american_spender's Xanga

Move

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:48:36 GMT

Hello! This blog is now here:
http://dan.sublibrarian.org/

Shostakovich Doesn't Care What You Think Of His YouTube Video

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:50:52 GMT

A little ballet music and a pretty sweet bass instrument:

Here he plays the end of his own piece:

And here are some typical deadpan shots and a taste of what he was working on around about the time of the war:

Remind anyone else of Pearl Bomb by the Melvins? A little, a little.

Here's my favorite recent discovery, the unusually chill second movement of Piano Concerto #2:

I love those comforting/menacing strings. Shostakovich does Chopin. I do really like it. You sort of have to enjoy feeling nervous and giddy to enjoy Shostakovich's impulsive context switches, but this piece shows he could even get something on your Soothed By the Greats mixtape if he felt like.

And for no reason besides Bach is super, a little touch of J.S. in the night:

I don't know why this piece, which is the opening of his St. John Passion, reminds me of Blonde Redhead. Well I suppose there's that descending chord progression, that takes a handful of measures longer than you expect to get to its lowest point... and the pipes linger a little too long, too, and overlap, and there's that steady pulse of the bass and string arpeggio. I have a recording of this that I'd have worn out if you could do that with mp3s. Whether this has something in common with Blonde Redhead, or I'm crazy, judge for yourself here, here, and here.

class in Llandenny

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 14:10:42 GMT

I took a rattling bus (line 60 from Newport to Monmouth) to my Shostakovich class last Wednesday morning a little before dawn. This week the class was temporarily held in the hamlet of Llandenny and Terence Gilmore-James (Terry!) sent me a carefully hand-drawn map to the town centre. (About the word Llandenny: in Welsh "ll" is pronounced by blowing air out of both sides of your mouth, like a lisping cartoon snake, say. I find myself making excuses to practice the Ll sound, e.g. ordering whatever beer's got it. But words with two Ll sounds, like the common name Llewellyn, are currently out of my league.)

I got off the bus at Cold Harbour with my cup of coffee and baguette and walked the rest of the way, about two miles on a country road. The sun was coming up and the scene became handsome:

The rest of the class is from nearby and they were impressed that I'd come up from Cardiff. A gentleman named Max who plays the double bass thinks I am "quite enterprising". Terence and his wife Grace drove me all the way back to the train station in Newport, and promised to do so for the remaining eight class sessions. Both are one of a kind, and everyone in the class has been warm and charming toward me. We were filling out a form and someone complained of having no box to check for "indeterminate gender", and everyone tittered and then the same person murmured "quite ludicrous!" under her breath. I forgot to mention that the class is mostly made up of upper middle aged sorts and pensioners. I am, it seems, the only whipper-snapper.

The professor, Terence, is just that sort of intuitive, charismatic personality that you dream of having for a classical music prof. No one in the class seems to *really* like Shostakovich, in an unqualified way, and Terence's opinion is that his music would have been better if he had sneaked away to the west like Rachmaninov and Stravinsky did. But everyone respects the symphonies and listens hard and places him somewhere between Chaikovksy (in string orchestration), Prokofiev (in the shape of his melodic lines) and Hindemith (not positive what the connection here is, but I think it's also melodic). His symphonies 1 & 5 seem to be the favorites so far.

I think being under the giant eyeball of Stalin might have actually been good for Shostakovich's music (if not his health). I'm building my case. It's like the way 80's hard core thrived under Reagan and Thatcher. When W was re-elected, we consoled ourselves the at least we should expect four years of really good punk rock (by the way, where is this 2004-2008 really good punk rock?) Shostakovich's music always dealt in the absurd and contradictory, it seems appropriate that he composed in an environment where there was irony aplenty (e.g. the irony of Shostakovich composing From Jewish Folk Poetry to please Stalin's request to use more folk music, only to be unable to premiere them because Stalin had begun campaigning against Jewish culture in the press) Actually I don't know if this is the right approach. I'm working on it.

Terence Gilmore-James and Shostakovich

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:32:33 GMT

Terence Gilmore-James, who introduced Thom Yorke & co to 20th century music back in uni, is teaching an adult learning course on Shostakovich in a town an hour north of here starting next week. I have no clue how I'm going to commute up there each Wednesday for a 2 hour class.

From this:

Radiohead began at Abingdon School, a boys' school outside Oxford. Abingdon has a history dating back to the twelfth century, but it is not an 幨ite bastion on the order of Eton or Winchester. Its students tend to come from the Thames Valley region, rather than from all over England, and many rely on scholarships. The members of Radiohead were born into ordinary middle-class families: Yorke's father was a chemical-equipment supplier; Jonny and Colin's father served in the Army. They were, basically, townieshe kids on the other side of the ancient walls. Even at Abingdon, they felt out of place. The headmaster of the school, Michael St. John Parker, cultivated a pompous manner that many alumniot just Radioheademember less than fondly. Parker is still in charge, and has described the school spirit in these terms: "Competition is promoted, achievement is applauded, and individual dynamism is encouraged."

