Credit Cards Roasting on an Open Fire

Look, I don't follow the news much anymore. It doesn't help my immediate life much if I do. I got enough going on, trying to position myself at this nutty corporation so I am always perceived as having value, balancing productivity against my innate laziness, coming up with actionable ideas re novel writing, learning to write creativelike (though I'll never touch Raymond Chandler's pure pulp poetry), doing a thing or two around the house so the entire family edifice doesn't come a-crashing down, and being under the constant surveillance of my inner demons, I got enough of all that and more for the news to matter much to me. I especially get cheesed off when I overhear people talking about news that isn't worth a moment's notice anyway, national-scale gossip about some damn TV star or sports anti-hero.

But! What the flip are we doing to our country? I heard driving in that there is a big credit crunch hammering the economy, and that Citigroup Inc., one of the big banking thingies, has been bailed out by a huge investment from Abu Dhabi. Or the way I look at it, our profligate buying on credit has us teetering like a poorly loaded cargo ship and only a big heavy line from the Arabs is keeping us from rolling over and sinking. The Chinese have bought much of us up. The Arabs are continuing to do more and more of the same. The only thing that keeps me from sweating in panic is that the Chinese and the Arabs are not natural allies. I mean, it's not like one of them has a resource the other one wants, giving them both incentive to cooperate. Surely there's no reason to imagine a consortium of next-generation world leaders slavering over the big fat pig that is increasingly on the block and sharpening their knives for a feast. No, no worries about that.

Who's to blame? All of us, I guess. All of us who maintain deep lines of credit, who don't pay off our houses so we can instead buy SUVs, who keep our economy buzzing by enriching the middle men who sell us plastic electronic gizmos manufactured on another continent and that really don't do a lot to enrich our lives in return. What does that shiny new iPhone really do for you? Just more shit to learn how to do, and you know it will break before you adapt to it enough so that it becomes a true enhancement. And if you didn't have a credit card you would never have been able to buy the damn thing in the first place. Would that really be a loss?

All right, so worrying about yet another foreign investment may sound like so much paranoid nativism. Don't we want a truly open global economy and isn't this another step towards reaching it? Maybe, perhaps, I don't know. It just doesn't feel right. And as I not only witness but personally participate in the continuing shift of some of the most productive elements of our economy -- manufacturing -- to factories and business parks in distant countries, and compare the focus and willingness to work over there with the attitude of millions of Americans who collect welfare and live in houses built by underpaid illegal immigrants, I can't help but expect we are setting ourselves up for a fall of historic proportions. Was it Nixon who shifted the dollar from being based on gold to being based on oil? Was it really to prevent Saddam selling oil in euros that we went to war? I doubt that, and I don't know why I should care that oil is sold for a basket of currencies and not just dollars. I don't know anything, in other words. But I don't think my concern is based solely in ignorance.

So here we are starting that special season when we show our love by buying people stuff and waiting until we get our meager income tax returns months later to pay for it. The connection between that and the finer points of the Christian mythology completely escape me. I like Christmas, parts of it. But the decorations and the canned music and the sales and above all the concern of commentators over the importance of "consumer confidence", which is nothing more than an exhortation to treat consumerism as some kind of social or moral or at least patriotic duty, they all make me want to just visit with family, play games, eat a lot and be careful not to buy a damn thing.

I don't know if this post was going somewhere, but this is it. Time to, uh, work now.

Happy Thanksgiving and all that

A beautiful day outside, bright and cool, leaves aflame. Very quiet. No one coming but my mom, who has to drive up from the Bay Area and is probably stuck in traffic right now. Wasn't supposed to be this quiet.

Mother in law lives in Idaho, was going to come down and bring her ten-year-old grandson. We were going to take him to the train museum and stuff, really looking forward to it. But when she found that out, and that we needed to go through some stuff she left in our closet, she freaked. Couldn't handle being faced with reminders of her husband, who died over five years ago. Yelled and screamed. Hung up and canceled the plane tickets. So my sons' only first cousin doesn't get to come visit after all.

The kid's dad can't stand her either, so she'll spend the day by herself. Kid'll go off with his mom's family and have a good day. Down here, just my mom, not that other one, so lots of peace and quiet. Looking forward to it.

