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I don’t seem to recall ever being favorably disposed toward humanity, but every year I’m impressed a little less…

Me and a friend of mine were walking home from a bar on Thursday night.  A dog was wandering ahead of us, meandering around like a lifelong stray, but it seemed healthy enough and it wore a collar.  The worst of my instincts said to leave the whole thing be, but my friend was quite adamant that we do something about this lost dog.  Seeing the collar, I rather hoped it’d be a simple matter of checking the tags.  If it had been, I obviously wouldn’t be writing this.

We caught up to the dog.  No tags.  Again, I had the urge to leave things alone.  Again my friend convinced me otherwise.  We followed the dog for a good ways trying to get some idea of where it might have come from.  Passing by one of the various New Paltz bars, a patron recognized the dog.  Apparently it was from the building next to my own apartment complex…

Deep down I knew that was too easy.  I’m too cynical to believe any good deed could end that well.  Sure enough, after sending a 3rd friend out to buy a leash, catching the dog, and bringing them down to my apartment, the house that we thought owned her was empty.  No lights, no noise, no one home.

I live a simple life in a small apartment.  Pets aren’t allowed and there’s no room anyways.  Obviously the dog stayed the night with me…

No barking, no scratching, no making a mess.  I’ve never seen a dog quite as friendly or as passive.  She plopped herself on the floor and watched me go about my nightly routine.  She didn’t even cause problems when we went out to grab some food…

In lieu of describing Alaina Ip (named snarkily after my friend) , here’s a picture we took that night.

The next morning I was moderately optimistic that we’d be able to get a hold of the owners and complete our good deed.  Alan took the day off to chaperone the dog around town and do what had to be done.  First, a phone call to the house next door.  After a few tries he was able to get a hold of them.  Verdict: not their dog, but they said they thought the owner had left town.  That’s pretty terrible, but at least we were now free to find the dog a good home…

A little later, the postman saw Alan walking the dog.  He recognized Alaina as Rosie from the Bed & Breakfast up the street.  In the mean time, Alan had called the Animal Control office to ask if anyone had been looking for a lost dog.  Figuring he could just take the dog to the Bed & Breakfast, hand her over, and toast to our great generosity, he was somewhat surprised to find the Animal Control officer already at the Bed & Breakfast when he got there.

And here’s where the story starts to suck.  Alaina, Rosie, the dog we found walking home from the bar, had been found in town a few times before.  The owner of the Bed & Breakfast had presumably been letting the dog go intentionally because … the dog has a most likely benign, but painful and eventually lethal tumor.  She’s 11 years old and the surgery that would help her costs $1500.  The owner, one of those wretched humans that deserve nothing but misery from now until the end of time, was apparently quoted as saying to one of the previous good Samaritans that she keeps hoping the dog will get run over so she won’t have to pay for anything.  Fuck her.

The rest of the story, still somewhat ongoing, played out according to the various rules and regulations that define such things.  The animal control officer cited the lady and gave her the dog back.  She now has 3 days to take care of the dog, somehow.  That doesn’t sound too good to me, but at least Alaina/Rosie won’t be wandering the street in pain all day.  I’d like to think that the lady will pay for the surgery.  If so, my friend and I are going to see if we can’t buy the dog off of her and start the search for a home again.  If she doesn’t do anything, I’ll be posting the name of the Bed & Breakfast on here.  It’s about as much as I can do to enforce the karma that should have picked the lady off long ago.

Pretty miserable state of affairs.  For once, I would have preferred to have had absolutely nothing to post for this week.  Writing has always been a very escapist hobby for me; at least when I’m telling the stories I get the choose the horrors I want to contend with at any given time.  No such luck in real life.  The only thing guaranteef is that humanity will continue suck in every possible way.  Whoever is telling that story is sick and debauched and I hope to hell they don’t get to write the sequel.

Writer’s block dogged me last weekend like some sort of film noir stalker.  It followed along to Monday, and Tuesday was a lost cause, mostly to class.  After a fit of fatigue-inspired desparation, I finally managed to start something new on Wednesday.

Well outside of this website, I also maintain a journal.  In theory, it’s a collection of musings that lack  coherent structure.  I do occasionally generate an idea within the journal and then build it up somewhere else as something a little more mature, but in truth the journal is more like a catalog of petty whining and stream-of-conscious complaints.  A portal to history in the making it is not.

Lost and increasingly frustrated with my lack of output, I decided that I’d take my routine, journal documented and annotated, and turn it into a story.  Yes, I was desparate enough to try to turn a 9-5 tech support job, 3 hour microeconomics class, and errand-filled repetition into a story…

I’m happy to say that’s not the story that I’m half finished with.  I admit I started that story, but fifty words in and I was bored with the setting, the characters, and whatever cobbled together plot I had decided on up to that point.