In schools of this kind, many students gravitate to the art, music, and drama departments, where the sense of discipline is looser. For Radiohead, the saving grace of Abingdon was an exceptional teacher named Terence Gilmore-James, who headed the music program. "I was a sort of leper at the time," Yorke recalled, "and he was the only one who was nice to me." Yorke was born with his left eye paralyzed; in his childhood, he endured a series of not entirely successful operations to correct it, and the oddity of his half-open eye made him a target for bullies. Tougher than he looked, he often fought back, but he preferred to disappear. "School was bearable for me because the music department was separate from the rest of the school," he said. "It had pianos in tiny booths, and I used to spend a lot of time hanging around there after school, waiting for my dad to come home from work." Other members of the band also studied with Gilmore-James and were encouraged by him. "When we started, it was very important that we got support from him," Colin said, "because we weren't getting any from the headmaster. You know, the man once sent us a bill, charging us for the use of school property, because we practiced in one of the music rooms on a Sunday."

The yen for freedom in Radiohead's sound owes a lot to Gilmore-James, who immersed his students in twentieth century classical music, avant-garde music of the postwar era, classic jazz, and film scores. Once, he had the school orchestra perform Richard Rodney Bennett's score for "Murder on the Orient Express" while the film was playing. He left Abingdon in 1987 to devote himself to the legacy of his father-in-law, the Welsh composer Mansel Thomas, whose music he is editing for publication. "I watch over Radiohead much as I watch over my children," he said in a phone call. He spoke with the fastidiousness of a lifelong teacher, and yet his tone was enthusiastic rather than dogmatic. "They were all of them talented boys, in the sense that they had more than average abilities to think for themselves. I was of a different generation, and I did not always grasp what they were after, but I knew that they were serious. And they were delightful to be around, always getting carried away by their latest discoveries. Whenever I see them"is voice became firm?I tell them that they must continue to pursue their own original line."

Extension Granted

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 10:03:12 GMT

Last night, despite having written 3000 words a day for two weeks straight (plenty to finish on time) I decided to grant myself an extension on the novel. Here are the reasons I presented myself for consideration:

The novel is just too good to rush.
I didn't really start till the 12th, due to factors like remembering that I can't write.
I have a project deadline on the 27th and, besides HVAC control systems being important to the world, I'm paid by the hour. We're traveling to France in December, and maybe Egypt in January, so we need the money.

So the good news is that I'm 25,000 splendid words into the novel, code-named Teratoma, which is set in a Cardiff size town in Wales where two heavy metal bands, Teratoma and Diebola, are engaged in a rivalry over which band is more Satanic (and more Celtic--Satanic/Celtic are conflated in the fantasy world of the novel--the important thing is that they are old gods). Our heroes are a 14 year old orphan metal head and his Liszt-obsessed narrator friend who hate each other but are forced to write a zine in order to pass their creative writing class. Of course, they find themselves caught in the struggle between the bands.

I feel good about it, that's the other good news. I made the mature choice and cut out an entire subplot involving a remote island of cannibals, proving that I can "kill my darlings". I also planned to give it an epic sweep of time, but currently it's entirely set in about a 2 week period in 1991. The final word count of the novel will be about 25,000, but I have to write more than that so I can cut about half the words. Lord knows about half of them already need to go!

The bad news is that it won't be finished on the 30th, and thus won't receive the NaNoWriMo cup for 2007.

Progress

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:32:33 GMT

Novel Two: More Magnificent, One Would Hope

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:21:21 GMT

One of the things I learned in last year's disaster is that the way I go about planning short stories doesn't work for novels. I admit it freely: I need a plot synopsis.

What's this? A plot synopsis? Doesn't a synopsis necessarily constrict the playful flow of events and characters? Pour cement over the orchid garden of creativity? Well, yes, yes... but this year I want to transcend raw word count as an objective. If a certain improvisational playfulness must be sacrificed in order to learn how to plan out stories better, so be it. My current story writing method simply does not scale to novel length stories.

What, you ask, is my short story writing method? And how precisely does this old story writing method not scale to long works? I'm glad you asked. In what I'm getting intimations will be another mammoth post, I aim to try to capture in words how I go about writing stories. Then I'll cover how some of my best loved authors plotted out their novels. Finally I'll describe my rigorous-- in fact downright fascist --new plot writing regiment I have already begun to deploy for Novel 2.

