"I'm the Slime Oozing Out From Your TV Set."

After two long, quiet years of reading, writing and research, I've got access to cable television again. It's been two weeks. It's going to take much longer than that to recover.

During my cable-less interval, I've been desensitized to the cultural bankruptcy that TV represents. I'd forgotten about the amazing capacity for TV to pander, belittle, objectify women, perpetuate stupidity, perpetuate the stereotype of the stupid man and cause diarrhea, heartburn, split ends and an erection that lasts more than four hours. Wait... I think I got the side-effects of a designer drug for the treatment of whatever the hell psychosis it is that causes Hollywood starlets go out socialiting without underwear on.

I just really wanted the cable for sports. I've been OD-ing on college football. It helps that my teams are good this year ('Roll Tide, Roll' & 'Boomer Sooner', but mostly Roll Tide, baby!), but it turns out the commercials are not good. I've spent a lot of time during commercials with my mouth hanging open as if I'm trying to taste the so-light-it's-clear beer or eat the Carl's Jr. 4-pound Slop Burger with Triple Back Bacon and Chipotle Anabolic Steroid Sauce, but I assure you that that is not the reason. I love watching sports, but the commentators are almost as loud and crass as the graphics and pundits on Fox News. (Speaking of loud: If ESPN misplaces Dick Vitale, they can always use Chris Berman instead. Since when is Berman that loud?)

I like Sci-Fi a bit, so I checked out the Sci-Fi channel on the off chance that the acting had improved. No dice. I caught a bit of their updated Flash Gordon series, and I can honestly say that I've seen far more nuanced performances on the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.

Eh. TV is a festering, stinking slime.

You watch this. I'm going to try and catch Sportscenter.

How to drive a train...

7:12am this morning: The driver mentions that the train in front of us is very late and he can't go around it to keep us on time. Duh.

PS - I really need wireless, n'est pas? I hate having to post these kinds of things so late in the day...

Hey, everybody. Remember me?

I've got fall fever. It's going around, and I can't shake it off. At first, I thought it was due to the impending start of college football. Those that know me know how I love the college pigskin. But that wasn't really it, not entirely. Then I realized that it was fifteen years ago this fall that I went off to college. This gave me fall fever in a not-so-good way. But either way, it stuck with me. Why, oh why am I am so fall feverish?

I'll tell you why: heat. Hot, heated, flaming, sun-born heat. That's why.

Now, I know all of you in the 'traditionally' hot parts of the country may be a bit indignant about that statement, so let's try this. Everyone who has central air raise their hands.

Ah-ha!

I know you can't see me through the mighty inter-tubes, but my hand is not raised, I can assure you.

Someone decided that So-Cal, a place with the hap-hap-happiest weather in the country should go sans a/c. Oversight city. When it's 95 outside and 90 inside, it's no wonder I can't shake fall fever. I'd like to see you try it.

Triumph! ...of the Definitive Kind.

It's done. The first complete rough draft that I've managed. I wrote 'The End' with great satisfaction. The final word count: 57042.

My first thought upon finishing: "Which of my other book ideas am I going to attack next?"

If you've ever thought about writing a book, I recommend this experience highly. I'm sreiously considering doing it again in May. No, really, I'm not kidding. I feel that good about myself and it's that much fun. And this time I'm going to start from scratch. And then I'm going to do it in November, too, during the actual NaNoWriMo.

I want to thank everybody who cheered me on. I'm telling it true when I say that I couldn't have done it without you. I need to specifically thank (or curse) my brother Dave for inspiring this crazy book idea.

I'd like to thank the Blue Line for being a proper pain in the ass. It's harder to get overwrought about writing a 50,000 word novel draft when your environs are smelly and noisy. Thanks Metro Blue Line! Thanks a lot!

I especially want to thank The Amazing Addie for showing unwavering confidence in me despite me telling her to stop it. She also put up with my weird schedule and the resulting pile of dishes in the sink (Don't worry, sweetie. They're going away soon). If you didn't already realize it, Addie's an amazing person.

All right. That is all.

Can we party now?

Triumph! ...of a sort (Part 1)

Good news! But first, some reasons that I haven't blogged in the last week. One as you might guess, is the continuing saga of my attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. The other was the week from hell at work.

Last Monday I put in 9.5 hours at work doing production for a meeting involving 25 people. I had to do invites, rsvps, find the overhead projector, find the overhead projector that wasn't broken, get the door to the meeting room unlocked without benefit of our office manager, who was home dealing with a small, persistent flooding problem. The Monday meeting went really well even after all that.

