I’m leaving it all up to you

7 08 2011

It was so obvious I forgot to mention it: the Big Fear.

About The Unexpected Neighbor, I mean, the main reason I hesitated to tell people  I knew that the book was now available at Smashwords.

And no, not whether or not they liked it. But whether they’d think less of me for this story. I mean, they could like it, but think it a trifle, and thus consider me. . . trifling.

Y’know how I mentioned a couple of posts ago that, however foolish the attempt, I nonetheless try to control what people think about me? Wasn’t kidding. Not one bit.

So here I tell people—you, my friends in New York, a friend in Wisconsin, my mom—that I wrote this book. Because I want you to know that I wrote this book. And I might even want you to read it.

Maybe.

But if nobody I know reads it, I don’t know if I’ll be more disappointed or relieved. I want you to like the story, and I think the story is likable, but I’d like you to like it quite apart from me—as in, AbsurdBeats is here and the book is there and never the twain shall meet.

Silly, I know, and embarrassingly neurotic. (Okay, so the control thing may have something to do with neurosis, as well, but it sounds so much. . . flintier to state I want to control than to say I want people to think well of me. Control, yeah, I’ll go with that.)

Anyway.

I want to get better at this, the novel-writing, and while I think The Unexpected Neighbor is a decent first book, I don’t know that I’d have published it if I thought it were my only book. I wouldn’t want this to be too big a piece of me.

It’s not me. It’s not biography, and no one in the story is me. But it came out of me and there are bits of me (and friends of mine) scattered throughout these characters. It’s not all or nothing; the twain has met.

It’s mine, but not me.

I know that. I have to trust that if anyone I know reads this, they’ll know that, too.

How they know that, well—deep breath—that’s not up to me. That’s up to them.

Or I could just hope that only strangers read it.

_____

(This is the real hat-tip to Susan Wise Bauer, but her site’s not loading; I’ll add a link when I can here’s the link.)


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Categories : Musing

Unexpected smashing

27 07 2011

So I learned a couple of things:

1. Smashwords doesn’t like smart quotes. It was easy enough to fix—deactivate smart quotes conversion, copy each version of smart quote, then find-and-replace on the version.

2. It also doesn’t like converted m-dashes. Which is truly unfortunate, given how much I like m-dashes. The fix for this was considerably pickier: because the symbol for the m-dash is “C”, I couldn’t run a find-and-replace without turning every “c” into “- – -“.

3. And it’s not a fan of the converted [small] 1/2 fraction. Not a huge problem—this was a novel, not a math test—but still.

4. If you follow the directions in the free guide, you’ll make it through the AutoVetter. Again, it didn’t catch the problems, above, but I hate to think of the problems I’d have had had I not gone by the book.

Learning curve, I guess.

Oh, and now that it’s fixed, I can recommend that you check it out on Smashwords (it’ll be a week or so before it’s available at Amazon or B&N): The Unexpected Neighbor.


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Categories : Writing

The Unexpected Neighbor

27 07 2011

So I finally did it.

I finally dragged my first novel into Smashwords, where it is being uploaded as we speak.

Not the exact cover, but darned close!

Converting it into their style was a pain in the ass, especially since I had to work in the hated Word rather than my preferred WordPerfect, but their free style guide was easy to follow.

It’s still waiting to be approved and vetted and ISBN’d and all that, but, hell, at least it’s a start.

Now, I just have to convert the second novel, and get off my ass on the third one. Oh, and try to find work. And a life.

Whatever.

*Update* Oh, hey, there it is, temporarily on the home page of Smashwords! I guess the wait is for inclusion in the premium catalog (Amazon, B&N, etc.), but if you wanna, you can read it right now!

*UpdateUpdate* Here’s the link to The Unexpected Neighbor‘s Smashwords page; I’ll put up links once it gets into other catalogs.

*UpdateUpdateUpdate* But wait a moment. Something’s weird with the formatting—doesn’t like the single quote mark. Waiting to hear how to fix it.


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Categories : Writing

Stop me, oh ho ho stop me

17 07 2011

I am fucked. Fuckity fucked fucked fucked.

And if it’s not completely my fault, well, it’s damn sure that had I been less of an idiot, I might not be quite so fucked as I am now.

*Sigh*

Same old shit: how many times on this blog have I moaned about all that I don’t do? And what have I done as a result?

Yeah, you got it: bupkis.

I used to keep a journal, but it’s been years since I’ve bothered with one. The blog is no substitute for a journal, but certainly there were some topics which could overlap with a journal.

