An Editor's Dreams

My sense of time is utterly destroyed.

It keeps occurring to me in bright flashes, moments that leave me stunned and doubting and recounting the days: somewhere at the beginning of 2010, I completely lost my macro-scale concept of time. I can still count seconds; still feel hungry at the right times of the day; but when trying to recall how recently something happened, I find that my judgment of such matters is gone.

I just finished a night's writing, working on the manuscript for a short story, and when it came time to save the new version to my rough drafts, I was shocked to see that the story that had "languished far too long" had only been laying abandoned for seventeen days. Every few minutes I find myself having to remind myself that it's only been two weeks since I started at my new job; that I'm only two weeks gone from when I last saw my friends from out of town and only three weeks from my arrival for a vacation in Fort Bragg. This weekend feels like it was all at once four days long and only one day (perhaps helped by having slept very poorly on Friday night). I can't believe tomorrow is only the start of March, on basically any level: this year has had so much adventure already.

Speaking of adventure, I have had the first unpleasant experience with my new job as far as the ways it has leaked into my day-to-day life: I've begun to have copyediting dreams. Both Friday night and Saturday night I found myself dreaming of being at work, hunched over a gray-filtered doppelganger of my lovely and spacious desk, with a manuscript in a manila folder in front of me; and both nights I have found myself chanting and maundering to myself as I go hunting for errors, so desperate to find something wrong in the blurred mess of chimerical page proofs that I would swear dream-me was sweating. Both times I felt defeated, or panicked, like I was not able to find something wrong, but not because there was nothing wrong; and both times I woke up gasping in a way I haven't since the old and indomitable nightmares of attending a final for a class I never bothered to attend.

I like to rant about the lack of strong, challenging rites of passage in our modern world, but I think I may have found one. Maybe I'll get a tattoo to commemorate surviving it once I'm through to my ninety-day review; or just go all the way and get scarification on my face.

To make this germane to the blog again, I will say that the good news is that the new job has not impacted my writing (though I find myself uninterested in talking about the nuts and bolts of it). This year has actually been fantastically productive, and my slip-ups in scheduling have been unnoticeable, in the sense that I have not found myself kicking myself when they occur. The biggest snag I have struck is the technical limitation caused by Wednesday (the new laptop) being in some senses a large netbook—notably, thus, a machine that lacks a CD drive. This had made submissions to magazines difficult, as I cannot easily edit my writing files into tarted-up .doc files and get them sent out, and I in fact am behind on submissions for this very reason. I plan to attempt to fix this issue this week and address the backlog, because the truth is, without submission, this career is going nowhere; and the the longer I wait, the more awful and looming the world of rejection and judgment is going to seem when I do get stuff out the door.

And now, this post is long enough; and my attempts at further prose have been so purple I think they might be leaving the visible spectrum. Suffice to say that life is anxious, and busy, but good; and that this blog and all its trappings, Randall and company included, are firmly anchored as part of my life.

Whoa.

The first week at the new job is done, and the title is all I have to say: "Whoa."

The culture and ethic here is very, very different from my old job. I don't want to engage in bashing my old proofreading position, so I will say that it was what I needed when I was at it; but this new copy editing job is definitely the right next step up. This includes, as a mixed blessing, the fact that this new job is actually a serious, forty-hour-plus work week: I have spent my first four days embroiling myself in the style guide and various secondary sources dealing with the kinds of certification exams we produce material for*, without many more breaks than those mandated by law and the occasional need to take two minutes to reset my brain. It's challenging, it's new, and it's exciting; but this does mean that I am not able to take much time online during the day, which in turn has meant that I haven't had much time for blog updates.

Fortunately, this is in part because I am spending large portions of my evenings writing. Book Three of Not Providence is as of now about a quarter of the way into its rough draft phase, and I have finished 1.9 short stories already this year, with a third about halfway done. I'm back in that place where I find myself getting jolted at random with bits of inspiration and new possible twists in my stories, which is honestly a lovely place to be. I'm trying to get the energy together today to deal with a magazine submission, but something—I suspect fear—is making it feel like a mountainous ting to surmount, so I may have to cleanse my brain with an episode of Lost before I do that. And yes, in a more mundane context, I am finally watching Lost; see earlier in my blog for why I'm allowed to be behind. (Please take that sentence in the spirit of good fun.)

