Upcoming and Downgoing

I woke up on the wrong side of the week, but I have some administrative stuff to address and a few other things to say, so here's a post anyway.

1) I referred to a secret project a few posts back. Tomorrow, that project debuts: I helped to copy-edit a series of comics for the creator of Ctrl+Alt+Del, one of my two most favorite webcomics. While labor-intensive, this project was so much fun that I am having a hard time adjusting back to my normal copy-editing job. If you somehow got here from there, welcome!

2) I mentioned it on Facebook and in a group e-mail, but not here: Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #45, with my story "Kingdom Automata", aka the crazy robot story, which I have written about at great length in this blog, is available here. For free in electronic forms, and for a nominal fee in paperback.

3) Opera season started on Saturday. Get ready for opera posts for the next several months! Woooo!!!!1!

4) I was the only one to volunteer a story during the first week of workshop in my UCLA class, so one of my stories is going to be drawn and quartered workshopped by 17 other students tomorrow night. I agonized over the choice, and spent most of the last four days regretting the story I picked, but there's nothing for it now and I must have had a reason to select that one in the first place.

The instructor got the class to give me a round of applause for being brave enough to volunteer during the first week, before we know anything about each other. I waved it away: "I'm just a show-off." Because I am.

5) One of our assignments for this class is to find a paragraph or two of fiction that we love and bring it in at some point to read aloud. I am stumped. I looked at all my best-loved books and realized I love them in macro ways; because the story connects to itself, and the characters shift over time, not because one paragraph stands out. (This is not so for movies - I know plenty of movies where just one shot will send me to heaven.) I'd do Chandler or Leonard, because they're masters at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, but our instructor has mentioned that he's going to bring in some Chandler, so.

The one I'm considering right now is Rebecca, some of the first chapter: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Rebecca emerged from my youth as my Fahrenheit 451 book - the one I'd choose to memorize, to become, in the event that books went extinct. Rereading it last year, I realized it's really not a perfect book, but I still stand by it as one of the most evocative books I've read, and one of those books calculated to make you fall in love with itself. So, reading from that first spell-setting chapter seems to fit in with the point of the exercise, even if the book isn't one I can defend on the whole. Maybe I'll figure out something else before it's my turn.

Wish me luck with the rest of the week.

Mining Whilst Tipsy

Matt is rather drunkily slaughtering orks in the computer room. I'm rather drunkily sitting in front of my computer out here. In theory I ought to be plunking down more words in the novel, but I'm not really feelin' it. I'm in a fainting-couch mood, instead. This is a mood where I go into the computer room, plunk down in the empty laundry basket, and give deep sighs until Matt asks me what's wrong. Then I draw a dramatic hand across my forehead, lean back, and tell him that writing is soooo hard. Then we both laugh.

I'm in a good place on the novel, really. Things are going well. I'm on track to be finished well before my deadline if I don't lose momentum. There are mechanical problems, but they're fixable. My writing is actually smoother and more creative in its smallities than on the previous project; I'm prouder of it on a sentence-by-sentence basis. I'm not positive it adds up to anything, but I think one day it will. I'm also grateful that I have the version of Microsoft Word which shows me, in the bottom bar, how many words are in my document. It's incredibly helpful to see that total and know I'm nowhere near the end of the story. But it also shows me that I'm nowhere near the end of the story. Gaaaah.

Sugar has this to say about writing:

Writing is hard for every last one of us... Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

It's a quote I relied upon completely when I discovered it back in the fall, and I would not, not, not have completed the Greenland book without it. But the day-to-day experience of writing a novel is indeed not at all unlike mining. It's dirty and unpleasant and hard and from inside the mine, it doesn't look like you've made any kind of progress. For the moment, I just want to curl up in a ball and have someone pet me and say yes, dear, it surely is hard. Poor coal-mining baby.

No one is doing this for me right now, although the alcohol seeping into my brain cells (while it's removing some of them--woops, there goes what I knew about Kierkegaard) is certainly clawing away at the maudlin-ness. See, maybe there's the secret to coal mining. Get good and lubed up before you go down in the pit. Wait, no, that's a bad idea. I think I'm just about ready to get back to digging myself, seeing as how what I'm doing isn't actually life-threatening and I need to ride this buzz before it vanishes.

But first! In other news, I'm rereading Rebecca for the zillionth time. The most recent time I read it was in college, though, and at 30 it's quite a different experience. It turns out that I remember the mood, tone, events, and characters of the book far better than I remember the actual page-by-page experience of reading it. I've always said that it's the book I'd be if Fahrenheit 451 became reality. I still hold to that, as it's just essential reading, but I'm kind of turned off by how much more rhapsodically descriptive it is than I remembered, how much less it is about Big Things and how much more it is about small things. And how much more informed by patriarchy it is than I remembered. Thanks a lot, Mount Holyoke, now I'll permanently notice crap like that. Next on the list is David Foster Wallace, whom I've never read before aside from a short story or two which I didn't much enjoy. We'll see how Infinite Jest strikes me. I'm 1 for 2 on Thomas Pynchon.