The Mad Scientist at the Podium

By gum, I have SO much to say here. I got workshop news and Yes news and readin' news. I shouldn't've neglected this space for so long.

Let's start with the recent stuff, and maybe go backwards in future posts. Last Friday I gave a reading at CSUN, along with my poet colleague Khiem Nguyen, and I thought it went quite well. You can see video of two of the three stories I read on my YouTube channel, or you can just scroll down a bit.

The first video includes a little of the introduction the GRS leader, Freddy Garcia, wrote about me and then read. (The video cuts in a bit late, doesn't focus right away, and then cuts out the applause and the high-five I gave Freddy when I got to the podium.) He was so thoroughly complimentary that the first thing I could say when I got to the mike was "Holy shit." He said things about me being a mad scientist, Frankensteining genre in exciting ways, finding the wounds of the reader and tracing them without flinching. (I think.) It was amazing to hear those complimentary things about me together with stuff that I knew factually to be true.

Freddy and I are in a fiction class together this semester, and this makes me simultaneously very happy and very sad. I have a big friendcrush and a big writercrush on him, but he is near the end of his M.A. and I'm right at the beginning, so I think this is the first and last time we'll be working together. Also, he's a poet (a good one), and as I've told him, I do not understand poetry and I fail at writing it, so I don't know how much use I will ever be to him as a writer-friend. In any event, that's Freddy, speaking first, and then there's me. The story I read in this first video is "Shade," which you can find in Hobart right here.

By the way, you pronounce my name exactly like it looks, cold-iron, like you wouldn't want to iron your clothes with a cold iron. But it's not Freddy's fault that he didn't know that and I wasn't quick enough to correct him. (I go by Katharine Mason at CSUN because it's my legal name.)

Then I read a second story, "Infinite Space," which you can find nowhere but in this video, because it's racked up 15+ rejections. People kept telling me after I was finished reading that they didn't know why no one liked it, because they thought it was good. I think I see why after reading it and watching this video - it's kind of samey and it ranges without satisfying - but I like it enough as-is that I don't want to pull it to pieces and re-build.

I know these videos are a little hard to watch, with just my face surrounded by a pool of darkness, but the GRS readings always take place that way, the only light at the podium and the reader blind to the 20 or so people in the room. I like seeing people when reading, but it's kinder to do it this way, especially if this is the first public reading the reader has given, which is often the case.

Also, I feel that I look a little like a full-throated bullfrog, but that's all right. I read well, and that's the point. I read a third story, too, the Biff Tannen story, but Matt's phone ran out of juice so it is lost to history.

I really enjoyed doing this reading. I enjoy reading, in general. I get nervous ahead of time, but then it goes well, because I've loved reading aloud since I was a wee girl and have worked hard to be good at it, and then I am happy and can't wait for another opportunity to read to people. Hear that, universe? I'd love to read anytime you'd like me to.

OCTOBER 21, 2015

It's today. It's the day every Back to the Future fan knows. It's the day Marty goes into the future.

I am so excited. (The Cubs better win the damn World Series.)

To celebrate, I'm posting a piece of fiction I wrote, in fun, to try and understand the perspective of Biff Tannen, who is up there with Gene Hackman's character in Unforgiven for no-holds-barred villainy. I hope you enjoy it.

Worstbest Writing, Worstbest Weather

My to-do list for today involves four writing tasks, two reading tasks, and "change sheets?" I think it's going to be a good day.

So far we've had to do two exercises in my workshop class, and my work on them has been the worstbest kind of work. For each, I've written my requisite word count, and been very pleased with the result, to the point where I think maybe I can fiddle with the result and eventually send it to a flash fiction market. And then as I start to fiddle with it, the thing starts to look bad, and then worse, and then I kind of turn away in shame, like George McFly turning away from that ginger who's macking on Lorraine instead of defending her, while Marty's going all transparent in the corner, like oh, forget this, I don't actually have a solid core of self-esteem, I'll just go home and read my pulp sci-fi mags. Who wants a smokin' hot, boy-crazy girlfriend, anyway?

Of course, we all know that George found it in him to stand up to that ginger and get the girl.
Let it be a lesson to all of us. 

What? You guys don't have Back to the Future memorized down to the last millisecond?

The point is, these exercises have felt really good at first, very solid and forward-moving in terms of my writing ability, and then they collapse under scrutiny. Exercises collapsing under scrutiny is in itself not a surprise, nor even something I can beat myself up about, but it's disappointing to think that I've done well and then discover that I haven't.

I believe I can fix the second one, but I haven't heard from my small group about it. After I do, on Wednesday, I'll let it sit for a month or more before I look again. I've read it too many times. Here's the first paragraph, though.

Obviously the place is unsafe, but it’s a large expanse of flat concrete out of the sun, so the boys go there to skateboard. Skating is transportation, mating dance, and self-expression all in one, so they learn jumps and trade lingo under the corrugated roof of this old warehouse, its viscera cleanly removed, its walls torn off in ragged sections as if eaten. Usually, Dylan’s older brother crams all five of them into his dusty blue Corolla in exchange for weed or gas money, because moms do not need to know about the warehouse, and they roll away the long dog days after school out here, surrounded by loose desert and abandoned equipment, the wind stirring sand into their hair. Yesterday, Dylan’s brother brought his girlfriend along in the passenger seat when he came to pick them up, so Ray and Colin got left behind. 

I actually took this from life. I drove about an hour north of L.A. to see a friend last week, and on the way back I went by what appeared to be a group of abandoned construction sites. Under a former building, which is now not much more than a rusty steel roof and the beams holding it up, I saw the bottom halves of boys skateboarding around. Oddly, their movements reminded me of nothing so much as bumper cars, trundling in little sedate paths. I think it's because they were pretty far away. Whoever those boys are, I doubt they are sedate up close.

One of my writing tasks today is revisions on the dreadful story. A reader gave me a fucking perfect solution to a minor web of problems in the story, so integrating her idea should be like putting a key in a lock. I hope. And then I'll start in on Light in August. Thus I go into undiscovered country in terms of Faulkner, and I'm pretty fearful but naturally I'm looking forward to it, too.

It is HOT here. My Facebook friends in other climes are making noises about fall, and it's kind of disorienting, because it reminds me that it is actually September. (And my friend in Australia is talking about how nice it is to fold warm laundry in the season she's in, but that's a bit different.) Here, September feels like an extension of August - dog-hot, what-are-you-talking-about-Eliot-August-is-clearly-the-cruelest-month August - instead of the transitional month it's always been for me. A few more years in SoCal and I won't associate September with autumn at all any longer.