Of Timesheets and Where-I'm-Business-Traveling

1-

Every two weeks we receive a super helpful email reminding us it's been...two weeks since the last email, which means we're all about to be paid. So turn in those timesheets, baby. (Everyone in the building has a timesheet. Everyone. Even though 99% of us are salaried, like me.)

And every two weeks there's a Platitude or a Fun Fact just below the "don't forget your timesheets" reminder.

So about a month ago the whole shebang irritated me (maybe I hadn't popped a cold can of Diet Coke open in a while, maybe I was pissed from a conference call I don't know), and I answered the fact with a fact of my own, and 'replied all'. It's now expected of me, and ya know, that's fine.

So here was this morning's teaspoonful of useless knowledge:

FACT: Women blink nearly twice as much as men.


And here was my reply:

BACKGROUND TO THE AFOREMENTIONED FACT: Men have no awareness at all of how many times it is they blink.

If asked to verify a count, they ask their wives for help; they then blink slowly, deliberately, ponderously, making blinking look like a really big, important and ponderous job – so their wives will see how hard they work, doing all of that pseudo-cerebral blinking.

Not that I’m bitter or anything...


2-

I'm about to begin my on-the-job travels. Here's where I'll be going in the next couple of months - Louisiana, Indiana, New Mexico and South Dakota.

Ummmm....yeah. None of you guys are around any of those places, are ya?


I didn't think so. Bummer.

Golf Channel and Poast Toastee Days, and Other Things.

My brain is currently Sponge City with editing and thinking through and waking up at three a.m. or so with thoughts like Oh shit of course...that's where that one sentence I wrote on the pad a couple of months ago fits in....

But it's working, so I'm not fussing, but only saying.

Anyway, a couple of things have been getting me through this...(Whirl-Word-Alert)...rewriting abyss, in no particular order:

1 - Going out with JB and drinking wine at our neighborhood bar(s). We wish they were pubs, and thus better, but they're not, so there ya go.

2 - Sex.

3 - Music. Right now I have Tommy Bolin's Post Toastee on repeat.

4 - The camaraderie of you guys.

5 - Rereading favorite novels at light speed and barely taking them in, just kind of feeling and scanning and flipping the pages, and remembering I love to read, and thinking about why.

6 - Watching shows from Ramsay to History Channel shows to CBS Monday night sitcoms.
And watching...

7 - Golf. Yeah, that's what I said. Golf. I love golf - love watching it, love golf courses, love hearing about golf and watching golfers fight themselves and the courses they're playing to win. I suck at the sport- look like I'm playing mad croquet when I play. Took a bucket full of lessons several years ago and the pro kept saying Your form is good your swing looks good your play will follow or something like that, but no, mad croquet ensued and ensued. But next year, I'm trying again.

Meanwhile, I'm a watcher. And an editor of myself.

How about you all? How do you structure time to skirt around and aid and abet what you're working to do with your writing?

Editing Eye Opener From Hell

Well.

Well well well.

I worked and worked this winter and by late February, I thought I had finally finished my novel, and I do mean, finished it. Done. Finito. Edited and hammered down. It had, after all, been two and a half years, and I'd really worked to a schedule in the last months, and a grid of sorts, notes in order, clipboard of scattered stuff, finally battened down.

Anyway, in June I began rereading, as I have now faced the reality that my word count is too high, which was no biggie in the first four chapters. Most of it was what I wanted it to be. Maybe edited 1K out of those first four, and honed parts, here and there.

BUT. I just finish a re-read of Chapter 6, which I now see is Chapter 5. And while the bulk of it is intact, I have boatloads of notes all over those pages. Virtually rewrote the first two.

It took me four full months to get to the point I could look at this manuscript and really see it and read it, in a more-than-rote way.

How long does it take you guys to get to the place in your heads where you can edit, and not feel pain, or at least be able to see what you're doing?

Orwell vs. Huxley

Robin Jr. sent me this link. SO worth seeing.


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Freddie is Stacy...

...and her new link is on the bloglist on the right.