I. How I Make Up Stories Now

Previous to this novel, my best way of writing a story was the following: first, I'd come up with a Voice--an attitude, whatever you want to call it--that I thought was cool. A way of talking. Then I'd come up with a Situation, something somebody wants, that I thought was cool, too. Like maybe someone wants a job, or a passport. Or to not die. Maybe also the Voice would be an unusual one to hear in that Situation. Once I had these two things I'd sit down and write the story, pretty much whatever came into my head when I adopted the Voice. The story had to come out from start to finish in one sitting, or I was toast. Next, over a period of days or weeks, I'd neurotically revise individual sentences of the story, making sure there weren't any cliches or jokes that weren't funny or grammar mistakes. The text would usually boil down a good bit here. Finally, I'd post the thing on Xanga, late some night.

Oh yeah... then the next morning, I'd wake up with a feeling in my stomach like I had murdered somebody's pet. Like, guilty. So I'd nervously go back on Xanga and change about five or six more lines that I realized were terrible, and that I prayed no-one had read yet. Then, again... my heart racing... I'd repost.

THEN I'd bring the story to my beloved poetry gang, and they'd suggest cutting tons of other things out, like usually half of the whole freaking story. "What does this have to do with the story?" they'd ask. They'd tell me the first half of the story felt like "throat-clearing". Or they'd say "I think you have two stories here, or maybe three." Ah, such is the nature of the writing workshop. Unfortunately, I don't think I ever really revised to the extent that they suggested. I never did any complete rewrites, that's for sure. Down deep, I think they just wanted me to write poetry instead of stories. But their comments were awesome. Anyway.

The problem was that my writing process was all very dramatic. For example, I was downright superstitious about the need to write the story initially in one sitting. If I broke it up into multiple sittings, I'd get blocked and I'd hate what I had written and would delete it or bury it as a private Xanga entry. The method requires that characters take things in a direction I hadn't thought of, that they pretty much write the story for me. I don't think I ever planned out how a story would end when I started it. I guess I liked keeping myself in suspense.

By the way, I'm not and don't expect to become the sort of writer who can spin off gorgeous prose and realistic dialogue and narrative arcs that resonate deeply with sophisticated people. I'm never going to be able to describe a pretty sunset, for instance, much less make this description somehow embody the themes of my novel or the whole history of literature as some kind of meta-sunset, or whatever, like some writers can. In fact, I don't think I would even be able to tell if I'd achieved that kind of stuff. I'm always going to have to rely on an assortment of gimmicks to distract my readers from the ugliness of certain things. Also, I'm always going to have to edit the crap out of my words, and it's always going to feel like propping up a dead pet I killed to make it look still alive to the owner. I'm always going to feel really dirty and vulnerable when someone else reads what I've written.

So be it! Having limitations doesn't mean I can't to get better at tinkering with little things and pretending I can get improve through the fascisistic application of a gruelling writing programme. But how should I comprise this programme?

II. All the Research I Did About How Authors Actually Write Plots, With Blessed Little To Show For It

Right away I want to dispel any illusion that there are books out there that can teach you how to write as good as this long-ass post will. Sure, your local book nook is full of titles like 30 Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How To Make Different Ones) that teach phrases like "The Gorilla In the Room" or "Kill Your Darlings". But what the Write Good industry suffers from is not a dearth of advice, but of properly contextualized advice.

Let me give you an example. Say I just read the Brothers Karamazov, somehow for the first time, this year. Say I think it's one of the best books I've read up till now. Say I want to know how old Fyodor does it, those characters, and how he gets away with 6 page monologues about the universe and with continually re-telling the same damn story about some feverish dude who gets away with some crime and how bad he feels. How does he get away with telling the same story again and again? And the dialogue! How does he make his characters mutter things that make you exclaim, aloud, to the astonishment of the rest of the Java Shack, "Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, you devil!" Suppose I had all these questions? Where do I look?

I know, I know... Joseph Frank's excellent five volume biography of Dostoevsky, which covers the man, his letters, his Russian orthodox faith, the political climate of St. Petersburg in the late 1800s... But c'mon, do I have time to sift through all that? What if I'm writing a novel in November? What if I am going to die in 50 or so years and need to get on with things? How do I cut to the chase? Must I choose between the Gorilla in the Room and 5,000+ pages of biography and end notes?

In a perfect world, how I'd learn to write would be to walk into a Writing Advice Bar and be able to say to the bartender something like: "So, I'm writing a novel and I've always liked the sense of humor of world war II vets, maybe because all that bullshit and arbitrariness in the war gave them a taste for bullshit and also made them nervous/guilty about surviving. Also, I've written a lot of software so I appreciate designed things and abstraction and multiple levels of indirection and have an appreciation for analytic preciseness in language and oh I find logical absurdities really funny, but on a surface level I realize doesn't resonate deeply, i.e. it's boyish giggles rather than mature hearty chuckles I get from these logical quandries and puzzles. I should also mention that a class on existentialism recently turned me on to Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and made me want to disown everything I've ever had to do with abstraction and absolute moral truth and detached, riskless reflection. Finally, I grew up in a foreign land and therefore find myself preoccupied with islands and cultural nuttiness, all that Jonathan Swift crap. So, how should I write my novel, would you say?"

