Category: Uncategorized (Page 7 of 16)

On January 2, I swore off women. I felt that I chased them too much, that I bothered them. Women in general seemed to have better things to do than deal with me. So, says I to myself, I’m going to stop wasting everyone’s time by trying.

Also, on January 2, a Jewish woman going by the screen name “mono_no_aware” sent me a message on OKCupid to tell me I was fascinating and would I like to grab a cup of coffee sometime?

On her profile, she not only discussed mono no aware, but played with the English and Japanese meanings of ‘aware,’ and referenced mushin and do alongside Michael Chabon and Haruki Murakami…as if she expected you to already be familiar with Japanese philosophy and good books. She had pictures of her travels in Europe and spoke of her love of the French language and French culture.

And she was interested in me!

I was in a quandary – I had anticipated something like this, but considered the possibility so remote as to be not worth worrying about.

Announcing your plans is the best way to hear God laugh.

So I went to three friends (you know who you are) and asked, ‘you know that I have sworn off women, so I won’t bother them, but now this woman is asking me to coffee, should I accept?’ And these three friends replied, in order, ‘yes,’ ‘yes,’ and ‘YES YOU FRIGGIN IDIOT!’

So we decided to meet for tea.

I was delayed in getting there by half an hour, and she, cross, texted her friend and kvetched…and her friend said, ‘trust me. Wait another ten minutes.’ I arrived, and we sat down, and chatted. We took a walk. She had worked in publishing and was working on a novel. She had taken a long slow route through France, and fallen in love with the people and the cities and the tongue.

There wasn’t really a spark, but there was some interest, so we met up a second time (just to make sure!), this time for lunch. And, when I found out she had a taste for craft beers like I do, for beers at Creekside afterwards.

She tells me she felt the spark when I jokingly poked her tummy as we sat down to our beers, to my spiced Belgian ale and her to her finely-crafted IPA.

Things progressed. We spend Valentine’s weekend going to her temple on Friday night and my meeting on Sunday morning, and, in between, dressing to the nines and ordering take-out pizza and eating it with champagne at home. We had so much fun being religious together we actually sat in silent retirement for the first time on Sunday night to get more of it, because we’re total dorks. As I went north to Sacramento to film a government meeting, my boss cunningly snuck her into the van on our way out…and she handled herself with joy and aplomb, doing the same work and suffering the same trials as we were.

For this woman, Melissa Weiss, is joy. I can see it in her prayers, in her lovemaking, in her eating, in her cooking, in her joking. With her, ‘the inner light’ is not a metaphor, but a plain fact. Her body feels like home, when she squeezes me in her arms after I’ve been gone. She has allowed me to take my dreams and hopes out from the vacuum-sealed places in the heart where I stowed them, because she shares them too.

When I told her I was joining the Peace Corps and going to Senegal, she asked to come. And I realized that, if the Corps wouldn’t let her, I would wait and try again next year, so we could go together.

She was the first woman to fearlessly offer to join me in the African bush. And she was the first one I was truly ready to stay for.

I purchased a used gold ring, in accordance with her tastes. Used gold is the most ethical, because at least no one had to suffer for her to wear it after the last person left it at Hamilton’s Jewelers. A plain gold band is Jewish tradition, representing the perfect union of marriage. And, of course, a used plain band is frugal!

This morning, as she finished davening and offering her thanks and prayers to God, I asked her to stand. Her tzitzit shivered as she stood, resplendent beneath her shawl and glowing with the in-breathing of YHVH that had just left her lips. I said, “I don’t speak much Hebrew, but I’ve been practicing.”

I got on one knee and opened the ring box. And I asked her to marry me in the language of Abraham and Sarah, of Jacob and Rachel, of Isaac and Rebekah.

She said yes, in English.

Then we hugged, and she cried, and we kissed.

 

My God, it’s a beautiful morning.

There are some writers who are like whittlers – once that first draft is done, they have to whittle and whittle like Hell in order to shape the damn thing into the shape they want.

There are some writers who are like cement mixers – the first time it comes out, it comes out perfectly mixed and ready to set in stone.

Guess which one Admiral Bob was. Damn him.

This is easily the most controversial injunction in Heinlein’s Rules. And it’s not hard to see why – I’ve had some real howlers of first drafts (don’t even ask about the first draft of “Hull Down”), as has every writer I’ve known except Admiral Bob and Laurie Bland. Charlie Jane Anders sums it up well here. That said, I disagree with both.

I used to be a chronic rewriter – up until the dawn of 2013. Even when I had it in the mail, I would rewrite. Editing is a bit like Communism and glitter, it’ll expand into everything unless contained. But I know how much my first drafts can suck (speaking again of “Hull Down,” the first draft of this version never even spells out the Big Reveal at the end). So what I’ve done is create a strict editing schedule.