Lest this whole post start with the letter "I", I (damn!) would also like to bring everyone's attention to a recent bit of entertainment and enlightenment—the Guardian's ten rules for writing fiction, in which a variety of authors give their ten rules for, well, being a writer. I reacted to being sent the link with a burst of skepticism, but the sender is someone I trust, so I clicked it, and was pleasantly surprised, even uplifted. Out of all the advice, the only one I disagreed with much at all was Elmore Leonard's Rule Three, and even that I don't take much issue with—I do think using a verb other than "said" can be a good thing, especially in terms of avoiding adverbs after "said" (in my eyes a much worse crime), but I agree that "said" is a much more transparent word than many writers will admit. I particularly love Margaret Atwood's and Neil Gaiman's lists of advice, but other particular gems of wisdom include:

Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said". (Roddy Doyle)

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue. (Helen Dunmore)

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. (Geoff Dyer)

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand. (Anne Enright)

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money. (Jonathan Franzen)

And the one I most needed to hear:

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity. (Anne Enright)

All of it is that pithy, that insightful, and that valuable; if you're looking to write, this is an article to read. Though do have the courage to disagree with them sometimes; the only thing I think is an absolute for all writers, always, is the one piece of advice all of them seem to repeat endlessly, and the one that I found, in its Zen way, most enlightening:

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. (Anne Enright)

Write. (Neil Gaiman)

Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style. (PD James)

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go. (AL Kennedy)

So, I'm going to go just that—write, in my own voice and as close as I can get to without fear—and try not to worry about how I'm coming up on the end of my projected break from Not Providence, or the fact that I'm getting on a train in a couple hours, or the possibility that all I'm going to do is receive face-stinging rejection letters for a good, solid while.

As soon as I eat some breakfast and finish an episode of Lost.

(And thus was the Great American Novel left to die...)

*For those not wholly in the know on this one, my new position a copy editing gig for a company that makes a variety of books, but mostly review and study guides for various licensing exams; I am choosing not to name them mostly because I do not want to even for a second seem like I speak for them as a company.

Ups and Downs

I feel like I've used that title before. Maybe because it's incredibly jejune.

Anyway, I am having a very busy week, but I felt that updating was the right move, as it's been, only two days in, a week full of ups and downs (fortunately, almost all my direct and personal experiences have been ups); I have about ten minutes, so pardon as this becomes a bulleted list full of link salad.

• Personal Up: This week is my last week at my current job. I'll be moving to a new position a little closer to home, more money, smaller company, etc. etc. It's a weird feeling to be on my last week somewhere—the last time this happened, the store was closing, so we were all on our last legs. My mood is one of completion and celebration, but also a little bit of loss—loss of the people and the familiarity and those all-important rituals—but I still have to jump through the usual hoops. It's like a really lame Irish wake.


• Book World Down: Amazon's little war with MacMillan. I am less than impressed with Amazon's behavior on this front. While books may get marked up a lot, books get marked up for a reason, and you are, as John Scalzi said it, "unload[ing] a shotgun into a crowd of writers" when you pull this kind of action against a publisher. According to the New York Times, Amazon has relented; but according to John Scalzi, some books from MacMillan imprints are still not available on Amazon, so I suspect either Amazon is badly managed or they are trying to stab at their foes even as they fall. Mr. Scalzi's thoughts on how to deal with this are all at once obvious and brilliant; if you want to help an author catch a break, listen to him.


• Speaking of corporate entities I am less than pleased with at the moment, a personal corporate Down: Google. Google has decided, as of today, to discontinue the FTP service that allows me to broadcast this blog here on my website, for good business reasons that nonetheless make my life complicated. The workaround they are offering is not as robust nor is it truly a replacement; as such, I think it's time I look into WordPress, so stay tuned for a possible format shift. You'll be kept updated, I assure you.


