fine whine

Well, I have failed. I had good intentions to write my NaNo novel but never got around to making that a reality. I could list off a whole bunch of excuses starting with disenfranchisement from the election and continuing on with the whole lack of an overall plot until the twelfth, but really I never had the motivation in the first place for the sci-fi novel I’d planned about killers from the fourth (spatial) dimension. I chalked up 3446 words before giving up completely, most of that in protracted expository dialogue (and I typed another 1359 words of notes about the book).

Hoping to salvage the month, three days ago I began work on another novel, one nearer and dearer to my actual life. This time around I came up with 14,703 words (no notes, though) of musings on my life as of late, particularly about my dreams. I meant dreams in both common definitions of “nighttime imagination things” and “hopes and aspirations”, and I wrote out a lot of personal stuff, briefly and occasionally fictionalized, about those topics. I talked about jobs a lot, and also a bit of my childhood. It was pretty good stuff, and I’ll likely post parts of it somewhere here on my website, eventually. There are a lot of misspellings and other errors in there, though, since I typed almost all of it on my Palm with my fancy new keyboard.

I must admit that I really like typing on my Palm. It’s just such a neat idea, and the keyboard never ceases to amuse me as an example of really good engineering. If ever I am faced with another typing assignment I’ll probably forego the computers altogether and use this instead, I like it that much.

As for the next Nano, I intend to try again and win it. I have another year to prepare, and this time I think I’ll make an actual outline, instead of a paragraph for the first section, another for the last, and some ellipsis dots between them. Failing that, I’ll hack the contest. The last good idea I had before stopping thinking about Nano altogether was to write a Groundhog’s day scenario wherein a good amount of the action is repeated and thus the text could be duplicated. Of course the devil would be in the details, particularly the ones that set apart the iterations, but creativity should help that. I thought I’d have this happen to a small group of people (researchers in deep space or current-day rogue scientists not unlike Michael Crichton’s guys in Timeline), one or two of whom would have a sense of deja vu each time but never the same ones. The protagonist(s) would have a tough time getting persistent information in such a scenario and the solution would need to be clever. I could even go about doing this thusly: write a story to the best of my ability and divide its eventual word count into 50,000 and repeat as necessary. So it’s sort of cheating — I’m willing to give it a shot if it pushes me out of short story territory once and for all.

This is not to say that I’ve had a month of bad writing. I’m slowly catching myself up on the daily updates, and some of them are worth looking back upon, I think. For me, at least. After all, I wrote some five thousand words on this page for the month, so can I count those too? That would just about push me over the half way mark if I combined every word I typed in the month, I think.

Well, there’s always next year.

Back when I was planning out my PTO I’d picked today as the token day to finish out my novel. I had no way of knowing then that by the time I would reached this day I would have already given up on writing not one but two separate novels. This is in fact the case, as I posted on this Nano forum post, excerpted below in its entirety for those who do not want to read the rest of the conversation or are merely too lazy to click links:

I’ve decided to throw in the towel. I lost motivation about midway through the second day, plugged along with a couple hundred words of easy expository dialogue here and there until the 12th when I had a late night revelation of what I thought was a plot. I furtively wrote it all down (I wasn’t at home nor near a computer) but in retrospect it’s really only the skeletons of the beginning and ending. I’m missing the whole middle.

So I wrote nothing until Thursday the turkey day, when I conceded that a book I didn’t care to write would be tough to make someone else care about reading, and I started over with a very slightly fictionalized account of my life, and where I am with careers and dreams and whatnot.

I milked a good 14,000 words out of that before losing steam, and today I am throwing in the towel. Last year I wrote 48,000 words about not being able to write, but this year I don’t feel like mustering the effort to do those other 30,000 (if I keep the fourth thousand words I did for “Killers from the fourth dimension”). I’m sad to do it but unless I cheat I can’t win this year, and it’s a big step for me that I’m not going to try to cheat, I think. After all, I usually resort to cheating in video games before I give up.

I didn’t care enough to even name my protagonist. For that matter I didn’t even use a placeholder: I merely referred to him exclusively with personal pronouns.

Moreover I did consider cheating. What a hollow victory that would be, to claim that I’d won a contest judged on the honor system with no prizes other than personal satisfaction and individual pride. I could’ve easily found fifty thousand words to post, as I had already sized up the words I’d posted here this month. I even considered tracking down all the emails that I’d sent and replied going back to the first, but before I got too far along that shady path I saw the wisdom of my ways and posted my concession. I’m disappointed with myself and feel very defeated, but I’ll move on easily enough, I think.

