Okay. Next?

Didn't get much done yesterday and there's way too much to do to mess with this anymore. So this morning I madly wrote vaguely related test paragraphs and lots of notes. Since it turned into one of those adventures where all the little clues finally make sense at the very end, it needs more careful plotting and less ad hoc. Hence the note-writing. Of course, no amount of note-writing and fifth-quarter revisiting can change the fact it's an ad hoc hack through and through but that doesn't matter now. 'Tis the season to stress over a lot of other stuff and I can't wait any longer to get started. Wee hoo hah!

47k

For the first time all month I'm actually ahead of the linear wordcount to 50k. Time to break and leave the coffee shop and cross town and see how the undefeated high school football team is doing in its playoff game up the street from our house. Yippee! Maybe I'll buy me a hamburger. Hot dawg!

For years we kept all the old soft cuddly toys and bassinet in our babies' cradle that their Grampa made, tucked away under a shelf in the garage.

Then Bailee found them and carried them away one by one and put them all over the yard.

Then she discovered she'd made a nice comfy place.

May this Thanksgiving holiday be full of soft cuddly toys you can put in your mouth, and a cozy cradle to curl up in at the end of the day.

A Dog and her Bark

She also takes me on walks to meet her new friend.

F O R D*

This cost me a few thousand words.


* -
Fix Or Repair Daily
Found On Road Dead
Fucked Over Rated Dog

Take your pick.

Victory in Iraq Day 22 Nov

A number of people shook off the infection of pessimism and the sand the media has been pouring on them long enough to notice something:

We won the war in Iraq.

Don't expect the President to mention it. Especially don't expect the President-elect. He was hired on the theory that he was right to oppose the war and to oppose fighting it properly (i.e. masterfully opposing the "surge" while congratulating the troops who effected it). He's not going to change his tune now, especially since it isn't necessary. He gets the incalculable benefits of the U.S. having removed a dictator and placed something like the rule of law and democracy in one of the world's political and economic centers of gravity, while keeping his anti-war reputation, and at a pretty low cost as wars go. I don't begrudge him this. Just sayin'.

Just to check my sanity (which some would argue I checked years ago and never bothered to reclaim) I did a quick Google News search on "Iraq". I saw headlines about:

Iraq to vote on security pact
Iraq warns of consequences of early US pullout
In Baghdad, debating post-US outlook

This and the usual tension of civil (i.e. largely unarmed) debate. Conspicuously absent: Relentless terror attacks, Iranian troops interfering, a never-ending civil war, mass unrest. Indeed, war correspondents are returning to find the place relatively peaceful.

"There's nothing going on. I'm with the 10th Mountain Division, and about half of the guys I'm with haven't fired their weapons on this tour and they've been here eight months. And the place we're at, South Baghdad, used to be one of the worst places in Iraq. And now there's nothing going on. I've been walking my feet off and haven't seen anything." -- Michael Yon

There is one dire warning from many quarters if the US pulls out to soon: Pirates. Yep, that's the worst we have to worry about now: That the Gulf will follow the example of the Horn of Africa. And we know it won't. Except when using them against each other, I'm sure even the Iranians and the Saudis would cooperate against piracy.

I had a reader in times past who continuously called me an idiot for refusing to see that the Bush / Cheney plan was really to drop Iraq into perpetual war so that Western oil companies would always have leverage in the Gulf. I'm glad to say he was wrong all along, and that I suspected it all along. Not that I would necessarily put it past Royal Dutch Shell to be pulling strings with blood-soaked fingers. But sometimes you have to look at the world as the executives do and not the writers of paperback thrillers.

In recent months I've also been glad to see emerging validation of my instinct not to be political fashionable, but to follow my own vision. I've never backed off my support for the Iraq War. I've learned of the lies and the subterfuge and the crimes committed by the Bush Administration, and I have no interest in defending them and I certainly wouldn't push for a pass on prosecution or, in the end, for amnesty. Fuck that. Crime is crime, and as we saw recently with Prop 8, clever use and abuse of the law can do real evil.

