It seems like half the posts I put here are of the type “no, I’m not gone, I’m just really busy.” And that’s the truth - I’m finishing grad school in about three weeks while starting a new job, and getting the motivation to put virtual pen to virtual paper isn’t exactly easy right now.

That said, there are quite a few interesting things going on (not the least of which is my Akismet anti-spam plugin randomly deactivating, allowing all sorts of interesting eastern European people to post nice invitations to lengthen parts of your body. I think I zonked all of them, but you never now) - my final paper that I’ll probably ever write has to do with Sherlock Holmes, poverty, class, and street children. I gave my thesis/novel to my advisor to check out, all 291 pages of it. And I went to New Orleans, which was right on that line between fun and exhausting.

So, to the three people who read this blog (you know who you are!), thanks for putting up with the silence. There will be less silence soon.

General | 2 Comments »

I spent the last three days down with the flu. For a while I thought it was a cold, but then yesterday, as I was huddling under the covers on my couch, I did a little “do you have the flu or just a cold?” survey. Yep, it was the flu.

My fever broke last night, and I had to change my shirt in the middle of the night because I’d sweated through it. I’m still lying in bed, feeling weak but as if I could recover. Better than yesterday - when I woke up I seriously considered never leaving bed.

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This is the first Monday of 2008 that I don’t have an inordinate number of things to do. I mean, I do have an article to write and some novel to work on, paper topics to outline, a meeting at six to prepare for and lunch to make, but none of that (meeting aside) involves having to be somewhere at a particular time in order to do something.

So I’m on my couch, listening to music, thinking about Sherlock Holmes and considering where I’m going to go for a pre-lunch run. And about writing things…because it occurs to me that after this weekend I’m going to have much less time for that sort of thing.

General | 1 Comment »

That’s right, there are 833 posts on this site now. That’s a few.

Writing continues - I kind of need to rejigger the ending again, and introduce a character earlier in the story, and figure out what the main guy is really trying to do, and, and, and…

So yeah, that’s what I’ve been working on. This rewriting thing takes forever, especially if (like me) you take two weeks off in the middle of it to “recharge.” Recharging doesn’t seem to work - it just makes it so I need a couple of days to warm up before really being able to get into it.

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Beware of any article that uses the words “my generation is…” because that means the author is about to make a massive generalization based upon his/her circumstances. This article came out in Newsweek, and here’s the premise:

Like many young professionals (I’m 36), I embraced the lessons of my seniors about hard work. Yet my generation racks up debt the way our grandparents used to squirrel away pennies.

This comparison (her vs. her generation) is specious, but that’s not my main focus. The author here has done the usual idiotic things done by people who have no financial clue - “…my wardrobe is too full. The biggest life issue facing me when I open my closet door is whether to put on an Ann Taylor jacket or a Gap sweater,” and “I bought my first two-bedroom condo (in a marginal neighborhood) for $450,000 two years ago with 5 percent down and an interest-only loan for the next seven years (note to boss: please don’t ever fire me).”

Um…ok. Eve Conant has too many clothes and blames her spending habits on the lack of home-ec classes. Right. Basic economics on this level ain’t that hard. Take the money you have and subtract the money you spend. If it’s a negative number, spend less. This ain’t rocket science.

What’s more annoying is that she only talks about avoidable debt here - clothes, house purchase, etc. The real crushing debt factor for young people is, and will remain, student debt. It’s not just the student loans, it’s the expenses incurred while you’re a student, which either are private loans or credit card debt.

I’m no angel here - when I was poor as hell and living in Chicago in the early part of the decade (hey, remember that recession?) I ran up a good chunk of credit card debt. After I moved to San Francisco, I paid it off. Part of paying it off was things like knowing how to cook and not buying new shoes until they were dead, covering scuffs and tears with shoe polish so that I could make it to weddings without having to spend another hundred bucks. I’m wearing those particular shoes now - they’re ten years old, past time to replace them as dress shoes, but they’ll still cover my feet for other occasions.

This was a long-winded rant, one that I probably shouldn’t do very often because it’s unfocused, but I really hate it when someone like Conant takes her circumstances and thinks they apply to an entire generation. It cheapens the struggles of the people behind the statistics. Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to incur tons of debt to buy from Ann Taylor and take out an unaffordable mortgage. Some of us had to in order to pay the rent between jobs. And others - people who are less lucky than I - are suffering under the weight of money they paid for an education, an education that was their only shot at a life without payday loans, bodega vig-gatherers, and fifteen phone threatening phone calls a month from the gas company.

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This morning, Golden Gate Park:

Dozens of black-clad punks gathered on a hill, one patch-jacketed hippie.

A four-man multiracial tennis game, the server swearing in Chinese when the ball goes by.

