Surreality shows....

While writing about a book in my Random Acts of Reading blog, I mentioned a fellow and a frequent occurence from eight grade. I actually included his name and the teacher's name. Couple days later, there was a comment from him, a big time California lawyer now. My surreal moment of the week. I think he must have had someone on his staff google his name once a week, can't think of another way for him to find my obscure readinng log. He remembered the book and the teacher, but not her favorite comment about him. His comment to me was "Geez, you have an amazing memory!"

I've been thinking about that, because I don't really have a great memory. But I remember junior high, more than high school and college. And not because of any chemical additives. I think the reason I remember junior high is because I wrote every day, and the reason I remember my junior high classmates is because I wrote about them. I do remember 4th grade pretty clearly as well. I read Harriet the Spy that year and kept a notebook about that year, a la Harriet. It did not go over well for me there, once people found the notebook. I solved that problem in Junior High by writing for "publication". I wrote a soap opera and my classmates were the characters. Every night, I would write two pages of dialogue and then call my best friend Maryanne and we would discuss the episode. She would make editorial suggestions and if I agreed, I would make changes. Then I would re write the thing, this time on a sandwich of carbon paper and notebook paper. I learned early to only bring one copy to school.

So what happened? In high school, there were "things" that had to be done, things that would lead to engineering degrees and law schools and grad degrees, etc. I followed along and did those things, even though I really had no intention of being any of those things. I always intended to be a writer. Somehow, my little twelve year old brain knew that to do that, I had to write every day and I did. In HS and the first two years of college, I didn't. And there was plenty to write about. So, did I just have more time and energy to write in Jr. High? Less time and energy dedicated to pretending to be something else? Jr. High kids have the amazing ability to totally be themselves and HS's do a good job of getting that out of them. Or at least me.

So I guess, like any good writer, I've spend a good chunk of years procrastinating.

"As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90% procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching informercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly."-- Paul Rudnick.

Exciting times at the Story Factory...

Last time I looked, our little site is getting very close to the thousandth visitor. I know, small numbers for some, but I am pretty pumped about getting into the four digit numbers.

Coming this fall at the story factory, two exciting new works of fiction will be in progress, along with a contest to find better titles for some existing, but badly titled works. The two new things have titles already, Tyranny of the Ordinary, otherwise known as TOTO and The Brothers Keen. Ideas and research for both books are coming in nicely and I'm honestly not sure which book with get written first, although I will make every attempt to save one of them for November and the annual insanity known as National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo.

But the big question remains, which book comes first, the political book that will be fun, but a lot of research, or the other one, that will be more life based, at least life that I have been a bit more invovled in.

Shuttle Update...

Discovery undocked from the space station. They're checking for damage and getting set to come home tomorrow.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

Motivations...and finding God in Stephen King

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
Thomas Berger


After reading some writing quotes, it struck me. Most of the truly successful writers have industrial sized chips on their shoulders. And are quite proud to show them off. The novels I've been reading this summer, the ones that get under your skin and stay with you a few days, they're not written by nice people with a message of grace and love to spread to the world. Most of them are damd mad and not going to take it anymore.

The problem is, nice people don't get mad. That's what my mother taught me. Anger was the big no no. Don't feel it, and certainly don't express it, not in front of anyone, anyway. So I go and write a book and totally ignore that fact that the main character is so pissed at the world it colors everything she does. I ignore and therefore she ignores it, denies it, and the whole book ends up feeling like a lie. So the question of the book becomes, sure the command is Be angry, but sin not, but what happens when you don't listen to that sage advice. What happens when you get angry and sin your heart out, then go on a bit more? I'm starting to think that's the book. Because nice girls didn't get angry in the forties. They didn't live it out and take it out on strangers.

Which isn't the typical "female adventure story." But maybe it's a bit closer to the female experience, of the world falling apart at the seams and not being able to do a damn thing the fix it.

So it's all Stephen King's fault. I've been reading through his stuff, in mostly chronological order this summer. And something stands out. In the darkness of all his stories, the light is clear. There is good and evil and no doubt which side is which. Unlike real life. But light shines brighter in the dark. You really don't need a flashlight at twighlight, but it sure is necessary at one am on a moonless night. But more on that another time...


Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever
studied, writing columns for newspapers.
-- Jimmy Breslin



What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. - George Orwell



I hated school. I don't trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.
Stephen King


ps, I only liked school until I was 14. And I enjoyed college. But hs was the pits.

Fire on the Mountain

"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the
recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a
hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."
--Henry David Thoreau


There is probably the biggest problem I have had lately writing. Writing while the idea is still fresh and new. It gets sometimes to where by the time I get to writing somthing, it's already stale and old because I have reworked it mentally so many times that it isn't new enough to write anymore. Not sure that makes sense, but there it is. After six or seven mental playbacks, the scene isn't fun anymore. Writing, instead of a process of discovery, becomes a work of transcription. I think this is what Thoreau is talking about when he talks about heat. It's the flame consuming new fuel that is the heat of writing, not a picture of campfire hung on a wall. There is a certain life to a campfire compared to the dryness of processes central heat. And unfortunately, we're taught that the central heat is desirable.





"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from
mediocre minds."
--Albert Einstein

And you should go see what's goin on with Discovery today...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

Space Junkie

I was not born a space junkie. It was a gift from my father, when I was about five years old and my father woke me up and made me watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. It was history, and gosh darn, Dad wouldn't let me miss it, inspite of the late hour and my mother's non-interest. We watched every space flight that was broadcast after that.

But the biggest gift to space junkies ever, is the internet. NASA TV live over the internet is much better than any ten minute coverage the networks can provide. Something about the ordinaryness of some fellow in the firing room getting up and walking to the coffee pot in the back of the room. It's the third time it's on this week and still exciting.

The two best things though, are the crew radio checks and the final "polling".
Crew radio checks occur after the crew is secured in the shuttle. The crew then has to check communications with the firing room, launch command and mission control in Houston. Then they are instructed to not touch the knobs except to adjust the volume for their own comfort. The thing is, the voices are so full of anticipation and excitment. It's the first flight for Lisa Nowak and Stephanie Wilson and they're voices aren't seasoned scientists, but little girls at Christmas. Same with the boys. They are even more pumped, especially those who've done it before. Apparently, there's nothing "Been there, done that" about space travel.

The final polling is when the launch director goes down the list and asks each area for go-no go. Even the voices of these engineers and specialists drip with excitement. These folks love what they do. I'm sure there are politics and personality problems, affairs, and all the other crap that comes with government work, but today, they are going to space. Everything else is so much crap.

On our trip to Flordia in 1976, my family and I were subjected the full propaganda machine about the space shuttle. We bought it and I still have a hard time believing there are folks out there that are not exciting about space travel and the space station. Our Florida trip in 2004, we went to the Cape again, this time the propaganda machine was focused on Mars. Know what? I'm with them. Let's go.

I don't think there's anything better than launching Discovery on the 4th of July. Except maybe launching the Mars trip on another 4th.