But looking at the big picture -- turning away for a moment from Bush's crimes just as we turn away from Lincoln's, from Wilson's, from Roosevelt's -- Saddam's regime was an octopus of caustic influence and direct interference, and something like what we did had to be done. 9/11 provided political capital that Bush had to spend, and overspend, quickly, and overspend it he did. "Squandered the good will," he did, and the world is a better place for it.

Now the once long shot candidate whose campaign was built in part on a strongly opposing view will take the reigns. In the see-saw world of a functional democracy this is no surprise. What's emerging as kind of a surprise is the centrist, indeed hawkish, aspect of his first cut at a cabinet. But only kind of a surprise: I've said all along Obama is damn smart.

Stuff to Post While I Gear Up To Write Some More II

An amplified voice and roaring cheers hit the glass. I open the window to let them in. The football game everyone but me has gone to is underway. Cheers and whistles, game calls, the band brass drifting over trees and houses. Somewhere a dog barks, and in between a motorcycle goes buzzing by. I love the sounds of America.

We built our house in an open lot in the middle of the block, far from the roads but just an almond orchard away from the high school. The location has served us very well. We can walk up to the school for meetings and events (the children always drive). Parents like letting their kids stay here, because we're so near the school. Post-game fireworks can be watched from our driveway.

The football team went 10-0 and is now in Sac-Joaquin Section Division III playoffs against a team from way down in Vallejo, over an hour's drive. No idea how it's going. Tempted to take my Burning Man bike and turn all the colorful lights on and ride up to see. All the cool kids are up there.

That's a difference from my hometown. Not that I knew the cool kids, or even who they were, but I never heard about them going to the football games. I only did when we had a pep band. That was fun. We were good, too. At an away game once we were so dismissive of the opposing band the eight of us marched around to their side of the field and played the Mickey Mouse theme song. Got in trouble for that.

* * *

My kid Skzx started a club at school. It's all about camping. Tomorrow early they're going to Dillon Beach for a couple nights. Parents too. The 19 year old, Sk8r, and I will have the house to ourselves. Might not see each other much, or at all.

I've got four days' writing to catch up on. That means six to do -- ten thousand words -- by Sunday. I'm not a fast writer. I don't want to spend the whole damn weekend at it. But a goal is a goal and frankly, my kids will take me for a weenie if I don't make it.

* * *

Another writing place. My other grandfather's old desk. Backed up to the headboard (bed's not against any walls). Can see the TV from there, and open a curtain to the outside, and have tea and ice cream, and stack books. Doesn't work out as well as the typewriter table upstairs.


Progress chart, kind of showing my behindness.

Stuff to Post While I Gear Up To Write Some More

High keening and whining sounds from outside. I open the window. It's from down in the creek bed, along with yip yip yips and a rough dysphonius barking. The gang is passing through. I wonder what ever became of our beautiful cat Jet, Lucky's mother, who walked away one year. Used to see her hiding in the weeds now and then.

* * *

I was sitting comfortably in the men's room today when someone dashed into the next stall and made unhappy sounds while dumping about three buckets' worth of leftovers into the toilet. And then did it again. Didn't bother me at all. I am so glad I raised children.

* * *

One of my writing locations.

The table is my fave. It was my grandfather's typewriter table. He kept it out in his office when he was foreman on a farm during the Depression. Before the crash he was a newspaperman -- maybe that's where he got it, I don't know.


Zooming in on the nifty sticker a NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison gave me ...

Presidential Prototype?

Sir Joseph Porter and his Old Man


I grew so rich that I was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament.
I always voted at my party's call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
      I thought so little, they rewarded me
      By making me the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

Business As Usual

It's pretty clear by now I was never caught up in the Obama thrill. I never really saw what was new about him other than being the child of a man born in another country (a plus, if anything). All the fine talk rang hollow, and I'm suspicious of popularity anyway. That's all by the way: I'm perfectly fine with him being President -- he's an amazing person and so long as he doesn't end up under the thumb of those legendary Washington interests, he'll make his mark.

