“And now it’s time for a breakdown.”

I’m taking a day off from the Paris Review Interviews thing to play a little bit of catch-up and braindumping.  So no, I’m not talking about a nervous breakdown (that’s coming soon enough), but a breakdown of what I’ve been up to lately.  There are a lot of folks to whom I owe emails, critiques, apologies, etc.  This is not meant to be a replacement for those.  It’s just a little something for someone asking, to quote Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On?”

Aside from the dayjob which I constantly bitch about this time of the semester, the Fall’s been awash with activity…

1
I got one story published back in October and another one due out in about a month.  Exciting!!  I subbed one recently, which I’m not too happy with, and on further readings, I’m not sure how much hope it has.  We’ll see.

2
This weekend, I’m going to Philcon, or as I call it: Operation: Meet Peter S. Beagle.  Hopefully, I’ll run into a tweep or two.  Plans have been made and phone numbers exchanged.  Still, it would help if the con posted their schedule (they hadn’t yet at the time I’m actually typing this sentence).  A Twitter search actually shows individual panelists posting their schedules.  I wonder if I could just stitch them together for a rough map of the con.  Of course, with my luck, I’ll get that done right about the time when the program schedule is posted.

3
I’ve started a new story with will have at least one of, or some combination of the following elements: Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, The Appalachian border between Ohio and W. Virginia, and 1920s historical anectodes about White supremacist groups.  No idea where it’s going.

4
I’ve almost recovered from whatever branch of the Andromeda Strain that invaded my sinuses.  It was my own fault for letting it linger for a week or so.  When I finally needed to take some days off and ended up with no writing to show for it, I knew it was time for medication.

5
I suppose having read the comics and blogs of Warren Ellis for years was bound to have some effect on my writing process.  In a recent post, he talks about what he uses to write.  I couldn’t tell you how much of my workflow I consciously stole from him.  But I thought it’d fun to compare and contrast.  My setup is in red.

Computer 1 is a Lenovo Thinkpad X61 an old Dell Inspiron 1501 running dual-boot Ubuntu 10.10/Windows XP. It’s slowly dying (Actually, my backup laptop, a Compaq Presario 2200 is the one dying and I expect it to within the next 2-3 months), and I am either a) too cheap to buy myself a new machine or b) too terrified of having to load up a whole new machine. Pick one. I’ll very probably buy a new Thinkpad in the near future. This is the main machine that never leaves the desk.

Computer 2 is an Asus Eee Acer Aspire One netbook that lives in my bag.

Other Device is an iPhone 3GS. It lives in one inside pocket of my leather coat. In the other inside pocket is an old Nokia foldaway bluetooth keyboard. On the days when I don’t want to lug the netbook to the pub or wherever, I can still write short bursts of text or longish emails just with the kit in my pockets.  I don’t have something comparable.  I’m too poor.

I use the Chrome Firefox browser on both computers, because it’s very fast and the browser syncs across both machines. That means that I always have my delicious.com and Google bookmarks regardless of the machine I’m on, which is important. Also, I always have single-button access to Google Reader (which also syncs to my iPhone via the Reeder app).

I write in OpenOffice, on both machines. It’s a bit clunky in places — adding page numbers should be a fuck of a lot easier — but it does the job just fine. I save all work in .rtf format: every word processor can read .rtf. I’ve tried other setups–this is just easiest for me.

(If I’m writing film or tv, I work in Final Draft — industry standard, inextricably linked into workflow systems at a great many production houses and studios. If you want to, for example, tell a cable network to throw away their entire workflow structure because you think open source screenwriting software is cool, be my guest, but also be prepared to be called a twat.)  I don’t do any of this, but his point about industry standards is well-taken.

I often write rough drafts in Notepad PageFour, and then copy the text over into OpenOffice, which forces me to rewrite and polish.

I occasionally use Google Documents for short stuff on the fly, but I often find the word processing to be a bit herky-jerky.