• Creative Up (no pun intended): Up has been nominated for both Best Picture and Best Animated Picture. This is stupendous news; Up well-and-truly does deserve the Best Picture, and just being nominated goes a long way toward pulling animation out of its current ghetto of separation. I dream of the day that variations on a medium will all be judged equally (animation vs. live-action film, sequential art vs. novels, my favorite topic of genre fiction vs. fiction), and we just came a tiny step closer. My only worry is that splitting its nomination between two categories could also split its votes, but, a man can still dream.


• And finally, here at the bottom, a Political Up (liberal politics to follow, you have been warned): My country is getting the wheels moving on repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". I think that letting anyone who is fit to serve do so is the right decision in all matters, and seeing things start to shift pleases me. I recognize it will take time (unlike a lot of America, it seems), but I'm glad that the government is starting the move.

That's all the news that's fit to type on my lunch break; now, please pardon me as I go lift weights and eat hummus. It's an exciting life I lead.

Christmastime, Pretty Baby

I think my writing work is taking a nap for the holidays.

That's right; today is the last day of the grind, and then after a night with a houseguest it's off to the Great Green North of Mendocino County.

My Christmas got off to the exact right start this weekend, as I received a present from a new friend who I keep insisting can't possibly be that new, and an old friend whose company I had not shared in a long while. I am now the proud owner of my first Christopher Moore book; and of a black piece of canvas that says, simply, "What Would You Attempt if You Knew You Could Not Fail?".

I nearly teared up opening that one. It is now proudly displayed in my living room, in full view of my armchair, where I will sit, and read Christopher Moore, and think that I know exactly what I would attempt—and I'm attempting it nearly every day. Fantastic timing on that one.

So, just one more day; just a few more QA jobs; and then it's the long drive and the foggy windows and the constant winding greenery that leads to my house (and yes, the hotel that looks like a golf course fucking a salmon run). My aunt will put on her reindeer pajamas; my father will crank the Elvis Christmas album; and we'll crack more than one bottle of wine and get down to the important business of playing board games, opening presents, and spending time with family. And during that time, we'll all reflect on our year and be grateful for the time to be with each other—though the food may be fattening, though one or two of our usual guests may not make it, though the fireplace may fill the house with smoke, it's Christmas, damn it, and nothing is going to make it anything less than that.

It's likely that I will not have time to blog while I am up there, so I leave you with these thoughts: Whatever holiday you're celebrating, whatever you choose to call it, I hope yours is incredible; and I say to you, with all the best hopes and intentions: Merry Christmas.

Bawdy Storytelling

So, first of all: Not Providence will go up tomorrow, though perhaps not at the usual time; I didn't get a chance on my lunch break to get the edited update converted for Web viewing, and may not finish it before the 9-5 starts tomorrow morning.

And why, do you ask, did I not finish that tonight? Why, Tyler? Why would you strand us like this?

Two words for you: Bawdy Storytelling.

Some of you may have heard of this, and if so, and you like it or aren't in the SF Bay Area, feel free to move on and not read this post. If you haven't heard of it, then read on.

Bawdy Storytelling is exactly what it sounds like: perverts getting together and listening to perverts talk about being one, in the form of 10-ish minute stories told up on a stage at a nice bar in the Mission.

Bawdy Storytelling is also some things that are not apparent from the name: Bawdy Storytelling is an honest and friendly community; incredibly, sides-clutching funny; encouraging of newcomers; and a showcase for some really, madly, deeply talented storytellers. There are performers at this show who have blown me away with their skill at facial expression, powerful delivery, and just plain balls-out honesty. Bill Hicks would be proud.

It's late, and I recently took some Alka-Seltzer Cold (the night-time formula, because I'm wild and uncouth); so it is entirely likely that my words are not encompassing the true worth of Bawdy. So I'll tell you a story.

I have attended Bawdy Storytelling twice.

The first time, when giving my ride directions to my office (the show starts at a time such that we needed to hurry there right after I get off work), we miscommunicated about the road, and she wound up five miles east of where I was and unable to see a street sign. We fought traffic the whole way. And when we got there in time for the inspirational opening ukelele piece (oh yes, it's true), we were ecstatic.