So long as he doesn't. If he's serious about appointing Hillary as SecState, I think we can all agree that dream is officially over: The consummate power player, and wife of an ex-President whose fingers are in every lucrative pie in the world, being named Secretary of State. It was a fun little revolution, wasn't it? I hope you enjoyed it.

It's a little early but I'm thinking Daniels/Rice 2012. I don't like Jindal -- he's a creationist nutjob -- or ANY of those clowns who ran against McCain. I admire Dr. Rice completely, and Daniels, recently re-elected governor of Indiana, has a get-it-done tight-budget reputation. That's all I know. It's enough for now.

Musing

Took the dog for a walk today
Took my wife to the matinee
Took my mom to the high school play
And now we host the cast par-tay

* * *

Idly surfing for evidence of people making their escape. Crawled along an intertube and found pictures of the one SCA event I ever went to.

I'll not forget it. I was desperate to be a part of medievalist activities. I had been to the Renaissance Faire. I was a geek and a reader of Sword & Sorcery and terribly lonely. But I had a nicely compliant girlfriend and she wore a peasant dress and I rented some tights and we took the bus from North Berkeley up into Kensington for a Twelfth Night Revel.

January 4, 1975 -- There are pictures of the event, pretty much as I remember it. I'm not in any pictures. We floated on the periphery, shy and uninvolved, and then fled once my inability to merge became terminal.

* * *

Laughter fills the hall. The play closed tonight, and all the kids are here, gorged on our food, sprawled in our furniture, intertwined like so many puppies, good kids, girls and boys full of life and energy and love and promise. Right now, at this moment, I hear cheering. Whatever reason.

Out there somewhere, there are kids who are desperate and lonely and cannot merge. But mine are not among them, and for that my gratitude has no limit.

(And those lonely kids have my sympathy, and hopeful thoughts. I can't do anything for them, but I will always know they're out there.)

21825

Not knowing how I managed to write over 2.5k today. Worked until 6:30, went to a coffee shop meetup close by, gurgled my empty tummy with a frapp, typed in concert with other typers. Heard via cell phone our high school was whomping butt in their last game (closed the reg. football season 10-0). Went home, wrote some more, hot tub, wrote again. Stopped when I surpassed yesterday's goal (50k*13/30=21666), not a bad start to the weekend. 'Cept it's to be a busy weekend, may not get aheader. Whatev. The story grows tendrils within itself, gels, will become a living thing if not let starve too soon or too long.

Crossroads

Taking a break from writing, cruising Burning Man pics at Flickr. Found a piece of home.

The blue thing is the Exploratorium, a mobile dance floor complete with stripper pole and quadruple propane-powered flame jets. I cannot describe how fun it is to cruise around that dusty adult theme park in that thing in the middle of the night. (Under the floor are the functional remains of a Japanese pickup truck.)

It sits at the corner of 7:30 and Bonneville. The prairie schooner is across the intersection. Somewhere under all that wood it's motivated by a large pickup.

The girl is carrying ice and her outfit reminds me why I want to go back.

Casino Royale

I don’t have to tell you what sort of icon James Bond has become. International adventure, sex, bad humor, fast cars, gadgetry -- ever since Ursula Andress came dripping out of the surf in the first major film and the bad guy got the point. The movies were always entertaining, but got steadily more ridiculous from there.

I’ve always been fascinated with the real Bond, the original, as told in the novels and short stories written by Ian Fleming. After watching the most recent movie on DVD, Casino Royale, I was curious to see how closely it followed the book. I read it years ago. Times have changed, I’ve changed – it was time to read it again.

