Neither the First Nor the Last Lesson from South Park

If you're reading this and you've also been sent a proof copy of my Greenland book, please see here. After some useful feedback, I created a few family trees, to help parse out all the different characters. A dramatis personae might not be out of place, but it's rather old-fashioned for this sort of book, so for the time being, I hope this helps. If you haven't read the book, the information at that link won't make any sense to you, but you're welcome to look; it doesn't give very much away.

I grew tired of my Nordic landscapes and started downloading fractal wallpapers. I now hunger for ever more of them. They are gorgeous, and I'm not yet tired of looking at them. I'm using Windows 7, with rotating wallpapers, and I finally figured out the easier way to get pictures into rotation, so I'm probably going to end up using all my disk space on the dang fractals. But they are so cool.

I've now written over 70,000 words on the horror novel. And somehow, I'm astonished to find, I'm in Act III: The Ticking Clock.

Excerpted from an e-mail I recently wrote:

A feature screenplay has two plot points, right? End of act I, end of act II. Each of the plot points spins the story in a whole new direction. I am not a literary expert, but I understand that books have numerous plot points, and that they’re diagnosed in a completely different way than in films. In films, there are two and only two, and other important things that happen are merely Things That Happen, not actual plot points. In American films, they are generally so obvious that you can’t not notice them once the concept has been pointed out to you.

In the feature film South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, there's a point near the end where the Mole looks at his watch, and he sees this:

Ever since I started noticing that the third act virtually always involves a ticking clock in one way or another, thanks to this movie and specifically this frame of animation, I can't stop noticing it. Now, in my horror novel, my antagonist has given my protagonists 24 hours to decide something, and I still totally failed to notice I was in The Ticking Clock until one of my characters said "Clara wants our answer before noon tomorrow." I typed that, and then, after I read it over, I thought of the image above.

Ha. Wow, brain. That's some serious training a lifetime of American movies and almost ten years of cinema study has given you. Like, re-education, almost. It's also really ironic, because what's at stake in The Ticking Clock is time, which is kind of the whole point of my book.

Well, it's funny to me, anyway.

The Obscure Ability to Find What You're Looking For

Two nights ago I had a dream that, when I woke up, stuck like caramel in my teeth. I was in my old house, the one on Maryleborn Road, where I lived in high school. Somehow the house was mine, I owned it with Matt. It had the old green carpet and the dark paneling, prior to the redo (to the benefit of all, believe me) my mom did. Our landlord's leather sofa was in the exact same place, but the living room seemed stretched, much larger than it had been in life. The house was absolutely piled with stuff, papers and folders and books and notes and objects, just piles and piles of things everywhere, and since there was so much space, the stacks were endless.

My father wanted me to go somewhere with him, and before we left, I had to find an array of items, perhaps ten of them. They were all things from the non-recent past, years-old items or notes or paperwork. I felt sort of triumphant that I knew I had these things, that I had done the right thing and saved them, but because the house was much larger than my memory of it and there were hundreds of piles, I couldn't find what he wanted me to find. He was reminding me in his gently-annoyed voice that it was time to leave, past time, and that I had told him I had these things, and why hadn't I found them so we could leave? I was assuring him that I just needed a few more minutes, because I knew I had the stuff, I had saved it all like I was supposed to, but there were just so many piles to look through. I had located probably two or three of the ten items I had to find when I woke up. There were other elements to this dream, but that was the gist of it.

It was crystal-clear to me what this dream was about, even at the moment I woke from it.

This Post Is Made from 100% Procrastination

For the first time I'm understanding the difference between wanting a vacation due to desiring a break from a job I don't like, and wanting a vacation due to a sort of tired burnout. Maybe this is naive of me, maybe people who like their jobs are saying DUH, but at this point I could really use a couple of days where I don't have to do any work. I enormously enjoy each category of the work I'm doing, all for different reasons, but I'd really love a breather. My body could use a respite from teaching, too. I've been subbing a lot in the last couple of weeks, and although more money is always good, I think I'm ready to drop back to my regular schedule of (now) 6 classes a week rather than, for example, this week's 8.