But alas, no such Bar exists. What we get is one-size-fits-all Information, removed of all the impurities and risks and the blood on the hands and personal touch.

So anyway, back to the research I did. As I have hinted, I started out by asking how my pal old Fyodor wrote. Did he use the Snowflake Method (tm)? Did he write plot events on little slips of paper and sit up late at night arranging them on a larger piece of paper and drawing lines between them? Well... I found a couple pieces of information. For one thing, he wrote Brothers Karamazov serially, an episode at a time, in some publication or other. Combined with the fact that it is sort of a detective novel, it stands to reason he knew how it ended when he published his first installment. He must have had a plot synopsis! Another thing we have on the internet is a page of notes for one of his chapters: click. While inspiring, these scrawled notes and lines and doodles of chapels do not help me.

In the end, I gave up on figuring out Dostoevsky's writing process. The internet had nothing for me, mostly because the search terms only returned Write Good factoids and rising-action falling-action charts.

So instead, I started googling interviews with other favorites who are or were recently alive: Arthur Bradford, George Saunders, Joy Williams, Amanda Filipacchi, Kurt Vonnegut. The cool thing about less well known writers is that they tend to be interviewed by smaller outfits that actually ask questions about an author's method. From these interviews I gleaned that Arthur Bradford looks for a straight forward story anybody could relate to and then puts surprising characters (blind guys, talking dogs, giant slugs) into the straight story. George Saunders talked a lot about starting with a certain kind of voice, sort of living inside that voice for a few weeks or months, then doing neurotic self editing. GS said he struggles with cutting the legs out from anything too sentimental, which I relate to. An interviewer asked Amanda Filipacchi a lot of good questions about plot--plot being probably the thing AF's best at--and AF responded that she more or less just spends tons of time coming up with hard questions about every detail of a nascent story, and then comes up with five or six different possibilities for every tiniest branch of events in the story, and for every character trait. Even if she instinctively latches on to a certain answer to a question, she keeps writing things down in the list, because sometimes authors I guess have false alarms. Amanda's novels (the one I've read: Love Creeps) are really plotty, by which I mean a lot of action-type things happen in them. She crams the twists and turns you'd expect from three or four novels (say, one quirky psychological thriller and two smart chick-lit) into one slim volume.

It makes you feel good, as a reader, when there is a lot of plot. It makes you feel productive, like a lot of work went in to the sentences you are reading, and that you're really going places.

So after doing this research, I realized that one of the main things I need to learn how to do is to write a plot synopsis. A lot of my day-to-day anxiety last November was related to not knowing what was going to happen later. So this November I'm going to go absolutely bananas with plot. My writing process etc is going to revolve around producing plot. Plot, plot, plot. I'm pleased to announce, readers, that in my next novel Events Will Occur. They just will!

III. How I Plan to Trick Myself Into Writing A Plotty-ass Novel

What is clear to anyone who has read this far is that 1.) I write by the seat of my pants and 2.) I don't know how to do any different. So if the following set sounds totally fascist, keep in mind that I'm focusing on one thing. Don't give me any of that romantic bull about not crushing creativity's orchid underfoot.

Oh yeah, and if you're wondering why I call them Axioms instead of Tricks, it's because axiom sounds a lot more hard-ass than trick. Plus, the whole idea behind self-trickery is that you don't tell yourself it's a trick. So, axiom.

Axiom 1.) I shall have a complete plot synopsis written out by October 30. This I shall call my Worst Case Plot Synopsis. As such it shall not preclude surprises or the kind of character inspired turns that make good fiction, but will provide a fallback in case November becomes a run of 30 sterile days.

Axiom 2.) The way I will fill out this synopsis before October 30 is by asking questions. Amanda F.-style I shall interrogate the sysnopsis like a rabid bloodhound so that I don't give up on the overarching story's plausability some time around November 6th, say. These questions to the synopsis shall be worded aggressively, e.g. "why would such clashing personalities bartholomew and todd live together, anyway? That's ridiculous!" so that I shall dredge as much self-doubt as possible before the writing.

Axiom 3.) The plot synopsis shall consist of 13 chapters, and the peak of whatever head of steam the novel does build shall be released at the end of chapter 8. This corresponds closely to the golden mean (try typing 13 / the golden ratio into google to see what I mean) and shall be a little mathematical secret that will make me smile a secret nerdy smile to myself in my darkest hours of plot paralysis. If it's good enough for Leonardo da Vinci and Dali, it's good enough for me!

Axiom 4.) The first draft of the novel shall be typed into an actual typewriter and shall consist of 120 typed pages, corresponding to an estimated 60,000 words. Then on Dec 1st will begin a carpal tunnel odyssey as I type the whole thing into a computer.