At first I started to make some small tweaks.  One by one, each change got a little bit larger.  After 200 words I was barely left with my initial idea still intact (no loss).  One person became three people.  My tech support job somehow became an anonymous poet laureate for a group of bank robbers.  A few sentences later and I turned the bank into a bar leaving me with a trio of bar-robbers philosophically opposed to speaking on the phone.  With the vault gone I had to pull out a few other motivations for my crew of would be Dillingers to wrastle with (other than their mutual distaste for tech support that is).

Currently, it’s half done and it’s not half bad.  (That means when it’s all done, it’ll only be a quarter bad?)  Another week at my current sluggardly pace and I’ll have it finished.  2,500 words tops I imagine.  I want to keep it short.  So far I’m riding a wave of Dickensian wall-breaking that would get old after more than a few pages.  Also, I want to have something to submit soon.  Once a month.  That’s the goal.  It’s not I have any especially need to put a story out into the world that quickly, but the world always seems a bit brighter the day after I’ve mailed off my tripe to another unsuspecting editor…

But aren’t short stories a waste of time?  I hear that periodically and I’ve never heard of them selling especially well.  It’s a tough market, although that’s all the better for learning against yes?  If you can write a publishable short story in such a small but vigorously contested market, you’ve proven that you’re up to par on your writing, at least that’s the theory.  If not, Neil Gaiman discussed short stories a bit in a recent interview. Verdict: not dead.  So there!

Well, I’m starting to antagonize my audiance  I imagine that’s as good a reason as any to bring this week’s absurdity to a close.  Adieu and Go England!  (I’m assuming the USA loses early, but hey, anything can happen right?)

Ahh, it has been terribly difficult to write.  I made such an effort to give myself time and I’ve done nothing to take advantage of it.  Sigh.  I suppose it’s the weather.  Rainy with occasional visits of thunder.  I find myself unmotivated.

For the sake of obligation and a  stubborn refusal to admit that I’ve got no place writing today, I have amassed a list of interesting Internet curiosities.  Since I stopped posting multiple times per week, I’ve done my damndest to avoid dumb link posts, but what else have I done this week worth discussing?  Well, I watched Wolverine.  Must I discuss that further?  Atrocious, really.  I finished the story mode for Red Dead Redemption.  Little confusing toward the end, maybe a little unnecessarily melodramatic, but a solid story and such a beautiful world.  I wish it had slowed down toward the end just a bit.  Maybe it was just my desire to see everything through, but the whole northern part of the world remains unexplored wilderness just yet.  I guess I’ll have to get up there one of these days…

So about those links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY: Legos are still cool.

http://kokugamer.com/2010/06/04/video-game-alphabet/ : A font for a LAN party poster?

http://us.akinator.com/: the game I wasted my time with instead of writing.  Sigh.

Finally: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100527/ap_on_re_us/us_the_big_walk, just one of those stories that amuse me.

My usual apologies for a wasted post.  Something better for next week…promise.

No writing, no reading, not much of anything this week…except…I started playing the game Liar’s Dice in Red Dead Redemption.

Enjoy!

A day late.  That means something good right?  I don’t know about that.

I’m starting my first MBA class today, thus beginning a two or three year adventure that’s sure to eat up my free time and turn my haphazard writing schedule even more on its head.

Whether by coincidence or intentionally cramming, I’ve tried to toss do as much reading, watching, playing as possible this week, with some amount of success.  My short-story is half edited and as long as today remains an intro class without too much work, I’ll be able to finish the rest of it today.  This short story, called Widget, is only around 3,000.  I intentionally made it short, partially because the 10,000 stories just take the wind out of me, but I’m also hoping the shorter format will prove to be a bit more publishable.  If nothing else, I need to learn how to write an engaging piece in less than 5000 words for the sake of the trees.

I always find myself trying to balance informative blog content versus a real need to not give any of my stories away.  I really can’t give out too much otherwise they become unpublishable, but that leaves me with some pretty bare scraps to talk about.  Again, I’m falling on the side of wasting words, but my hope is that its come together as a cross between a 30s hard-boiled detective story and a comic book.  And no, I’m not ripping off Watchman either.  Dick Tracy maybe…

Beyond writing, I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption.  The reviewers have been calling it Grand Theft Horsey and it is very similar to GTA IV, but that’s hardly an insult.  They took GTA and made it about cowboys.  No complaints whatsoever.  If anything, it’s been refreshing because the Western has been so soundly underplayed within computer games.  For whatever reason, that genre has been neglected.

In Red Dead they have done a good job balancing the necessity of Hollywoodesque drama with a more realistic   As with every game and movie mad ever, there’s that weird sense that there’s just a little too much going on it the world for it to be realistic, but again, I’m not going to complain.  From the moment I hopped on my horse, crossed the desert during a thunderstorm, and then jumped on a train to get to the next town I was thoroughly hooked.  So far, I’d say that I haven’t been this engrossed in simply exploring the world since Morrowind.  Not even Oblivion or GTA IV encouraged me quite as much to just walk around and see the scenery.

