Man, do I need to write something.

I’ve been wandering around for ages now thinking I should. But today – now – I’m suddenly compelled.

I did a couple of things today. One was to post a snippet of silliness called Giant Rat on an Orkut group called “Hopped Up on Goofballs”. No reason really, just because.

The other was I talked to someone on IM who I flirted a bit with on another site pre-orkut.

I need an aside here – I’ve been using Apple iChat as my chat client. Now iChat rocks, it’s got a great, easy, good-looking interface and is easy to use. But it’s got some limitations that annoy me. It supports only AIM and .mac accounts, and it will only let me sign in one at a time. Now I of course have AIM accounts (two of them), a .mac account, an ICQ account, and a Yahoo account. So I want one chat app.

Trillian, everyone says, but no — no mac client. So I’ve tried a few others and wasn’t happy with them. That was ok until my group at work decided to start using iChat for business communication. And they wanted my .mac account. So suddenly as far as my friends could see, I was gone. And then I was using yahoo chat and sometimes AIM and iChat all at the same time. So I just found a new client, Adium X which supports all the major protocols, and which I actually like. Not as much as iChat but still, I like it. It’s pretty usable even though the duck theme is annoying.

The upshot is that all my chat accounts are up and logged in at the same time, finally.

This meant that this woman who’s been trying to dig me up on chat for a while finally found me.

We chatted a bit today, started talking about writing and art (she’s both, a pretty good pen and ink artist and a pretty decent poet, at least to my reader’s eye). So we started talking, not really either of us knowing much about each other, and found a common ground talking about writing. I gave her a couple bits of mine to read, she gave me a couple bits of hers. I liked her poetry quite a lot more than I expected to, which was a pleasant surprise.

And I started thinking – damn, why have I stopped?

So why have I? and why do I suddenly need to start?

Orkut’s part of it. No question. I’ve focused a lot of my creativity, in tiny slices, on that universe. Scraps, testimonials, postings, it’s all little bits and pieces of cleverness and witty banter. Each one is a quick thing, but together, they add up to a lot of brain power and attention. Also, my compulsion to be a personality on orkut the way I was on USENET drives me. My compulsion to win the love of the many delightful females, I suppose, is also a factor.

But today – I had one of those “don’t care about it” days. Where I can’t keep up and don’t care if I do. Maybe that’s fatigue, sure. I’m fried. Worn out. But maybe it’s just hit a saturation point for me where I need to do something else.

I have a lotta stories I need to work on. I should maybe post excepts but I can’t stand sharing stuff that’s not done. There’s the Wanton followup, there’s a vaguely Carnivale-inspired story about a mysterious figure who comes to a small farm, there’s a bit of something that starts with two people who meet at a funeral. Several others. There’s something in that stack of stories started or conceptual that I could get traction on, but I need to quit fooling around.

The call of fooling around, though, is strong. Not to mention the call of work. But that’s another entry I wrote that went into the weeds and may never see the light of day.

So here’s my resolution – this weekend I’m not going to fool around on orkut. This weekend I’m going to get out one of the in-process stories and work on it. Maybe only a little but I have to do it before the skills get rusty.

We’ll see how well that holds. I might actually do it. B^)

Read more “Reading and Writing and Resolutions”

Where’s it gone? Have you see in? I had it here. [checks pockets]

Where has my creativity gone?

Bollocks. I know I had it. If you’ve got it, please, send it back. No questions asked.

I could blame Orkut. It might even be true. Adam Rifkin told me the other day that without jail, he’d live there on orkut fourteen hours a day.

It’s not the time though. I’m not spending a lotta hours. I’m spending a lotta brain power. It’s like being at a party with all my funniest friends, and we’re all in a vague competition to keep the level of cleverness very very high. When we’re all hitting together, riffing on each other, trading jabs, working like we’ve rehearsed a routine, it’s a thing of beauty. Orkut’s like that, sometimes the jokes are working and sometimes they’re not but either way the brain’s running, the attention tightly focused. And I walk away from the computer fogged like I’ve been playing a video game.

It’s reached the point where it’s work or orkut and then brain’s empty; I must re-fill it with beer, and then sleep.