Axiom 5.) Or, the "explain it to me like I'm a 12 year old boy" axiom . If I can't describe why the events of a particular chapter are totally sweet to a 12 year old boy, is it really worth putting in a novel? When I was 12, my favorite novel was Last of the Breed by Louis L'Amour. Last of the Breed is about a experimental jet fighter pilot who gets shot down in the USSR but escapes by pole vaulting over the POW camp wall. It turns out his ancestors were eskimos or something and he manages to live off the land for months while being pursued by a worthy nemesis, a cunning soviet tracking expert. This guy, no supplies, no tools, makes it all the way over the bering strait! You can't tell me that's not totally rad. Every chapter ends in a cliffhanger. Every chapter. The Explain It To Me Like I'm 12 Rule. Take that, Write Good industry-types.

Axiom 6.) The novel will be presented in glorious full color third person limited perspective. There will be a narrator, but it will be a sort of unreflective type guy with I guess a really good memory, but Bros Kara. style will have this commentary on the characters that is sort of inane. So more or less, it will be the 3rd person, and no cheating by revealing the character's thoughts. If someone wants to think something, they've got to say it. By using this narrator, I will trick myself into not going into long reflective passages that are going to bore the pants off Axiom 5's 12 year old boy.

OK ya'll, those be my Plot Axioms. As you can imagine, the result is going to be a little on the contrived side, but at least there will be action and conflict and perhaps one thing will at some point lead to another.

How is my plot synopsis coming along, you might ask? With 8 days to go, I'm about half done with the synopsis. The novel is going to be about bicycles, assassins, an island, church burning, and homesickness.

By the way, thanks for all the awesome comments on my Confessions fair readers. Last year, I don't think I could have handled the pressure of being observed. My earlier confession: wouldn't have happened. I would have cracked. But now I've proven I can battering ram my way through 50,000 words. My fingers are physically capable. So I'm raising the stakes.

I know some of ya'll have expressed interest in writing a novel of your very own in November. I'd encourage you to do it-- it is sublime torture. I can guarantee you that even if you don't like what you create, it will make you a more appreciative reader. It will, and you can hold me to this, increase your pleasure in novel reading elevenfold. Let me know if you decide to do it and we'll be nanowrimo writing buddies.

a harmless TUP

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 10:12:00 GMT

The second issue of TUP is finished. It looks so rad. There is a story in there called The Remarkable Intruder that I can't wait to read. Lots of friends contributed other stuff. TUP is put out by the dauntless Keegan/Katy team of Portland, OR, previously of Mpls, MN. They also make books such as journals. Send them some of your money.

For TUP #2 I contributed a mash up poem, mailed in the final moments before flying to Cardiff because Keegan said he'd publish it. The poem is call "a special knack for packing a basket" and is about picnics, aliens, and having what it takes. There is a picture of a child eating fried chicken next to the poem. I worked pretty hard on the poem, getting each line glued down exactly where I wanted it. I'm proud to be somehow associated with such fine people as these.

A preview of TUP2: clickety

The story of my first novel: a confession

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:51:45 GMT

Last year the Filthy Critic (perhaps my favorite film critic) convinced me that I would be able to write a novel in a month, and that if I didn't, I was a pussy. So in order to be included in his list of readers who are not pussies, I wrote a 51,623 word novel. It was more 51,623 words, less novel, but I was still damn proud that I did it.

This year, I'm not going to let the lack of threats from a film critic stop me. That's right kids, this November I'm writing another novel. But before I do that I thought I'd confess a little about how novel #1 came to be.

The thing is, I'm a little embarrassed to reveal even the general plot, because at every level of magnification this novel, my first, is bad. Just horribly awfully bad and also unreadable. But if I'm going to do this project again I'm going to do it better, and not have as many miserable nights as I did last November. Going over what happened last time in front of millions or maybe scores or maybe none of judging eyes will help.

Oh, and, this post is going to get a little long and whiny, which I can tell you because I'm writing this sentence after the stuff that comes later. It's a confession. You can choose to take the confession or you can take a pass. Don't go in the little booth with the curtain if you don't want to know what I did. So to speak.

I. The Germination
I came up with the storyline for the novel about 2 days before the writing began on November 1st. Before that there was an idea for a character, this kid who writes an enormous fantasy novel in his bedroom, losing all touch with his friends and family. So with 2 days to go I had this kid, the character, but I had no storyline. I know, I thought on October 29th, 2006, how about this kid has a friend who was adopted by baptist parents from Korea, so she's a like really devout Christian. She's also like really socially well adjusted and an all around strong personality. Of course he falls in love with her, and in order to win her over he throws his whole novel--the dragon designs, the maps, the complex plot line rendered on post-its, the manuscript--off the Hennepin bridge. She doesn't ask him to do this; he does it because he doesn't want to fall off the face of the earth for 3 years again (his first novel is just one in a series that is planned out to the 7th volume). Plus, he had already sent the manuscript to George R. R. Martin for advice and George R. R. Martin wrote back that the novel was no good, very sorry.

