Zephyr 98

From Jonathan Carroll’s generous introduction to Jeffrey Ford’s Empire of Ice Cream, one of my favorite story collections, a quote that punctuates our hunger for wonder and why we love stories that bring it. A context would be, kids say “Wow;” adults typically don’t (or it takes more to wow an adult), because we can’t run the world if we’re constantly in awe of it.

Yet we know that the imagination really is most alive when it is not in control of things, flying through the air without a safety net below to catch it. To live surrounded by wonder means the unknown and the dangerous also surround you as well.

It’s a great intro and a great book, and makes me love short stories and want to be a writer all over again. And there are stories here that I can adapt for bedtime telling. Tonight, my kids get to hear about the Twilmish who inhabit sand castles on the beach and only live as long as the castles survive the tide. I love being given a story I can retell with great pleasure, and can’t think of a bigger compliment I can give the author.

Update: I think the quote above illustrates why flying dreams are so memorable, why it’s sad that they visit with less frequency as we age, and why those rare nights when they pass through like an old friend are so exciting and, on waking, bittersweet. Maybe that’s a best reason (there can be more than one) to write–to try and recapture, where you can, the sensation of flying without a net, and making it seem easy for the reader. Because it certainly seems easy in dreams to at least get off the ground–although maintaining altitude can be tricky. Like being a superhero with finicky powers.

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For Christmas my mother gave me a leather bound empty journal with an old buffalo nickel snap clasp that she had also once given to my grandfather late in his life. He was a compulsive chronicler who never used it, telling her it was too nice. I decided it was a good place to stash memories from my life, because my memories are like a random pile of view-master discs, and I’m frightened and disgusted by people who remember everything, till I recall that every memory is a recreation (in any way you pronounce the word), at best only true in spirit, and that people with good memories are simply better storytellers or reconstructionists (liars) than me. So I decided to use that journal to get with the lying and, by the end of  the first page, discovered why my grandpa didn’t use it–because writing in perfect bound books is a pain in the ass. At the age of 80, when he received it, he would have found it more difficult than I to use. His journals were almost all spiral or ring bound books that lay flat. So I’m going to cut out the few pages I’ve filled, get myself a flat-out journal, slide it behind the buffalo nickel, and paste in the representative pages from the old journal. Then give the old book with its pages turned the color of baked meringue–which, for paper, must be the color of entropy–to young Sophie to fill up with art and observations if she wishes.

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Stephen King’s On Writing is delightful and my favorite Stephen King book. Even when I don’t care for his work, I respect his ability to tell a story and make a lot of money, and make many people uncomfortably happy. But the parts actually about writing, minus the whining about critics and the heavy handed “you must do this” bits, are hard to argue with and fun to read. After reading several good authors who started as high school English teachers, I’m beginning to wish I could rewind to college, go down that route till I was disenchanted, then take the Publishing World By Storm! The best parts of the book are the Writing Tools and the recounting of the roadside accident where someone who could have been a character from one of his novels almost kills him. There’s also a lengthy memoir section that has good moments.

(Parenthetical editorial note–the more I write, the more I appreciate pragmatic advice and the less time I have for advice on getting in touch with one’s writerly feelings–which, I think stops most people in the land of the informal essay and meta-discussions about writing. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft is another favorite–she’s very disciplined and the exercises are difficult and helpful.)

Formidable CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series has become another fiction favorite. Over the holiday break, I gave in to the insistence of an old friend, read the first two and have the third in the background (they are currently a 12 book series about the same main character, in four connected trilogies. So far, it seems almost as good as Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series I’m so damned fond of, although his human characters were easier to like out of the box. (Were they all human, aside from flora and fauna samples–maybe.)

I am avoiding reading anything that will also steer me off course with this current writing work on Balrogs and the derivative short pieces that I’m currently focused on, which I hope to pass on to second draft review friends soon. (Thankfully, Cherryh, for all her superpowers, did not distract.) With a tsumani-like post-Christmas nasal congestion flooding my head this past weekend, I spent most of my time reading another rec (my reading picks often rely on the kindness of friends), Sandman Slim, a hardboiled neo noir urban fantasy about a guy who comes back alive from Hell (after 11 years as a human gladiator) to play a little pickup ball with the heads of the Circle who sent him there. I love good hardboiled work that knows how to use the language and tell a story well, even if most of it feels familiar. Slim is like Charlie Huston’s gritty Already Dead, only, I think, grittier and a bit more high flying (read, show-offy) in its language and perhaps not as smooth in plotting. William Gibson called it a sweet dirty-ass masterpiece. Exactly my kind of downtime reading. There are inconsistencies–there are also inconsistencies and disappearing characters in Raymond Chandler’s beautiful work, but that doesn’t stop me from staying on the main road and enjoying the story.

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Parapraxis is a word invented to translate the German, “fehlleistung,” the famous Freudian Slip (or, literally, the failed or mistaken performance or achievement). Describes most of my life. Possibly the right name for this blog.

