Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
About Walnut
View all posts by Walnut
I can see the finish line, and is it ever depressing
I don’t often indulge in one of those writers-writing-about-their-writing posts, and I promise I’ll try not to overdo it, but I have to kvetch.
If you had asked me a few moments ago how long I’d been working on my novel, I’d have told you, “Three years.” But I just checked. I wrote the first version of the outline on 4/27/03, and I finished the earliest version of Chapter One in June, 2003. I’ve only been at this two years! It just seems like three.
Here’s the first paragraph from that very first outline:
Poor Judy Miller
I can thank Ishbadiddle for the link to this great LA Times piece by Rosa Brooks, which has a fine discussion on the ethically appropriate application of journalist privilege:
The Judy Miller Media Hug-fest
Honestly. When you see right wing slugs waving the banner for the First Amendment, that’s when you know you’re living in The Poseidon Adventure.
D.
Gastronomy Domine III
High time we got back to food. For you relative newbies, I’ve previously discussed the Ultimate Coffee Experience (including Vietnamese Iced Coffee and Indonesian Crappucino) and the Joy of Liver. Today, let’s visit the food that tastes you back.
Beef tongue.
Suffer the children
In her July 6 post, Demented Michelle* told the story of a dickwad psychiatrist who told her she didn’t have sufficient life experience to be a writer (she was a teenager at the time). This jogged my memory the way a swift kick will turn over a Suzuki Samurai. Here’s my tale.
Summer after 6th grade, I decided to write a novel.
Brazil
Since I’m not quite as big a jerk as I make out sometimes, I’m not going to bother tagging this one for Technorati. It’s not like I have anything original to say about the London bombings, nor useful, nor insightful.
Instead, I’ll give you one trite thought, and one remembrance.
The trite thought: as the Chinese curse goes, we live in interesting times. Lucky us.
The remembrance: my thoughts keep returning to the movie Brazil. With its depictions of urban terrorism and government oppression, Brazil seems more prophetic than ever — perhaps even more than 1984.
And I’m wondering if there’s any way out of this mess. Seems we’re only managing to dig a deeper hole — and we’re all in this hole, every single one of us.
D.
Gauging emotional impact.
Here are a few related questions for the writers in the crowd:
How do you know if your story works at an emotional level?
Rephrased: how do you know they’ll laugh when you want ’em to laugh, cry when you want ’em to cry?
And how do you know you’re not traipsing off into the land of literary autism? Maybe you know that place: you look at what you’ve written; your inner voice says “YES!”, but your readers all say, “Uhhhh . . . ”
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now — ever since I got into the latter third of my novel, and more frequently as I close in on the ending. Thinking my way through the epilogue today, I made myself cry. Since this happened while driving, you might argue it wasn’t a good thing. But I was tickled.
It’s not the first time I made myself cry. Trouble is, I get into moods where it doesn’t take much to set me off. An old Barney Miller episode might do it for me. Since the stuff I write ultimately comes from my innards, it stands to reason it should have some emotional impact for me.
I suppose that at a bare minimum, my writing should make me feel the ‘correct’ way. If it doesn’t work for me, why should it work for anyone else? After that, I would hope it works for my handful of readers. The fact that my writing made a certain someone cry recently does, I admit, cheer my heart.
It would be nice to have a few dozen readers vet the manuscript before farming it to the publishers, but I know that’s not going to happen. So I guess I’ll have to cross my fingers, knock on wood, and send it out, hoping that at least one publisher will see this book the same way I do. What else can I do?
D.
Review of Lenox Avenue, #7
My review of Lenox Avenue, #7, is up at Tangent Online.
Lenox Avenue is a bimonthly speculative fiction/art zine that pays top dollar — 5 cents a word, up to $100. Max word count = 6000. Here’s what they’re looking for:
Quirky, edgy, stylish, odd
Exploration of cultural myths/traditions not well-represented in spec-fic
Magic realism, slipstream, new weird, all welcome
Stories in which the characters are immersed in the culture and events, not necessarily outsiders encountering it for the first time
Here’s a link to their guidelines.
Based on Issue #7, they have a smart editorial staff with a good eye for talent. Check ’em out!
D.
Deader is Better
Hellraiser VII: Deader
The Dream Team
Hellraiser: The Meaning of Fear
Cast, from left to right: Dick Cheney, George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld.
Not pictured: Karl Rove
D.
Gross Anatomy 101
Blog block vanished when I read Brian’s post today on FAF (Beaches) . I remembered something from high school — something you don’t need to know. But what the hey.
GF v1.0 and I used to agree that there were some high school couplings best left out of the imagination. One pairing in particular scandalized us. Let’s call them Archibald and Patricia.
Though blessed with a good heart, Archibald had one flaw which should have doomed him from any hope of young love. He looked goofy, and in high school, looks are everything. Patricia, on the other hand, only had a goofy personality. Actually, that’s too kind. If you spent any time around Patricia, any time at all, your face would freeze into an expression like this:
Because she was that weird. Honestly. (God. Do I really look that fat? And it looks like I’ve had hair plugs!) Nevertheless, these two goofy people found one another, and, soon thereafter, were sighted holding hands in the canteen, making eyes at one another outside of AP Calculus, even dating.
Every year, the school schlepped us smart kids down to Newport Beach as some sort of reward. We never thought to question this elitism because this was one time when the deck was stacked in our favor. After all, the lettermen got all the cute girls, the stoners got all the loose girls, and what did we get? The beach trip. It was better than nothing.
How it happened, we shall never know. Perhaps Archibald’s choice of bathing trunks was some sort of precognitive wardrobe malfunction. Perhaps things were going too slowly in that department and Archibald thought shock therapy would be just the thing. Perhaps he was simply too much man for Woolworth’s Clearance Table swim shorts. But the facts are clear: at some point during the beach trip, Patricia spotted Archibald’s package.
And the experience was sufficiently traumatic that she broke up with him that day.
GF v1.0 and I speculated endlessly about this. Was he that big? Or was he that small? Had Patricia never seen a penis, not even in books? Had Archibald suffered some horrific accident as an infant? Maybe, in the deep, dank, salty darkness of his drawers, this is what she saw.
Now, come on. Just because it was hyperlinked didn’t mean you had to click on it. If all your friends were clicking on a hyperlinked cliff, would you click on it, too?
I knew you would.
D.