Anyway, that was the original germ of the idea. But even on October 29th 2006 I realized I'd have all this material written in the first three days (about right) and anyway how would it end? And here's where things went off the tracks. Another idea I'd been toying with was that of a videogame version of the Bible-- a totally immersive experience somewhat like World of Warcraft (which by the way I had never and still have never actually played). It would be called the Live-In Bible, and would sit side by side with the NIV on the shelf of the future. The idea was you could run around with your buddies in Bible lands, solving puzzles and ushering in new covenants. The twist was that the game was created by a company that was anti-role playing, so you had to have a full body scan and play the game as yourself, with your real name, etc. But when the company takes the game to Christ-Con, the big product convention, they face a lot of opposition for leaving out the creation and the book of Revelation, those cornerstones of Scofield Bible folks. Zondervan offers to buy the game for a handsome sum it on condition that the premillennial dispensationary reading of the Bible by prominent board members be honored. The second coming and the garden of eden had to be in the game.

So that, the video game bible, was the second idea. You can probably guess where this is going-- I decided, hey, I'll just combine the two ideas. The guy who writes this huge fantasy novel also works on the Live-In Bible. And that's about all I had planned on November 1st when I started writing. I didn't know how it would end, but that didn't turn out to be the reason for so many miserable nights.

II. The Writing

For some reason I thought for sure I would enjoy writing about the development of a video game version of the Bible. It would be tons of fun to talk about all kinds of crap like what would the point system be, what types of non player characters were there, what would it mean to "win", how would you handle the voice of God. What repercussions would sinning have in the Live-In Bible? Would this depend on the covenant in which one was playing? There was a lot of fun to be had at an Evangelical products convention. This is what I thought.

So I wrote the huge-fantasy-novel part of the story in three days. No problems there. But once Esther (the cool Korean dude) came into the story, I got stuck. I sort of stopped understanding why Esther would be interested in Robert, the nerdy yet proficient fantasist. She had just broken up with the bassist for the punk rock band Nailed For Me, and was pretty pissed off about that, but I couldn't see why the hell she would make an effort to hang out with Robert. Everything I thought of for them to say to each other seemed trite. I tried-- I got them together every chance I got, and I had Robert always go hang out at the pet store where she worked. But every time they got together, nothing. They just plain weren't compatible.

So having run out of steam with the romance bit, I decided to jump forward to the poking-gentle-fun- at-biblical- literalists-and- evangelical-consumerism bit, the bit where the Live-In Bible was going to be so damned fun to write about, and take Christ-Con by a storm of controversy. I decided that by the time they got there, Robert and Esther would have switched roles--Robert had become a newbie Christian (having perceived an obscure connection between certain patterns in the fantasy genre and the gospel) and that Esther would have become interested in liberation theology and social justice (not a loss of faith, just a move to the left). For some reason this switch was fascinating at the time, but it was to prove disastrous later when I had to actually write about Robert's conversion experience.

So, predictably for any sane person, the development of a video game turned out to be very bad source of compelling prose. So did the marketing of a videogame. So did any controversy over the video game (though I did get a couple of weird bastard characters out of them, see Things I'm Proud Of below) So I ran out of steam a second time, this time deep in the heart of Christ-Con. Rather than come to peace with either of the two blobs of writing I had produced thus far I decided to jump forward again, as far away from videogames as my little writing fingers could jump. My THIRD brilliant idea was to have Esther, the Korean orphan girl, get interested in social justice organization in Thailand. Some family friend work out there helping women get out of the sex industry. As far from video games as I could imagine. Actually this same jump represents a second whole category of writing mistake, that of being too big for one's philosophical britches. I took the novel to Thailand because I figured I could show how life in the USA is built out of fantasy... how we just go from one media meal to the next-- you know, my standard donkey crap. This move to Thailand was expensive, for the novel if not the characters (Esthers support came entirely from the sale of the Live-In Bible to Zondervan). In order for Esther's move to be interesting there had to be some conflict. So I invented some random conflict with Robert (I had made them get married, long story-- I changed this to Esther's older brother getting married) and added a new major character-- let's call him Ralph because I don't remember his name-- who is the dark horse of the novel if there is one. Ralph is this ultra conservative dude who goes with Esther to Thailand with the idea he will protect her, plus make converts in the more hellfire way of doing it. He doesn't quite get the idea of social justice, so again I was trying to put conflict in artificially and with ideological bluster. As you'd guess, cramming Thailand in a novel at the last minute is expensive.