It is Fleming’s first novel, written in 1952 when he had no idea if the effort would pay off. Often I’m much more interested in an author’s early work, produced before his imagination is spoiled by success. My copy is a Signet paperback, fifty cents new, printed in 1964 after Fleming’s death but before his last novel, which “will be published in the spring of 1965.” I got it used about thirty years ago, at Holmes Books down in Oakland, a wonderful old store piled with old books moldering away in the grimy windows’ dim daylight.

The best thing about reading old Bond books, beyond the writing itself, is the necessity to disconnect this James Bond from the caricature that has developed since the 1960s. The real James Bond was a World War II vet, a naval commander with some experience in behind-the-lines espionage, not too far removed from Fleming himself. Going only from this book, I’d say he was born somewhat before 1920 – this because he bought his first car in 1933, a slightly-used supercharged Bentley (analogous perhaps to a modern Bond starting out with, say, a 1985 Rover Vitesse), and he must have been at the least a precocious teenager by then. Thus for the book he’s in his early to mid thirties and has had the unfortunate experience of having had to kill a couple of men late in the war – thus the double-oh distinction. He was not chosen for the assignment because of his mad secret agent skilz and ability to slaughter a dozen bad guys while seducing countesses and straightening his tie. He was chosen because he was known to be a good and serious gambler, especially at cards, and a gambler was what the assignment called for.

I love the simplicity and the absurdity of this story. Le Chiffre was a stateless man, one of many thousands wandering about Europe in those days, whose country of origin either no longer existed or was simply deemed irrelevant by those who took post-war chaos as an opportunity to reinvent themselves. His earliest known address was Dachau, June, 1945. His role was as paymaster to a communist organization in control of various French labor unions. He invested Soviet money into a chain of brothels and lost his ass when the French upgraded their blue laws. In a bid to recoup his employers’ losses and save his own neck, he sets up a high-stakes game of baccarat at Casino Royale on the French coast. It’s Bond’s job to beat him.

This Bond has no gadgets; there is no Q Branch presided over by a doddering über-engineer. He has only his small Beretta .25 under his arm. Vesper Lynd does not start out as some winking Bond Girl but is a bureaucratic fellow employee who grows on him naturally. In other words, they don't immediately like each other, but after a bit of personal sparring he admits to himself he wants to get her into bed -- as any self-respecting reader in the golden age of men’s adventure magazines would expect. In time he actually falls in love with her and decides to quit the service and marry her.

This plan falls through.

Meanwhile, Le Chiffre and his two henchmen, their rickety old Peugeot, the ill-kept rental house where Bond is tortured (just as in the recent movie), are all decidedly and unpretentiously low-tech. The only honest gadget in the entire book, apart from a botched bomb plot early on, is a cane gun such as you used to be able to buy in any novelty firearms shop. There isn’t even any cheating at cards -- Orson Wells and his x-ray specs are not to be found.

Like old movies, old books are time machines. I love my Bond trips into the 1950s. I’d love to see a period movie based strictly on one of the original novels. It would be so very back to basics. For all its half century of updating, the recent film follows the book reasonably well, and this is a major reason why it is one of the best of the James Bond movies.

* * *
I was at work trying to organize my crap when I found this little essay, written several months ago. I had an intent to say more about the Bond character and illustrate it with some juicy quotes. But in retrospect that would be superfluous, so here and done. Now to go organize more of my crap.

15004

An all-day slog. Some of it was enjoyable creativity, some of it just work. Sometimes you get to paint the model, sometimes you have to work on the background. Twice this weekend I went to meet other afflicted souls at local coffee shops, group meetings arranged through the website forum. Shared tables, drank mocha (my fave cause I've no pretension to maturity), made humorous cracks as appropriate. They were nice folks and to be in the company of people typing madly away was helpful for my focus and attention issues. All right, my shitty discipline, if you don't like me trying to sound all clinical about it.

How goes it? The plot thickens. It's terrible because I've neither read about nor experienced the situation I'm creating, but so what. A more realistic cast can be cast in when folded and refried later. Meanwhile I am exactly on schedule, which means I'll be way behind by the weekend. Par for the course.