I have a much greater respect now for the people who succeeded in writing not only novels this month but novels in general. For now I think I’m a short story author. Do I even have a novel in me? We’ll know next year, I guess. Time to play some video games and start the deluge of library reserves that have been stored up for the whole month, I suppose.

I posted some 7,634 words today to my secret NaNo blog/word counter. Almost every one of them was typed on my Palm so I can’t say for sure they’re all from today, but either way that’s not unimpressive considering the lack of progress and motivation that has characterized this venture this month.

The pieces were all in place for one of those rags to riches tales, of my triumphant ascent from faceless drone to a high salaried position behind a desk in a corner office. I had even worked a couple stints in various mail rooms, come to think of it. But the signs were wrong, the pieces dashed. I was back at square one, albeit with a bunch of clothes I’d gotten pretty cheap and a discount card that was probably good for some time yet.

So begins yet another chunk of my second stab at a novel for this month, a last-ditch effort to salvage NaNo and come out with my dignity semi-intact.

1,407 words today… I’m trying to be optimistic, and verbose at the same time. Neither is working out too well at the moment.

So it’s the day after Thanksgiving, and I took the day off. Not for any particular reason or activity (Jessica needed to work today, after all) but just because I could.

So what should I be doing? Today’s a big day for shopping, but I want nothing. Today I should be thankful for stuff, which I guess I am but not so much that I need to write it down.

Writing. That’s what I should be doing, as I am several tens of thousands of words behind on my novel. So writing I did, starting an entirely new ‘novel’ that is mainly recollections of my dreams, some fictionalized and others not, and woven around them are contemplative pieces about my hopes and aspirations, at least career-wise. This is pretty high-concept, I must admit, especially considering that my first attempt at a novel this month was about “Killers from the fourth dimension”.

I still think that book has some legs (as they say) but I don’t really feel like getting behind it at the moment and giving it a big shove.

I’m not generally one to pick favorites. You can look at it as a sign of great integrity or great insecurity, but either way I just can’t consistently a shortlist of the entertainment greats (or colors or foods or anything else for that matter). That said, to claim to be “not generally one to pick favorites” often leads to explanations longer than this one and after that, bewildered expressions. To save people the trouble, I often pluck titles out of the air as “favorites” just to grease the wheels of polite conversation and discourse.

Movies-wise I generally champion 1997’s science-fiction/anti-fascism epic/spoof/actioner Starship troopers, more for the reactions it gets than for any actual affinity I have for the misunderstood gem.

That said, I do love the film.

I’ve never settled on a token favorite music group or album, however. Mostly when I’m pressed I just mention the ones I’m borrowing from the library, at long as they’re moderately well known. Other times I just think back upon my collection and name names that pop up more than a couple times. In doing either I often omit the discs that I really do enjoy, oftentimes much more than the recent ones or the multiples.

After all, the Crash test dummies have been trying out a lot of new things on their more recent albums, but they’re leaving out the stuff that makes it worth hearing.

But I digress. Today when I was walking around I was happy to be listening to Visual Audio Sensory Theater by VAST, which you’ve discovered if you’re lucky and which you like if your tastes run parallel to mine.

Well, Lars Ulrich likes VAST too, but don’t hold that against either of us.

I really like this album, and all the more so for having discovered it all on my own. Way back when I worked a pair of jobs for a summer, one of which saw me clocking in at midnight and out just around dawn. My commute, as it were, was about a twenty five minute drive, several miles of which was through Sand Run Park, a two-lane blacktop path through some of the most scenic bits of the Cuyahoga River valley.

At one point the road dipped through a river. I usually slowed down for that bit.

I knew those roads very, very well. By the end (and once I knew the way traffic and the deer worked) I was able to drive through the park with only my parking lights lit, and occasionally did so without incident. Being a foolish teenager I sometimes would do the same whilst steering with my knees, employing equal amounts of leverage and stupidity. But none of this matters. It was when I put aforementioned album into my player today that I recalled the first time I played it, moving stealthily through the park.

The disc, for those who don’t know it, starts slowly and quietly with some strings that build up a sweet theme until abruptly switching over to a crunchy electric guitar riff. Then it starts to rock, and with great samples and instrumentation thrown in for the ride it makes for a good album all the way through. It hit me hard the first time I heard it and it sounds no worse these so many years later.

That isn’t the part that matter so much either. The greatest part is the fact that it was a complete surprise to me. Back in my hometown there was this little shop called The Record Exchange that had two great bins of discs priced twenty five cents to two fifty, and I looted it often in those days. By now I have probably fifty or sixty such CDs littering my collection, and to be sure many of them are trash.

