An Artist's Lunch

I've been thinking a lot lately* about the curious alchemy that goes into my writing. Not necessarily all my writing, but all my really good** writing: that weird mix of inspiration, time, timing, energy level, environment, and mood that is magical when it all clicks together but is often only knowable by its absence. Specifically, I've been wondering if I can develop a mind hack (or hacks) such that I can, if not call up the writing mindframe on command, at least jumpstart myself on days when the Muse is giving me grief***. What I'm finding is that some things are relatively easy for me to control, but others border on the unstoppable and the ineffable.

I can deal with the relativity in issues of temperature, and I can certainly work harder on the issue of sleep (too little and I can't work, no matter how surreal a passage is supposed to be). I can handle the idea that I need to manage my stress. But then there are problems like how inspired I am in the morning (let's not discuss how many times I've tried to scrawl notes on a rocking, creaking bus), or how playing too many games can render my creative mind down into pudding, or how easy it is to miss the key two minutes of inspiration and wind up with aborted words smacking against the inside of my face instead of sliding out onto the paper. I can even deal with having a relationship to the English language that some might argue should be corrected with surgery.

What I can't deal with, or rather, can't currently figure out, is my literary relationship with food.

I'm an eater; anyone who knew me when I was younger can testify to that. Exercise and my stomach are at a constant war with each other, and I can be tricked into overexpenditure by the mere hint that I might get to try some new and unexplored food. For all I love the image of the starving artist, it's not me; food and emotion are inseparable in my mind, from the airy joy of well-made salad to the lust and decadence of a plate of calamari. Food is the fastest way to engineer a mood shift or a downfall—nothing makes me grumpier than the sensation that I've eaten too much, except perhaps the feeling of spending too much time hungry. This may be why one of my dork icons is Dean Winchester.

I've been trying for a month or so now to understand the effect of food on my mood in general and my writing moods in particular, and it's been a seriously stop-and-go process. At first I thought avoiding greasy was the key, but then I wrote one of my favorite shorter pieces after eating a Jack-in-the-Box hamburger; then I thought the key was just not eating too much until I found that hunger destroyed my writing too. I've tried eating local, I've tried eating fancy, I've tried eating fried and dairy-free and even almost tried South Beach. But nothing about my stomach is so simple that I can narrow it to one category.

Except for this morning, when I sat down with a cup of Red Rock coffee and a bag of dim sum, and just enjoyed the grass and the trees at my local park, and realized the ticket: I am happiest and writiest when I am eating "like an artist".

This doesn't mean starving, obviously; nor does it (always) mean decadence. It means home-cooked meals in my lovely little apartment; it means local restaurants whee I feel like I can talk to the servers. It means weird little dishes I've never seen before and seeing the night streets out of the restaurant's windows. It means putting hot plates in front of people who smile about it; it means a tray on my knees while I watch whatever I got from Netflix, and the chill of the kitchen as I try to make Indian food happen. It means experiments and failures, mise en place you're almost proud of, trying to add more adjectives to your dishes. It means I want cooking and dining to be as adventurous and wonderful as writing; it means I want to leave the meal with a story or else leave the meal feeling like I'm part of the metanarrative of being an artist. A recipe is like a magic spell.

That's what it means.

Maybe I'll find I don't have this right; maybe I'll find my categories are too complex, too simple, or too broad. Maybe an artist's lunch is not as easy as I want to make it, and maybe more of it has to do with the process than the end product. But one thing is for sure: I'm now off fast food, barring desperation; and I'm pretty sure I'll be needing a way to moderate my intake of bacon.

Oh, and in case you were wondering: I ate dim sum in the park after I wrote today; and before tonight's late-night editing jag, I'll be joining a friend in the city**** for Burmese food. So today, I think the magic will work; and thus today, I think I will do some editing.

Hooray for food.

*Read: Always
**Read: Really good relative to my own work and certain writers whom I will not name for political reasons
***Come on. We've all had them.
****San Francisco, for you non-locals; also, why did I get so asterisk-happy?

More from the Unfit for Society Files

Those of you me know I am impressively hirsute; thus, it should not surprise you that my stubble regenerates at an alarming rate. I'm sunglasses and a track suit away from playing Russian Hitman #2 in the next Jackie Chan movie.