The second time, my ride got held up at home, and then took an incorrect exit and wound up headed north instead of south; she arrived at 6:30 instead of 5:30, when we had been told that it started an hour early, at 7, instead of the usual 8. We were not the most cautious drivers on the way there, but were safe. And when we got there at 7:20 and discovered it indeed not only planned to start at 8 after all, but wound up starting late, we were pleased. And as soon as we knew the date for the January show, we immediately started making plans to be there.

Something about Bawdy sabotages our days (though mine was pretty gentle to me, I expect due to the Sick taking care of the bad luck already), and yet, we always find time to be there. I was dubious for months, but now I can't imagine missing it for anything that doesn't involve blood or wedding rings. When I say Bawdy Storytelling is amazing, I mean it; if you can put up with some nasty words and some very frank discussion of sex (and I mean frank in all caps, twenty-point font, letters of fire), it is some of the best performance I have ever had the pleasure to see, and especially for the $10 entrance fee.

Now, the organizer of the show very strongly encourages us to spread the word and help Bawdy Storytelling grow; so if you are interested, please, check out their website at bawdystorytelling.com, and see if the topic and timing for next month's show interests you. I might be there; who knows, I might even be onstage.

But not if you attend, Mom; there are some experiences that I think we're both happy keeping separate.

Not Providence: Restate My Assumptions

There are approximately five reasons I am willing to miss a Not Providence update (assuming I don't individuate all the different reasons I or a loved one could be having a medical emergency). One of the good ones just happened.

It may take a person involved in the creative life to understand why this is exciting, but, I have rather unabashedly been pitching a novel while I work on Not Providence and my magazine submissions. So far it's been exactly what you'd expect: a whole lot of digital slammed doors, the words "not for me", and the whole time the thought that, you know, maybe a guy could be happy with a career in Account Management...

And then, because God is the biggest of bitches, I got an email back that was a bit rosier.

I of course won't go into details, but the bottom line is that I was asked to submit sample chapters and the rest of the usual novel proposal rigamarole (details to come when it isn't late and the details aren't boring). This does not, I must stress, mean that I have representation; and I am braced with a heart full of wonder for the strong likelihood that I will still get a "No". But this is farther than I have gotten yet, and after the way this year has destroyed me in terms of my artistic aspirations I really can't be grateful enough to know some of the effort mattered.

But, that happened this morning; then today was the 9-5; then tonight was getting the query packet together, and dinner, and getting the query packet together, and telling my parents so they didn't hear it entirely via the Internet. When I got off the one it was 10:01, and I had not even touched tomorrow's update. And tomorrow night I'm busy.

So, that said, it looks like this week's update is to be pushed to Thursday, and today's "writing work" will have consisted of prepping for tomorrow's query submission. This may seem like bad news for you Not Providence lovers, but the truth is that work on the serial was begin to become wearying, and having a week off in which I got to undertake such a major hurdle for my (shall we say) mainstream writing career was probably just what the doctor ordered.

So, no Randall in Mudville tomorrow. But at least now I'm upbeat enough to believe he'll continue to thrive.

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.

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.

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.

Miscellany

(Because there were too many of these to just spam you with them on Twitter.)

• Something about this winter has me flashing back to Christmas season '06, and the events in my life are mirroring it a bit too: Good friends, a rocky romantic situation, Warhammer 40k and Jasper Fforde novels fresh in someone's mind. (In case you didn't think I was a nerd before.) This isn't entirely a bad thing, but it has me slightly melancholy, like maybe things were simpler back then. Because as everyone knows, things were always simpler back then.


• The moving process is all but complete. On Saturday I drop my keys off at the old house, and then I just have to wait to see how much of the deposit we get back (that we can't fight to get the whole deposit back is a portion of our deposit agreement that I was never privy to—you can guess how I feel about that). The new house is to the "Box a Day" phase, where if I unpack one box a day I will have things all put together by mid-November. Things I have learned: I own a great many notebooks, and need to re-organize my personal files. Hence, those books will be saved for last so I don't feel like I'm making more work for myself. Life is all about tricking your own brain.