Methinks I need to go back to journal writing, mainly because I can repeat myself and repeat myself and repeat myself and not worry about it because nobody else is going to read it. It works as a kind of practice: go over and over and over and over and over something until that something moves, until I figure out how to move.

I’ve said previously that there was some stuff I needed to work through, but just thinking about it hasn’t been enough. I need to write this shit out.

You, however, don’t need to read it all. I might get all meta on you and report on this process, but, for your sake and mine, I’ll stop me since you’ve heard this all before.


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Categories : Musing

Tomorrow you just don’t know

3 07 2011

Betwixt and between, once again.

My second summer session course was cancelled, which is officially Very Bad News: I need the money. But I’m also unofficially fine with this (even though I need the money).

I don’t understand my moods. Okay, yes, I get the anxiety about money and the omnipresent dread of my own existence blah blah, but calmness amidst this apparent calamity? Dunna understand, at all.

Perhaps the calm is due to some clearing out of things in my apartment, trying to create more space in my space, and the general satisfaction of wanting to change something and actually being able to do so.

Perhaps it’s knowing that I can earn some of that necessary money through Mechanical Turk. No, it’s not a career and nothing I’d want to do long-term, but it’s an alternative to sitting on my ass waiting for someone to call for an interview.

Perhaps it’s that I had a few things on my mind which have been sorted, at least for the time being. Instead of that head-space being invaded by the always-voracious anxiety, in this instance it’s simply allowed me to breathe.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve started writing—really writing—again. I think that bike ride with C. I mentioned a few posts ago really did signal a shift, which is a hell of a pleasant surprise.

Or perhaps I’m simply in massive denial, and once this delusion fades I’ll be filled with all my usual vexations and perplexations. Could be; probably.

But in the meantime I’m going to go with this.


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Why don’t you kill me?

19 06 2011

I am so tired of being a loser.

C. and I were at the end of our leisurely Red Hook/Gowanus ride and finishing our equally leisurely conversation in—yes—a leisurely manner. We had been discussing her novel* and her job and taking classes and the trail detoured into my life.

Which is when I burst out the above statement, along with complaints about being an underachieving dilettante and not extending myself or diving into anything which would  pull something out of me or committing myself, really, to anything.

And it’s so goddamned irritating, I ranted, that I make the same diagnosis over and over and over and still, here I am, grumpy and underachieving and uncommitted.

No, I’m not going to continue the rant, here; besides, you’ve heard it all before: I was stuck for twenty years between suicide and living and now I’m stuck in the not-knowing of living blah blah.

C. suggested that I just get out there and try different things, volunteer, anything to get myself moving and maybe, just maybe, involved. Sound advice, certainly, and nothing I haven’t told myself in previous go-arounds.

But it did occur to me, after we finally split, that I’ve got a real issue with trying to hoard time, so much so it interferes with the just-get-out-there approach: I don’t want to commit because what if I can’t follow through? I don’t want to be inconstant, so better not to be anything at all. What if I run out of time?

Nonsense, I know, at least in prosaic terms. I live in time and can no more grab hold of it than a fish can water. I can control my movements in time, but time itself? Nuh-uh.

Whether I can do anything with this elementary law of physics remains to be seen.

And there’s a flip side: Even as I am a physics-al being, I also know what it likes to live absent time. I’m not talking here of being ‘in the moment’ (although that’s nice when it happens, rare tho’ it is), but when I’m so involved in an activity that I have no consciousness of time.

Which brings me back to the beginning, and writing. C. mentioned that I seemed to be in a fictional frame of mind (oh, the meanings in that observation. . !), and I mentioned a story I had been turning over. I have characters, I said, but not much beyond that; I need to let this sit a bit, see what happens.

But then I noted that in between novel 1 and 2, I started another story, one which I might never get back to, and maybe this story is like that one: the one which prepares me for the next one.

And right then, I thought, Well, I’m not a loser dilettante when I’m writing; I just write.

Thus, that leisurely bike ride and leisurely conversation popped something loose: Start writing again, and the writing will come. Sketching out that story for C. helped me to see that that’s maybe all it will ever be, and that’s okay. Commit to the writing itself, just, just remember that I can commit to the work itself.