As such, it shouldn't surprise anyone that when I found myself with a date tonight, I brought a razor and shaving cream with me to work; a quick shave at the end of the day will go a long way toward making a good first impression, thus allowing me to reel her in with my repertoire of philosophical rambling and movie quotes. So, into the murse they go, and off to work I go.

The rest of the morning is as normal as a day right before a holiday full of indecisive weather can be: I ride the train, ride the shuttle, read some Pynchon, talk to the shuttle driver about her psychotic lodgers. I hop out at my office building, still bland as ever, run over to get a bagel from our local corporate bagel chain, and head on upstairs, bagel and lunch in hand, murse over my shoulder.

"Oh," I think, as the cab draws me up to my floor. "I need to get my badge out so I can get through the security door."

So I reach into my bag.

And something bites my finger.

I think a few swear words, wonder aloud (as the doors open) what the hell could have done that (my keys?), and pull my hand out...which is now turning red from the cuts on my finger.

It turns out grabbing a Mach 3 by the head will do a number to your flesh.

For the record, I'm fine; I had an exciting morning involving paper towels and three different co-workers giving me the Band-Aids that were not in our criminally understocked first aid kit. All that's damaged long-term is my pride, and possibly two small divots in my right index finger. But I leave this note here as a reminder of how much I, theoretically gifted and intelligent, can well and truly suck at life.

Not Providence over Breakfast

Good morning, my fanatics. Part 16 is up, and it looks like somebody's eyes are glued to their navel.

As for me, work has already technically started, I haven't finished breakfast, and I just got slapped across the face with the first paragraph of a new novel (to finish in my copious free time), so you will pardon me if I am not at my wittiest; all my Awesome reserves are flowing down other channels. Enjoy the update; see you here next week!

Pieces of the Puzzle

Today, after several weeks of guests arriving every weekend and two very long, surprisingly punishing weeks at work, I finally had a Saturday where nothing was required of me until the evening. In celebration of this, I cooked myself a nice breakfast, got a haircut, wrote over half again my expected daily word count, and tried to finish unpacking.

I did not succeed in this last endeavor, but I did make some very good headway—as of right now I have one full-sized box and one small Amazon box to go through before the house is thoroughly unpacked and sorted, which puts me light years ahead of where I was at this point in time at the Granada house. I probably would have gotten more unpacking done, were it not for the fact that one of my boxes was, unexpectedly, full of treasure.

A year or two ago, my parents came to visit me; and when they came they brought two boxes of Stuff, an accumulation of items that had gone into cardboard boxes during either the move from Los Angeles to Mendocino or some lesser move between there and me going to college, and then proceeded to stay there. These were boxes, I thought upon first glance, of paper; loose paper, old character sheets from the febrile and obsessive gaming days, notebooks from college, things like that. But then I got to unpacking them, and I remembered that in my world, very little is just paper.

I found a script from my high school days that I'm pretty sure was meant to encapsulate 1920s slang, about an alien with the superpower of being totally cool; I found another script using a revolt by the students and my English teacher as a metaphor for the Russian Revolution. I found half-empty notebooks from a dozen classes; course readers for the classes I loved; a piece of artwork from a good friend now distant but occasionally in touch. I found a creative writing notebook where I talked about how depressed and isolated I was, alongside some kind of prepubescent insistence that my girlfriend at the time was the girl of my dreams. (Yes, because I love being jerked around by teenagers who think they're under assault by a demon...it makes sense when your skin looks like a strawberry and you can't understand where you got all this chest hair.)

And then I got to the physical stuff at the bottom of the box: an old Swiss army knife from my Boy Scout days; a metal slammer for playing, of all things, Pogs; a life point counter from Reaper Miniatures, back when Magic players actually thought life points capped at twenty; and a light blue envelope, clearly in my much-younger handwriting, that just said "Wonder Weasel & Wicked Weasel".