My first reader has gotten back to me about the Greenland book, and because he's very kind, he has allowed me to go back and forth with him at great length about the manuscript. Last night I composed the third in a series of e-mails to him in Microsoft Word before pasting it into the body of the reply; with his paragraphs and my responses it was about 5,300 words. I feel guilty asking him to talk about my work in such great detail, but he continues to insist that it's okay.

The actual substance of his feedback has been very surprising. He told me that I've written a bummer of a book, something which is okay with me but which I hadn't really connected the dots to realize. He said that it was actually interesting and not impossible to follow the language, and that he didn't find the setup too holey, issues I worried over endlessly. He noted that there are many more characters than a modern novel usually has, and I honestly hadn't really thought of that. I don't know if it's a flaw per se, but both he and Matt said they had a hard time following who was who, so I think a family tree in the back of the book is in order. Just, like, not a complete one, or some surprises will be lost.

While I'm pleased to see that I've still got enough of the book in my bones to talk to him about it in detail, I find that I have zero motivation to dive into re-editing it. I definitely need further perspectives - especially from women, especially from people who like reading novels more than this friend does - but there are even a few easy fixes my friend pointed out which I could implement easily enough now, and I haven't exactly jumped right on that. I could do it, it's not a confidence thing, but I'm totally not interested.

I think it's because I'm working on the horror book, and don't want to dilute my writing energy back to a book with such an enormously different group of characters. So perhaps, after all, it was a bad idea to jump right into the new book without being completely finished with the old book. Of course, at my current rate of work, I'll be finished with the horror book by my tentative deadline (April) and definitely by my drop-deadline (June), and will be able to take a break between the full closed-door draft and the first open-door draft to hunker down on the Greenland book. Plus, I won't know until June whether my Greenland book won grant money, and I can't really send it out for publisher approval until I find that out. So maybe it worked out better this way, rather than worse. I'm just worried that the feedback will kind of dim in its fresh usefulness in my mind, and I won't remember all the resolutions I had for making things better.

Last night I knitted myself a coaster for my desk, so I could get rid of an old coaster with bad memories (um...never mind) and I put on The Social Network to amuse me whilst working. I still stand in utter awe of that movie's script. It's like All About Eve; I could put it on a continuous loop for about 14 hours and listen to it and feel smarter and smarter all the time. Every time I see it, someone else's performance jumps out at me. This time, again, it was Andrew Garfield's. I wanted to steal his character out of that movie and run off with him to Mexico the first time I saw it, and I felt that way all over again this time.

This was the result, by the way:

Turned out a little lumpier than I expected, but I don't have any emotional turmoil attached to it, and it'll keep condensation from ruining my desk. Which is the point.

Workspace, v.4

With Matt's and Ikea's help, I've got The Ultimate Workstation now:

Contrary to appearances, there wasn't actually a nuclear explosion happening inside my house when this picture was taken. The afternoon sun is kinda bright, is all.

I feel very silly having a monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard all hooked up to a laptop, because why didn't I just buy a damn PC, but this is just how it's worked out. Now my laptop is far enough away and high enough up that it isn't ergonomically bad for me to look at the screen, my fingers are happy about typing on this yummy new keyboard, and I'm not taking up half the space on the dining room table with my setup. We went to Ikea and bought what amounts to a slab of pine on top of some metal sawhorses, but it's exactly what I need, no more and no less. Plus, it's a lot warmer upstairs than it was in the dining room, so I'm very happy. Doubleplus, because the pine's unfinished, I can draw encouraging messages on it in Sharpie (or perhaps get someone more talented to do this for me). Like a desk version of a Trapper Keeper.

Well, then. Back to today's chores. I goofed around too much in the past week and now have a hundred things to do before I can do fun things like blog or work on the book. Maybe in a few days I'll have more to say.