Something else will come; something else always comes.

~~~

*Hey, C. it occurred to me that you could work the slingshot into a joke: Your narrator could pick up a slingshot or having someone hand one to her and she could demur, muttering “Too Clan-of-the-Cave Bear.”

Anyway.


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Dese bones gonna rise again

31 05 2011

This was not the best season of Bones.

Which is to say: this was the worst season of Bones. Not a single episode was as good as previous episodes, and while there were no truly terrible episodes, the best it got was only “all right”.

Alyssa Rosenberg argued on Matt Yglesias’s blog (now her own, at ThinkProgress) that the problem was with the overarching theme (the sniper), namely, that is was weak and centered on a boring character. I think she has a point: Although the first season didn’t have an overarching theme, two were set up for the following seasons, one regarding Brennan’s family and another with the serial killer Howard Epps.

Now, I kinda think the whole sexual-sadist-serial killer is played out (yeah, I’m looking at you, CSI, with the truly boring Nate Haskell), but they undercut the superman-superevil bad guy schtick deliberately: Howard Epps thought he was a genius but, as Zack pointed out, he really wasn’t as smart as he claimed to be.

Season two was backboned by Brennan’s backstory, with her plastic-surgeried criminal father dipping into and out of a number of episodes. (“Judas on a Pole”, which introduces him, also includes a great cover of Kate Bush’s “Running up that hill”.) It also introduced the Gravedigger, a nasty piece of work who appeared again in single episodes in seasons 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The Gormogon thing (season 3) was weird, and the Zack angle on that was weird, but it was also satisfying: so over-the-tops nuts (ritualistic cannibalism of secret society members) that there was a certain brio to the writing. Everybody seemed to be having a good time—well, you know what I mean.

Season 4 didn’t have any major arcs, save, perhaps, the Angela-Hodgins fallout, as well as an somewhat underdeveloped bit about Booth’s brain. (It didn’t really cohere, but that it didn’t really cohere didn’t really matter.) Oh, and the introduction to a rotating cast of interns/assistants. Anyway, it had a fine, fine, season ender.

Too much about the Booth/Brennan relationship interfered with season 5, but there were still some very good stand-alone episodes, as there were in each of the preceding seasons. I’m one of those who did NOT want Booth and Brennan to get together—yes, adults who have chemistry may nonetheless desist from dating—but I was even more annoyed at how forced those episodes were. Stephen Fry, who brought back his utterly charming character Gordon Wyatt, then ruined the moment by pushing (against character) for a romantic relationship. Brennan’s father talked about it, Angela talked about it, Booth and Brennan separately brooded about it—blech, it was all too much.

Yeah, we get it: they have chemistry, but enough already! Anyway, the Angela-Hodgins arc was more interesting.

Still, there was an energy and wit running through these seasons, a humor and affection comingled with the murder and mayhem, such that even amidst the utter unreality of the television crime procedural, you got the sense that these were real people doing real work.

The people mattered, the work mattered: a fine balance.

This year, however, that was thrown off. Again, I think Rosenberg may be onto something about the boring sniper arc, but I think the greater problem was that the balance got thrown off. The crimes were almost beside the point, or existed only to drive the personal plot-lines; thus the play of earlier seasons was missing, as the writers sought to reduce the looseness and otherwise force into a pre-exising cutout every damned storyline. This not only took away much of the wit of the dialogue, it also signaled a certain impatience with the characters.

So, for example, Sweets entertains doubts about his expertise and has those doubts resolved all in a single episode; both the doubts and the resolution were, erm, doubtful. (And Miss Julian opened up to Sweets, which, frankly, was not believable.) Brennan’s father was brought in for a couple of completely superfluous scenes, and there were bits about Cam and about Angela’s pregnancy (guess, no, really, just guess how the season ended), but it was all rather listless.

And having a number of the interns each undergo a character change? Please. Give me back my uptight Clark. (f only they could give back my favorite intern, whose death scene was devastating.)

It was never truly awful and, really, only a few episodes were bad, but it was such a letdown. I’ll watch again next year (even though I was not particularly happy with the last episode set-up for the new season), but I hope this season was a lapse rather than a harbinger.

I did, however, watch a truly awful show this year, even after swearing off it. Yes, I moaned my way through yet another season of CSI-New York. Ye gads. They brought in Sela Ward to replace Melina Kanakaredes, and I thought, Oh, well, I like Sela Ward.

I might still like Sela Ward, but her character, Jo? Do. Not. Like.

This show just got sappier and more moralistic as it went along. God, I can’t even be bothered to go through everything that was wrong with this show because everything was wrong.

The only good thing: it may finally have gotten so bad that even I will look away.