Now I’m wondering if there’s also a term for compulsive use of parentheticals in speech and writing. I’ve given thought to an entry titled The Cave of My Parentheses, wherein lurks asides, nudges, afterthoughts inserted midstream, brief internal conversations with myself at the expense of the reader, and textual (not text-based)-emotes.  And occasionally, midstream clarifications added to avoid editing the stream of thought. It’s also used as a cheap way to insert a clause without using commas, and sibling to the long or em-dash (biggest of the three Dash sisters, Em, En, and Hyphen).

The more I write, the more conscious I become of writing habits used to satisfy only myself. Not self-conscious, just trying to be aware as I write or correspond to weed them out or apply them with more discipline.

Revealing a little self-analysis, I think I do this because 1) my father loved to talk and wasn’t interested in listening, so I became good at getting my voice out fast, whether my thoughts were well formed or not, just to be heard; and 2) the persistent notion that people who respond quickly are the most intelligent in the room, a notion held and often reinforced by smart people who respond quickly; and 3) it usually takes me a long time to form complete original thoughts and I’m often too impatient or worried to let them form. I also have a habit of thinking and speaking the same way I write, which usually involves several rounds of edits, the initial goal just being to get it on the page.

Which leads us back to parentheticals.

Is there a word that means “fear of parapraxis?”

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That’s Words Per Month. Happy to hit the number. Very happy. A lot more to do and, really, at least another 50k words to finish this draft of Eating the Balrog (which is a damn silly title that pleases me and will likely change to something like Sword of the Malraugin or Bombs and Volcanoes and Balrogs O My! or What’s All This Then About Ballllrogs? or the Balrog with Nine Million Tongues.) I’ve been mighty afeard of writing something with fantasy critters init, but I’ve taken a practical approach, a thing of magic simply being  something we haven’t managed to capture (but will) with science. That’s not what the story is about anyway.

Here’s the synopsis I typed into the National Novel Writing Month site: I started with memoir combined with family folklore, and mixed in real history and fantasy elements to tell the story of two boys growing up in the foothills of the Oregon Cascades in the late 60′s. The main characters are young and it’s the story I want to tell, but I’m not sure if the end result will be a “YA” or adult novel (and don’t know there’s an important difference yet). I’ve written it by hand (164 pages in two college ruled notebooks and 4 pens later) backed up by a photocopier, to be typed during a rewrite. I did error on the conservative side of the count, so there’s more words than what’s listed here, but again, that doesn’t matter. (I’m not remotely a Luddite but paper and pen kept me focused and were incredibly portable). The draft is rough and tumble as hell and really not finished. It’s more episodic than I expected–there were plenty of surprises, most of them nice. It’s my second novel–the first took years and was a meandering mess. With this one, I spent a month churning out what I know now is mostly well structured exploration, and, with a lot of revision, will be the basis for a grand novel-length story possibly of interest outside family, friends, and captive cats (who I can’t keep off my lap anyway).

Other good news: our programmable thermostat has fixed itself after toying with me last night at 3 AM for a delirium-filled hour where it randomly thought the house temp was anywhere between 52 to 96 degrees F and wanted to hold it at 65 (which means 70 upstairs). After researching the problem thoroughly on the appliance webs, I learned that the best approach is to blow it out, shine the battery connectors for the LCD display, and whack it. That advice was given by a grizzled repairman who shut up the guys who were telling others with this problem everything from their furnace had died to their house circuitry was overloading and they were risking death by thermostat-induced fire. Now, it’s almost certain that my old thermostat, the Honeywell Chronotherm mark III, is past its prime and needs replacement with a touchscreen device that reads my secret temperature-based desires, but that can wait. Yes, the whack worked. A gentle whack.

Also, today at my house of workship, we received news that our paycut of the last 18 months was being rescinded starting Jan 1 (without the need for layoffs or other penalties to compensate). Debby did the happy dance when I sent her this news in a text. She was volunteering with Sophie’s kindergarten class and, she said, received some very odd looks. I love her because she outwardly expresses the things like happy dances that other people habitually keep inside themselves, taped over with a polite chuckle and a “rather.”

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From the NaNoWriMo Novel Writing Guidelines FAQ. This would be for me, who gave up tens of pages ago on the notion of typing this thing in. Better to type the next draft. I’ll be a smarter keyboard monkey, then, too.

Good old Lorem Ipsum. (I used to work with her sister, my dear friend Loren, who only spoke highly of her.)

How do I verify if I’m writing by hand?

Invoke the Luddite Clause!

What you do is write your 50,000 words, then have someone you trust verify that it is, indeed, 50,000 words. Then using something like the Lorem Ipsum generator, submit a file of the exact number of words of your handwritten manuscript to our word count validator.

So I’m keeping a Word doc up to date, word count-wise, with a draft for a very long future contract with myself written in nonsense Latin. Currently, I’m at 140 pages and an estimated 40,100 words, at about 286 words per page. That’s a conservative estimate, based on lines per page and average words per line from sample line counts.

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