fine whine

I've been reading lately in part because I enjoy reading and also because the library's doing their summer reading club, whereby I stand the slight chance of winning things in a drawing. Entries are based on the number of books I read.

I recall the reading clubs of my youth, which netted me many a free McDonald's hamburger or Pizza Hut personal pan pizza. Back then I would sometimes play one local library against the other, checking the same book from both and getting credit twice, and other times I'd claim I'd read books I hadn't finished. Guilt aside, the only problem with the latter approach was when the librarian would quiz me on a random book, and occasionally I'd find myself fabricating a book based on the cover image and the rest of my imagination, or another book altogether. I wasn't caught once.

Now, for the adult program, I don't even need to summarize the books or give a report. All I need do to enter the drawing is to write the title, my name and numbers, and throw it in a box. What could be easier?

Now while I am tempted to enter books I'd read before the contest began, or books I have at home, I've been trying to be somewhat honest with this. Every entry records my library card number, and it is probably trivial for the librarians to check if I have, in fact, checked out a book I've claimed to read. In the spirit of total disclosure, though, I've begun checking out books after I've read them, though only one so far: Cory Doctorow's Down and out in the Magic Kingdom. Then again, I read it after the contest began.

I read it online in minutes here and there, in a tiny browser window at the bottom of my screen. It was an easy enough read, and though heavily Disney-otaku-esque (it takes place in the park, after all) it was a fairly enjoyable book/HTML page. I read it in less than a day, and still got my work done. It was a light day.

Cory also offers his other books in free digital formats, and I'd attempted to start Eastern Standard Tribe but wasn't able to focus on it that day and still get my work done.

It did not help that the latter book is not conventionally linear, but two parts of the same story that alternate chapters. In the end it all fits together, but it's difficult to begin, particularly when I'm only able to read one or two lines at at time. Not to worry, I realized, as I had just reserved both novels from the library.

Well, since then I have read EST and it too was enjoyable enough. But that's not what this is about.

In Down and out the concept of 'deadheading' is mentioned, a form of cryogenic sleep or some such preservation of living people over long periods of time. In that book people do it as a form of one-way time travel, waiting around until the timer stops or something interesting triggers them to thaw and rejoin the living and breathing.

Another book I've read, Iron sunset by Charles Stross, mentions 'deadheading' but in a sense more like its current (well, current as of Abagnale's Catch me if you can) airline meaning--namely, a pilot who is a passenger--though only in the sense that it is for travel. Stross's deadheads are passengers on interstellar liners who paid for the economy class and are deep-frozen or otherwise in stasis. The richer passengers get to experience the luxuries of the ship and so on and so forth.

I just found it odd that both authors used the same word. This is by far not the only time two writers have 'coined' the same thing, nor will it be the last. Like I said, it was just odd, particularly since I'd read the books so closely together.

Personally, I'd use the term 'hiber-nauts'. Or, if you're a burgeoning writer, you can. Without the quotes and the hyphen, if you're bold enough. Just drop me a line, okay?

One of these days I might write a story about that sort of thing, and then, well, I'll use it. Which will make me look like the copycat, if the hypothetical burgeoning writer used it first. Such is life.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

The word 'blog' can in fact be used as a noun or a verb. When used as a noun, it names something that receives, organizes, and publishes posts. The verb is the action of posting to the noun.

Individual bits of 'blog' are in fact called 'entries' or 'posts', not 'blogs'. This is an important distinction, and it is all the more imperative that this is made clear before blogging is made mandatory.

Preliminary research indicates that 'blog' makes a poor adjective or other modifier.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION.

First, allow me to apologize for addressing you, the readers, directly. I've tried in the past to keep this impersonal and detached, but I feel like being apologetic today. Bear with me, please, or come back tomorrow when I write about some movies.

I've given up on trying to get myself entirely caught up to the present day, site-wise. Stored in a safe location I have unfinished posts from many days of the previous two months, but I don't even have blank drafts after last Tuesday and I don't want to fabricate any. Chalk it up to the winter blues or whatever but I'm just not going to mess with it.

That said, once I get my computer situation settled (my hard drive died two Mondays ago, losing a lot of things) and my Palm re-synchronized, I do still intend to publish, on their appropriate days, my B-Fest comments and whatnot. I'll point that out when it happens.