A bit of background: Wonder Weasel was the thing that was going to make me famous, back when I was in middle school and trying to pretend to childhood genius. I drew it on photocopied pieces of paper that I made my dad get me while I was at school, wrote 30-50 page "issues" with all the skill and gravitas of, well, a thirteen-year-old with minimal training. That I was obviously trying to duplicate Darkwing Duck is to only sell me a molecule short. I actually found some pages of the comics, too, and am preserving them in my files for future mocking by hypothetical fans and children.

But this envelope confused me. Its contents were solid, and small, clearly a collection of some kind. Had I made a time capsule for my fictional characters? (Wicked Weasel, by the way, was Wonder Weasel's evil twin; if he had an origin story I do not remember how it went.) Had I made miniatures of them somehow, maybe during Alternative Education Week with my history teacher/fellow wargamer? Or was the envelope convenient and used for something unrelated after it had housed a portrait? Wincing at destroying a piece of the past, worrying it was nothing of interest, I ripped open the envelope.

I had made myself a jigsaw puzzle.

It must have been given to me as a present, possibly purchased after haranguing at some art museum gift shop: a blank white jigsaw puzzle, pre-cut and intended to be decorated with art of your choice. Or something like that. I had clearly used all of three or four colors, and it was clearly from somewhere near the middle of my artistic endeavors, but I couldn't say more. So I just sat down and put it together.

Never in my life have I done something quite like what I did today: assembling a puzzle whose final picture I only have the faintest inkling how to perceive, created by a much younger me and sealed away for more than a decade, forgotten about completely until now. I despaired here and there that I might not have all the pieces, that some had been lost or forgotten or perhaps given to someone else in some weird school-fueled exchange that we both forgot about (when I have flights of fancy they tend to enter low atmosphere). I got confused and turned about when I discovered a piece had broken in half, and had a cool refreshing bit of relief when I determined which rogue pieces fit together and where they went, though it meant physics was against me for the rest of the process of completion. And in the end, huddled on my floor with the innards of a box full of paper all around me, I got it finished:



It's a terrible likeness of Wonder Weasel. And Wicked Weasel too, for that matter (he is, in theory, the smaller black one in the foreground). I think I drew this in the period when I was trying and failing to imitate Jeff "Bone" Smith. But the point is not that the art was great; the point is that getting to sit down and put together something I made years ago was an unexpected adventure, a little visual icon of a trip to the past that I am so glad I got to take. I think, next year, I will make myself something similar, some little mystery or treasure map to be deciphered in ten years time. Maybe I can even make it intelligible to someone else, the way this puzzle was. I wonder if anyone sells instructions for treasure maps...

My whimsy levels are high today; I really hope the friend I am having dinner with can handle it.

The Longest Year

This past weekend, I played host. To celebrate and "break in" my new apartment (how the birthday party didn't count I am not sure, but I guess this completes the ritual), three of my closest friends came over and joined me in a game of Dungeons & Dragons (yes, really). In the midst of our rolling of dice and insistence we were half-demon warriors from an alternate reality, my phone let out its little electric buzzsaw noise that tells me I have a text message. Two seconds later, I was staring at the reminder that in one month, I would be celebrating my one-year anniversary with the girl who dumped me in February.

My second thought was "Jeez, how did I forget to delete that?"

My first thought was "That was this February?!"

Here it is, November 2009. A month and a half and the decade rolls over, which would probably be a big deal if I had not been eighteen at the turn of the millennium. But despite a shift in number sets being underwhelming, I'm still looking at the year in confusion, because I have trouble believing this year has only been a year long.

No matter how I look at it, the year feels crowded. On a macro level, my country inaugurated its first black President and took some major steps in overhauling how we live our lives and govern our people, and the Internet really started to visibly change How We Do Things; on a micro level, I entered and exited not one but two relationships that were theoretically long-term; lost touch with people I had considered best friends; made new best friends in unexpected places; moved to living on my own for the first time ever; and really started to dip a toe in this Professional Writing thing for real. The friends I talk to at work were first met no earlier than last October, but my brain insists I have known them since about 2004; I was stunned when I realized that the friends whose highly-embarrassing (for me) wedding I stood at was one year ago this past Halloween. Time has dilated this year, and I have no idea why.