• I appear to be sick. This is not how I wanted to be. Though I do have to say, watching the director's cut of Legend with a raging fever is a real experience.


• Speaking of the director's cut of Legend: watch the director's cut of Legend. Seriously, it is almost a completely different movie, and a much better one; I tried to watch the U.S. theatrical release and after 10 minutes my wrists ached from clenching my fists. I'll have to rant about my hatred of test audiences later.


• Lastly and most importantly: I started writing again last night. Naturally, it sucked, and I don't want to use any of what I wrote; but after a night's sleep the corrected, improved version came upon me in the shower, and now I'm taking my lunch break (which would ordinarily be spent getting exercise that the Internet recommends against while sick) to get that down on paper. Tonight I will do more writing, and unpack a box, and maybe, if there's time, spend some quality time with a DVD. The old rituals are starting to come together alongside their new and improved counterparts, and I cannot begin to say how much this excites me. Now if only my upstairs neighbor would stop morphing into an elephant every night...

No, I Haven't Forgotten

If all goes according to plan, this will be the last in this recent glut of skip weeks for Not Providence. The moving is down to unpacking a box here, a box there, with the floor space mostly open and my house mostly together, which means I can focus on the things in life that matter. This includes both Not Providence and the Super-Sekrit Projekt Mark II, which I hope will see the light of day before New Year's.

Thanks for hanging in there and continuing to read—next week, God willing, Randall rides again.

Friday to Sunday: A Writer Gets Older

Nine days and it feels like my entire world is tilted wrong.

It all started on Friday the 16th when I, to go ahead and just stay vague, ran into some relationship troubles. It all seemed to be manageable, the usual places where the puzzle pieces don't automatically fit, and then we were moving forward with an eye toward smoothing it out. On Saturday, I moved, which was a lovely pile of crazy—too much to do, a personal space full of heavy boxes, furniture shifting and much snapping and swearing. Sunday was Where the Wild Things Are, which is lovely if not the same thing as the book, and tapas, which never stop being exciting. Both of these were lead-ins to my birthday, the cake and presents and all the good hugs and the people here just to see me. I needed to unpack, but no matter how much I focused there was a fat man sitting on chest, strumming the strings of my intuition and telling me I had something wrong.

On Wednesday, I was dumped.

My friends all rallied and the love-bombs began, just enough to help me but not enough to steal all my air; there was wine and sushi and a little bit of bitching and it all got handled. Then it was dinner with the family on Thursday, and the first of two sweet hats, and other gifts besides I have not fully had time to appreciate. Friday was dinner with the friends, which had a rocky start but was still delicious, and on Saturday I hosted my first birthday party ever in my new place, which was delightful and enjoyable and definitely a success thanks to a friend with a bag full of board games and another with an amazing hand in the kitchen; Sweet Hat Number Two was collected, bringing my Sweet Hat total to three, and I spent a wonderful night with wonderful people I love, watching them meet and talk and play and just be, and felt glad that even if I couldn't have a long conversation with each of them individually, I could at least have brought them here to this place and time.

Now it's Sunday, and the ex has come to pick up her things. We exchanged bins and books, pills and boxes, all the things we traded with each other when permanence was still a hypothesis; we had that long pink-eyed stare and the confused, cold goodbye, and the tacit understanding that we just closed the door on an era. I closed the door, sat down, and cried; and in crying ejected a ball from my stomach that I hadn't wholly realized was there. And then I sat up and got online, and realized that most basic truth: Now that all of this is over, I'm expected to go back to life as normal.

But it was all done while the day was young, and I have permission (granted by one of my best friends) to spend today relaxing and pampering myself as I see fit. There will be some boxes moved, and dishes washed; but today I get to sit down with a DVD in my player and just enjoy the feel of the space. Today I get to walk through Mountain View and know that I am loved. Today is my birthday present to myself.

27 was rough and full of failed attempts; here's hoping that the next bridge from October to October has a couple fewer missteps.