Tai Chi at Stow Lake

A balding businessman in a black Miata, blasting “Everybody Dance Now” by C&C Music Factory.

Life in the City | 1 Comment »

I took a look at the American Book Review’s 100 Greatest Last Lines to Novels and…well, there are probably many better last lines to novels, if the lines themselves were to be read individually. This is really more like a list of last lines to books that critics, in general, think everyone else should read.

Writing | 1 Comment »

Second draft = done. 291 pages, 1.5 spacing, 11 point font, including chapter breaks. Nineteen chapters plus an intro and an epilogue, if you’re counting.

And, I really wish that I had written it as well as the quotes from this John D. MacDonald archive. He could write, that man.

Writing | No Comments »

Lost in all of the hubbub about the American election is the little border problem that’s going on between Ecuador and Colombia, with Hugo Chavez’s predictable inflammation.

Unlike most people who pontificate on this kind of thing, I’ve actually spent some time in the are in question. The problem appears to be that somebody from FARC was spending some time in the jungle near the Ecuador/Colombia border. News photos from the area show Ecuadorian troops boarding transports at the Lago Agrio airport. I spent a not-so-fun morning at the Lago Agrio airport a few years back - it’s a hot, sweaty place with one crummy snack bar and lots of muscular men with automatic weapons. I’d just come back from a four-day jungle stay, and was covered in bites, bumps, and mysterious rashes.

The area north of Lago Agrio is Agnostura - the densest jungle I’ve ever seen, a wild area of seasonal rivers, wetlands, creepers, caymans, anacondas, and…oil production. To get anywhere you have to use a helicopter or a boat, and you wouldn’t go anywhere unless you really wanted to. It’s dangerous and uncomfortable. Here’s the funny thing - the Ecuadorian government has no great love for FARC guerillas - they’re dangerous to ecotourism. Why did the Colombians smoke them out solo? If they were conducting operations so near the border, why not alert the Ecuadorians?

Something smells quite bad here. On the other hand, Hugo Chavez is a demagogue and an idiot. Him getting involved makes everything worse.

And, of course, the sad thing is that Ecuador is quite poor. Not desperately poor, but close. They don’t need this kind of crap.

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Honestly, I’m not. I haven’t been writing here because I’ve been writing everywhere else, where “everywhere else” means into a Word file on my battered Ibook. I’m 15 chapters (out of 22) into a chapter map and timeline for the Toilet Story (that’s what I’m calling it - this is a working title) and am going to finish that timeline/map tomorrow. Once that’s done, the Official 2nd Draft is done, which means that a few people get to see it and tell me things like “Dan, that character was dead fifty pages ago!” and “what’s with all of the hipster-bashing?”

Good times.

Writing | No Comments »

I revised and rewrote for a few hours today, getting through fifteen pages of what I am now comfortable calling The Toilet Caper Story. Great name, huh? When I started writing it, I called it New Story May 2006, but since that was nearly two years ago, I figured I’d pick something less demoralizing.

Anyway, when I finish this re-writing round, it should be in a stage where it’s mostly coherent and the plot actually follows a line, as opposed to jumping hither, yon, and to all of the places in between without much rhyme or reason. There are still characters I’m having trouble with, but I should have them nailed down within a couple of weeks.

In other words, my working plan is to finish this round of go-throughs by the first week of March (two weeks! Crap!), take a week to myself, then go for a third, polishing round and finish this sucker off. After that, I’ll go through the “trying to get it published” bit again, as well as submitting it as my master’s thesis. See, even if I can’t get this thing published, I’ll still have something physical as a reward!

Writing | 3 Comments »

I’m on page 185 of the first draft as I go through and rewrite. It’s a slow slog right now, and I am working on it as I read through comments I’ve received from my Elite Ninja Writing Group as I go through. One thing that I’ve noticed about rewriting: cutting is much more fun than adding scenes. Writing new scenes actually involves work, while cutting just involves highlighting and hitting the delete key.

And I just spent ten minutes randomly reading Internet junk…back to it.

Writing | No Comments »

I finished the final graphic novel of Strangers In Paradise last night at 12:30 am, and found myself kind of wistful. I started reading SIP on the recommendation of my brother a couple of years ago, and was kind of surprised to find myself really liking it. What’s truly amazing is that Terry Moore started publishing the thing in 2003 - that’s fourteen years of Francine and Katchoo and David.

And now we get no more of them, but it ended well. Thanks, Terry!

Writing | No Comments »

- Seattle is a fun city, especially if you rent a car and they upgrade you from “Chevrolet Cobalt or similar” to a spankin’-new Volvo with seat warmers.