The occasional one does stand out, and such was the case with VAST’s debut disc, which found its way into my hands as a four-for-a-dollar promo disc in a barely-labeled envelope.

Sometime since I’ve given that one away and replaced it with the genuine issue, and that was the one to which I was listening today. Today when all of this came back to me and I decided to write it down.

So, well, thanks, Record Exchange.

To say that I was discouraged today about my so-called novel would be an understatement. To say that “I am not going to pretend that I’m not doing so well with my novel.” as I did Monday is a bad double negative, and in fact an incorrect statement. I’d meant to say that I wasn’t going to pretend that I wasn’t doing badly with my novel, which in fact I was. Doing badly with my novel, that is.

I am, of course writing this several days from the date that is above this. I left this as a draft and returned to it only after having given up on said novel, attempting to write another (which I also abandoned) and having written two other entries about such (this and this).

This whole lack of motivation/bad novel thing did not make me happy. As such, in Monday’s entry I pretty much trashed Bruce Sterling’s Zenith angle, and he dropped by my site within hours to leave me words of encouragement.

Seeing his name in my email (I get a copy of every comment before you ever get to read them), I was totally deflated. Here was a guy whose book I’d said was “very, very bad” and he had seen it. In retrospect the book’s not very, very bad, but it’s not great. I wrote the words in question mere minutes after putting down the book, the last chapter of which I’d sped through due to annoyance and a nasty headache.

For what it is, and that is a fictionalized look at events parallel to the paradigm shift (sorry, just had to use that phrase) up to and after the 9-11 attacks from the perspective of a practicing geek, the book works. It probably feels more dated now that some of the principal political players have been re-cast as evil, and all the more so since there hasn’t been any more major terrorist happenings in the intervening years. At least, not on American soil, where it matters.

So Bruce, thanks for stopping by and for the kind words. I didn’t hate your book, and I will in fact pick up others from the library.

Also, in the intervening time, another author dropped by and weighed in on the issue. He’s Pauly D, author of Consumer Joe (soon to be made into a feature-length blockbuster film, or perhaps just a TV show) and he’s stopped by here before. Nice to see you again, Paul! Now I feel bad for aggregating his blog and never visiting it to leave comments.

Shockingly enough these two aren’t even the only published authors to have visited my little corner of the web lately. Lee Goldberg stopped by and commented on my entry about his book Unsold TV pilots. At least I didn’t insult him too.

Incidently, I’d deleted that comment accidently, but was able to recreate it from my emails. Sorry about that, Lee. Stop by again some time, okay?

We had a big meeting today at work, consuming almost my whole day. The idea of it was to get all of the teams together to do team-building exercises as well as to have, on paper and projected on the wall, very generalized overviews of processes that are not yet set in stone. Good stuff, that. Cynicism aside, I had in fact been looking forward to this meeting, in a way. After all, once it was over we were supposed to be all chummy with our teammates (some new, some I hadn’t even met) and clear on what everybody’s responsibilities were now, in light of the recent firings (eliminations, departures, whatever) and the results of our long efficiency project.

Well, it was a nice idea anyway. We did cover a little bit of that material, but unfortunately my department is the one that always gets exceptions made for it, and it looks like now will be no different. So much of it is still up in the air, also, but at least I got a heads up on the next batch of abbreviations and lists that will matter to the higher ups (we’ve got the 3 Cs, the 9 Ps, 10 of something else, and so on) that won’t change much of my job at all.

Interspersed with the thankfully short presentations (I’ll give them credit for that — the organizers knew how to mix things up to not bore us too much with any given thing at once) were a number of activities that were meant to bring us closer together as a team and teach us things at the same time. The first activity was one of the cheesiest, and an exercise in frustration for me as I suggested immediately a solution to save us at least one step that we ended up doing anyway. I think my mistake was telling one or two people, not barking it out as an order to all fifteen of us.

The activity was thus: We were given a tennis ball for the whole group and we were to stand in a circle. Somebody would start the ball by throwing it to somebody else, calling out that person’s name. We needed to do this for everybody in under thirty seconds. I reasoned, as soon as we stood up and before we started tossing, that we should just each pass it to the person next to us, but instead we threw it back and forth like all the other teams. The people in charge then said we needed to cut our time to ten seconds, and suddenly somebody else had the idea to pass it my way. So it goes. Then things got to be absurd, as we all took turns touching the ball without even passing it and ultimately huddled around it and shouted each others’ names simultaneously. By that time the whole thing was an exercise in stop watch button pressing, and I think we came in second place. Not that it matters. I returned to my desk annoyed at myself for being annoyed that my initial idea was ignored.