Some of it, I think, is because this is the year I have most seriously started using the Internet: I am much more active on the Webbertubes this year than ones previous, and so much more aware of goings-on in the world, with the end result that it seems like more is happening. Technology is connecting us and allowing us to live in new and broader ways, such that even when we're working we're probably doing something, and it is a world I, for one, look forward to without too much trepidation (the issues of privacy, copyright, and attempts to control information are too big for the scope of one little blog post).

Some of it is because this year has been crowded: new home, new lifestyles, new and resurrected friendships. I have not had a weekend that wasn't already full up with social engagements since October 16th. I am working out more, taking more walks, watching more movies (I suspect young film buffs will grow up denying that Up, District 9, Where the Wild Thins Are, and Inglourious Basterds all came out the same year). I am trying out more new things and trying out more new people, and I think the end result is that this feels like four years because I've probably lived more in the past year than I did the last four.

But some of it, and you all had to know I was coming to this, was how much I am writing. I spend so much time at the Internet because I spend so much time working at the computer; because social networking will, I think, be key to eventual success as a writer; and because bursts of procrastination, like it or not, are part of the creative process.

While this should probably wait until December, my posts will be full of Christmas and winter by then (and if we're lucky the outcomes of Super-Sekrit Projekt Mark II), so I'm going to say it now: Writing is making my life longer. Thank you, to all my readers, of this blog and of Not Providence; thank you to the people who tell me to keep at it; thank you to the people who understand when I choose the company of a keyboard and a whiskey over anything outside the house. You'll be thanked again when real, paper-and-ink publication comes my way; but for now I want you to know you are appreciated. You have, in a small sense, helped make me immortal.

Not Providence: Now with More Adjectives

Part 15 is up. Yes, their Stroganoff really is excellent.

I have again been in a dry spell for blogging lately, but was recently slapped with something I need to reflect on; so you'll be seeing a little more from me later today, as work allows. For now, enjoy the serial!

Not Providence is Here, but My Wit Isn't.

Part Fourteen is up and running, in which our hero has dinner.

I apologize for being slightly late—everything was running five minutes behind today, my updates included.

That's all I have for now, folks—enjoy the update and we'll see you next week!

Reviews: Where the Wild Things Are; Me and You and Everyone We Know; and Myself

Actually reviewing these movies cannot do them justice. Both of them are bizarre and heart-rending and quirky and sweet and painful, and display a mastery of directing emotion and just plain showing humanity as it is that I am not sure I have ever seen anywhere else. See them; you will absolutely not regret.

This post is more about the things I and these movies have in common: Quirks; emotions; and a sense of rawness and the desire to close the distance.

Both the aforementioned movies are highly emotion-driven movies. Max and the Wild Things are emotions gone out of control, an intensity of feeling that both viewed and viewer have difficulty processing it's so bright and sharp. The characters of Me and You and Everyone We Know are having difficulty processing, but it's difficulty processing life: processing our little failures, our day-to-days, our lack of control over some things and the basic happinesses and sadnesses that codify existence. The characters all in their own ways speak of waiting for a world that's fantastic, of being ready to be amazed and confused, and do not know how to deal, except in the heat of the moment, with how amazing life really can be. And I think it's both those things—the extremes and the wonders of the day-to-day—that I've lately been letting myself miss.

I fight not to be this guy; the person who is spoken to by a movie, who reinvents himself via cinematic quotes and who swears on directors or authors the way others swear on the Bible. And yet, how much have I judged that because of media's capacity to sway my mood?

I won't give you the massive essay I was penning here for a little bit; it's long and it's maybe even a little too private. But the bottom line is that these movies spoke to the things in life I was letting myself miss—to the strangeness of reality, to the little beauties all around us, to the simple power of innocence and the basic bizarre loving insanity of human nature. You can call it Oedipal if you want, Lacanian, an effort to get back to the prelingual. You can drape the bones of it in whatever meat you want, put a little coat on it, make it dance around. The crux of it is the same: these movies have deeply moved me and made me consider things that I think, honestly, it was high time I considered.