Meanwhile I tie myself to the desktop, trying to finish the video, and write while the video editing software and the old computer crank slowly, slo-o-owly away. I'm nine days behind in NaNo, but that doesn't mean I quit. There's a still a story to write, a story I need to learn how to write, what viewpoints to use for what part of the story, what revelations of fact and motive, etc. So. A good day for all that.

A good day to all!

The Book Stops Here

Not quite yet. But Friday I was three days behind with no chance to work on it, and with Thanksgiving looming I knew I needed to work double-time over the weekend so I could get back on track. Two to three thousand words per day was about what I needed to do. Two to three thousand words each day exploring an off-the-cuff mystery story that, against all odds, was starting to gel. Not necessarily on paper, but in my mind. Characters evolved, story elements and twists emerged, alternate beginnings were envisioned, solutions came to mind for certain problems with plotting that were caused by the need to be realistic, etc. etc. The value of the exercise is included in these discoveries. All I had to do was sit my ass down and write more and write it faster.

So I went backpacking on Angel Island.

Now I'm six days behind with way too much to do in real life to worry about catching up. Not done writing, though. Too much cool stuff thought of to just let it lie, arbitrary internet deadlines or no. The hard part will be continuing it in January.

Angel Island is a national treasure. If it hadn't been turned into a military reservation during the Civil War (when Confederate ships coming in and bottling up the flow of gold were a real worry), and then kept by the Army for various reasons until recent times, it would not now be a wildlife preserve but instead some sort of enclave for the wealthy. Not that there's anything wrong with that but I like it as it is. The views of San Francisco, of the ocean seen through the Golden Gate and its Bridge, of mountainous Marin County, of Richmond, Berkeley and Oakland, of the Bay Bridge, of Alcatraz, they are all unparalleled. You can even see the neighborhood I grew up in if you have some good binoculars (which I didn't).

Hiking, Bay Area style (no, not us!)



A view from the top (Mt. Tam etc.)



Easy camping, long-closed Fort MacDowell and the Bay down beyond



Ghost buildings, a century old





The old Nike base (and yes, I have been down through that hatch, but that is rather another story ... )



A nice view from the ferry, the top of a Golden Gate Bridge tower just visible in the fog



Me and the real reason I do this stuff (or almost anything, really)

Comforting Snippet

If you are arrested in China, the U.S. Embassy is a friend indeed.

In cases of lengthy incarceration, we visit American prisoners at least every 30 to 60 days to ensure that American citizens receive treatment no worse than that accorded citizens of the PRC. -- U.S. Consulate Website

Well! No worries, then.

Trending Down

Not to bitch or anything, but there's a lot to do and probably I won't get back into a reasonably productive groove until next week sometime. Now, I've managed to squeak along. And now that I've hinted at doing worse I'll probably actually do better. Still, if you extrapolate from this, I'm going to have a lot of catching up to do the week I find out who gets laid off and who doesn't. [18,856]

I love the smell of jet fuel in the morning

Smells like … a long day. It’s dark and cold at five thirty in the morning, the stars softened by mist and the air redolent of the fuel trickling through an idling set of jet turbines. It still amazes me that it costs the company less to lease an Embraer 135 and run it back and forth than to pay for as many commercial air tickets and rented cars as the people here in this little private terminal would otherwise need to use. Probably there are additional considerations, large ones, strategic matters I can’t grasp, but whatever. I love this stuff. Meanwhile, the WIP whips along painfully, this scene and that aborted for lack of any real fire. That may be a typical symptom of the second week, so I’ll just keep trying. Somehow, I’m still only about a day behind, and that’s pretty good. [16,870]

Even Betel Nut Girls Get The Blues

They sit or stand in glass booths by the roadway. Colorful flashing lights and neon attract attention. Miniskirts and skimpy tops attract more. They run out in their high heels and sell betel nuts to truck drivers, and to anyone else who needs a mild stimulant and badly stained teeth. In between customers, they sit exposed at a high table preparing more batches of betel nuts. They don’t have time while doing this to write their NaNo novels.