Lately I've watched some decent DVDs, and I'll eventually give them a nod as well. Overall, though, I just don't have enough to talk about to fill up another seven days that I can't just say in the coming days and weeks. I had some vaguely timely thoughts last week, but other than wanting to talk about morons paying hundreds of dollars for goldfish surgery, I've long forgotten any of it.

Rather than fabricate that last week, though, I'm going to be up front about skipping it entirely.

Why, why is this, you may ask? Why am I not diligently updating my site, my memory dump for posterity (and because I forget things)? I was so good about it last year, posting something, whether it be a silly one-liner or a silly (three-liner) haiku, or an actual bit of insight (some of which were vaguely worth reading).

Well, I was good about it until last November. I think I got bummed out about failing to write my novel, and haven't gotten back into the swing of typing inside little boxes since. I'm slowly publishing the dregs and the drafts of January so it will eventually , but last week will remain blank.

So thank you, dear readers, for sticking with me. It can only get better from here.

I've got something of an entertainment buzz going. Now that Nano's over and my vacation hold at the library is off (despite only writing four or five days last month I never turned my hold off) the good stuff is just rolling in.

I've been cracking up flipping through Interior desecrations by the very funny Jim Lileks. It's possible that I'm just tired but some of that stuff is side-splitting. Check out this book if you have any sense at all of taste or humour.

Last night I watched Suddenly, a thriller from 1955 that is more known for having Frank Sinatra as a villain than for being a pretty good movie that gives far more screen time to Sterling Hayden than it does to ol' blue eyes. This is not to say that Frankie doesn't turn in a good performance. He turns out to be a pretty decent psycho killer out to make a cool half mil to off the president, but pretty much everybody is good. I haven't seen the other film on the DVD, ostensibly with Frank again as a heroin addict or something like that, but Suddenly is well worth watching. Then again, I like to watch Sterling Hayden. If you have no idea who he is, go out now and track down The killing (one of Stanley Kubrick's forgotten early films about which I have written previously). It's a darn good movie and you shouldn't regret watching it. I don't.

I'm also happy to have finally stumbled across the excellent drama The Wire that HBO's been showing for a couple seasons now. Though it treads on the same turf as Homicide: life on the streets it's a different beast altogether. It's dense, clever, well-written, dark, gritty, and even funny at times, and I'm enjoying it immensely. Altogether I've done well to have waited and had all of these hit me at once.

Harshing the buzz considerably though is the continued stupidity of HBO's DVD people who cannot seem to consistently stick a chapter stop at the end of the opening credits. Why is this so difficult? I cannot be the only person in the world who does not want to sit through the entire theme song every fifty minutes when I'm devouring these shows. I am enjoying this show so much but when I watch five episodes in one night that means I need to fast forward four times (I did want to hear it all the way through, once) and tomorrow night I'll likely need to do it eight more times too if I know the way that I watch these things.

Then again I didn't pay for this (thank you Columbus Metropolitan Library) but I was thinking that I would probably be willing to pay an extra dollar or two (not more than two though) when I do buy discs of a show if it had chapter stops after the opening credits. At least until everybody figures out what the producers of M*A*S*H seem to already know. DVD makers, just put a chapter stop after the opening credits, please, damnit. This just gets to me for some reason.

On the upside, though, now I have a challenge. 'Roundabout the end of episode three ("The buys") I heard a familiar tune, albeit in an unfamiliar fashion. The song was one that I first encountered on the highly underrated soundtrack album for Batman forever called "The hunter gets captured by the game" and as far as I had known until today the song was done first by Tracy Thorn backed up by Massive Attack.

How wrong I was. Though that album is no stranger to cover tunes (Lou Reed's "Passenger" done by INXS's Michael Hutchence comes to mind) I'd never considered this song, one of my favorites of all time, to be one. Well, the one in the show sure didn't sound like Massive Attack and I immediately (and correctly) inferred that the version I knew and loved was likely a cover, but this one could well be also.

So I went out on the web, and I'm still not sure what I heard. Unfortunately "The Wire" is too common to help out on a search, and the HBO forums don't have a good enough search either. I'm pretty sure nobody else has asked about the song on there, and I moved my search over to the good old allmusic guide instead. There I discovered that the song was written by none other than Smokey Robinson and it was probably first performed by the Marvelettes. Unfortunately it's also been done by another five or six artists, too. So now the hunt begins.

I enjoy the hunt.

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.