No.

There is still no update to Not Providence this week; the Movebeast is still firmly entrenched in between my shoulder blades, demanding my attention and my time. The bulk of the deconstructive work is done, but we are not quite to that delightful point where all that is left is the rebuilding effort; and as such, it is hard for me to get into my usual routines, writing among them.

And I don't mind saying, it's been difficult. Not writing, to wax cliche, is like not breathing, not sleeping, not coming up for air; like some basic, primal need inside me is not being met. It feels like my life is treading mud.

The entire disruption to my routine has been like this. I've been working, hauling, guiding, thinking, placing, a thousand other verbs, and none of them sound like "rest". I don't have a new routine fully worked out, and by definition sort of can't—most things involving the new house are things I have only done once, maybe twice, and plenty more things are not in place for me to have any kind of habit (like the fact that I will not, in fact, be navigating around a sideways length of bookshelf every time I walk through the middle of my living room). As I suspected, it has not been the easiest thing to deal with; I have arguably been at my worst the past week or so, and my loved ones have born the brunt of it, which is not really how I like to be.

But, there have to be bright sides. My loved ones still love me, after all, and I've been forgiven my screaming and my snaps. The main part of the move is over now. This weekend is the final push, the last load, and this week is the emptying of boxes. And come Friday there's my birthday to celebrate, even if I'm celebrating it with cleaning; and next week I just have to pick up little pieces, and then the saga of the Granada Street house will end.

And then, oh my readers; and then, how I will write.

The Gasping, Sucking Strain of Ritual

I'm a creature of ritual and habit. That's not really a secret. I function best when I have a schedule laid out ahead of me; I am in my best moods when certain parts of my day run exactly as they have before; and I love rituals and superstitions and strange little quirks of behavior that govern holidays, celebrations, social interactions. It's why I love talking to people. It's why I love the SCA (or have come to love it recently, anyway). It's why I love new relationships, with the learning each others' quirks and sharp edges and recipes for happiness. It's why the end of the year is so great, for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's why I get up every morning at the same time, why I can handle my problems if I can tell what time it is, why I sometimes set my calendar by the bagels in the lunchroom.

Moving is the opposite of routine.

Moving is an inherent disruption of ritual. It requires extra energy normally reserved for life's others ins and outs; it requires you to go without some things for some amount of time while they are tucked away in boxes; it requires planning and favor-asking and physical labor; and worst of all for me, it requires, for anywhere from 30 days and up, that I surrender the concept of home.

Home is at the center of my rituals. Home is a base of operations, a storage space, and an anchor. I cook my meals standing in certain directions, I hang or store my utensils using certain motions, I duck away in certain ways to avoid the high-pressure faucet wetting my clothes. I memorize the flow of things in my home and work by rote, pleased to just be able to sit there and feel the way things exist within my home.

When I am moving, I cannot do that. I experience everything with a sense of its limitations, measure my actions by what I can afford to pack now and pack later. I divvy the house up into nights of work and boxes, budget my time into making it as easy as I can. I buy food in a way that lets me afford a U-Haul. It makes me stressed, and tense, and occasionally even sick, confused when I even contemplate the fact that this phase must end.

And yet, moving has its own magic. It has the DVDs I watch while I pack, which seem, so far, to all be different takes on crime drama. (Two winters ago it was Bones; now it's Dexter. I can't imagine what it'll be the next time.) It has the joys of Box Tetris, the reexamination of my spatial footprint and the geometry of my belongings. It has the valuing and revaluing of the little things and the decision about what I must own. It has the cleansing feeling of hard labor, and the sense of a major accomplishment when the furniture's all brought in. And it has the shivering promise of a new routine, of the little joys when I figure it all out. Living is ritual, but moving is adventure.

What I'm saying in all this is that I am coming to terms with the move, and finding the ways it excites me. And that, if I can, I'll be doing some of my packing in a pirate hat.

(And yes, Not Providence will be back soon.)

Not Providence: Brief and Inconstant

Hello all, my fine readers, my friends.

It is time to risk missing an update.

