Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Writer’s Life
Routine
Despite the presence of a number of questions both pending and weighty, life is settling into something of a routine; I’m able to sleep at least seven hours each night, my total commute time is about 15 minutes, and work thus far is shaping up to be more than satisfactory. The muse should wake up any time now, right? Right?
I wonder if she’s awake but not letting on. Maybe I have to try to write something to see if she’s still there. Hellooooo!
Hard to believe I used to entertain myself by writing. Nowadays, I have to resort to YouTube parodies of the old Star Trek.
But nothing compares to the real thing, eh? I bring you CAPTAIN KIRK, SPACE QUEEN!
See, this is how the writers thought Kirk would behave if he had a woman inside of him. The director must have told Shatner to pull out all the stops on this one. I can imagine Shatner: “What’s my motivation?” and the director: “You’re a woman! Trapped! Inside a man’s body!”
Gotta go. Ferret Bueller’s being a pain in the tush again.
D.
Post 2000
I thought that was kind of remarkable.
I keep hoping that when my life settles down, I’ll have time to reflect, to write, to entertain again.
I miss the old Balls and Walnuts.
D.
The muse stirs
I was listening to NPR this morning . . . something about Obama and Afghanistan and Iraq. And the muse stretched and yawned:
Imagine an America even more polarized than our own, where the wealthy have no use for the underclass unless they are also a servant class; and imagine an America which has decided to spread its “permanent interests” from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. Military is too expensive, so the US decides what’s really needed in those areas are citizens. And so the wealthy class have transferred a couple hundred million US citizens to the mountains of Afghanistan and the oil fields of Iraq and points beyond. But that’s not the fun part.
I’ve worked out a clever system of taxation whereby the non-filthy rich either have to emigrate or stay at home as permanent indentured servants. Of course, there are a few who live in the cracks, refusing to pay the National Tax and refusing to emigrate, and our protagonist would necessarily be one of these. An outlaw, equally disdainful of the uber rich and the proles who do their dirty work. Someone who takes from the rich and gives to himself. Who chuckles whenever he gets a post card from his older brother, an invitation to join him in the golden poppy fields of ‘Stan. Who (as needs must happen in a piece like this) starts out in a world of trouble and only sinks further and further into the shite.
A story like that lives on its setting and doesn’t take much of a plot to drive it onward. It’s a rich world, or at least I have a feeling it could be if I gave the muse the time she needs to create it for me. But there’s the rub: time.
If only I could drive and write at the same time. Heaven knows I have plenty of car-time. Dictation, perhaps?
D.
Getting lonely around here
Soon after I began blogging, I remember reading an author’s comments about why he had stopped blogging. It may have been Cory Doctorow, or maybe one of the other literary youngbloods. He wrote that blogging was a lot like stand-up comedy. You need to be fresh, you need new material, and eventually it gets to be rather wearying.
Well, that’s a paraphrase of something I read four years ago. I may have mangled it. It certainly captures how I feel.
I’ve settled into a new and by necessity tiring routine: I work long days five days a week (except on my day-off-without-pay), somehow manage to get most of the cooking, cleaning, and shopping done, catch up on chores on the weekend, try to answer all my emails. Since this job ain’t forever, I’m in search mode, too. It’s hard getting phone calls from potential employers or partners at 8 PM when I’m corpse-tired and not wanting to be bright and interesting and engaging. I’ve already blown off two possibilities, each time because of a bad vibe. Oh, and there was a third. Good vibe that time, bad location.
But I digress. All of this stress and fatigue has taken its toll on the blog, and correspondingly, my readership. I think a lot of people have given up on Balls and Walnuts and I can’t say I blame them. I’ve had to focus on the job and writing has become a luxury. I’m hoping the muse will rouse from her slumber once my life shifts into a more normal routine, one not involving 2.5 to 3 hours of commute time daily, but in the meantime, I feel like a dear friend is in a coma.