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Categories : Review

KSPR post: Unexpected Neighbor

13 05 2011

Posted a few excerpts from the first chapter of my first novel, Unexpected Neighbor, at Knotted Spring Press Review.

When I finally manage to format it all for SmashWords, I’ll let y’all know.

And, hey, if you know anyone who might be interested in publicizing their work, send ’em my way. Yeah, it’s all still very beta, but why not leap and look at the same time?


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Categories : Follow-up

Announcing Knotted String Press

9 05 2011

I’ve finally done it: came up with a title for my writers’ blog.

Haven’t done much beyond that—if you go to the site, you’ll simply see the title and the generic WordPress intro post—but I am pleased finally to have started something.

As for the title itself, well, I could say that this had something to do with quipus/khipus and how the notion of digit-ized communication tickled my double-meaning fancies—I could, but that would be a lie. I mean, I like the notion of “talking knots”, but any doubling of the title’s meaning came after the fact.

No, I wanted something that could be remembered, that no one else had claimed, and that was an uncommon enough term that if someone entered “knotted string press” in a search engine I had a shot someday of appearing on a page nearer to the top than the bottom of the results.

Oh, and I wanted to have some connection to the title. I immediately thought of Black Cat Books, figuring (correctly) that that name had been snatched up, then came up with Black Coffee Books—alas, there was a Black Coffee Press (out of Detroit) already in existence, and while they’re real publishers (and KSP won’t be) I didn’t want to be an asshole and claim a name so close to theirs.

I ran through a number of other options, some of which were taken or too boring or too close to common terms or just too cumbersome, but I wasn’t coming up with anything. So I decided to open my old poetry file to see if there was some evocative-but-simple phrase I’d written that I could steal re-purpose for the new site.

There was gaspingly pure blue sky from “Sky Blue (Was My Favorite Color)”, but that was too clunky; shimmering ink also appeared in that poem, but, apparently, that has World of Warcraft connotations (no offense to gamers, but that’s not what I’m going for). I like the line ransacked of faith from “Reckonings”, but, really, that’s no title for a writer’s blog.

Then there was dislocated photograph from “Gretel, Away From Home”, but that didn’t fit. I tried to think of some sort of Gretel connection, but, nope.

I skimmed and scrolled up and down, then landed on the phrase We are a knotted string/
across the lake.

Huh. There was also this, from “Last Light On”:

Like a coarse string
                her conflicting
                passions and necessities
                pull through her –

                not cleanly, like
                shish-ke-bab,
                but
                scraping and ripping,
                tightly weaving
                an intricate
                furious
                bloody knot. 

And finally, my first novel was briefly named “Knots on a String”—hell, that might have been it’s original title—and in one draft I had a scene in which one character explains to another that, well, it had something to do with knots and string and it was all so very clumsy that I took it out.

Anyway, I clearly have a thing with that whole “knot” and “string” image, and “Knotted String Press” fit the other criteria, so “Knotted String Press” it is.

I think that could work.


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Categories : Follow-up

So tell me something someone and help me get it right

1 05 2011

I don’t know what I’m doing. I may have mentioned this once or twenty times before.

Freelancing is feast or famine. I get inquiries, but when I tell people that I’d expect to be paid for a two-hour consultation on how to improve their writing, well, poof!—there goes any further contact.

I write in the ad that rates are negotiable, but, really, do people think negotiable means “free”? Just to be clear: negotiable does not mean free.

Or I’d get requests to write college papers; I’ve since put in a line stating that I do not write college papers.

No, the corporate gigs are the way to go, but that particular boat only pulls into the harbor on occasion. All aboard when that happens, but otherwise, dry dock.

So, yes, back to looking for FT work. But doing what? And who’d hire me? And can I still teach and work for The Man?

This is an issue because I had to decide whether to accept a teaching gig for the fall even though that might interfere with that ol’ 40-hour workweek. But then I said fuck it, who know if I’ll even have that 40-hour workweek, and besides, I like teaching and I like my department. So yeah, fuck it.

This attitude may explain my current life circumstances.

I honestly don’t know what the answers are to the questions I don’t know which to ask. I don’t think there’s any, one, way to do/perform/be in/live this whole life thing, but I gotta tell you, I think I”m doing it wrong.

If I wanted to be optimistic, I guess I could say that at least I’m still holding on, but, y’know, I’ve never been accused of being optimistic.

Yep, things are as backasswards or assupwards as they appear.

Excellent.

Photo: Seriously Cute


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