If You Liked It Then You Shoulda Put a Vampire In It

I took an online writing workshop through the magazine Barrelhouse this past fall, and one of the things I was hoping to get into with my instructors and fellow students was what genre amounts to in the writing market of today. My opinion was previously that since Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, then building with Harry Potter and, later, Twilight and all the accompanying vampire television, fantasy fiction has become much more of a mainstream proposition, no longer restricted to social misfits and obese owners of comic book stores with stained shirts, but something you can read on the subway without people thinking badly of you. Then I stumbled on this page on Wikipedia, and learned that apparently everybody is reading fantasy on the subway, and has been for many years, and has maybe just been putting false book jackets for Philip Roth over that Ken Follett novel. Which made me wonder ever more why the literary community disdained genre fiction. I think it has something to do with the taint of money against the porcelain posterior of art, the idea that popularity means you haven't written something lasting and worthwhile. I tend to believe exactly the opposite, because I think it matters if people like it. Especially if gigantic numbers of people like it.

In any case, I had thought that genre writers were rather maligned among the literary community, and while I think this is still probably true for writers who are deep inside the boundaries of the genre (i.e. high fantasy, hard science fiction), genre bleeds over into literary fiction in ways I hadn't really guessed. I was told by one of the workshop leaders that agents had taken to suggesting, "Put a vampire in it!" for lit-fic that they didn't think was yet worth selling. Shudder. And once I started looking for genre fiction in the lit community, I found that Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood are sometimes considered more genre authors than straight literary authors, which enormously surprised me. 

I'm much more familiar with Atwood, and yeah, she writes a good amount of speculative fiction. Probably her most famous work is The Handmaid's Tale, which stands immediately next to 1984, is Venus to Orwell's Mars. But she's also written a number of novels that aren't speculative at all, that are about women and friendships and woe in the present day, and there's no doubt to me that her work falls firmly into the category of literary fiction. 

I have all sorts of questions about this sticky subject - whether genre fiction can only be acceptable to book snobs if it's in a literary-fiction shell, where the dividing line is between something that's Fantasy and something that's Literary With Fantastic Elements, why something that so plainly has worth is deemed worthless by so many in the literary community. Whether the derision has changed since LotR, or whether the shooing-in of genre elements is about dollar signs on the part of the agent rather than a concession about available quality. Why the community bothers to hold up Cormac McCarthy as an example of its broad-mindedness when it could just as well be reading Ursula LeGuin and calling it even. I could spend all day brooding over this. 

But that was a really, really long way of saying that I'm struggling with the genre problem in my work. Right now, you see, I'm working on a horror novel. Or at least, I conceptualized it as a horror novel. In fact, I put in a bunch of silly horror tropes at the outset. My "monster" has residence under the stairs. I collected a group of young characters and put them in a lodge way out in the woods. The call is coming from inside the house. At some point I hope to have someone say she'll be right back. Etc. This tickled me pink when I started erecting the structure of it, because I LOVE horror fiction, especially when it's extremely well-done and is nevertheless idiotically gory. (Drag Me to Hell is a perfect example of this kind of thing, a wonderfully made movie that tosses buckets of gunk at the screen and wants you to laugh about it.) I wanted to write a really excellent horror book that had silly cliches snuck into it so that intelligent consumers of genre fiction would read my book and wink and say "I see what you did there." I hoped it would tickle them as much as it did me. 

The problem is, my writing is getting better.  

I'm stepping away from the self that worries about sounding arrogant to tell you this. My writing is getting better. Last night I wrote a few thousand words that, when I was finished, I read over and shivered; it was exactly what I wanted to say, beautiful sentences that didn't need editing. 

The room inside was dustless, with fresh pink and white gerberas on the little table under the window. A faint clean-linen aroma emanated from the canopy bed, on which was arranged a panoply of stuffed animals, their friendly blank eyes and funny colors only grim in the context of this room. An enormous, elaborate dollhouse stood open on the right-side wall. A downsized dresser stood against another wall, a blue satin jewelry box the sole object on its surface. Elaine knew that a plastic ballerina crouched inside, en pointe on a spring. A nightlight glowed under the drapery of the bed.

I'm writing much more carefully now than in times past, working on a sentence-by-sentence basis rather than just writing a lot, sloppily, and coming back later to fix it during the editing process. I never wind up with more than a few really splendid sentences that way, and by writing with total intention now, I end up with whole paragraphs of fiction that makes me proud to read it instead of just baseline getting-my-point-across stuff. It is much, much harder, slower and more exasperating, but oh, is it ever better. 