I also work extensively in notebooks. I use Moleskines and Field Notes. I write with ultra fine point Sharpies, or good propelling Mirado Black Warrior #2 pencils, or, sometimes, a Tuff-Writer pen I was given, because it’s actually a bloody nice whatever black ballpoint or colored gelpoint pen I happen to have have on hand in my go bag. Be aware that I fetishise nicely designed goods, and the same results can be achieved with a Bic and a notebook bought for fifty pence from the Post Office.

6
“There is NOOOOO… rule 6.”

Uh, I think that’s it.  What’ve you all been up to?

April in Paris, Part the Third

Number three in a series of thoughts and meditations on the words of some of my favorite writers from their interviews in The Paris Review.  Actually, this week you’ll get two for the price of one.

That’s why I like short stories. You’re always trying to keep the person interested. In fiction, you don’t need to have the facts up front, but you have to have something that will grab the reader right away. It can be your voice. Some writers feel that when they write, there are people out there who just can’t wait to hear everything they have to say. But I go in with the opposite attitude, the expectation that they’re just dying to get away from me.

The Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 176, Amy Hempel

That last bit might be true of me if I was a short-story reader instead of a wannabe short-story writer.  I fight my way through to the end of a lot of stories that I probably wouldn’t if I wasn’t trying to figure out how to write them.  I actually forced my way through an entire anthology once.  Believe me, I really was dying to get away from some of those stories.

It’d probably help me to adopt Hempel’s attitude toward my stories.  I have it when it comes to editors and slush readers–I know they only need the slightest excuse to reject me.  It’s okay, though.  I don’t hate the players.  I don’t even hate the game.  Of course, there’s the matter of what “the game” is, exactly.  This is where folks in some circles talk about “the death of the short story,” or how it’s irrelevant, or how short stories are written “not to entertain people, but rather to help improve the resumés of the people writing them.”

Let me pause to beg you folks: No “literary vs. genre” or “character- vs. plot-driven” “Great taste/less filling” debate in the comments?  Please and thank you.

Anyway, the fact is, whoever you’re writing for, you don’t have a lot of room to maneuver in a short story.  Every word you write matters, and in the best shorts, sometimes the words you leave out have an impact. This is what’s always intrigued me the most about the form.  That, and the myriad of available techniques for keeping a reader interested because the one tool you just don’t have is the room you have in longer forms, like the novel.

There’s another side to the time factor when it comes to short story writing.  I was going to use a different bit of Raymond Carver’s Paris Review interview in a future post, but he did make a comment that’s relevant here.

After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of a payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now. Hence, poems and stories. I was beginning to see that my life was not—let’s say it was not what I wanted it to be.

I don’t have kids, but I can relate to that desperate sense of urgency.  I mean, I didn’t start this writing thing until I was thirty.  And it’s taken me seven years to reach the my current rank of “Small Potatoes” by trying to figure out this writing thing with short stories.  I’ve learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work, and it’s been important to my process to get feedback through submission and rejection–and even acceptance and subsequent editing. 

Lots of my writer-friends ask me, “When are you gonna get that novel out?”  I do have an outline or five, but the truth is, I’ll get that novel out when the idea of working 2-3 years on a single piece of work that could all end up in the toilet doesn’t scare the shit out of me.  I’ve only now gotten to the point where I can accept that notion for a 3,000-5,000 word piece that maybe took me a month or two.

I watch all of you novel-writers in my circle very carefully.  Each and every one of you, without exception, has guts that I just don’t have.  You continue to struggle with your first drafts, or your tenth drafts, or your query letters, or with getting or even keeping agents… I’m getting the shakes just thinking about it.

Still, I know it’s a YMMV kinda thing.  I’ve heard more than one novelist talk about how difficult short stories are to write.  I remember in my previous life in mental health work, I worked primarily with adolescents and knew a guy who primarily worked with homeless adults, literally, in the streets.  I’ll never forget what he said to me once.  “You’re a better man than me.  Adolescents?  No way.  I’ll take my psychotics and drug addicts any day of the week.”

We writers pick our poison, I guess, just like everyone else.  And short stories are mine.