Me neither. Stepping through meeting agendas, negotiating technical details and resource usage while outnumbered two or three to one (the Chinese don’t under-staff projects like we do), touring factories, going out with our hosts to huge dinners, doing the company email thing afterwards, getting to bed late and lying on a mattress so hard it cut off the circulation in my arms if I lay on my side …

Then yesterday we rode the Taiwan HSR from Taichung to Taoyuan and caught our plane where I sat in the second to last row, my keyboard on my stomach, my wrists bent double, my elbows jammed past my ribcage to the back of the seat, and my aching head and neck in contortions so I could see the screen. Wrote some; not a lot. Couldn't keep my eyes open in that dry air anyway. Last leg from San Fran to Sac was cancelled so I rented a car and grabbed this cloud’s silver lining to visit family strung out like gems along the highways home.

Counting today’s quota I’m only about 2 ½ days behind, and that ain’t bad. The value of the exercise is undeniable. Just gotta make time. Plan is to do so after the concert tonight and git it on this weekend in between other things. [12,194]

Red Lights Reflecting

I imagine I looked very businesslike, sitting in the back seat of a large black car hurtling down a Taiwanese freeway in the dead of night, the glow of my laptop reflected in my glasses. But really, all I was doing was NaNoWriMo. I did do some real work on the plane. But my heart wasn’t in it. Can you imagine that?

I will focus much better on site anyway.

But it was fun, in my little kid heart, to cruise through a foreign city at night, red lights reflecting on streets wet from a recent rain, bright colorful signs in Chinese characters all around. Fourteen hours in flight or no, I still get off on the movie-ish-ness of it all.

I am right here exactly. Seriously. I tried to put the arrow right on my room. I am that kind of, erm, person.

So 10pm here means 6am back home. Last trip I was nine hours to the right. Now I'm eight hours to the left. That means to know the time here, take Pacific time and subtract eight hours, then add a day. Fascinating, yes. Could they ever pay me enough for all this knowledge? [10,789]

6439

Despite appearances (29% above yesterday's minimum goal), I am not ahead in this game. About four hours after my NaNoWhine I found out I needed to go to Taiwan. So instead of writing, I'm blogging at SMF, awaiting my connection to SFO, and dropping a note to the world in case my last trip is any indication of things and I wind up without internet for the next few days. The plan is to write like mad on the long flight and get way ahead. The reality will probably be a cramped seat, the person in front laying all the way back, and me trying to type on my tummy and wearing the special glasses that let me see a screen only a foot away and that give me a headache. But I know there'll be little to no chance for this stuff until Thursday, so that plan has to be the plan as it is the only plan. Since I signed up for this flight so late, chances are I will get one of those seats in the very center of the plane with two people between me and the aisle on either side. I'll make sure I don't have to go to the bathroom until everyone is fast asleep.

Ye WIP rolls along, Scene I still under way. I'm pretty sure how it will end, but not where I'll pick up afterwards. I didn't really settle on which half-baked story idea I would try and work on until sometime Thursday -- until I actually sat down on the front porch swing just past sunset with forty five minutes to kill before we went off to the high school water polo banquet -- and so it remains half-baked or less in its future portions, though the present piece is fairly crusty round the edges, and the cheese is all melted, so I'm not too worried.

4394

The story rolls down through a gravity field of its own making, no turns needed yet, just roll roll roll, baby. A time will come when the current main character has to drop out and let other voices pop in, but that won't be for awhile yet, so no worries, the hardest part is to reach deeper into my skull and pull out more pumpkin guts and spray them with my typing fingers out onto the screen when I'd really really really rather do, let's face it, almost anything else. But I don't want to be a weenie. I don't mind being a weenie, don't get me wrong, it's being thought of as a weenie that I want to avoid, especially since they'd be right. They being the weenie-callers. Thought I'd clarify that.

See? That is how it's done. Don't stop, just write, stream it out, and don't worry about the next turn in the plot until your main character has suddenly had the realization flood all over him like the effluent of a busted sewer pipe that he is in a jail in China of all places with the circumstantial evidence rather strong that he got drunk and killed a local, and though the police really prefer to leave foreigners alone when it comes to their indiscretions, murder isn't quite the wink-wink it used to be, and with this realization that he is well and truly fucked comes another realization, i.e. that the author don't know shit about Shanghai police procedures and had best distract the audience with somebody else's troubles, as they can be knit to the first somebody's troubles later. No one has to know that most of the verisimilitude was gleaned from a handful of conversations with a local or two and does not reflect much in the way of real knowledge. Backup and facts n shit are for the rewrite.