Then I had to jump back in on Tuesday and Wednesday and prep for an even bigger event on Thursday afternoon. This one involved 120 people (it was supposed to be about 90) and variations on all of the aforementioned problems with the addition of running out of food. There was nothing I could do. I didn't know until the last minute that someone was bringing 16 sixth-graders. Who knew that they could eat that much? Despite that, everyone seemed to have a good time. Chalk up another success.

I knew that this week was coming, obviously, and decided to go ahead with the novel madness anyway. It turned to to be my most productive week yet. On Tuesday, I nearly hit my quota on the train (that's 90 mins per day) and I would have hit it if not for the damn Sonic Expander that got on at Anaheim Station. A Sonic Expander is a category of Blue Line denizen that feels obligated to take up as much space sonically as they can by means of talking loudly on their cell phones, cavorting with their friends, or in this case, READING OVER MY SHOULDER while doing all of the above. That was truly annoying. I got to 1648. I had time to get 1700, I would have gotten to 1700, but no.

The rest of the week went great. I set a new record on Saturday: 3050 words in just under 4 hours.

And now, the good news. Today I did 2523 words and I now stand at (drumroll please):

50073.

That's right, baby! I DID IT! It feels good. And it would feel even better if I was done with the story. I still have Major Climax Part II (a big action sequence with more than its fair share of explosions or perhaps a touching love scene of emotional grandeur) and Denouement (Six months later, Earl was not, as his wife predicted, the Ambassador to Tahiti, but had instead realized his childhood dream of becoming a Chippendale dancer) still to go.

So I haven't been able to write 'The End'. But I've got a week. I like my chances. And then I can post Part II of my Triumph.

So many words - so incoherent...

Hit the halfway point today. 25247 - so just over. Two days early! I tell you... it's been crazy again.

Have I mentioned that people on the train smell? I've been really unlucky with that yesterday and today. One of the smelly guys was also twitchy and we thought we might have to call for medical help.

The weekend was really productive again. I did 2700 words on Saturday and finished before the power in our place went out for 4 hours. I backed up. There was a live wire that went down about half a block from our place. The surge was really bad. We thought we had lost the amp, our TV and Addie's computer. But after they figured out how to fix it ("Does somebody have a bypass in their truck?" - There were six SoCal Edison trucks there. Someone better have a bypass) and the power came back on in full, everything was fine. That was a sucky moment. Like Monday.

The Time change kicked my butt this year. i fell asleep on the train while writing on Monday morning. And Monday afternoon. I only got 320 words out on Monday. I made up for it today with over 2600 words. I need to make up for it again tomorrow. I case you're keeping score, right now, quotas are mattering again.

I've gotten into a new area and it feels a bit like week one all over again: I'm dazed and confused... But I think I'm finding my way again. Like Grasshopper, I'm learning patience. And when to just hang-it-all, forge ahead and ramble quasi-incoherently until the magic happens.

More soon...

Week 1? Done. Week 2? Definitely not done, but rockin' hard.

This'll be short.

Week one is over and it was pretty interesting. There is no shortage of ups and downs with this process.

I got just over 15,000 cranked out last week, and that's what it felt like a lot of the time - just cranking it out. But not in a bad way, as you'll see. My handy guidebook said that this might happen so I powered through. Now, with week two under way, the guidebook said to watch out for burnout. So yesterday, which was day one of week two, I decided to go light (only 1200 words), woke up energized and got 900 really good words (not cranked out) out this morning. I'm really looking forward to later today, tonight and this weekend. We'll see how long I can sustain this run. This is great because it feels like quotas don't matter. I'll get the quotas automatically because the story is wanting me to write it right now. So I just write a lot...

More Sunday...

Weekends are Nice.

So this weekend was nice. Cold's pretty much gone, I'm ahead of tomorrow's word count and the story is going pretty well, I think. Really, quotas aren't really a concern anymore. I'm more worried about hitting story points so I can write 'The End' by March 30. But before this budding confidence, there was Friday.

I came in under the daily quota on Friday due in no small part to a sudden terror that gripped me in the morning when I started to write. I couldn't get rolling. It might have something to do with the train ride again. It seems to be either feast or famine on the Blue line. I sat down and got the laptop set up before I noticed that I was sitting across from a crusty-faced crack addict. She was somewhere between age 40 and 75, it was hard to tell. She smelled bad and talked to herself and frequently fell asleep mid-sentence. Then there was the huge snoring guy. It probably registered on the Richter scale. But the best was the unattended backpack. They made a minor fuss, but then just took it off the train without taking precautions, like, say getting us the hell off the train. So maybe it was no wonder I couldn't get into the swing of things.

The afternoon commute featured a train so full that I couldn't even get my laptop out without risking damage. With all this, by the time I got home, I was sure that I was going to be an abject failure in this endeavor. That's just how my mind rolls. But Addie cheered me up and Saturday morning I put on an iTunes playlist artfully titled 'Kicking Ass' and rolled up my sleeves. 2500 words later, I was having a beer.