At this point I pause to make an observation about the experience of writing a novel under the gun. When word count is king, some bad things happen. A shameful number of evenings, I had no idea what I was going to write and did not start until 10pm. When I did start, I hated every word I wrote instantly after I wrote it. My protagonists just sat there, wanting absolutely nothing much less to talk to each other about video games. I remember one night in particular I was wrestling with how the hell Robert would go from writing fantasy novels to writing video games, practically speaking. His task, as well as mine, seemed sisyphean because I had already spent all this time making the case that he was a writer, and it felt like starting over. So I figured that, rather than writing about the transition itself, I'd have Esther show up one evening to find Robert had not slept in days, suddenly working on this video game. Later I would go back in and make it seem realistic. When Esther showed up I made it so Robert was just as sick of his project as I was of mine, but driven on by who knows what passion. Esther rebukes him for not getting enough sleep, but he won't hear of stopping. He wanders around his house with a blank expression, arranging full body scanning cameras, fixing bits of code, playing back various scenes. I figured that on the writing days that I felt miserable, my characters should feel miserable.
Another thing I'd do to get my word count for the day was write about stuff I had done during the day but make it happen to my characters. Then once I had my word count I'd go do "research" for the really tricky passages (conversions, relationships, the sex trade) by searching the web for articles about premillenial dispensationalism and the global sex trade. Then I'd get tired and pissed off at the world.

Sigh. Here is where the evenings of great misery came in, and where I started to develop the attitude that my novel had become a bit of an abomination upon the earth. But I kept my chin up and soldiered on, writing a pretty decent scene where this Ralph guy takes a bus into the nightmarket with some biblical pamphlets and makes failed attempts to communicate before getting schooled by some ultrasuccessful mormons who have bikes and whom everybody loves, and who can speak fluent Thai. Humiliated, Ralph walks up the hill to the park where he has an encounter with a strangely effeminate Jesus-like character while half-snoozing on a park bench. It was at this point I started to really like Ralph. He had some problems and rough edges but he was overall a pretty good guy. So much for conflict. And when it came to actually writing about the sex trade, it was just impossible to do; I didn't know what to write! So instead I had them hang out with the charismatic leader of the mission, this guy who would improvise praise songs each night and everybody had to play an instrument or at least bang on pans. This sort of interlude brought me back to my safe space.

This was probably the lowest point of the entire month. I was stuck in three separate locations. There were gaps at crucial points between the swaths of story. I had no desire to write about 1.) Robert & Esther awkwardly hanging out some more at the beginning of the book 2.) The subtleties of Robert's conversion 3.) Christ-Con or 4.) what happened to Esther working for justice in the sex trade industry. And on top of this, people from real life were starting to ask questions about my novel-- what was it about, basically? Could they read it when it was done? These were close friends and family, people whose attention I valued greatly. I couldn't possibly let these people down!

So what did I do? I went into survival mode. I started lying about what was in there. I figured, there's still time to put more stuff in there. Every time someone asked about the novel, I'd tell them something different about it-- actually a few sweet misc plot points came about in this way: 1.) Robert was an overactive child and his parents found a doctor to do an ice pick lobotomy-- so Robert now worries about the state of his soul 2.) Jesus enters the story as this friend of Robert's who goes to punk rock shows with him. These passages are narrated from first person point of view of Jesus. So at one point I said to Peter "well, Jesus is in it". Then I had to put Jesus in it more prominently. 3.) that there were some Thai gangsters in there. Actually none of these 1, 2 or 3 were outright lies, but for every claim I made for what the novel was about I felt compelled to make the novel live up to those claims.

The final night of the novel writing, November 30th, was the night I brought it all together. Holy crap were those last few days productive. Do you want to know how it ends? Well. Until tonight I have confessed all of this to no one, so I might as well tell you. Esther helps build a shelter for on the outskirts of town but she manages to piss off some Thai gangsters (see 3. above). Meanwhile Robert is back in the States keeping in touch as the Live-In Bible becomes the most popular game-- nay, activity-- in the country. Soon everyone is playing-- the sin-related crime rate plunges, and America becomes a utopia (slightly sketchy, I know, but give me a break). But back in Thailand, the gangster with the gold teeth is still looking for a way to get back at Esther for stealing from his pimps, though she's safe in her specially designed compound. After his experience in the park Ralph starts going crazy... seeing visions, etc. One night he's swerving around town in the mission's van and almost runs into a something moving under a blanket. What is it? It's a baby, crawling across the road. It's been run over as evidenced by the tire tread marks. Yet it seems strangely OK, though coughing a bit. As Ralph is loading the baby in the car, he spots the gangster with the gold teeth. He speeds away! But it's too late, the gangsters have apparently climbed into the back of the truck. Or is he imagining it? No, it turns out, he isn't. In a somewhat awkwardly abbreviated scene the gangsters finally shoot Esther, despite Ralph's efforts. Tragedy! When Robert hears about Esther, he falls into despair. Angry at the world and at the now ubiquitous Live-In Bible, he changes a few key bits of code that regulate sin & punishment for the Live-In Bible and this wreaks havoc! He opens a portal so that characters from non-Biblical role playing games (like dungeons and dragons) can enter the online Bible lands. The novel ends on a note of anticipation and dread as terrible creatures begin to crawl and slither into the carefully calibrated online Bible, bringing with them their unbiblical scoring systems and distorted balance between good and evil (not to mention their lack of regard for the rules of this or that covenant). It's a sad ending; ambivalent, and not a little tragic.