Heinlein said except on an editor‘s orders – i.e., someone who isn’t you.

I’m lucky, damned lucky, to be surrounded by talented and compassionate first readers (you know who you are) who are happy to tell me where something doesn’t work. Equally important, they’re happy not to tell me how to fix it – only how it’s broken. Then I can figure out ways to fix it. I have three or four that I regularly turn to, and write between one and three drafts. I figure out how many revisions to write based on (a) how close together the responses arrive and (b) how consistent the criticism is.

In Ian Brown and the Hand of Fatima, there was supposed to be a scene where Ian is waylaid by outlaws in the Highveld of South Africa, then talks his way out of it. This was based on something that happened to Benedict Cumberbatch. I showed that story to four people, every single one of which hated that scene with a passion. I took it out back, gave it a last cigarette, shot it, and replaced it with a thing about elephants.

If you have a couple of people who can all agree that one scene sucks? Listen.

If you don’t?

CritiqueCircle.com offers a credits-based way to get your work critiqued for improvement. I’m a member, and use Critique Circle when my first readers are sick and tired of reviewing my work for me. I also recommend finding or forming a writer’s group in your local area – but ideally one that Gets what you’re trying to do in your work. I would hesitate to read bits of No Time to a mystery writing circle that mostly focused on cozy Fair Play mysteries.

How many drafts should you go through? Five, maximum, and that’s only if you know there’s something terribly wrong with that first draft but Just Don’t Know What. After five drafts,  that story is either ready for the mail or you should toss it.

And then start critiquing your friends’ stories. If they critique yours, it’s only fair you critique theirs. You’re not Amanda Palmer, you don’t expect people around you to work for nothing.

This is where Heinlein’s admonition comes in: stop fucking fiddling with it. It may not be perfect, but it’s done, and it needs to leave home and make its own way instead of sleeping on your couch and eating out of your fridge.

Which is where we’ll take up next week.

There’s an apocryphal story attached to Abigail Adams, wife of the notoriously obnoxious and disliked second president, John Adams. She apparently chased (or, more likely, sent one of the children to chase) her husband as he was on his way to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, to bring him his favorite pair of pants. “Because most of the business of politics is applying the seat of them to the seat of the chair.”

She could easily have been Tabitha (or Stephen) King, Charmian London or Vera Nabokov for all that. Because the first business in writing is applying the seat of your pants to the seat of the chair.

You.

Must.

Produce.

Without a steady flow of new words, everything else dries up. It’s a slaughterhouse without incoming meat, an oil well without oil, a Congress without draft legislation. First and foremost, you must write.

Every writer is different – I tend to write in three-day bursts, plinking a few hundred words one day, a few hundred words the next, and hitting a streak of three or four thousand the third day. Jack London’s famous stint was 1000 words a day, Dean Wesley Smith writes in public, Bradbury wrote a short story a week, Kerouac wrote the entirety of On the Road in one forty-eight hour Benzedrine-fueled rush. To this day, Stephen King writes double what Jack London did and won’t let himself get up until he does.

Unless you’re going the Kerouac route, and I don’t recommend it, don’t wait for inspiration. Inspiration comes to you when you’re actually working, not when you’re playing another round of Civilization IV*. Talking about “inspiration” when you’re not writing is just another excuse for not writing. And having taken my share of long sabbaticals, you write better when you’re in a habit of writing. You get rusty otherwise. It’s just like anything else that way.

How much should you write? I’m going to talk of words per day, even though you may write in week-long or three-day terms like Bradbury or I. Don’t take Stephen King or Jack London or any other number out of thin air. You are not Stephen King. You are not Jack London. That’s like going to the gym and saying, “well, I’ll lift a hundred pound weight every day. That’s a nice round number.”

Dean Wesley Smith recommends doing a time inventory once or twice a year, measuring how you spend all your time in fifteen minute chunks. I can attest that this is a useful exercise, and also a huge pain in the ass. It also becomes less useful if your life is less than completely predictable, say because you switch continents or because some weeks work furloughs you four days out of five and some weeks they call you in for twelve-hour shifts of unpaid overtime.

What I recommend is looking at the most stable parts of your week – maybe you never get called in on Tuesdays or you’re free after church on Sundays – and set that aside for a test run each week. This is the time where you sit down to crank out another few hundred or few thousand words. Start at a set time and end at a set time – slightly less than you’d want, so your brain considers the time precious.

When you’re done, divide the number of new words by the hours you’ve been writing. This is your words per hour, and it’s going to get more accurate each week until you know your average wordcount like the back of your hand. My own is about 800 words per hour.

Now, look at the upcoming week and see where you can reasonably slot in half an hour or an hour to write. Calculate how many words you can write this week given your wordcount and the time available. Halve this number, because shit happens.