Next time: The kinds of stories I like.

April in Paris, Part the Second

Here’s the second in a series of thoughts and meditations on the words of some of my favorite writers from their interviews in The Paris Review.

It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier.

The Paris Review – A Humorist at Work, Fran Lebowitz


Unlike Fran, I desire to be productive.  Thirty or forty years from now, I’d love to have a phone-book-sized tome of The Complete Short Fiction of Don P. published, like Bradbury, or Ballard, or Card, or Ellison.  But like her, though, I am got’damn lazy.  Now, I have my own methods for tricking myself out of my own laziness.  I couldn’t possibly list them all, and different methods will work at different times.  But this post isn’t about that.  It’s about giving a name to whatever it is that blocks your writing–not the 101 reasons you might have for not getting shit done, but that single cause that’s there once you boil away your rationale.

Every writer I know or know of has reasons for not getting writing done.  Jobs, problems, spouses, children, children with special needs, parents with special needs, &c.  And yet, they publish.  But, while I firmly believe that if people who work their dayjobs while undergoing chemotherapy can still get their writing done, you can, too, this isn’t a guilt-trip post either.  I’m not going to tell you to just STFU and get it done.  Not in this post (especially since I already have in others). 

What I will encourage a writer to do is to get to the core of whatever it is that stops you and, aside from doing whatever you have to do to overcome it, to first just get off your own back about it.

See, I know exactly when I’m not writing for no other reason than “I’m just not feeling it,” which is fucking unacceptable.  Or, “I’m too tired.”  Or, “I’ve had a hard day at work and I’m just emotionally drained right now.”  Or, “I’m blocked.”  Pfft.  Bullshit.  I may or may not be treating myself fairly, but to me all those reasons have my personal laziness as their root.  And knowing that makes the next step surprisingly simple.  Because what am I going to do?  Cry about it?  To what end? 

Better to just make a choice.  To either CHOOSE to be okay and sit with the regret and irritation that comes along with not writing, or CHOOSE to use one of my aforementioned tricks to get myself back on the ball.  Because bitching about how I’m not writing gets old really, really fast.  Just ask Mrs. P.

Next time: The reason I write short stories.

April in Paris, Part the First

As promised, the first in a series of thoughts and meditations on the words of some of my favorite writers from their interviews in The Paris Review.

The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours.  I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being.  There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down.  Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard.  Don’t let people interfere with you.  Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done.  If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

 The Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 203, Ray Bradbury


It’s tempting for anyone who’s read Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, or even the rest of this Paris Review interview, to dismiss his “just do it” work ethic with, “That’s easy for him to say.”  I mean, I’ve certainly never cranked out “two or three thousand words in a few hours” without some difficulty.  And it’s been a pipe dream of mine for years to meet Bradbury’s suggested goal in Zen of one short story a week.   In fact, I’ve tried and failed at this for quite some years now.

But Bradbury’s approach doesn’t just represent a metric to me.  It’s a way of writing that has finally shown that, like everyone says, it’s about the journey.

Let me be clear: I’m not talking about “it’s the journey” in some head-in-the-clouds, stop-and-smell-the-roses, appreciate-the-here-and-now kind of way.  I’m talking about a journey that fucking makes me a better writer.  And I attribute every piece of (my pretty meager) success to that journey.

Why?  Because my personal writing journey–that attitude of “just fucking do it”–is fed by one aspect of my personality: my inherent stubbornness.  And it’s only been that stubbornness that’s been able to defeat another aspect of my personality.  the one that gets in the way of my writing: my inherent laziness.

(Edited to add) What fuels your artistic journey?

Next time: The other ways I beat my laziness.

“April in Paris”*

What you’re supposed to do is act like a fucking professional.

-Mr. White, Reservoir Dogs

You know how folks would get excited knowing that their favorite TV series were on, say, Hulu, in their entirety?  I felt exactly the same way when I read that The Paris Review has put all of their writer interviews online.  After years of passing up on purchasing the interview compilations, I gouged on them like a starving man.  I found–in a couple of cases, rediscovered–some real gems, which I’ve posted on my Tumblr.