Something is missing and I don’t know how to get it back. I don’t know, maybe what I really need is a velvet merkin.
(more…)
Roll call, with contest
I may be sending out a mass emailing soon, so I wanted to make sure I had all my li’l pals in my address book. In the comments below, stand up, wave your hands, make a scene. And I’ll sweeten the deal, too: I’ll choose one of you at random to receive Paul Meloy’s short story collection, Islington Crocodiles, which is just plain WOW. (My more literate review should appear soon at The Fix.)
Note that it’s especially important to respond if you haven’t commented lately. I have lots of folks on that blogroll who rarely if ever comment. I don’t know if you’re still reading me or not!
Thanks for the comments to yesterday’s post, by the way. I thought it was a little over the top, but maybe I’m selling myself short. I do know that Karen and Jake dislike it when I get literary. If I ever did get “serious,” I think I’d have to find different beta readers 🙂
As an aside: writing this stuff sure is different than writing humorous genre fiction. It’s a whole different mindset — almost a poetic or dreamlike space I need to get into. It hasn’t been intentional. Each time, I was in that space to begin with, and that’s the stuff I wrote. Is this making any sense? And now that I’ve found that space, perhaps I could re-imagine it in order to write more.
In one of the many self-help-for-writers books I read five or six years ago, one author said that when he writes, he imagines himself to be a much better writer than what he truly is. When he does so, he creates material that is far better than his usual fare.
Some pretty weird mystical shit, eh?
D.
The enormity of “enormity”
President-Elect Obama (HUZZAH!) said it in his speech last night, and just now some commentator on CNN did the same: enormity, used in the sense of enormousness. This has always been a pet peeve of mine. Darfur is an enormity; the Pacific Ocean is just plain enormous.
It’s like the word “harrass,” which people sometimes pronounce “harris,” like the surname. That bugs me, too.
Let’s check Webster’s . . .
Main Entry:
enor·mi·ty
Pronunciation:
\i-ˈnȯr-mə-tē\
Function:
noun
Inflected Form(s):
plural enor·mi·ties
Date:
15th century1: an outrageous, improper, vicious, or immoral act
2: the quality or state of being immoderate, monstrous, or outrageous ; especially : great wickedness
There — I told you.
Huh? What? There’s more?
3: the quality or state of being huge : immensity
4: a quality of momentous importance or impact
usage Enormity, some people insist, is improperly used to denote large size. They insist on enormousness for this meaning, and would limit enormity to the meaning “great wickedness.†Those who urge such a limitation may not recognize the subtlety with which enormity is actually used. It regularly denotes a considerable departure from the expected or normal
they awakened; they sat up; and then the enormity of their situation burst upon them. “How did the fire start?†— John Steinbeck.
Doh!
I’m wrong about “harrass,” too.
D.
*CONTEST* Dean’s and Dan’s Fiction Challenge *CONTEST*
Dean and Dan planted the idea; and then I remembered the 69er and thought, why not do something similar?
So let’s split the difference between 50 and 100 and make it a 75er.
The prize:
. . . a $20 gift certificate to the online gift certificate-giver of your choice. Yes, $75 would be more appropriate. Yes, I’m too cheap right now to offer a $75 prize. Deal with it 😉 Look at it this way: the vast majority of ezines offer a good deal less than $20 as payment for much longer stories. On a per-word basis, you’re doing pretty damn well.
The rules:
* The story has to be EXACTLY 75 words. I’ll be using Microsoft Word to do the word count, and if you’re over or under, I’ll give you a chance to edit.
* We’ll let this one run until interest peters out.
* We’ll judge it by the old Writers BBS system. Once I close for entries, I’ll ask each of you to vote for the first, second, and third place winners NOT including your own entry. You don’t get to vote for yourself, in other words. I’ll ask you to email me with your vote so that we can avoid the whole ugly voting thread scene (you Writers BBS veterans will remember what I mean).
* You have to play to vote.
* Multiple entries are fine. When folks vote, though, they’ll be voting for a story, not for a writer.
