Author: Don

“Come to see victory/ In the land called Fantasy”

Apparently, I just can’t seem to get enough of the Ithaca League of Women Rollers and watching home bouts. I drove to an away bout last night to watch the Sufferjets play the Utica Roller Girls.


I’ve been engrossed in my share of sporting events, but I just don’t know what it is about roller derby.  Yeah, yeah, I know–it all has to do with prurient fantasies brought on by watching women play rough with each other, right?  Sure, being a straight male, I’m certainly not above anything like that.  I’m comfortable admitting the possibility that I’m just a slimeball.  But that’s not it.

After all, the point of having a fantasy is sitting back and imagining yourself being engaged with the object(s) of your fantasy, right?  But do I have slimeball thoughts about these ladies?  Despite basic biological tendencies, not really.  Between being taken, being of advanced age, and knowing that my deteriorating eskrima skills would be of little use against a roller-girl beatdown–those are enough to keep those types of fantasies in check.

I hear you scoffing, “You are so full of shit!” like Jack Lemon to Kevin Spacey in Glengarry Glen Ross.  But hear me out.

I’m thinking back to the John Waters quote on discipline from his “10 Best Pieces of Advice for Functional Freaks.”  Especially the bit about how…

Discipline is not anal compulsion; it’s a lifestyle that breeds power.

I think that’s the real object of my fantasy where roller derby folks are concerned.  Any derby organization consists of folks busting their asses to do something out of pure love.  I’m not just talking about the skaters putting in hours-upon-hours into training, either.  They and the whole gaggle of folks behind them–volunteers who officiate, run the merch tables, run the scoreboard, &c.–put in a crapton of work to put a season of bouts together, to say nothing about the service projects they do.

I’ve watched these bouts over the past couple of years and I realized that their power isn’t in the fact that they skate and whoop ass at the same time.  Their power is in their willingness to do whatever they have to do in order to get to skate and whoop ass, and do it for the love.  That’s a little difficult for me to get my head around.

Sure, I love to write.  But while I may not have any expectations about making enough money off it to quit my dayjob, I also love the fact that the one piece I got into the McSweeney’s website still gives me some juice with other writers five years later.  And that folks seem to like my writing enough to publish it and sometimes, pay me for it. I am not one of those writers who go, “Oh, I’d do this even if I never got published.” 

The point is, it’s inspiring to watch a group of people can put in so much work into something other than their own self-aggrandizement.  The least I can do with that inspiration is to get back on my horse and keep putting in my time in the ‘shed, despite the writing troubles I’ve been bitching about lately.  I’ve got upcoming story deadlines, stories that need revision, and rejected pieces to resubmit. Not to mention, a conference to prepare for.

And I’m getting to all that right now. Well, after I look at the pics I took one last time…

“Let her go, let her go, God bless her/ Wherever she may be”

One D.O.A., One on the Way One D.O.A., One on the Way by Mary Robison

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Mary Robison’s prose is as dense, sparse, and evocative as ever. You might call the snippets of text disjointed, or gripe about a lack of obvious plotline, but there’s still a narrative to be followed.

The main character is certainly the sort who might reveal a lot of the facts of her life to you, but still keep you at arm’s length. Indeed, Robison’s prose seems to purposely keep me at a distance. I know a lot of people who would complain about that too, but it was a curious experience for me. It’s almost as if I had a front-row seat in the theater of the main character’s life, but with a splatter-shield in front of me.

And believe me, with everything she goes through, that’s a good thing.

View all my reviews >>

Functional Freakiness

I made a small effort toward getting back in the writing saddle after my weekend adventures. I confess, I haven’t had much luck. This is how I’ve been feeling for nigh on two weeks…

Reading between the lines of those blog entries, you can probably detect a tinge of guilt.  It was fed, in part, by this quote I’d read (and posted to my tumblr) from filmmaker John Waters in his “10 Best Pieces of Advice for Functional Freaks.”

I’m a fascist about my work habits and I expect you to be, too. Never have a spontaneous moment in your life again. If you’re going to have a hangover, it should be scheduled on your calendar months in advance. Rigid enjoyment of planning can get you high. Militant time-management will enable you to ignore how maladjusted you would be if you had the time to notice it in the first place. Discipline is not anal compulsion; it’s a lifestyle that breeds power.


I may have reasons for my lack of discipline and productivity since the end of the academic year, but no real excuses. At least none that my Inner Drill Sergeant would accept, especially with the amount of rejections I’ve received lately.

I think it’s time for Gunny to come back out and square me away.

Now, between that John Waters quote and Gunny up there, a lot of you are probably fearing for my sanity. But if you’re not familiar with the flims of John Waters, here’s a sample of his mindset. This is a little something he did for some indie movie theaters that I remember seeing in high school.