The second exercise was odd, if not almost stupid. We were to line up on either side of a length of PVC pipe and, having raised it into the air with two fingers of each hand, lower it to the ground. Think about that one for a minute. Then, ponder the fact that they didn’t account for larger or smaller teams, giving the group of five the same length pipe as my group of fifteen. Oops. So we did manage to do it, but not before wasting at least five minutes trying to get it to a good starting position for the short people. “Lowering” it is an exercise in, well, something, since the physical act of holding it up opposes the idea of lowering it. In the end I and the guy on the other end wound up barking out orders to the people in the middle who were not as low as the others at any given time, which worked fine but taught us little about teamwork. It was a trivial exercise, that, since the pipes bent at the person who needed to drop. Oddly enough it took a person on the end to figure that out. You can make of that what you will.

The third activity was the one that haunts me to this day. We were given a regulation sized bag of marshmallows and another of spaghetti noodles and the task of combining them, and only them, into the tallest possible structure. Never, ever, ever try this with fifteen people. This is a three person task, six at best. As it was we had too many people and not enough to do. I managed to not be named team captain, as the others nearly unanimously picked the bigger, louder guy. Only two people wanted me, with my engineering background or whatever, and they were the quiet ones. As such I got to be chief builder and stay on task the whole time instead of moving around between all the other teammates and ask if they needed any help or whatever else our captain did. I think that some of the others knew they were redundant so they tried to innovate with the materials, and soon we began receiving pre-built noodle/marshmallow pieces with only half a marshmallow. Never, ever, ever split your marshmallows. It’s not worth conserving marshmallows if you lose stability, which is precisely what happened to our structure. We ended up shoring up two of the sides with outriggers (well built ones, I must say) and achieved a mere 39 total inches which was the tallest, but still a defeat for us.

We took the wrong approach, I think. Instead of sitting down and designing first we tore into the bags and started spearing marshmallows. I am as guilty in this as anybody else. We also did not use the spaghetti as best we could. I know now that we should have split the majority of the pieces down to 70% of their length so as to be able to use full-length noodles for crossbars diagonally and the shorter pieces for square edges on all sides. As such we could probably have even gone a step further and built cubes that could be independently stacked, since any given one should be pretty darn stable.

I fear I am going to need to stop myself from buying a bag of marshmallows and another of spaghetti just to try for myself. Just to know. I just need to know…

Other highlights of the day were some new verbs that I’d never heard before, at least not outside of the usual noun usage: to “bucket” and also to “hindsight”. “Hindsighting” is pretty obvious if not just wrong. “Bucketing” is a practice most people would consider “Lumping” or perhaps even “Pigeonholing”, both of which are good verbed nouns but already established ones, darn it. People, stop verbing nouns!

On a related note, one reason I didn’t find myself liking The zenith angle was Bruce Sterling’s constant reference to “melting smokestacks” or something like that. I am utterly unfamiliar with that metaphor, and haven’t yet found a suitable explanation of it. Did he make it up, or am I just missing out on some jargon? I was, after all, the last person to find out about “going forward” so this could well just be a gap in my knowledgebase.

Well, I am not going to pretend that I’m not doing so well with my novel. I need to write over 45,000 words in the next week.

On the upside, I just read Bruce Sterling’s The zenith angle and it was really, really bad. Not as bad as what I am writing, but Bruce is a pro. In a way it was a little inspiring.

Tonight I made the mistake of getting Northfork for us to watch. Big mistake.

If I had paid to watch this, I think I would have demanded my money back plus interest. I’d reserved this from the library because I had an interest in it, at least the movie that I thought it would be. The trailer (which preceded Greenfingers and Focus on DVD, if I recall correctly) seemed to me to be a sardonic look at a 1950s small town (very small) that was being relocated due its positioning right in the middle of what was to be a new reservoir, and the story of the men who were faced with such a task. James Woods among them, even. That movie I wanted to watch. Instead I got this high-concept thing with an ugly Daryl Hannah and Anthony Edwards as a four (or more) eyed freak with wooden hands about chasing the so-called unknown angel, and the mischevious little boy who may just be a cherub in disguise. There’s much, much more to it than that but none of it matters, let alone makes sense, and I think what the Polish brothers meant to instill a sense of wonder creates bewilderment instead. Bewilderment, followed by frustration if not dementia.

Avoid this movie. I cannot think of another Daryl Hannah movie that I have watched (save for Blade Runner) let alone one that I liked, but if this is how she is to be remembered her prospects are dim indeed. Nick Nolte pops up, too, and frankly he hasn’t done too much that bowled me over either. Yet these two names are likely selling points. Go figure. Avoid this movie!