Today was great too - although I noticed that I might be in for some technical difficulties. My little Mac G4 PowerBook 867 MHz is nearly smoking. I'm serious - that's not entirely a metaphor. I can - even right now - smell the circuitry heating up. Maybe it's all the software I have running. Word, Excel, Curio (great brainstorming software), iTunes (constantly running), a web browser, several widgets... My poor computer can't handle it. The CPU temp got up to 135 degrees at one point and is nearly always maxed out. I back stuff up. A lot.

Anyway, that's all for now. Wish good fortune tomorrow for the train rides...

Day 1: Finally rollin'.

After all the planning and waiting I finally got to start, and it was pretty fun. Today's total: 2330, well over the target of 1700!

I was able to effectively use both legs of my commute despite funny smells (morning commute) and people pulling emergency door releases and making us wait ten extra minutes (evening commute). Then I spent about three hours at home. So four-and-a-half no problem.

Characters are doing things I didn't expect already. Super cool. Yes, I said 'super cool.' I have no other words left to describe it.

Now I'm fried, but pleased with the day's work. Look for another post Sunday night.

Whew.

Speed-Writing for Fun and Prizes! (Not really.)

For those of you who don't know, I am about to attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Or I should say, a rough draft of a book. Very rough. I'm co-opting a methodology employed in NaNoWriMo (NAtional NOvel-WRIting MOnth - nanowrimo.org) which normally occurs in November. I'm doing it in March and calling it MiNoWriMo. I've been trying to get myself to do this for a while - write a book that is - but with the day job and all, it's been all too easy to make excuses. I'm already busy. But now is my time. I can feel it in the wind and the creaking of my bones and... Carpe Diem and junk like that stuff.

"First the French horn and now a 50,000 word novel in a month? Sounds nuts. I always knew you were nuts, Mike."

Yes, it's nuts. But it's going to be crazy-bad fun, too.

As for 50,000 words this post is around 800 and it only took about 40 minutes to write. Here are some great novels that come in at around 50k.

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Mine's likely to come in longer. Unlike the hacks listed above, I have something to SAY, dammit. I kid.

Now: details.

Tomorrow is the day and I'm more than a bit nervous. I'm afraid that I put too much pressure on myself in general and it's been hard to let go of that in advance of this project. I'm really hoping that the sheer brute force involved in this style of noveling will help reject my natural tendency towards overbaked perfectionism and low self-esteem - not a winning combination. I want to do that, but we'll see how strong my tendencies really are.

Having said that: I really can't wait to start. I've been thinking about this book for a long time, and since I decided to give this self-crash-course in novel-writing a try, I've been tempted to just jump in and go. But I didn't. Got to protect the sanctity of the month.

So. A little about this book. The jumping off point for me was: What if a group of people got together and actually performed the Twin Paradox thought experiment in the real world? [You know, shoot one twin out into the cosmos and get him up near the ultimate speed limit - light - and since theoretically nothing can go faster than light, time (and length, by the way) has to change and so for the space twin time slows down and therefore he ends up younger than his Earthbound twin upon his return. Simple. Intuitive.] What would the result be and would the experiment answer more questions than expected? This led me to want to explore how - besides science - that we answer questions: religion, meditation, fact-finding, blind faith, informed faith, encyclopedias... so many gradations. Is there a better way answer questions? Would we even know what it was if we saw it? Tell me about your mother. So that's it. Nothing big - just psychoanalyze the world so to speak.

Another point - a big one: The book I write is unlikely to have much resemblance to what I mentioned above. Once characters get out of my head and onto the word-processor, they have a way of doing what they want despite my efforts otherwise. They become inconsistent, rebellious, surprising, lovesick, psychotic and generally... human. That said, I hope to maintain a modicum of control over the process. At least the Twin Paradox experiment will be in there. I know that. But how the characters will react? That's the fun.

On another note, I seem to be trying really hard to get a cold. It would be the first one in more than a year. Last night was pretty sucky, but so far I feel better today. So I'm going to take a lot of Emergen-C until the symptoms flee in abject humiliation. But if they persevere and get the better of me, I'll get on with the noveling in any case. Nothing like a deadline.

I'd like to thank everyone in advance of this for their unabashedly glowing well-wishes and creatively snarky comments. I hope to keep everyone updated periodically. If you guys don't hear from me, that's when you should send well-wishes and guilt-inducing tidings. I can do this, but can really imagine needing help.

If you can't do all that... at least wish me luck.

Mike

PS - Future updates are likely to be terse and possibly panicked. This is normal.

PPS - It's official. I typed this up this morning, but as of this posting I have a cold. So... one of my characters will too. See what I just did there? Art imitates life.