There may not be much difference between Waters’ and Gunny’s attitude toward work, but if someone who works as hard as Gunny can produce the stuff what Waters does, then you know what? I want to be a functional freak.

“Everybody needs a little time away…” Part III

I took one final day yesterday to relax from the stresses of life, the dayjob, and my writing. I know what most writers say about needing to write every single day and the thing is, I agree 100%. It’s just that I’ve come to the realization that I can’t do it.  I should, and I should keep working toward that.  But if I treat writing like another job, then like any other job, I need a break.

Yesterday was the third and final day of the annual summer festival. Whereas Saturday was sunny and hot, almost to the point where I was worried about heat stroke, Sunday was gray, drizzling at times, and about 20 degrees cooler. I thought all I needed was a thicker polo shirt, but I was wrong. Still, some hot chocolate warmed me up enough to enjoy what I saw: People dancing to a circle of drummers, folks doing Yoga in the cold, and a local group of bagpipers which includes a sci-fi writer who is a frequent contributor to Analog as well as Asimov’s Science Fiction and other places.

If nothing else, I’ve got a third day’s worth of potential character sketches, here. 

Now, I’m getting slowly back on the wagon. I’m finally getting the first draft of my story for Rigor Amortis together, building it around the skeleton of an unrelated flash fiction I wrote about 6 or 8 months ago. I figure if Carol Emshwiller can include “Acceptance Speech” and “Report to the Men’s Club” in the same collection, then I can make a story “the same, but different” than one I’ve previously written (not that I’m 1/10th of the writer she is, but still).

“Everybody needs a little time away…” Part II

It’s actually taken a lot for me to realize just how much I needed a break from this year of hell at the dayjob, even after an extra-long long holiday weekend.  My writing suffered.  I’m not talking about how much I haven’t been writing lately, but the fact that I was convinced that somehow I could get it done if I’d just whipped myself a little harder.  But I think I was, literally, beating a dead horse.

So, I went for another day of frolicking in the sun at the annual summer festival, the one time and place in the year when I don’t mind running into coworkers.

And again, the best part is that this batch of photos is ripe with character ideas!  I’ve already begged off critique group tomorrow to go to the festival’s last day.

“Everybody needs a little time away…”

As if my “wrojo” (i.e. “writing mojo” — brought to you by Regan) wasn’t low enough, there’s been so much more to distract me this past week. There’s been an upsurge in work in my dayjob capacity as the Special Projects Bitch. To unwind, I’ve been taking advantage of the nice weather conciding with my town’s annual summer festival. But hey, sometimes you need some time off from writing and to recharge. And it’s only recently that loafing is only a small part of recharging. The other part, at least for me, is being charged with something–in this case, the energy that drew me to live here in the first place.

Traditionally, the festival starts off with a Thursday night parade.

My favorite part of the parade was the Ithaca League of Women Rollers and their Chia Skate float!

The best part is, there’s at least a half-dozen character ideas in just these photographs.

More to come, as I’ve just spent most of my Saturday. And I plan to spend some of my Sunday, as well.

Tough Love

I didn’t post last Sunday’s critique group evisceration due to sheer exhaustion.  But the hardest two weeks of the academic year are behind me at the dayjob. I took an extra day off for the holiday weekend and I pretty much wasted yesterday (on purpose).  So, I figure looking at these crits would be a good way for me to get back into writing today as I (try to) keep live audio and video feeds of Roland Garros in the background.

It occurs to me now that I’ve only looked at the story once or twice since then. I was temporarily seduced by a couple of flash fiction projects, one for a prompt on Zoetrope, and the other by a Twitter joke gone too far, with further yet to go.

Anyway, I brought the next bit of the short story I brought last crit group session, which is for a seekrit project.  The group read the first part of the second act.  With scalpels and machetes out, here’s what they said.

StoryWin

  • Scene I brought was “heavy” and “dramatic.”  Also, “vivid.”
  • Readers had a better idea of the who and the why of the story
  • The scene “comes alive” where the shit starts hitting the fan and was “scary” and “suspenseful.”
  • The struggle between one of the main characters and the viewpoint character contains “tension” and “suspense.”
  • One reader mentioned that the way a particular magic spell was used might not have worked on TV or in a film, but worked just fine in prose form.

StoryFail

  • Wrote about relationship dynamics between characters that were missing for some readers in the first part of the story.
  • One section I wrote where I blended one character’s speech with the jeers of the crowd didn’t work for everyone. (Though the ones it did work for seemed adamant that I should stick with it.)
  • [This one I knew would be a problem going in–and I was caught red-handed.] With all the drama going on between the viewpoint character and one of the main characters, other characters just sort of faded away into the background… the aforementioned crowd, for instance.

So, lots to fix with this story and a third act to write.  Luckily, I have several months to get it together.