Fortunately, three writer friends recently unintentionally pimp-slapped me about it (well, one did it on purpose, thanks Fred), one by writing again after a layoff (can’t wait to see when it’s done, baby), one by asking me to help edit a piece, and one just by saying (thanks fred) ‘get fucking writing again.’

All right, fine, fine, I gotcha. At least I’m doing this. I can’t promise on the other stuff, but I’m looking at my stack of stories started and thinking, one of these has to be pay dirt, which one is it?

Ok. So next time I get the orkut urge I’ll try to work on something else instead. I don’t know it’ll work but, really. I will try.

So I should talk about the camping trip I chaperoned on last week – yeah, they put me in charge of ten year olds. The fools. Or I could talk about My Lunch with Adam Rifkin but he made us sign an NDA. So instead let me just say – ah fuck it, I got nothing, is it time to go to fiji yet?

---

Now Playing: Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Part Two from the album The Great Deceiver – Things Are Not As They Seem … by King Crimson

Read more “Creativity fled”

It’s one of those things.

I want to bitch about not having time to write.

But I don’t have time to write it.

Chicken or Egg?

Nevermind, we’ll stick with bacon.

Work’s been just getting worse and worse. Well, that makes it sound like work is bad and that’s not true; I have a good job for a great boss working for a cool and generally fair company. I like where I work (that fruit-flavored computer company), I like who I work for, I like who I work with. But – well, when they say you have to do more with less, in our case they’re saying the work of ten men with two. It’ll get better in a while, but what’s unknown is, for what value of “a while”.

But the upshot is, writing takes a hit. I’ve gone from barely time to write to no time to write. And it is, frankly, pissin’ me off. Because I am still an idea factory, with stuff I wanna blog about, stuff I wanna work on stories about, and that pile of stories started and not completed. That “met her at a funeral” story is calling me, as is the Wanton followup.

Grumble. Grumble? And did I say, Grumble!

But I should talk about “Guy!”

This is a cute little kid story. Stop here if you’re not down with that.

There’s this Orkut deal. It’s stupid, it’s fun, everyone’s doing it, other than those of you who aren’t.

But my orkut profile has this picture.

Now, my friend (we’ll call her) Laura, who’s also a member of Orkut (and suddenly I’m hearing betty boop, from a cartoon called “Bimbo’s Initiation”- “wanna be a member, wanna be a member!”. Ok, you had to be there, nevermind), and her little girl, who’s like 18 months, has become completely obsessed with my picture. She points, and demands. She wants mom to go back to the picture. “Guy!” she says. “Guy! Guy! Guy!”.

It was becoming a problem. Mom could not even read her email without the girl climbing onto her lap; “Guy! Guy! Guy!”. I finally had to send her the original of the photo, and she printed it. So now she gives the little girl my picture to hold while Mom checks her email. The little girl carries it around mumbling “guy… guy… guy…”

Wait, there are some punchlines.

The dad, Paul, stepped out of the shower the other day, and the little girl had left the picture on the bathroom floor. So there’s my maniacally grinning face looking up at him.

We met them the other night. The little girl had never seen me in person before. She was shy, hiding, pointing; “guy? guy? Guy!”. Paul observed I’m some sort of rock star now, for the toddler set.

So then, sort of to pay me back for all the hilarity I have generated in his house, Paul made me this. Which I feel captures the true, inner me.

Ok, so that’s enough cute kid story.

I need a fucking vacation. I need to be deep, deep underwater somewhere, narced out of my skull, or on a rocking boat watching pretty girls get out of skin-tight wetsuits. I need to be where the beaches are sandy and the water is warm and – the girls are in skin tight wetsuits, or nothing at all.

Rum? Rum. Rum!

Wait, I feel the pirate voice about to come back.

Ok. It’s past. I can go on.

I know just the island. And it’s calling to me. Baby, here I come.

Sigh.

Read more “No time to write about no time”

It’s rather a unique experience, having one’s mother read one’s erotic writing. Not quite like anything else I’ve experienced.