It's a fine site, she's a fine friend, and it's a fine thing, knowing Freddie is Stacy. (Also, someday, we'll be able to say 'we knew her when', when she scores the music for a major motion picture, or a breakout Indie film. Just watch and see. Or listen, really...)

Writing

Some rambles on my way to the point of a private place to write:

Three summers ago I began writing sketches and scenes and making notes about a novel that had been in my head for a while. I'd written a lot in my teens and early twenties, had been told I was good, I floundered with the idea of writing, and life went on.

Several months later, I found Sparky's blog and I hovered and read it, sent in an opening, sent more stuff, and what was the most key for me, began doing the writing exercises. They were great for whittling word count, for finding and honing the point of a scene. And sometimes we could send in a scene from our work. Oftentimes, this gave me the opportunity to sift through notes and actually write the scene that had been murking around inside my thoughts but had never quite made it to paper. Or laptop file. Sparky doesn't know this, but he quite literally helped me write my novel.

And I found you guys. It was, and is, wonderful.

Other excellent things happened along the way, that seemed just fun or just work or just something when they happened, but all came together as a way of spurring on the work...

....Chris had a month long writing exercise a while back, and it helped me focus and write one of the most emotionally difficult chapters in my novel, a climactic chapter two-thirds of the way through, because I didn't wanna let her down and not write. I wrote quickly, almost automatically, to get that done, and it's one of the besy chapters in my novel. (I've sent this out to several lit mags as a stand-alone story, and while it wasn't published, I received several personal motes back along the lines of - it made several cuts - loved the voice, the rhythm - loved almost all of it, really, it just needed... - that kind of thing. The point is, if I'd had the time to hone it to a story and sent it out to more than seven or eight places, I'd have done the deal.)

...Shona had a writing exercise several months later, and it gave me a reason to finish another sketched out and difficult chapter.

...I've read for some of you, and some of you have read for me. The knowledge that someone is waiting for your pages is huge. It's an anchor.

(There are more things to go here, some hopefully helpful to you, but I have to go to work, so I'll add later.)

When I wrote...I have a boatload of pictures and I was gonna put more on, but if I did, and explained them all and how they fit into the woven fiction of the novel I've written, and the ones to come, I might as well just set those suckers up as combo plan picture-books/memoirs, another genre entirely, and make it the truth instead of The Truth, and that would be much too much information, and besides, I think the best fiction lends universality to the concrete, the mundane and the every day, so if I send too many pictures along I think I'd be undermining my writing.

And I've seen things on some of your blogs that are so damn good, I've thought about the words being squandered - not that we ourselves aren't a killer good audience, but still.

I mentioned about being on the fence before and part of what I meant was - I think we're walking along the top of a fence line when we write on our blogs.

I'm going to start a private blog where I place things I may want to use later. Or sooner. A test place, a place to post things so that they feel 'solidified', accomplished - this place won't require comments, it won't require anything unless requested. What I'm saying is, I think we could all do with a place that no one can visit without permission - so we can post things and write and prep and instead of being a distraction from the writing we should be doing - which is - after all - how and why we know each other - it will be the place we can post writing to look over and think over, and, if we want, we can ask for comments - if we don't, we won't ask and won't receive. It's not another layer of work - instead, it's a place to help us focus. A place to practice or try out voice or structure.

Either way, it's a place to put something up and get work done without any way the world can read in, before we're ready.

What do you think?

The Blondster's photo shoot - pics are here

It was happy camper time for mama, seeing these, except for the part where I wondered how in the hell I ever made this child. If you have a minute, please go check the website of this excellent artist, Rachel Reilly, and see some of my baby's pictures from her recent trip to England.


Rachel Reilly's website

P.S. I tried to make this a click-able link, but failed and succeeded. I'm about to email someone to help me fix this....

I'm on the fence...

...about a couple of writing things right now, but one of them does not concern the cathartic Drive-Up-The-Highway Day I had to myself in my hometown last Friday; just me and my camera and a list of places to re-see. (Pictures below.)

I pulled off the interstate in the 'good part of town' to take the first picture - of the last house I owned when I lived in the suburbs of the city.