So Then What

I haven't had a lot of time but that isn't really my excuse for falling behind. I was wondering why I am so unable to go forward and then suddenly I realized: My story idea, the thing I'm trying to write, bores me. To death. I'm just not interested. So I guess the trick is to make a change so that I get interested. Nothing comes to mind. (Reading bores me too. Everything does. I know the problem but this blog is not the place for explicating the truth.)

NaNoMoment 7279

At 7,279 I was about at about 40% through yesterday's pace when I fled for bed. Tonight is opening night for each of my sons, in different theaters in different towns. So we are going to one tonight and the other tomorrow. I expect to be significantly behind the pace by the time Saturday affords me the chance to catch up. Such is this crazy thing.

Plotwise I have the big picture but must fill it in with lots of little pictures. I am so out of practice and mentally distracted by work that I have a hard time picturing it. That makes it a struggle. My thought processes are visual. I'm not good at remembering intangibles or processes or flows of relationship from my life such that I can inform fiction. All I really have to work with is pictures. Probably my outlet should be music and video rather than writing, I don't know. Not an acceptable excuse this month.

Was all excited when a good subplot occurred to me with which I could move things forward. Shortly I realized this highlighted the fact I never studied literature, else I wouldn't have felt like I thought of it myself. Also I would have thought of it sooner and more often.

No time to read. I feel as though I should have read a LOT more books in my life. I don't even have a favorite author. The few I've read enough to form an opinion of all have some major flaw or other, and I don't remember the rest.

When you write, can you get lost in it, and then translate that alternate reality through your fingers, across the screen and into storage? When I was a child, writing gave me the opportunity to get lost in fantasy. For awhile I felt if I tried hard enough, my fantasy world would become more real than the world I wanted to escape. So I wrote and wrote and wrote. It didn't work: reality remained real. Eventually I had to make concessions to reality -- dropped in and out of college, had jobs, started getting acquainted with other human beings -- and over time lost that ability to get lost in the fantasy.

But good writers probably don't get lost in it either. It's a matter of marshaling mental resources and discipline and productivity -- like a job. But a job flexible and free, at least, for the luckier ones.

So this struggle with writing productively without being able to get lost in it is part of the growth needed to become a writer. I get that. I get that the inability to escape is inescapable.

But does that have to make it so hard? :-)

Obamanic Relations

According to genealogical research summarized here, our President-elect is distantly related to the following people. It all goes to show if we all had professional genealogists tracing connections, we’d realize we are all FAMILY.

LBJ	Mariel Hemingway	Charles Addams
John Steinbeck	Christopher Reeve	Brad Pitt
Howard Dean	Sarah Palin	Jimmy Carter
Katharine Hepburn	Ken Kesey	Harry Truman
Dick Cheney	Robert Duvall	Senator Byrd
J.P. Morgan	John Hinckley	George W. Bush
Gordon Hinckley	General Longstreet	Woodrow Wilson
Birch Bayh	JonBenet Ramsey	Georgia O’Keeffe
Gerry Ford	Justin Timberlake	John Glenn
Lon Chaney	Winston Churchill	James Madison
Robert E. Lee

And all this just from his mother's side.

I only put names of people I’ve heard of, and I put them as I know them.

Yeah, I know, finding all these links was a terrible waste of precious NaNo time. Sue me.

Emotional Mixtures

Honestly. Though I voted McCain, and regard Obama as a politician first, a leader second, and a man of conscience somewhere out beyond third, he's brilliant, he's young, he's historic, and by the time I was home watching returns I was hoping he'd win.

“Marvin ... What do we do now?” -- Bill McKay

Enjoy the honeymoon -- interesting times ahead, as always, especially when he returns to the values he strayed from to win this thing. Congratulations President Obama!

