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A seven mile hike at Lake Minnewaska followed by homemade chicken quesadillas with mango salsa.  That’ll do, that’ll do.

It hasn’t been a bad day (or week) for writing either.  I’m some 5,000 words into a short story, probably the best I’ve written in a year, not that there’s any proof of quality there. I’m a motivated slogger.  I expect to get another few thousands words put down this weekend, maybe finish a draft next week.  Exciting times, I know.

I’d like to give credit for my new-found inspiration to a handful of writing books that I purchased last week.  I could drag up the names, but I don’t credit the books themselves. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Periodically, I find myself lost and muddled when it comes to any sort of genuine writing.  Sure, I’ve been tossing assorted blog entires out for years and I keep something of a weekly journal as well, but that’s not really writing.  The quality is suspect and there’s no editing.  No editing means no writing.  That’s just how it works.

Disappointed and thoroughly disgusted with my more intentional output, I start to think that maybe I just don’t know what I’m doing.  I’m untrained, untested, amateurish.  I need a mentor, a trainer, something to push me over the hump.  In a pique of desperation, I buy a book (or 5) on the craft of writing.  I get  excited that I’ll finish it and find myself newly remade into the next Hemingway.

As I’ve already let on, that’s not exactly how things have turned out.  I’ve read 4 of the 5 books.  They were decent in a way, but there’s only so much that can really be said about writing.  There are the usual platitudes: show don’t tell, start with the action, write what you know (really write what you care about).  There’s also some helpful market acumen tossed in (that 40,000 word fantasy epic novellete is never going to be published).

And then there are the suggestions.  A good half the suggestions are really just tricks to encourage writers to write.  I’ve honestly never found that to be an especially big problem.  I write when I can.  I can’t as often as I should like and I do get distracted easily, but no one can accuse me of ignoring my hobby.  I really don’t need parlor trick psychology to get me to a keyboard.

The second half of these suggestions are different ways to come up with ideas, different methods of arranging stories to be exciting.  Again, is this really the difficulty writers are having?  Perhaps, but I’ve always felt quite deeply that the idea, the story, the urge to arrange a beautiful world is the motivation for writing in the first place,.  I’m not interesting in writing because I like to sit on my ass at a keyboard for hours at a time staring at blank office programs and giving myself medically novel forms of carpal-tunnel.  I write because I’ve got a thousand and one ideas and stories to get down.  My problem is that I get them down…and they suck.  Different problem and not one that books seem to be able to fix.

In a weird and sadistic way, this is encouraging.  I’m not suffering from a lack of ideas or a lack of motivation (in which case why would I even want to write?).  I just suffer from inexperience.  I’m newly inspired because the book fundamentals were old hat.  I know my tenses, I know my viewpoints, I know why you start with the action, and I know why passive tense is no good…mostly.  I’ve got my spelling down and dialog locked in.  I can conjure a decent story and bring it to completion.  I just don’t have a strong enough voice.  I’m new.  As birthdays, anniversaries, and local historical societies like to periodically remind me, new doesn’t last that long.  Someday I will cease to be new and won’t that make some exciting blog posts?  That’s today’s inspirational tale for the masses.

I will say, the two books on editing were decent.  I’ve never read The Elements of Style and I was dumb not to.  It’s fantastic.

The book Line by Line, put out by the MLA, is a hideous looking book, a little yellow cookbookish thing like an 1980s guide to television repair, but it’s oddly inspired.  Editing is just so damn hard and there’s enough examples strewn throughout the book that it’s hard not to find something useful.

I also read Fear and Loathing, Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-inspired classic, an utterly hilarious little gem that I’ve never come to before.  Again, it’s a plotless book, although not nearly as plotless as Naked Lunch.  Gonzo journalism at least makes an honest effort at a complete story, something Naked Lunch seemed to intentionally avoid.  I always feel sort of strange reviewing a well-known classic, so I’m not going to, but this is my blog and I’ll make it a poorly annotated reading list if I want to.

Since I’m falling into a list, (although the premier form of internet writing) I’ve come to the end to this week’s entry.  My xbox bit the bucket so I’m not able to play Splinter Cell Conviction.   I haven’t had any new short-story rejections so for once I’ve got nothing to really whine about.  That pretty much leaves writing and quesadillas as entertainment.  That’ll do.  That’ll do.

I have them occasionally.  Rarely.  Almost never.

Of course, as usual, I haven’t written a thing.  Not a word.  Later.  Today.  Soon.  Tomorrow.  Famous words of the pathologically incompetent.   Still, it hasn’t been entirely a loss.  I’ve got some ideas rumbling around, a few of them might even be good.  Soon.  Soon.  Always soon.  I’ve got the file already up and saved with a nice working title.  That means the project is started!