I love the way these movies show emotion; what I need to do is let myself show it in my own work. I am good at emotion, but I could be better; and the same goes for weird. It's too easy, when writing about Fairyland and vampires, to forget that it's believable and enjoyable for your characters to eat ketchup on plain rice or to post little love notes to themselves on the fronts of their cabinets. I claim to write fantasy about humans; it's time I really focused on what I think humans are about.

But there's some stuff in there for my personal life, as well. Someone I read regularly on the Internet recently announced a major change to the way they live their lives, and I felt inspired. I don't have the room to mix it up the way she did, but I can build toward the life I want to lead, and I think that doing that more—fulfilling my New Year's resolution and then a few more steps after that—would be good for me. I style myself an artist, but I don't always feel like it; so it's time to do the things that do feel that way. I want to connect with the world around me; so it's time I decided to connect. I want adventure; it's time to put on the fedora.

It's time to Get Excited and Make Things again. It's time to wear clothes that make me feel comfortable and inspired, and to break out the trusty if damaged Palm Treo so I can try the Flickr 365 idea that I hear is going around. It's time to leave myself little notes around the house and to treat my work like a game I get to win every day at 6. It's time to eat healthy, to move, to study and to practice. It's time to base the triumphs of my life on a more expansive checklist than "ate today and didn't get fired and maybe wrote".

This is probably raw, and overly navel-gazing, and most likely in bad need of some editing; but now that it's done, post-movie post-thinking, I feel like putting it out in the Internet is exactly the right way to go. It's time to embrace life again and see if it sticks this time; it's time to set sail for adventure, and see if I can bang a coin on a lamppost enough to make the sun come up.

More from TED

This one goes out to my little sphere of people who always hear from me on Yahoo and Gmail; did you know we were hacking society?

Not Providence...

...is up.

For those who don't remember, Randall and company are in Fort Bragg, California, searching for a peacekeeper who has gone missing. Their efforts on this front have been stymied, however, by run-ins with a network of psychics acting as an impromptu police force, a crippled cult leader and his off-kilter personal help, and a series of demon-fueled crimes all committed within sight of symbolically resonant graffiti. Randall's convinced all the issues are connected, but evidence is slim—except for a calendar, found in another missing psychic's home, that suggests the graffiti are a series of psychic signal flares indicating where the crimes are to be committed. Based on this theory, Randall and company are getting ready to pay a visit to the next would-be crime scene, the night before a meeting with the cult leader in question and a visit to the backroads where the peacekeeper supposedly vanished. Looks like it might be coming to a head...

In closing, thank you all for being so patient. In a way it's kind of heartening that my readership fell a little during the hiatus; at least I know some of you are coming to the site for Not Providence. Now, I have work to do, so I'm going to stop yammering and leave to that link. Enjoy!

It's Happening

The weekend was a weekend of pleasant interruptions, spurred by friends visiting from out of town and a Halloween party to which I wore one of my lamer costumes (I don't care who you are, coming as one of your old LARP characters does not win you any points). However, on Sunday, after my guests left, I was able to get a few things done.

I took a nice leisurely train ride to Menlo Park and spent my birthday gift card at Kepler's (a lovely independent bookstore which all locals should patronize), acquiring via them and Amazon copies of Bryson's The Mother Tongue, Carroll's Outside the Dog Museum, Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, Larssen's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Powers' Earthquake Weather, and Priest's The Boneshaker, as well as the mp3 album of Dirty Three's Horse Stories, which I owned ten years ago and recommend to anyone who loves stringed instruments.

I hiked about with my books and purchased food for this week—Italian sausage, chicken, curry powder, olive oil, a megafuckton of veggies. Time to experiment.

I did some laundry and worked on amateur cartography for my D&D game (a statement which fills me with prurient chuckles for reasons I will not explain).

And I wrote.

Yes, folks, it's true—Book Two, Part Thirteen of Not Providence is written and ready for its editor (read: me). Today during my lunch break, seeing as how the Mongolian Death Cough still has a grip on me, I will be editing the HTML and CSS to receive its literary payload; and tonight, I will prep my words for upload to the Intertron Tuesday morning.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the draining move and the sickness in my chest, I have triumphed. Tomorrow, Randall and the peacekeepers ride again.

No biggie. Just thought you should know.