Spirits

Election Eve

Tonight is the crest
From now through tomorrow the roller coaster will be in freefall
Our breath will be taken as gravity recedes
And finally late in the night when the results are called
We’ll come to rest


In the new dawn’s early light, expect nothing. Whatever the results, they don’t change what you can do. Rely on yourself and on the community you build. As a favorite philosopher sings:

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution

I'm Missing All The Fun

This is like three miles from my house. Mild in-country suburbanites are rioting over same-sex marriage. Agh. I guess the good news is, since it takes two to tangle, this means plenty of people even out here are against Prop 8. But the pro peeps are highly motivated too: they think they are rescuing civilization from itself. However the vote goes, this will not be the end of it.

PuDaNaNoDiMo II

Finally. And I’m going to do this EVER DAY for a MONTH? Ack.

I’ll need to get more sleep. We partied with our Burn buds last night and got home about five PDT. Kind of appreciated the extra hour when I woke up in PST. Now it’s all a blur of rain and multicolored flame and cookies and beer and whisky and gin and loud music and inappropriate costumes and walking on stilts and hot chicks french-kissing and fireside guitar-playing and naked people in a hot tub. Not just another night on the left coast, though it sounds like it, huh. [3,362]

PuDaNaNoDiMo

It's explained elsewhere. I won't be doing the Da part.

So, like, I've written zero today. Actually whining about it to the whole wide web rather than just to everyone within hearing is intended to force my motor to start. I had no ideas but I did do something interesting this year and decided what the hell, I'll just write about that but change the names. So now I'm embarking on a sort of Lethal Attraction at Burning Man kind of idea. It shouldn't be impossible, either in the twelfth draft or in the hands of a competent writer, to give Black Rock City a sinister cast. It is, after all, dark and full of hiding places and absolutely built out of anonymity. But the story can't get dark for a long time. Right now I'm just sort of remembering it in fictional form, and already I've noticed how cleverly my conversations reveal the tensions between the middle-aged protagonist and his wife. I'm inventive like that. :P

Thing that stops me is, fictionalizing memory is fine, but what pulls the reader? What's the point of Scene II, if I've already established who's who in Scene I? What's going to happen, what little snippet of information, that will be enormously important later, is going to be revealed while banging the virgin gong at the gate? And now

*slap* *slap*

Wake up, you fool! It's National Novel Writing Month! You don't try to write well! You don't waste any time having it make sense! Just write the fucking thing!

But

*slap*

1717

I find it a total struggle: Writing is so often like pulling teeth. Even here on Day Number One, when a million people are streaming words by the thousand, far from their mid-month wall, I find myself stuck. Stopped. I wonder if it's the calcification of my imagination, which is neither so flexible nor so fearless as it used to be; or maybe I'm just distracted by aspects of life that can't yet be dealt with. Whatever: It's nothing a million other people don't deal with, even if we add the inevitable doubts, doubts inspired by the fact that the back of my mind continues to arrange Beatles songs for a capella quartet, that I'm annoyed at how ramshackle I've let the chicken coop become, that now could be a really good time to catch up on work. And not even those doubts about what I really should spend my time doing, what was I really put on this Earth to do, set me apart from any other writer. No indeed. Work ethic, focus, discipline, fundamental ability -- these may set me apart, but I know the doubts do not.

One Point Two Five Percent

I thought about going to a kickoff party and thought about not going, and going, and not going, and didn't go because my Miz started watching a scary movie on FX and I couldn't leave her like that in a big empty house and anyway I wanted to see how it turned out. I didn't know anyone at the party I didn't go to. Someone threw his house open to the internet in honor of NaNoWriMo and I thought, why not, maybe it would be inspiring. Or an off the cuff social exercise. Something. But moot, now.

At midnight my son and I were browsing university web sites but then he went to bed and I looked at my laptop and it looked at me and we agreed I hadn't given any serious thought at all to this thing. But that doesn't really matter. In most novels you just follow someone around doing their life and things happen and because it's a novel they are novel things and off you go. So I just did a little of that and can now go to bed where I freaking belong. [625]

p.s. - The blue widget is supposed to have my NaNo username where it says "Participant" and my wordcount where it says "0". Web technology bah.