In lieu of writing I’ve been reading.  Three books this week.

Monday I started Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs.  I’m not going to pretend that I understood a word of it.  Half On The Road, half Henry Miller.  It’s one hell of a skip-around drug adventure.  I’m not sure how it slipped through the cracks before now, but I finally got it reading it.  Interesting, fun, mind-boggling, also completely useless for anyone trying to get better at writing.  There’s nothing to pick out there, no skill one can marvel at.  It’s simply a hundred and change pages of crazy nothing held together by either madness or genius.  It was a quick read, and easy one to mark off the list.

What sort of unadulterated weirdness could follow that?  As of Tuesday morning, I knew nothing about  Vernor Herzog, the German director, or his eccentric actor star Klaus Kinski.  A coworker of mine mentioned sent me on my way with Kinski’s biography, All I Need is Love, and Herzog’s Kinski retrospective, a documentary called My Best Fiend.  I watched the dvd that evening.

Insanity.  That appears to be the running theme.  The back-story behind Fitzcarraldo is fascinating.  He actually dragged a boat over the mountain.  There is a line from Herzog, “I am sane, clinically sane, but Kinski thinks I’ve lost it.  He does have one thing in mind when he says that.  This one time when I was especially fed up with him, I did legitimately consider fire-bombing his house.  I was all ready to do it, but the plot was foiled by his Alsatian shepherd.”  Herzog offers no further explanation.  Why did Kinski have an Alsatian shepherd?  It’s not a dvd for final answers, also it’s in German with subtitles, but it’s well-worth the price of admission.

Following up on Herzog’s dvd, I read Kinski’s version.  Again, nothing but insanity.  The man was either a epic liar, a playfully insane chronicler of non-truth, or genuinely the most absurd person to have ever lived.  Again, I won’t give anything away, but it’s a fun biography to read as long as you’re prepared for a lifetime of rambling sex, insults, and movie magic.  It is an absurd book.

To round out my week, I started reading Rainbow’s End, by Vernor Vinge.  It’s cyberpunk, speculative science fiction, hyper-tech, all the usual sorts of things that I normally read and, despite the post-singularity technology, the most grounded thing I read this week.  Without going at the plot with any especial gusto, it’s a combination of Neuromancer, Snowcrash, and an action director’s take on Eco’s Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.  There aren’t too many authors who can pull off the recovering Alzheimer patient protagonist, but that’s what science fiction is made for, yes?

I’m not sure if I was tired of reading or tired of the genre, but it failed to capture as fully as some other books.  In truth, I think it was better written than any of them, but I’m reading this story last so it takes third place.  As a writer, it has finally solidified my mind on something that I could and should have seen a thousand times elsewhere, namely, that in any longer work it seems absolutely necessary to have multiple viewpoints.  It is simply no longer optional.  The modern novel appears all but unsustainable  when forced on a single voice, a single character, a single point of view.  Perhaps novels have become too influenced by movies?  Movies used to have longer cuts than they do now, for sure.  Have we lost any ability to follow a long narrative?  I don’t think so, I just think multiple viewpoints has become a better method for telling most stories.  It opens up the fictional world in ways that a single viewpoint could never realistically compete.  Rainbow’s End used a half a dozen characters for the primary view without any especial pattern.  It picked up a person when it needed them and then let them become secondary once their part in the mosiac was finished.  The umpire in me finds it unbearable, but it’s literary genius when used correctly.  I’ve obviously got a bit to learn.

Which is where I intend to do now.  Soon is finally?  Probably not, but the week is over and it’s time to start looking at the next one.  I don’t think I have any books on the docket, but I am considering Splinter Cell: Conviction.  I get too distracted, I know.  My one short story came back rejected.  Such is how things go.  I’m off to mail it on to the next future-rejector.  Wish me luck!  Adieu.

I finished The Blair Years.  Final estimate: anti-climactic.  I’m well aware that a diary, or any non-fiction for that matter, can’t just make up a nice Hollywood ending, but there’s something to be said for not misleading your audience either.  It took 600 odd pages to get to Bush’s presidency and another fifty or so before the Iraq War came up.  Considering ‘The Blair Years’ is practically a short hand for the post-9/11 wars in Aphganistan and Iraq, it seems downright cruel to carry the reader all that way and then leave them with a haphazard assortment of mini-anecdotes about the run up to the war.  I’m sure most of the good stuff was edited out, but it honestly would have been a stronger narrative if he’d cut the book off just as the Bush stuff was about to happen.  I’d rather have a cliff-hanger than a botched and boring token gesture, especially coming off a fascinating look at the back-end of the Bosnia/Kosovo conflict…

Next book on the docket:  Naked Lunch by Burroughs.  Can’t get much different…

In other news, I watched the movie adapation of Cormac McCArthy’s The Road.  In theory, it belongs to that venerable holiday genre: apocalypse survival movies, but it’d be tough to put it next to Mad Max and Children of Men.