Until I know my schedule, I don’t have any plans for future plans; no games, no books, no stories.  Today, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable next 5 weeks the only thing I’ll be doing is studying up on be Micro-Economics.  Not quite sure how or why that managed to come together, but seeing as class starts in 1 hour and 50 minutes, I guess it did…

Reading:  The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins.  It’s a general overview of Evolution.  I’ve read about that a few times before so it’s nothing all that new, but it’s engaging and and I like the topic.  I really need to find something a little bit deeper on the topic, but that’s surprisingly hard to find.  Maybe once the Cretin population dies off a little bit and America jumps up from near last on the list of industrialized nations and knowledge of Evolution.  Also, why do the books supporting science have such great names: The Blind Watchmaker, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, all very evocative and poetic.  The books criticizing science never seem nearly as artful.

Writing: That short-story I’ve been babbling about — it’s done and submitted.  It’ll be a few weeks before I hear back.  I’ve got another short story to resubmit after a rejection slip and another short-story to write, this one hopefully a lot shorter than the other one.  The premise is a character whose genes were patented.  I read a story about a patent case in the news not so long ago that managed to capture my imagination.

Playing: I’m finishing up Splinter Cell: Conviction.  It’s much faster and action oriented that the previous Splinter Cell games, but they did a very good job keeping everything together.  They did not overpower Sam Fisher too much, kept the gadgets interesting, and managed to pull the story along a lot better than expected.  I miss the old, slow-paced planning Splinter Cell, but the gameplay was maybe getting a little stale.  It seemed more realistic, but this did such a good jump with Conviction I can’t criticize.

I pre-ordered Red Dead Redemption, which looks like Grand Theft Auto in the Old West.  Sounds amazing, can’t wait!

Watching: Maybe Iron Man 2?  The character does not have much room for plot development.  I imagine it has to be terrible.  I know already that I’m going to be disappointed…I’m going to see it anyway, probably, maybe, unless someone saves me from it.

Cooking: maybe a pizza?  I’m still got a few bread mixes from my x-mas Bread Machine.

Hiking: Minnewaska 6th time this year.

And that’s the weekend.

Another rejection letter for a short story.  That makes seven for this year, three on this story alone.  Perhaps, I need to see about making some improvements…

I finally finished Old Man Goriot by Balsac.  It reminds me of a French version of Dickens, maybe with a bit of Three Musketeers added in.  A sad book ultimately, but a social book, like Dickens might write, and a stirring one as well.  I’d give more of a book summary, since it’s not the best known book these days, but it’s a tough plotline to pin down.  A dozen odd lodgers live in the same boarding house.  A social climber named Rastignac has a number of adventures therein involving a mysterious criminal, a forgotten heiress, and a broken old vermicelli maker.  The closest plot I might link it to would be King Lear, but I’m not sure that’s the best comparison to make either.  It’s quite the read,  also short.  Worth finding on the shelf.

My own short story is almost finished.  I’ve got a finished draft that I’m trying to polish.  It’s still drifting between 10 and 11 thousand words.  I was hoping to chop it down to the mid 7s, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.  SO far, I’ve got an intro that comes together rather well and the ending seems pretty tied up, but the middle has it’s guts to the wind.  It needs a lot of polished, probably a few more weeks, and then I get it sent out.  Sigh.  It’s all very time-consuming.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned previously, but http://www.duotrope.com is  the best resource I’ve found for looking up publishers especially for short stories.  I can’t say I’ve had any particular success with any of my would be printers, but the search functionality at Duotrope has at least given me a shot.  Absolutely invaluable.

Since I’m in something of a hurry I’ll end this right here.  One last item because I’m a sucker for graphs:   Is it better to rent or buy, a calculator.  Enjoy!

A short post today.  Last week was so exceptional that I suppose it was no surprise that this one had to be miserable.

Mostly, I’ve just been busy but not with anything interesting.  I did finish the last of my editing books and I’ve started reading Old Man Goriot by Balzac.  I got another rejection slip, this time from Strange Horizons, but the story only barely flt their oeuvre anyway.  It wasn’t really a surprise and I’ve already sent the story back out to www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com.

I’ve got a 10500 word short story draft done.  I expect it come in around 7500 words after editing, maybe a bit longer.  I’ve been dabbling with an omniscient narrator which is a little new for me.  I normally avoid it.  The voice does not normally come naturally to me and it starts to feel a bit contrived when I’m showing everyone inside out.  I think I’ve managed to work it in this one fairly well and I’ve keep the all-knowing voice to a minimum.

No other news.  Long week over and a long week coming.  I went hiking today which was absolutely gorgeous.  I keep hoping that if I can get this writing business going for real, maybe I’ll be able to hike a little more.  Here’s to the dream!  Adieu.

It’s been a busy week for work and a slow week for everything else.

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.