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Just did a page count - I've cracked 50 pages!
I've done quite a bit of work before and am now combining all of it into my draft outline. I officially cracked the 50-page mark and am moving on. Before I get too much farther, I'll need some test readers. Would anyone be willing to sign an NDA and be a test editor for me? Thanks in advance!
M.C. Escher was quoted as saying 'I don't need drugs, my dreams are scary enough'. I don't take drugs, but does Nyquil count? What follows is a no-BS, swear-to-God dream that I had last night:
I was standing on stage at the Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor and William Shatner. We were doing a live number on stage and I was waiting for my turn to sing to come up. Bill S. was singing while simultaneously working a tricep-pulldown weight machine. His microphone was balanced on top of the weight stack...the fact that it was moving up and down didn't seem to be a problem. I was worried, as the song progressed - that he would only be doing two sets of tricep exercises, since I normally do three. Seemed like the audience was doing well - I was waiting for my turn to sing to come up.
I haven't the slightest idea why I would have this dream. I'm not a fan of the Prairie Home Companion, couldn't sit through the movie they made about it. I'm not a fan of Garrison Keillor, either. I'm sure Freud would have something to say about it, but thankfully, he's dead and as yet does not enter my dreams to provide a diagnosis in progress.
I've been published again (thanks Indiebloggers!) and wanted to share that with you. I missed the notification - the only reason I knew that it was out there was because someone commented on it here (thanks to you, too).
Readers will be relieved to know that 'Mad Season', like everything else I've had published, is a work of fiction. I was drawing from a variety of personal experiences for the setting (cube farm, USA) and also from terrible things that happened to people in the past (The Zodiac killer, the Tate-LaBianca murders and Budd Dwyer. Violence in America has always been common, although what is most terrifying about it is the way it seems to happen without warning, cause or explanation. I certainly do not celebrate violence - it scares me. Writing 'Mad Season' was my way of getting my fears out on the table where I can look at them.
Read Mad Season on Indiebloggers
I'm not sure about anyone else, but when I'm writing different characters, sometimes the easiest place to find them is real life. One of my lesser talents is a modest interest in social anthropology - people watching, in other words.
I had a meeting with some people in SF on Thursday - taking the train back home on BART Thursday night, I sat opposite a guy coming home from work. The more I watched him, the more curious and intrigued I became.
Meet Joe Failure
"I haven't seen that pattern since The Cosby Show left basic cable", someone said at lunch. He wanted to reply with something smart but the right thing to say seemed to be beyond him. By the time he'd thought of something, it was about 4:30 in the afternoon. It was time to go home - time to roll back to safer harbors.
A slate-gray cableknit sweater with an electric blue pattern and a short-sleeve shirt that had been washed about fifty times too many. He morosely stared out into the darkening western sky - the rattling of the train kept him from dragging out his cell phone and calling a girlfriend. He tried to sleep several times and swore softly each time a jolt awakened him.
It felt sometimes like he was wading through a lake of syrup - each step seemed to take more effort than what it should have. Waking up in the morning and going to the gym or staying out to meet new people...it just seemed like a hassle after a while. After that last blind date, after the tenth or eleventh time he'd heard "I'll call you", it was just easier to crank up "Love Stinks" on the stereo. Sometimes he felt overwhelmed by the comfort - the sweetness pushed up from his stomach into his nose - like someone was holding him face-down in that syrupy lake.
Waiting for the right time to break free of it all seemed to be taking forever. What if we're still doing this when we're fifty? The thought of it frightened him. The thought of doing something crazy - going bungee jumping, skydiving or something - it scared him but it was titillating at the same time. Cheap thrills were the ticket. He stared at his own reflection - who was going to take a fat guy bungee jumping?
Maybe I should rob a bank.
Crime seemed like an option - an extreme sport of the real-deal variety. He'd fantasize about taking his replica Glock with the little orange nub removed and jacking some old lady's car in the nearby Safeway parking lot. That'd be a trip, wouldn't it? The Pillsbury Doughbandit. Why do the right choices seem so boring? What if the wrong choices are too much fun? The sweetness was pushing up through his nose again...something was bound to give soon.
He arrived at his stop - the end of the line in the South Bay. The little coal of desire had started to burn again, something which hadn't happened in years. He wasn't sure what to do about it but he was confident that he would figure it out.
I guess one of the take-aways from this exercise was that I make a lot of projected assumptions about people based on visual cues. This is a bad habit psychologically but from a writing perspective, it makes it easy to build three-dimensional characters.
Draft of the novel is still in progress - I'm excited and scared at the same time.
Job stuff has my attention at the moment; apologies for the lack of communication. In addition to the novel I'm cranking on a couple of short stories - one is in with Stacia over at Indiebloggers and hopefully it'll be published.
I had a great meeting with a friend who does contract CG work for various people - he's responsible for some of the pre-game graphics you see for the Giants, the 49ers, the New Jersey Devils and other folks. In terms of being creative for a living as opposed to doing it at night with desktop support for a day job, he had a few things to relate. Likening the process of being creative for pay, he called it 'looking into a big, dark forest'. It's scary at first, he said, but eventually you find your way to the clearing and from there you declare a niche of sorts.
I'm still looking into the dark forest, according to him. I know I want to take that step but there are a lot of what-if questions that I'm afraid of being on the wrong side of. Maybe this is too revealing - maybe you have something to share - this is probably why I'm writing this. I guess I've been struggling with trying to make the creative side of me something I can do as a day job. It's a difficult process because I've always been better at being resilient rather than at being successful. Not defining success as 'just being rich' but rather just getting what I want to accomplish over the transom. I don't know how I'm going to get this novel written or what I'm going to do after that. I just know that it is time for me to punch through some barriers that have been holding me back.