*Post your QUESTIONS in response to this announcement. Tomorrow, I’ll post a submissions thread. Save your stories until then. (Because I know some of y’all could whip one out tonight.)
Oh . . . here’s the best I could do for a one-sentence story:
Rick and Tina had fun with their new kitten the night before, although it was hell getting cat fur off Tina’s negligee.
Told you my muse was on holiday . . .
D.
The art of the micro
My home-schooled son only ever has one question for me: “Are you going to make me write tomorrow?” The kid has a major phobia. The annoying thing is, he’s good at it. He has my talent, I think, but he doesn’t have my love of writing.
Not that I love writing much lately. Remember that Twilight Zone episode where the comedian gets his wish to be funny, not realizing it’s a pain when folks laugh at everything he says? I feel like I’m living in the mirror image universe. Nothing I write is funny anymore.
(I’m not striking out completely, though. My audiologist showed her husband my spaghetti string camisole video. She says they were both cracking up over it, and for the rest of the day, one or the other of them would say, “I’m speaking Japanese!” and they’d start laughing again. Hmmm. Maybe I should go find more videos to poke fun at.)
Back to writing. I want to break my son’s aversion. It occurred to me that he might enjoy constructing one sentence stories; since I thought he’d appreciate examples, I googled “one sentence story,” and found — duh! — One Sentence Stories.
Seems like the highest rated stories are the jokes (When I asked my son how hitting his brother in the eye could be “an accident,” he replied, “I was trying to hit him in the nose.”) which, in my opinion, isn’t fair. These are supposed to be STORIES, not JOKES. Better was youloveme’s “Friends don’t give friends seven orgasms.” That really does speak volumes. Not that I expect my son to come up with something like that.
I wonder if I could manage a one-sentence story. (Exactly how dry is my muse?) The key, I think, is to have a much bigger story in mind, and then distill it to its essence.
I’m going to sleep on it.
D.
Catharsis
I’ve been writing for catharsis. Thought about sharing, but nah, this is for me. And that’s what a lot of catharsis-writers fail to realize. Have I ever told the story of my high school friend who, when I was home visiting from college, felt it necessary to read aloud from his novel-in-the-making? He had just finished reading The World According to Garp and it showed. His writing was one part faux-Irving, three parts teenage angst. I can still remember my gratitude that we didn’t have a loaded gun in the room.
We finished the computer room today. Our gaming computer had a fried hard drive, so we popped for one that was Newer! Bigger! Better! The repair dude said, “Man, I am SO glad you didn’t trash it, because that is a sweet box.” When a computer geek says “sweet box,” everyone knows he’s talking hardware, and the geek doesn’t even realize he could be talking about something else.
But don’t get me wrong. Geeks rule. We got this box a year or two ago, mostly because Jake and I wanted to be able to work on World of Warcraft quests together. Of course, now we’re bored with WoW (only took us three years!) so the impetus to have two good gaming computers is no longer there. Still, Jake’s “good computer” is getting up there, and the computer I’m using right now is older still — maybe six years old? Karen would know. Old. About 100 in computer years. It boots up like a 286. So old that when you put a CD in, out comes a poof! of dust.
And yet it’s MY computer and it has tons of MY stuff on it, including stuff I can’t back up. Paint Shop Pro, for example. It was shareware, once upon a time, and then I began buying the upgrades. You can forget about original disks. They don’t exist. And now I’m stuck. If I switch to another computer, I’ll have to buy all new software.
There really ought to be a thing where you stick one end of a cable into one computer and the other end of the cable into the other computer, and you hit a button that says “Clone A to B” and it turns Computer B into a carbon copy of Computer A. And then everyone would whine about how they screwed up and meant to turn A into B, not B into A, and now they’re ruined! And everyone else would snicker knowingly and say, sotto voce, “Noob.”
Not that I would ever make an error like that. You know why?
I’d make Karen do it.
D.