There’s background on this of course. Both on the story in question (I imagine everyone reading this has most likely already read the story, but if not, whatcha waiting for?) and background on my mother, and of course background on how I came to show the story to my mother.

So bear with me if I told you part of this already.

Ok, the story you maybe know about. “Wanton“. If I didn’t write about how it happened, it’s on my home page if you care.

I’m fairly new at this writing game. Oh, I’ve been writing for years, erotica to amuse myself and arouse my friends, technical manuals, an occasional travel journal (and if I could read my own handwriting I’d type that in, but hell if I know what most of it is. That’s what happens when you already have shitty hand-writing and then write in pubs while downing pint after pint of tanglefoot best bitter. And as it turns out, “best” doesn’t mean “more good”, it means “More strong”). But when it comes to the real writing with thought of publishing, that’s only happened recently. I am thus still seeking input (and yes, validation) from independent sources.

So one such was to send the story to my friend Lewis. Lewis is, in addition to being a pretty good writer, a writing teacher and a book reviewer for the SF Chronicle. After reading a particular story of his, “Scar”, I decided I might as well jump directly from a non-burning place on the stove directly to the fire, bypassing the frying pan stage completely (not one to do things in small ways, I guess one could say about me). This is a guy known for being a fairly harsh critic, and he’s a mainstream writer, so I figured I’d get a completely unvarnished review.

The topic of mainstream writing vs. erotica is a topic for another entry, one I keep trying to do an essay or blog entry on. But that’s for later. The relevant point is that I got the unvarnished feedback I wanted, and it was far, far better than ever I expected. There were minor technical issues, and discourse on mainstream vs. erotica which I expected given his point of view. But the core of the review was, as with those wonderful reviews that beautiful people like Circe and MP have given me, absolutely glowing to the point where I had to do the shuffle shuffle, “Ah, g’wan” thing and then say something self-deprecating, which is how I tend to deal with praise.

This leads me to the topic of My Mother. Which should be heard in a cartoon Freud voice as in Dolby’s “Blinded me with Science”.

The first point is that of connection and how these threads come together. Mom was a bookstore lady from the time she was a teenager until not many years ago. Lewis worked with her at various bookstores in the SF bay area from the time he was a teen until she and he both quit the bookstore biz a few years back. So they have a lifetime bond of absolute and utter book-geek status. So this is where things connect.

Mother is an interesting person. Born in the late 20’s, she was a little too young to be a beatnik, a little too old to be a hippy. She never went to college (which is a true shame), but she helped my father work through his master’s and Phd. in logic and communication, and in effect educated herself though at least two degrees worth of college. She and my father marched for peace and farm-workers rights, voted peace-and-freedom, campaigned for radical left candidates back when people believed that radical left candidates could actually win offices. She and my father smoked pot with college grad students and sent us kids to a hippy-dippy school where we majored in hiking and getting stoned and swimming naked with the teachers and high-school girls.

Mom’s a book geek. Mom should have been a writer; she’s a good poet though she is unaware of this, and could have written for a living easily. Mom knows writers and writing as much as any literature major I know, and can discourse on writing. She and I have only recently found common ground on this, because I grew up reading ONLY sci-fi, which was the one area she had trouble with (Lord of the Rings and Dune aside). So only in the last few years, as I started to read Bukowski and Fante and a lot of other more literary writers have we been able to truly discuss writing in technical terms.

This leads me to showing Mom my own writing.

Now it should be obvious Mom’s no prude. And I know she had “My Secret Garden” and Aniis Nin’s books and other erotica on her bookshelf, I know she’s read erotica. And I know she was – let’s say active – before she married my father. But there’s still a point where it seems weird to send your mother a story which includes phrases like “Come on my tits, Big Daddy” or “There was blood on my cock when I slipped out, drove into her cunt“.

But after showing her Lewis’ review of my story, it just seemed stupid to not show her the story. I eventually sent her a pointer, but half hoped she wouldn’t read it. Which was stupid of course.

It was a couple weeks before she brought it up. And when she did, I was ready for a weird conversation. Which wasn’t what I got.