The short version of events is that I need to move. Not immediately, but at the end of this month. This is not a big deal and I am not as stressed about it as I was when the situation was still wholly in flux, and even if I do not find an apartment that is to my satisfaction I have a valid fallback for the next month or two. But this does mean that today has been exceptionally stressful and draining, as I am a person who just does not cope well with not knowing where Home is, and that I have a lot to get done.

Tomorrow's update is ready from a creative sense, but not in a coding sense, and I may be unable to get it done in time for a 9am upload; so while I expect tomorrow's update to go up tomorrow, it may do so very late, and I would not be surprised if I have a missed week or three in the next two months as I try to get everything in my life sorted out.

Not Providence is in no way dead; the rest of Book Two is plotted out near to completion and Books Three and Four are skeletons hanging at the back of my mind, slowly growing meat. But there will be a brief, inconstant hiatus while the matter of the move is resolved. Once I know where Home is, you will know more.

I am very sorry to do this, but I am simply dealing with too much unavoidable stress to be piling the avoidable stress on top of it.

Randall will be back soon.

2008, In Review and Memoriam

Right. Today is going to be, as is tradition, insane; so I'd best get this done right now.

2008. What to say about 2008? Not a whole lot that's polite, really.

If I had to pick a single word for this year, I'd say it was Change. If I had to pretend I knew something about the Tarot, I'd say this year's card was Death.

You can see it in the American Presidential election and the polarized reactions to Obama's victory; the idea that while we're still in stormy waters, we've got the rudder pointed in the right directions, and the opposing idea that Obama is just going to sail us in deeper. We're mewling and squalling right now as a people, but we're on something like a track to real change.

Everyone I know had their life change this year, in a major way. Relationships ended and others begun; jobs applied for; apartments rented; hobbies shifted and renewed and left by the wayside. I heard a lot of revelations come out of my friends' mouths, a lot of decisions that we've all known were a long time in coming; and I've seen a lot of friends who are still struggling with what they should do. My own life is synecdochal: new house, new town, new routine, new friend. I dealt with some awful things, and some great things, and I shed a lot of tears over both.

Major, tough decisions were made this year, and plenty of questions are left for when we all open our throbbing, underslept eyes on the first. It's been a year of sadness, and pain, and (to go back to that Death card) rebirth; it's been a year of shaky first steps and horrifying first falls.

But as much as it hurt or is hurting, I know that these are steps that needed to be taken. Call them birth pangs, if the first steps metaphor doesn't stir your coffee; but I know that the world that is coming to be, both immediately and globally, is going to be a better one.

I plan to focus a great deal more on my writing in the New Year; I've been bad about letting some things flounder and soften. This blog is a place to shine the spotlight on the weird, but it's also a chronicle of a dream; and frankly, I don't think it will have done its job if it those first few commenters don't get to say "I knew him before...". Even if the ending winds up being "he owned that many guns".

So, prepare for more story submissions, and hopefully a few more story publications; prepare for more complaining about the travails of writer's block; prepare for more shouting and more heavy-handed prose. Also prepare, in the grand tradition of Cherie Priest, for progress notes--because you folks deserve/have been punished with a little more insight into my creative process. But don't think this means the link salad will end.

Goodbye, 2008. You've been a bastard of a year. Tonight, I'm going to drown you in Guinness, and make a crown out of a Page-A-Day calendar, and go out on a balcony in Milpitas and tell you you got what you deserved. You slapped me around when I needed it, and for that you deserve a proper wake.

And for all of you who aren't a unit of time, I leave you with two thoughts: first, that my current long project, Eyes of Stone, sits at 49,700 out of 90,000 words. Second, a bit of positivity to end the year--the knowledge that wit and eloquence can get you somewhere in this world: everyone, I give you Sir Terry Pratchett.

Happy New Year, folks. Have a drink for me.

In which I raise my glass

There will be a post tomorrow--I've got a topic all picked out, even some choice pithy phrases. But for the moment I am bloated with spent sugars and tryptophan, and my mind is moving more toward hurt stomachs and staring at a darkened ceiling than any kind of real thought process. So tomorrow, perhaps; but regardless of that, there are thanks.