This is your wordcount goal for the week.

You can extend this to monthly and yearly wordcount, if you like. And if you find yourself with an extra ten minutes by the word processor, see if you can wrap up that scene or write out a dialogue.

Once you have the time set out, you must protect it. You can do the café thing, or stay at home. Do, however, remove yourself from the everyday in some way – even if it’s just moving the chair to a different part of the room. It helps you make a mental break from all the other bullshit in your life. I like to mount a framed picture of Jack London that I have, to spur me on.

Then turn off the internet.

No, you don’t need it for research – forge ahead as if you knew, and if it’s important (or if it’s encyclopedic information), drop “[tk]” in that spot to mark it to look up later when you’re editing. Writing time is for writing, that is, adding new words.

For years, I had a netbook that I’d gotten for free in exchange for showing up and looking white at a factory opening in China. I got what I paid for – it was so crippled that a month after I got it, all it could do was play music and operate Word. It was absolutely perfect, because while I was using that computer, all I could do was write. I got higher wordcounts per hour on that thing than on anything else, even on my regular computer with the internet turned off.

This year, I’m getting a Hemingwrite, because it’s designed to do the same thing, share documents via cloud, and survive anything short of a nuclear blast.

I also recommend taking two or five or ten minutes to reread a bit of what you’ve written (assuming you’re working on an ongoing project), not to edit, but to ‘get into the voice’ as it were. I wrote “Sweat and White Cotton” with a very different voice from “Preta” and rereading a bit ‘primes the pump.’ It also helps me to outline the next scene or two, at least in a rough one or two sentence sketch, before I start. This and the front matter where I describe the plot as if telling the story to the friend I call the scaffolding, because it’s supposed to come down before I send it around to the first readers.

What are you waiting for? Get the seat of your pants in the seat of the chair. There’s writing to be done.

—

*I CAN QUIT ANY TIME I WANT I SWEAR JUST ONE MORE TURN

A moment of silence for Sir Terry Pratchett, who taught us not to fear Death. Go read his last story.

When I was a teenager, I absolutely loved Les Miserables. I read a condensed version of the book when I was fourteen, heard the musical for the first time at sixteen, saw the play for my eighteenth birthday, and read the full version between seventeen and nineteen. I read the full version in the original French during my first year in China, when I was twenty.

When I was seventeen, my friend James Chen told me about a book called Night Watch. It was a fantasy send-up of Les Mis, he said. And that was the first time I ever read Terry Pratchett. To this day, Night Watch is probably my favorite of the Discworld books (because I like humor, time travel, and French revolutions).

I kept reading, mostly as I could pick up books through the library or used bookstores. I read Men at Arms and didn’t get it, I read Guards, Guards! and did. I loved Jingo and Hogfather and Mort.

But most of all, besides Night Watch, I love Small Gods.

I picked up Small Gods in the oldest bookstore in Hong Kong, during my six-week exile in the summer and fall of 2011. Small Gods is …different. Sir Terry loved clever protagonists, brilliant but unappreciated people, usually cynical (Mort, Sam Vimes, Susan, Moist). Brutha is the exact  opposite. Brutha is simple in ways that not even Carrot is simple. He’s an uncomplicated believer in Om who happens to have a perfect memory. His belief and his simplicity power the entire story.

I like Small Gods because it talks about the power of belief, of how institutions corrupt, of what kind of man Brutha is and what kind of man Vorbis is, and what they represent for religion, power, and institutions. But I love it because Sir Terry so obviously wasn’t Brutha, and wanted to write him anyway. Because Sir Terry struggled to write this protagonist who was so unlike his other protagonists and so unlike himself. And he succeeded.

Goodnight, Sir Terry. I hope Death said ‘thank you’ for making him less scary to the rest of us.

Do you see the music?

When I listen to certain songs, they always summon strong, clear images or fantasies. Sometimes it has to do with the music video or where I first heard it…but often not. For example, London Symphony Orchestra’s cover of “Smooth Criminal” sounds to me like the Nazis marching into Paris, kicking down doors and clearing out undesirables. Here are some of the others:

Redskunk Jipzee Swing Band’s “Arctic Blue”: A John Constantine figure, selling his soul to Hell to save a woman’s life. He knows exactly what he’s buying, and he knows he’s damned anyway. According to Molly Reeves, she saw similar imagery while they were composing the song…even though the lyrics have nothing to do with it.

Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper”: The Battle of Teutoborg Forest, gone very, very wrong. Something dark and amorphous has swallowed the Germans, and the lonely Roman legion is in the middle of the darkness, around a feeble lantern. A black rain that should not be falls from the sky, staining faces and dulling armor. Shadows mass to swarm and attack out of the darkness, to douse the light. The one lantern may be the only light left in the world. The Romans are almost certain to die. But they are going to defend that flicker of flame, because every moment it remains alight is a victory.