III. Why I'm Proud Of My First Novel, Even Though It On the Whole and In Every Minute Part Was an Unreadable Turd
1.) I thought I did OK with that scene where Ralph proselytizes in the park. I felt like I was giving him a real chance, seeing as how he originated as a thing of pure evil. His shame at being outplayed by the Mormons was very realistic.
2.) The part where they destroy Robert's novel is alright. It was one of the rare places where I thought I was actually writing a scene that was important to anyone, in that it came from the characters motivations rather than what was expedient to force feed my plot to the novel.
3.) There's this one scene where they meet a member of the Zondervan board of directors, and I made him an outrageously grotesque monster, physically. Strangely shaped and whatnot. But he has these tiny shoes that hurt him a lot. I thought that was hilarious. Those tiny shoes! Why am I telling you this.
4.) I forgot to mention I did finally write Robert's conversion scene. Though it was awkward and hard to write, this is an example of where I took my medicine and wrote what needed to be written for the book. Writers are always biting the bullet and forcing themselves to write things the book demands they write. It is like, if you do science experiments on the bunny, you should also have to be the one to kill the bunny. This is an example of where I paid a high price for the bad direction I chose early on, but I bit the bullet, just like other writers who come up with bad ideas.
5.) Though the novel was not the meditation on fantasy and reality and the worlds we create for ourselves that I hoped it would be, I at least tried to cram in the type of stuff I was thinking about at the time.
6.) I wrote 51,623 words! Who cares what the words actually were?

What was promised concerning real life events

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 11:17:30 GMT

So Ash & I move into our apartment on Saturday afternoon. It's located on desirable Cathedral Road (desirable being the estate agent's term, but we agree). It's got lots of big trees along it, and a cinema/theater/art school nearby. And, there seem to be a lot of bikers per capita there.

Rather than finding a job I'm keeping my little propeller turning by working with some coworkers back in Minneapolis. Independent contracting seems lucrative on the face of things but I have to keep in mind that we'll be taxed back into the poorhouse at the end of the year. So far I've applied for precisely one job-- a sales assistant job with Kitchens-- and been rejected (at least politely, in a letter). I'm by no means discouraged; bring on nine more rejection letters, say I! Bring on even ninety times nine rejection letters!

Oh, by the way, I've been asked whether I'm experiencing any culture shock. Well, of course not, I'm from America which is the melting pot of all cultures. However, there have been a few new things to melt down in my pot. For example, I've learned that "hey there are you all right then?", esp. when slurred together as one long word-- "heitheareyoalrithen?"-- does not require a response, any more than "'sup" does in the US. This follows the general trend that what you can politely communicate to the American listener, you can politely communicate to the British listener with about six times more words. The British simply like and trust language more; the British surround themselves with dense hedgerows that require constant trimming and fussing, whilst Americans erect the picket fence, a toothy smile that they expensively whiten every few years so that it continues to "speak for itself".

Also, it never hurts to add "really" to the end of any sentence (this is true of the English, I'm not sure about the Welsh). "Really" functions as the expression of commitment to a reasoned approach to a topic. It means the speaker is aware there are various ways to approach the issue at hand, but that she has selected that approach which is the most reasonable, really. It's syntactic seasoning, just as Americans (young ones) say "like" to indicate that what follows could be worded more precisely but they are, like, too pragmatic to be bothered with subtleties of wording. "Like" in the middle of a sentence opens it out into metaphor and rough approximation; "really" at the end of the sentence aligns what precedes with Reality. "Like" is shorthand for "oh, I don't know". "Really" is short for "as Bertrand Russell would agree."

Oddly enough, the less educated here say "innit" (isn't it) where the more educated would say "really". For example, take the sentence "well it takes some time till you get settled in a new place, innit." At first blush it may seem "innit" is simply a less confident form of "really". It's certainly the perfect word to emphasize the nasal Cardiff accent, considered unpleasant by some (e.g. my friend Mags who first pointed it out to me). So is "innit" simply a watered down "really", for those who attended a comprehensive school and were denied opportunity to go to university? There is more to it then that: what is beautiful about "innit" is that it's anchored not in the enlightenment or Sir Russell but in the commitments & beliefs of the community. "Innit" values the consensus of the community, asks the community for validation-- "isn't it?"-- while "really" attempts to reference some higher moral order, a transcendent space where something can "really" be something else. I put it to you that "innit" reveals a more nuanced view of the way language works, though it is also an admission that one does not have access to a higher order. But on the other hand, the problem with "innit" is that it does not take the next step and *deny* this moral order of the upper class. It does not overturn this order. It's a retreat, rather than a brave advancement, into consensus and communal connectedness.

I dine on stereotypes and sloppy metaphor and poop out Welsh love spoons. Innit?