without the men in grey that seem to follow him everywhere he goes. Oh, and for some reason things tend to blow up whenever he's around. He makes a friend, a university librarian, and he's more or less gotten her convinced that the men in grey are real when they show up at the library. Hm, they're both more and less than they seem to be, and oddly enough they're not very nice guys. Much hilarity ensues.

Spellbinder is about what happens next.

I've always been a big fan of what happens next. Take Stephen King's The Shining, for example. At the end of the book (spoiler alert!) the psycho dad blows up the Overlook Hotel, killing himself and hopefully all the spooks. (Can you kill spooks? If you don't believe in them, do they go away?) Mom and kid are left alive, and what happens to them? Do they get arrested? How do they explain the blown-up hotel to its owners and insurance agents? (Hey, I'm an insurance defense paralegal, I wonder about these things.) Do they get sued? Probably not, since they don't have any money. How do they go on with their lives, knowing what they know about things that go AAAAAAAAAAAIGH!!!!! in the night? Steve doesn't tell us. He did a better job with IT, though he gave us (spoiler alert again!) a mournful future of forgetting all about everything that made our heroes what they are. Which sucks. Sorry, Big Steve.

Anyway, that's what Spellbinder is about. "Okay, we've been kidnapped, tortured, lied to, we watched friends die, learned about a sinister conspiracy, escaped and survived, so now what?" I'll probably post some of it here. It's going great guns. I seem to get into these periods of being hyperproductive-- right around the time I'm most likely to get pregnant, oddly enough--when I can't hardly stop. I think I'm coming down from one of those as it were, but I still cranked out close on sixty pages in two weeks, which is pretty amazing. I was emailing chapters to my writing group because I didn't want to wait to read it all to them. Nice folks, the ones in my writing group. Heck, anyone who puts up with me is nice folks.