Bob Dylan’s original “All Along the Watchtower”: A companion-piece to “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” The night before the Chinese Battle of Red Cliffs, where Zhuge Liang performs a grand Taoist ceremony for fair weather.

It’s debatable whether he had the whole three-day ceremony set up because he knew the winds would change in his favor in that time, or whether his ceremony actually changed the weather…but in this case, black rain falls. I see the man with the wispy beard look up in horror, because this is not of the Tao. Thunder strikes, and a lightning made of darkness destroys the altar. There is scattering and chaos as blackness seeps into the world…

Kongos’ “Come With Me Now”: Specifically, the accordion piece at the beginning. I always picture a massive Mayan god, done in the traditional artistic look, rolling back and forth with his face always forward and chuckling like a 90s video game boss. The rest of the song descends into chaotic postmodern fistfighting. As it should be, really.

Neil Young’s “Ohio”: The Stand. All of it. Mostly Stuart Redman, admittedly, and his trip back to Boulder with Tom Cullen, mixed in with the four messengers of Mother Abigail making their way west to Las Vegas and the confrontation, earlier in the book, with the Menagerie. Tired, dusty men on the road through the vast flat West.

Those are some of the strongest images I get from music. How about you? Do you see visions when you listen to certain songs? If so, what are they?

Today’s post is a bonus, coming a day early to celebrate America’s National Clam Chowder Day.

Seriously, next time someone gives you shit about how Americans have no indigenous culture/cuisine? Clam chowder. It was the canny adaptation of a centuries-old French and English communal dish (something akin to cioppino) to the bountiful shellfish fisheries of the Atlantic seaboard. The only proper chowder, white and creamy, is made with clams, potatoes, onions, sometimes a green vegetable like celery, and milk.* It’s garnished with oyster crackers, the modern descendant of the ship’s hardtack used to thicken the chowder (rather than flour) in the first place.

Where I’m from, Morro Bay, chowder is on literally every menu but Taco Bell’s. When I was growing up, soup options were Soup du Jour and Clam Chowder, and every restaurant has “the best clam chowder in town.” My first job, washing dishes, included “bottomless bowl of chowder” as an employment benefit. Can’t imagine why.

When I got to China, I discovered that not only did they not have clam chowder, nobody had ever heard of it. Not even the other gwailo. Being as how fish and shellfish were freely available fresh (as in, ‘alive’) in the wet markets and I was in desperate need of American food, I turned to my friend Old Scrote (who’s taught me so much) and adapted his recipe. Here, then, is my recipe for Chinese clam chowder.

First, go down to the wet market and argue with the fishwife in Cantonese.

Mind the blood groove in the floor, you do not want to fall in that shit. You’ll want a bunch of clams, mussels or oysters, and maybe a fish if you can get her to kill it and throw it in for less than ten kuai extra. Because of my terminal lack of fucks to give and usually dodgy employment situation, I didn’t ever have them shucked but just tossed them into the chowder, shells and all.

Go over to the vegetable ladies and pick up onions, potatoes, and celery. Everything I ever cook is ‘one quarter onion per person per meal,’ and you’ll want double that amount in potatoes and two celery ribs for each onion.

Head to the grocery store for the bacon and milk. Only use milk that you can make cheese with by boiling, adding salt and vinegar, and straining. If the milk doesn’t make cheese, it shouldn’t go in your body.

When you get home, chop the celery up into half-inch lengths and the potatoes into thin slices. As Old Scrote instructs, “Chop the bacon pieces very finely and fry them in a little oil. Chop the onion and soften it with the bacon.” Where we diverge is the next step – toss the clams in, liquid and all, adding water if necessary, then cover the cooking pot. Don’t turn it up too high – you want the liquid to simmer but not boil. It shouldn’t take but a few minutes, five or ten at the most. Remove the clams and set them aside, tossing out any that refused to open. You do not want to eat them.

The rest of the recipe proceeds like Scrote – throw in the potato slices, turn up the heat, and boil them. After about ten or fifteen minutes, toss the celery in, too. Add the milk after twenty minutes, then wait for the potatoes to crumble into flour and thicken the soup up. Add the clams back in and season with plenty of salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with Tsingtao beer and a side of homemade sourdough. Feed yourself and your two insane roommates and whatever friends/lovers come streaming through the house for a week or so.

Happy National Clam Chowder Day.

—

*I had heard legends of this ‘red’ chowder, mostly from a throwaway gag in Ace Ventura, but I didn’t really believe it existed. Then, when I was 22, I was finally served some. It made me doubt the existence of a just and loving God.