So I'm writing a really beautiful horror book. A book with emotional impact and difficult truths. But it's still a horror book, and of all genre fiction, I think horror is the least likely ever to be respectable, the way certain swaths of fantasy fiction have become respectable. 

So. What am I writing here? I am not denying that horror fiction can be beautifully written, by any means. But I find myself asking what literary fiction actually means, and why I'm so convinced that I can't write it, because that level of quality is what I'm striving to write day after day. It just also has a monster under the stairs. If I was writing a literary novel about this subject, I would emphasize that the book is about time, and the fucked-up-ed-ness of time and those who can manipulate it. But then I'd be writing a whole different book, a philosophical sort of thing that was more primarily about how humans perceive time than about how this group of characters copes with an evil little girl who can alter it. I'll think about the big philosophical stuff, and I'll maybe encourage my readers to do so while reading, but topically I'm much more interested in writing about the evil little girl than about the big stuff. 

Perhaps that's what makes this a genre book rather than a literary book. Writing about the evil girl rather than writing about the concept. I do have an idea for a conceptual book, but it's in the future, after I've become a much better writer than I am now. At the moment I just want to know what Clara's going to do next. 

Don't Be Steppin'

So, I was originally going to try and write about this with the notion that as a writer, SOPA and PIPA matter to my interests--in the future, without fair use excerpts of my work in various places on the web, I won't see as much promotion as I'd like. That's a pretty threadbare connection, so I thought I just wouldn't write about it. But I realized that the reason SOPA and PIPA and their idiocy matter to me is that I'm a citizen of the internet. As are we all. SOPA and PIPA matter to anyone at all who uses the web on a regular basis. Which means that they matter to you as well.

I think what needs to be said about the wrongheadedness of these bills is easily Googleable, and what interests me about it was crystallized by an item I read this morning from The Escapist. It seems that the hacker group Anonymous is claiming to have hacked and broken some major websites overnight: the Department of Justice, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Universal Music Group. Not that I expect these sites to be invulnerable to a serious hacker collective, but I'm still rather impressed; this ain't small potatoes.

I had kind of hoped that the peaceful shutdown protests that took place on Wednesday would go even further than they did. I hoped that Google would shut down its search function for a day, keep people from being able to Google anything for just 24 hours. I hoped that Twitter would grind to a halt. I hoped that comments forums all over the internet on sites like the Washington Post and the New York Times would cease functioning, so that just for one day, you couldn't make your voice heard (no matter what you have to say). I thought if there was serious, major disruption to the sites that people use with impunity every day--even, perhaps, sites that senators themselves visit--they would see how goddamn stupid these bills were, how too-far their reach extends.

I don't want to see the world go down in flames of chaos. Nor do I really even want people to actually suffer for their stupidity. But I know that in order to make obtuse people see reason about something that matters past the ends of their noses, you have to hit them hard exactly where they live. That means different things to different people, of course. If, as a barista, you know that a certain senator just has to have his Starbucks in order to function, and whenever he comes to the counter you turn your back and refuse to serve him--and you could be sure that all Starbucks baristas everywhere would do the same--you would probably have his ear a little more easily than if as an employee of a McDonald's you intended to refuse him, when the senator hasn't visited McDonald's in twenty years.

One of the things that troubles me about these bills is the same thing that troubles me about a great deal of legislation passed in the last 15 years: it seems to have been drafted and pressed and fed through the rollers of Congress without any sort of input from the actual constituency that elected these congressmen. I'll grant you that I have a pretty self-selecting group of friends to choose from, but I don't know a single person who thinks this legislation is anything like a good idea. I'd love to see the numbers on how many ordinary folk contacted their representatives on Wednesday, after discovering what SOPA and PIPA were all about, and said, no, we do NOT want this to be law. I'm betting it was a lot of them. I'm betting it was enough to elect somebody completely new, in fact.

For Wednesday's protests to actually hit the congressmen where they live, though, it would have to be a more dramatic gesture than Wikipedia and Reddit and what-have-you. It would have to be Google and CNN.com and CNBC.com and the Cornell site that houses the U.S. Code and whatever other sites congressmen and their staff use to get through their workdays. YouTube, probably. It would have to matter more than just your constituency rising up against your actions, right? It would have to be your bank's website.