What I got was a purity and intelligence of praise such as I’ve gotten from a couple of the editors who helped me with this story. The comments of a reader who really *got it*, who understood the characters, who understood the story, who understood why some of the details were left off-screen or left to the reader’s imagination. And I got a wash of parental pride such as I think I’ve never heard from either parent in my life. This is my mother suddenly realizing that her son has a reasonable level of talent at something she values above almost all else.

She said at one point – “I had to stop in several places and just think about, savor, your use of language. It was so good I had to just stop and consider it and hold off reading for a moment”.

I was speechless.

She finished this dialog by saying “That story is clearly done, and should not have been a page longer; but I really want to read another story about that same character. I want to hear more narration is his voice”.

I’m trying. I’m trying to find the thread of where his life goes. I have ideas and fragments of plot. But we’re back on the “why I can’t finish stories” thread. One of these days though, that will come to me. That character, Matteeo, he’s been in my head a while, and he’s got more stories to tell. And maybe some of them will actually have happy endings. Or maybe not. We shall see.

Read more “Mamma, just killed a man…”

She reached in her purse and she pulled out a gun and said,
“Now, just shut up and keep your hands on the wheel.
And just drive,” she said.
“Just drive,” she said.

My friend Circe, one again invoking my name in vain (It’s three times, like with beetlejuice), recently made mention of a question of focus as concerns blogging. More specifically, the fact that I said to her that I have not been focused enough to put up another entry.

She, of course, belittled me (lovingly). She scoffed at the notion that one would need focus to blog, and suggested that I should sit down and write without thought.

But that, baby, is not my bag.

It’s an interesting question though.

I have a friend, sometimes known as “Papa”, a musician and songwriter (and as good a bass player as I’ve ever know). But one of this guy’s gifts is the ability to do pure stream-of-consciousness writing that is pure brilliance.

Click here for examples. I’m still digging out more, there are dozens of them in archive somewhere.

The thing is, some people do this well. Just write. Just let brain fall to fingertips. Circe does this well. Some somgwriters do it well. Papa does it well.

I have gifts. But this sort of stream of consciousness writing is not naturally my forte. I’ve tried it, and can be funny, but I am aware of myself trying to be funny with it.

To write, I need to start with a thought, and refine it until I know if I have a valid point. Often this refinement is done as a write. I learned many years ago to compose email outside my mailer (Mutt, why would anyone use anything else? And it runs on the mac!). I learned that I was best off composing, thinking, reading, and then sending or discarding. A close friend keeps scolding me for this, for how many emails I have written to her and not sent, but she’ll see one day, when I let one out of the box that should have been drowned at birth, she’ll see why I keep the thought filter on tight.

Circe has a good point. One learns to write by writing. One does not learn by saying “I don’t have anything to write about”.

The question then is, do I want to use this forum to ramble (and god knows, rambling is not a bad thing, I generally encourage my friends to do it, and love it when they do), or do I want to only use it to post semi-clever essays?

Tune in next week…

Read more “Just Write, she said”

A common thread for me throughout my life as a writer (and I say that as if I had such a life, when in fact what I have is phases of intense creativity with long bleak (the word bleak is there for dramatic effect only, it’s a damned fine word) non-creaive stretches where inspiration left me, where the muse out to lunch and could not be summoned back) is the thread of begun but not completed.

There’s something so powerful about beginnings. So compelling. And things are so easy to start. A line, a scene, a bit of dialog. An encounter. The thrill of newness, the fresh taste of something you’ve never had before. A conversation between characters, thrust and parry. Chase and capture.

What, though, after that?

I prefer appetizers to desserts. I say that as a cook as much as I say it as diner. The prep work is more fun than the garnishing. Work with a knife, more satisfying the work with a squeeze bottle.

I wasn’t going to start talking about cooking yet in this blog. I think that veered away from a good metaphore.

I have at least 20 stories in a started or partially completed state. Another two or three (other than Wanton, the genesis of which I should cover in a later entry) finished, and those not really worthy of much because they were such early and immature efforts.

There are a couple, at least, that i think are worth completing. Another few in outline state that might be. I even have (started) a story about this theme – more or less – inspired by an American Music Club song called “At my Mercy”.