You want to know how some real professionals get shit done?  Then you could do worse than to peer into the brains of the likes of Dorothy Parker, Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and–for us genre folks–Ray Bradbury!

So I think over the next few days I’m going to post bits of their interviews, along with some accompanying thoughts.  Meditations, I guess you could call them. 

*Sorry, I’m still on the Count Basie Orhcestra tip from a few weeks ago.

“‘Cause whatever you do, oh, you’ve got to do your thing”

Like a lot of things in my life lately, this post is 9 days late.  Still, it’s the thought that counts, right?

This was going to be my “Why I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year” post.  But reading posts like that over the years, I’ve noticed that it seems difficult for me to write one without looking like a condescending jerk.

This isn’t where I’m going to turn up my nose at the NaNo, or go into my rationalization of why it just doesn’t fit in with my writing goals right now.  I only bring it up now because, despite my resolve to not even fool myself into thinking it was a possibility this year, I reupped my account anyway and found out that somehow, some of my peeps found and added me to their friends list. 

So, to them: You do your thing!!

Of course, the best part of reupping my account: the pep talks from famous writers in my email box.  I squeed when I saw Aimee Bender’s!

Showing Fools How It’s Done for 75 Years

Few things give me as much satisfaction as watching a consummate professional, in any field, at work.  Last Sunday night, I saw and heard a group of them–the 17-piece horn section, 4-piece rhythm section, vocalist, and conductor of the legendary Count Basie Orchestra.


I was expecting trombonist Bill Hughes to direct, but as it turns out, he retired last month. The band is now in the capable hands of Dennis Mackrel, one of the last members of the band to be hired by The Count himself.

I’d seen them play twice in college in the early ’90s.  The trumpet player in the pic above, Scotty Barnhart, was in the band back then, along with a few others.  If memory serves, he was the person who sold me the Live at El Morocco CD out of a duffle bag during an intermission.  See, I love that–even after 75 years, they’re still a working band.  Still on the hustle.  You can tell by the tour bus parked outside the theater.  The same kind of bus I used to ride on what were loosely called “gigs.”

My college flashbacks weren’t helped by the fact that I was also drinking cheap beer during the show.

The CBO in the vid below, directed by the equally legendary Frank Foster, was more or less the configuration that I saw in college.  My personal favorite song, “Corner Pocket” by Freddie Green and arranged by Ernie Wilkins, is at 2’40”.  I didn’t hear it on Sunday, which made me sad.  But the show still kicked ass. After 75 years and the inevitable personnel changes, the Count Basie Orchestra is still a group of what’s known in jazz circles as monsters and bad-ass motherfuckers.

Sort of makes me wonder if I can polish up the trumpet and revive my long-dead lead trumpet chops. I have to say, it’s been a long time since I’ve missed playing as badly as I did last night.

“God give us the blood to keep going”

I’ve had a bit of trouble getting a handle on my current work-in-progress.  It had such a promising start, judging from the critiques the first two acts have received.  But I struggled with the third act, so I took some time away from it to write other things.

This story’s for a closed anthology, and it’s due in about a month.  Time to get cracking again!  So after doing another round of hack-and-slash copyedits, I decided the piece needed a soundtrack.  So I picked some songs to mirror the sort of mood evoked from the picture above, and a couple of songs for different characters’ motivations.

Take a listen:

  • Chicago, “Prologue, August 29, 1968”
  • –, “Someday (August 29, 1968)
  • –, “While the City Sleeps”
  • –, “State of the Union”
  • –, “Dialogue (Pt. 1 & 2)”
  • –, “All the Years”
  • Depeche Mode, “Walking in My Shoes”
  • Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, “Battle of the Species”
  • Manic Street Preachers, “If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next”
  • Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens, “I’ll Take the Long Road”
  • Sons of Champlin, “Light Up the Candles”

Yes, I know there are a lot of Chicago songs on here, but at least it’s their cool ’70s and/or Robert Lamm-written stuff.