For Anonymous to take out these websites is--if not merely an act of revenge for Megaupload, which would be kind of lame and negate my whole point, and I can't believe it's a coincidence, with SOPA and PIPA so nearby--intentioned, I think, to send the message We Know the Internet and You Don't. Don't Be Steppin' in 'Hoods that Ain't Yourn. If this is their message, I think it's a completely proper one, if delivered in a terroristy sort of way. Of course, how the authorities will see such a message is a completely different matter. They'll smack down like parents on teenage rebellion: you little punks. How dare you fuck with us just because you can't break copyright law as easily as you could three days ago. It's meaningless defacement, taking down some websites, like spray-painting ASSHOLE on somebody's car.

This is the problem with terrorist messages, of course. They're never delivered properly. The destruction always seems to matter more than the message. Which is why the Gandhi/King-type protests of Wednesday did so much good: we're not going to wreck anything, we're just going to make your life a little harder for a day. Just to show you, and meanwhile show a lot of other people who didn't even know about it, that we think you're doing the wrong thing.

Yet I can't help having some admiration at the message, if only the message, of Anonymous in wrecking usdoj.gov. Rather than only showing you how heavy an anvil is by slackening the rope until the weight's pressing down on the top of your head, it's a razor slicing through the rope that holds the anvil up. Bang, you're dead.

Genuinely Weird and Totally Awesome

I'm about to hit 55,000 words on the horror novel, and while I'm pleased with its direction, and with some of the individual paragraphs and sentences and whatnot, I'm not sure whether it'll be an utter mess when I'm done with the first draft. I had a meandering talk with Matt yesterday about the spot where I was blocked (until I wrote through it, yay for me), and that brought me to the realization that there are a bunch of different ways I could make this universe work. He is the best devil ever to advocate, so I went down one leafy green path with him before discovering that it wasn't my original intention, and then went down another one while he listened and asked more questions, and then another. I think it might have made him a little nuts, but it was certainly helpful for me.

I wrote a segment yesterday about a couple of my main characters getting high. (On the maryjane.) I am telling you the truth when I say that I have never been high. So even before I put together a complete draft, I'm going to need to beg indulgence from somebody so I can find out if I wrote these few paragraphs properly. It's not with zero knowledge that I cobbled this section together, but certainly it lacks personal experience. I feel a little stupid and extremely square that I have to ask someone else, "Is this more or less what it's like to be high?", but there it is. Someone will probably write to suggest that I just get high myself and find out, but I'm not really interested.

I'm reading Infinite Jest, I think I mentioned a few posts back. I woke up too early the other morning after unsettling, unremembered dreams and I went downstairs and read it for an hour or two. I am on page fifty-eight. I said this proudly to Matt when he came downstairs, and pointed out that I was already an eighteenth of the way through the book. (To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure how I'll get through it, or when.) I should have learned the lesson that it's not a good idea to get too heavily into a piece of fiction while you're working on a piece of your own, because the last few chapters of the Greenland book were a tad too Austen-y for their genre due to what I was doing during breaks in the work. But I figure that a little more David Foster Wallace in any given piece of fiction can't really hurt. And it's long past time for me to have read this book.

Today is a day that I'll get the chance to do all three of my jobs, along with my fourth, unpaid one: I taught yoga this morning, I've got a couple of copy-editing tasks to do and turn in, and I've got something to edit with my paralegal hat on. When I'm finished with that, I'm going to work on the novel some more. I wake up and go to bed feeling lucky every day, now, but I don't say to myself often enough how genuinely weird and totally awesome my life is in its new configuration.

Apropos of nothing:

It's from a series of eight which I love utterly. I want to contact the artist and ask him if he'll do mini-prints for me that I can frame, but I have no idea how much I'd pay him for something like that and therefore whether I can afford it, so it seems foolish to ask.

OKAY THAT'S ENOUGH PROCRASTINATING. I have to get to work. Ooh, it's almost time for lunch!