Thanks to the people who do read this blog--I hope I manage to stumble into some moments of enjoyment, and that your numbers keep on growing. Thanks to Heather MacDougal in particular, for a brief flirtation with Internet legitimacy. Here's hoping you still drop by sometimes.

Thanks to my friends and family and the people who have seen fit to publish me; thanks to the people responsible for Joseph Campbell, and the Cthulhu Mythos, and sparking apple cider; and thanks to all the little things that complete my life that I am not remembering at this moment.

It's been a wild year, in ways I don't really say on this blog, and I'm grateful to have so many wonderful people to help me navigate the twists and turns.

Best of luck to you all; if that feels cheap as far as thanks, don't worry, there's a chance your remuneration is coming at Christmas. For now, it is time for the yearly ritual of DVD viewing--may God have mercy on our souls.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One...

I ramble.

I don't deny it; it's true. I suffer from an automatic mouth with no muffler. I relate ten-minute anecdotes, I derail conversations with sentences that are more like plots. I play with emphasis, with timing, with facial expressions and pauses. I am told that my interlocutor has heard a story only to go ahead and tell it anyway, or at least quote part of it just to satisfy myself. I will ask if people have heard "this one" even if I know they have, in the hopes that they will forget, and my heart flips over when I make reference to one of my old, tried-and-true verbal narratives only to hear the response "Wait, what?"

I acknowledge these as character flaws, or at the very least, occasionally irritating quirks. But I still do it (this is one of the great mysteries of life--our capacity to do incredibly annoying things with both awareness and verve). The question today is: why?

And the answer is simple: practice.

Think seriously about the stories you've heard. The archetype of the boring guy with the endless, pointless, totally unengaging anecdotes is strong, and it's on every street corner and living room couch. People drone on without pause or reflection. People add detail to their anecdotes that isn't needed, or misplace it such that it destroys the timing. People emphasize the wrong parts, pick the wrong audiences, and generally botch stories. For every truly good story every related to me, I can pick out three that have left me wanting to interrupt someone just for their own sake. I can also count at least twice per good story that I've been silenced via loud interjection or bemused stare. I know that the signal to noise on anecdotes is bad--I hang out with gamers, who are especially terrible about this--but yet I still contribute. And it's because I consider it practice.

I am not a skilled storyteller; my ability to grab a room depends a lot on the page. And I don't like that--I like a good story, I like a speaker who can lead me along, who can paint a picture, who can make me laugh so hard my lips curls back and my sides hurt. A lot of what is involved in telling a story out loud is also involved in telling a story on paper, especially when, like me, one writes by the seat of one's pants. I want to work toward that, even if it's unattainable. And so I talk. I talk and I talk and I listen and I listen and then, three times over, I analyze. I watch for where detail was overused, where it was underused, where a transition was clumsy, where the timing was off; I watch for where a person stumbled over a word and lost the thread, I watch for where a person took too long to remember a crucial point; I watch cadence and tone and the way these affect things, and the difference between a person laughing with the room and a person laughing so the room knows it's time to do so. And I, of course, do all these things for myself, and I analyze how I could do them better--and also, for the purposes of dialog, how my failings are natural and what they might say about me.

I ramble; but in some ways that rambling is valuable to my art. So if I'm conversing with you, and I start telling a story you've heard; or if you take it turn to tell a story and I seem distracted at the conclusion, please don't be offended. And if I start in on something you don't want to hear, something you do remember and didn't find funny the first time--just tell me that we're at dinner/church/a party/tennis, and this isn't the time to practice.

The Expected Violation

I had said in a previous manifesto that some few elements of my personal life would be allowed to intrude here; and one of those has reared its head, so allow me to say, briefly but loudly:

Congratulations to Matt Schwartz and Sara Harvey!

The wedding was beautiful. I had a smile stuck to my face the entire time. Even when I couldn't seem to keep my tuxedo from looking stupid.

Again, congratulations to both of them. The world needs more couples this happy.