The spoilerless gist of the movie is a father and son wander the post-apocalyptic wasteland surviving and looking for a better place.  There’s a little violence, there’s a few semi-shocking revelations about the survivors, there’s some back-story about the father and son, but it all wraps up in just under two hours.

I’d like to say it was a good movie, and I can, grudgingly, but I found it boring.  I suspect the book is very good, haven’t read yet, but on film the story didn’t seem to come together.  The father’s relationship with his son in a nuclear winter is an interesting concept and the movie tried awfully hard to make it interesting, but the whole thing came off too brooding, too slow, and ultimately unfulfilled.

I’m currently working on my own slow, brooding short story.  Coming along, coming along.  I’ve got three other short stories out in the wild.  The fourth came back declined.  Sigh and double sigh, but that’s how it goes.  I’m hoping to get that one out again sometime tomorrow. However…

there’s not that much point in me rambling about it.  It’s been a slow week in general, but the weather is getting better.  I’m hoping to put up some hiking pictures soon.  Until then, I’m out.

April Fool’s Pranks?  Is April Fool a thing?  April Fools’ Pranks?  I really have no idea…

So last week I went to New Haven to see a play called An Italian in Algeria or something like that.   Short version of the story is we never found the theater and completely missed the show.  (This is why I like free shows.)  Instead of wandering around aimlessly looking for a show that doesn’t exist, we watched The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s arrest-aborted thriller.

I can’t say I’ve followed the tabloids all that much.  I remember offhand that Polanski avoided the US ever since ditching out on a statutory rape charge or something along those lines.   Whatever the crime, I doubt the movie would absolve the directory anything, but taken as an evening flick it wasn’t half bad.

Without spending much time on it, the movie is an exploration of what an unrepentant Tony Blair might do if he was being hounded by a war crimes tribunal.  Alan Lang (aka Mr. Blair and played by Mr. Bond…aka Pierce Brosnan) is a former PM whose having his memoirs written for him by a ghost writer.  The old ghost writer died, murdered of course, and the new ghost writer has to deal with a cagey PM, a betrayed wife, and the all accessory characters that fill out space.

In retrospect, I can sort of see the similarity with Ninth Gate, also by Polanski, and one of my favorite movies (though it’s been critically panned).  All the critics mentioned the claustrophobia and paranoia of the movie and yes I saw plenty of that.  Really though, I was more enthralled by scenery.  The house off Martha’s Vinyard where Lang is hiding out is quite possibly the ugliest building ever constructed.  It’s a genuinely hideous thing with an uber-chic interior that looks like a cross between a prison ward and M.C. Escher painting.  The island itself suffers from English weather (it rains a lot) and feels more desolate that a New England vacation spot should.

The story rolls around without any really obvious non-spoiler hints I could drop.  In truth, the plot is neither all that complex nor really that interesting, but Mr. Bond and Obi Wan Kenobi (the young one, Ewan McGregor) do a damn good job of keeping eyes to the screen.  The ending seemed weak, but not woefully insufficient.  In total, Ghost Writer is worth the time to watch, but it’s not playing on many strings so it can be hard to find in the theatre.  Another DVD movie for most, I imagine.

In a close follow up to the movie, I started reading The Blair Years, the diary of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Communication Director.  It’s a dense read and not exactly the smoothest narrative out there, but it’s an interesting look at the day to day operations of politicking.  I suspect plenty of readers were disappointed to find out that it’s not an inside look at a grand Bush-Blair conspiracy, but I was never under that expectation.  The diary, and it occurred me that it’s the first diary I’ve read since Anne Frank’s, is really more like a really slow episode of West Wing.  It skips the policy discussions and sitcom drama in lieu of detailing the endless infighting and personal bickering that takes place inside any substantial and competitive organization.  Overall, interesting but far too long.  I’m 50 pages in and I’m not sure how thrilled I am to slog through the next 650…

Moving on to my own writing, I’ve got three or four stories out in the world.  My submission to Clarkesworld was rejected, but the response came back in a record two days time.  I like the efficiency!   I’ve already send that story out again.  I’ve got another two ideas in the works, but they aren’t even outlined yet so no details.  Lots of work for the weekend!

Other than that, nothing planned.  Should be quiet and stress free.  Not doing anything Easter except tennis and everyone’s off and about with their own things.  Here’s to getting some work done!

That’s pretty much the word.  Until next time.  Adieu!