- Coastal Kitchen is good lunch, Loki Cafe not-bad breakfast, and the Irish pub in Wallingford might be the best place in the world to sit by the fire and play cribbage on a cold and damp day. Fireplace? More pubs need those.

- People still know the Electric Slide? I never even knew it. I’m not sure whether this makes me cool or not.

- I just re-read Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and was surprised that my eyes got a little moist at the end. Either that or it was windy, and speaking of that…

- If you’re going to read Dickens, on a bench on a crisp, clear winter day with a view of the Tiburon Ferry and Angel Island and the smell of chowder in the air ain’t a bad way to do it.

- I finish school in May, which wouldn’t be anything to write home about (or blog about) except that it seemed to go by so fast. That said, going was the best decision I’ve made in years, for many, many reasons.

- There’s an election here in six days. My vote counts for the first time in, well, ever. Who am I supporting? Well, this person’s first name starts and ends with consonants, and this person’s last name starts and ends with vowels.

General | 3 Comments »

After looking through Business Week’s list of the cheapest-rent cities in the country, there’s one very good reason that those rents are cheap.

General | 3 Comments »

People who come into coffee shops with a leather jacket, expensive piercings (nose and expanded ears) tattoos, PowerBooks, and Iphones, who go right to a table, get some free water from the little water jug, then sit down and start doing stuff.

Never ordering a thing. That’s just plain rude. Similar things have happened both times I’ve been at my favorite cafe this week, and…I don’t get it. I’m writing about it now because the perpetrator in question easily has three grand worth of accessories on his person. Perhaps his trust fund just ran out…

General | No Comments »

Hey, I started to rewrite again today. Granted, it took me until three and I’ve barely spent an hour at it, but at least I’m back in the game after nearly a month of doing other junk. I often wonder how fast I could do this writing thing if I didn’t distract myself…

Writing | No Comments »

I went to the movies yesterday by myself. Depressing first sentence, huh? Really, it’s not that big of a deal; it was raining, I had some time to myself, and I managed to hit a matinee and a followup and bring my own food. AMC didn’t make much off of me.

Two films - No Country For Old Men and then Juno. I liked them both, for wildly different reasons, reasons that I’m going to try to quantify because I’m at lunch at work and I am still thinking about both of them;.

Country is like a western, sort of, if it was written by a total nihilist and given cinematography by God. It looks that good. It’s the Coen brothers at top form (right up there with Fargo and O Brother), and they are masters at creating mood. In this case, the mood was dark and dreary, fearful and somehow engaging, beautiful and ultimately questioning. And sad. The violence is more affecting than films I’ve seen with much higher body counts, because they manage to make each death mean something. Take the scene where the anti-hero pulls a guy over on the freeway and kills him right there. In forty seconds we start identifying with the victim - we know he’s going to die, he doesn’t. But he’s scared, and his fear comes through. Masterful.

Juno is a good movie to see afterwards. It’s light and funny in places, with dialogue that would make Nick Hornby and Elmore Leonard proud. Somehow along the way, it morphs from an airy comedy to something much more; it’s the cast, and the music (killer soundtrack!) and something about how it all fits together. Most importantly, it respects the audience; a lesson that every writer should learn.

General | 1 Comment »

I always like the places/cities blog meme. Cities I spent nights in in 2007

San Francisco, CA
Redwood City, CA
Los Altos, CA
North Shore, Oahu
Hololulu, Oahu, HI
Lima, Peru
La Paz, Bolivia
Camping on the trail, Bolivia
Random Salt Flat Towns, Bolivia
Cuzco, Peru
Aguas Calientes, Peru
Ollantaytambo, Peru
Death Valley, CA (camping)
New York, NY (night spent in JFK airport - fun!)
San Pedro Sula, Honduras
Copan, Honduras
Sonageura, Honduras
Trujillo, Honduras
Ceiba, Honduras
Guerneville, CA
Reno, NV
Carson Wilderness, CA

Notice the relative lack of domestic air travel?

No weddings in 2007. 2008 bodes different.

General | 2 Comments »

I swore I’d stay away from the computer today, other than to use it for music-listening purposes. But, it’s December 30th, I’ve been puttering around, and I had a few things I wanted to note before the end of the year. Warning: This is pure navel-gazing bloggery, and if it’s not the kind of thing that you like to read, please move on.

• I did more traveling this year than I have since 2001-2002, and while I still love wandering around and seeing new things, it’s more draining than I’d remembered, and sometimes creature comforts are nice.
• Writing is hard, hard work. Anyone who says differently probably can’t write.
• That said, when you get it right, it’s a total joy.

That’s it, really. Nothing too deep, but it’s been a pretty amazing year, full of challenges, joy, and lots of laughing. I’ll take that and run with it into 2008.

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