And it was the first time I ever noticed that this house was only a mile or so from the first full-time job I had - a crap job I fucking hated in a large office building that was part of the 'development' my tony little neighborhood bordered.



The thing is, though, the me that moved into that house in the mid 1990's didn't wanna think about the me that had worked that crap job in the mid 1970's, so I'd shut down vision on that building for close to three years. Shopped at a grocery store almost right across the street. Had a membership at a ‘fitness and swim club’ only one stoplight away. But even with this proximity, I'm not exaggerating when I say that the first time I saw how close my Crap-Job-Life had been to my Nice-House-Life, geographically speaking, was last Friday, when I turned off I-64 onto the exit ramp, and saw the building when I looked over at the outskirts of my former neighborhood. (Recently it's come to my attention that I've had a habit of slicing up my life times into episodes that seem on the surface to be completely unrelated, but knowing something analytically and seeing something starkly laid out on the road in front of me was, as they say, a whole different ball a wax.)

I hadn't put that building on my list of pictures to take, even though it has a minor scene in my first novel. I hadn't put that house in the novel, but I'd promised the Blondster I'd take the picture for her, which was the only reason I even looked right when I drove near that exit. I was going on past, except I couldn't, because I'd promised to take a picture, so that exit ramp scene (of sorts) turned into one of those 'Ha! Made Ya Look!' moments.

From there, I pulled back onto the interstate and drove to the far side of the county, a place where I hid out one summer and turned into someone else.



And then I drove back to the old parts of the backside of downtown where I once had a home with a sad man...




And to a house that hosted endless parties a while back, and to some other houses in that neighborhood that I lived in or halfway lived in, depending on the particular address.



..and to the suburbs close to that area, where I lived when I was a kid, and where I was subject to bouts of mystical thinking that both got me through and kept me unengaged.



It was cathartic, visiting these in one day and on a purposeful timeline; I coulda been my own Greek thingie up on stage…maybe had a walk-on part in one of their plays (a la the Greek version of Pink Floyd, or vice versa).

I have a boatload of pictures and I was gonna put more on, but if I did, and explained them all and how they fit into the woven fiction of the novel I've written, and the ones to come, I might as well just set those suckers up as combo plan picture-books/memoirs, another genre entirely, and make it the truth instead of The Truth, and that would be much too much information, and besides, I think the best fiction lends universality to the concrete, the mundane and the every day, so if I send too many pictures along, I think...

but that's for another day this week.

Googling can be both dangerous and weird.

I proved it to myself today, messing around with ethernet memory keepers, when I found a picture of the now-adult children of a now-deceased man fictionalized in my novel – the man who psychically scooted me up the interstate to the Playboy Club a while back, to try out.

And what’s even weirder – I never met his daughter (she was only eight years younger than I was at the time) (he was almost exactly ten years older than I was at the time, and I was quite literally barely twenty-one), and when the Club hired me but said I couldn’t use my real name, because they already had a Bunny Robin, which name did I want to use, I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say, so I picked the guy’s daughter’s name, even though I’d never seen her. And here I was today, looking her right in the eyes. Her father’s eyes. She looks like her father. He was very handsome. She is very pretty…AND NOW IN HER FORTIES. Mother of God.

And in the picture with her…her younger brother, who will never know how close he came to never being born out there in the West, because his daddy begged me more than once to come out West with him after he left me, high and dry. It was only a few months after he left that the begging phone calls started, and the visits back in town. I won’t go into the wild detail of it, but the begging went on for years, on and off, before, during and between our respective marriages. And this kid, in his mid-twenties now, would never have been born if I’d said yes, I’m on my way…

But the weirdest, weirdest part of all, is that below this picture was a picture of the man himself, older but still quite handsome, with the exact same halfway smartass smile, the same mustache, and a big, big cowboy hat sittin’ on his head.

You know, I hadn’t thought about this guy or much of anything or anyone else I wrote about and turned this way and that to craft a novel from, as the odd combination one just does have when combining the fodder of experience and imagination, but now that I have, finding out this man recently died, when I only remembered him and knew him as young and very much alive, really gave me pause.