And of course, I started two more stories this week (In fact, between writing this and publishing it, I started a third).

Beginnings are so easy. A writer friend of mine told me I’m good at opening lines. And many of my stories start with that gem, a line of dialog or introduction, and I’m left to try building a story around that. I’d trade that particularly frustrating talent for being good at endings.

The question then is – how the hell do I go finish what I’ve started? How do I go back and pick up the threads of something I’ve lost touch with and find a way to complete it, ride it to it’s inevitable conclusion? Maybe it’s a factor of how I write; it’s not a cold and cerebral process for me, it’s a question of being in the place, the time, the head of the character. I have to be there, walk with those feet, touch with those hands, drink with that mouth. And then I write what the character feels. But once I’ve lost that place, I cannot, sometimes, find my way back. Maybe this is why I have trouble writing in third person, or from a female point of view; I start that exra step away from the character and thus have greater distance to get back.

There’s a thought to ponder.

Or maybe it’s simpler. newness implies infinite possibility. Completion is – I don’t know, the opposite. Possibilities fined down to the point where there’s only one, and that is complete and past.

Or some might say it’s simple procrastination and the rest of this is navel-gazing. But screw that, if there’s navel-gazing to be done, I’d rather I was looking at some of *your* navels. [wink wink]

Read more “Well Begun is Half Done”

I guess there’s this fundamental dilemma that the writer must face – and when I say The Writer I am of course speaking in the royal we sense, of Me the writer. But I universalize this experience since my sample size is one, and thus must be the constant for all that type of individual called writer.

But getting back to the dilemma; what to write about?

Sometimes this is simple. A topic, a subject, a tale, it jumps out at you and takes you by the throat (or begs you to take it by the throat, but that’s another story for a different entry). But sometimes, more times, it’s less pure and clean and simple.

This thread, this train of though, speaks both to writing here, and to writing in general, writing the fiction I am generally focused on. Because in both cases, there are long list of things to say, but so many reasons not to say one or the other.

In fiction, the first and most vital thing is this – tell a good story. And for all the thoughts, all the ideas, all the buds and stems of stories, how many bear fruit? How many are worth the telling, in the end? What is truly worth the saying? And when is the way of telling more important than the story told?

And then there is this – what should be said? What can be said? For the mind of the writer takes everything in as potential inspiration. Friends, enemies, events, interactions, disagreements, encounters. The pretty young barrista who made my espresso yesterday, she may, tomorrow, become a character n some seedy bar in some seedy tale. The geezer driving in the next car over, who cut me off merging in traffic? He may find himself dead on the written page, slain in some ugly, slow and painful way.

And you – you who are in my life in certain ways, secret or not, public or not; you are all characters in stories I tell in my head. Yet your secrets are not mine to tell, so what I may say is then changed by the the need to be fair an kind with you, to protect your privacy and guard your whispered confessions.

There’s a story I want to tell. I suppose this is what Bukowski, Fante, Kerouac, a thousand others, what they said to themselves. There’s a story I want to tell, and in a sense it’s my story, and in a sense it’s not, but somehow I am always the main character. Which makes my life the story, and those I know the characters. I wish I could ask those men, how did you manage, when your life is your story, and your private, suddenly public? How did your loved ones manage when their secrets became public, when their words come from the mouths of characters on the printed page? Yes, such things are often veiled, but sometimes the veil must be thin or the essence of the character, the event, the motivation is lost.

So there are stories I wish to tell. But which to tell? Which to write? The science fiction and fantasy I daydreamed as a child, still stored away with characters and universes, war and love and death? Tales of dark crime and tough heros? Or can one simply tell a story of a man and his struggles with ordinary life? Is the level of literary pretension too high?

For the central element of all these stories is love; pain and love and death and love and war and love. Crime and passion and desire, heroism, villainy, magic and evil. Love and pain, these are the threads that connect them all.

And I am back, with that, to threads from the lives of real people.

Is this a closed loop with no way out?

I start many stories. There is never a shortage, it seems, of ideas and images. It’s the finishing that seems to be my bane. And that, I suppose, is another entry for another time.

Read more “Horn of Dilemma”