Blogging Before Sunrise

I feel like a damn farmer or somethin’…

I think the girlfriend finally has her sleep cycle figured out. She operates on Martian Standard Time or something, because it seems that she prefers to be up for 20 hours and then go for an eight hour sleep cycle. This is fine, on Mars, where the day is probably 28 hours and it means that she’d have a regular waking up and sleeping hour, but here on Earth, it means that we have a tendency to rotate bedtimes, going to bed in the morning, gradually creeping to an afternoon bedtime, then an evening one, then a late evening one and so on. We got up at 4 am today.

If the blog hasn’t been updated recently, it’s because of two things; working on the start a business issue and, of course, Grand Theft Auto III. But to address the issues one at a time:

No Senor, I Am A Hardworking Local. Que Habla Espanol?

MOM finally decided to take me in. That is, the Ministry Of Manpower. After MOM constantly told me that my submission wasn’t quite acceptable, I went up to my room and did my homework again. Actually, that’s a lie, the girlfriend did, as I’m utterly hopeless with business plans and so she went the extra mile and reworked an existing 10 page template we’d borrowed from a friend and upped the page count another 15, throwing in graphs, business figures and a bunch of other stuff beyond my comprehension. So we visited MOM again yesterday morning and this time MOM liked it and took it. Then MOM said I’d be notified about it in a while and to please go to my room. MOM then stamped my passport till the end of February, so it looks like I get to stay for another month thanks to the good–if tediously bureaucratic–graces of MOM. Guess we’ll just have to wait now and see whether this business thingy actually gets off the ground now…

How Do I Kill Thee? Let Me Count The Ways: Burning, Shooting, Stabbing, Bludgeoning, Running Over You…

You know you’re playing a video game for far, FAR too long when you’re sitting in a cab, see another car go zooming by and suddenly have the urge to take control of the wheel, steer the cab into the other lane to overtake and pass the nice shiny new car, then block it, jump out, throw out the driver and jack his car so that you can drive like a maniac over the elevated freeway and see if you can jump it across the river and into the boardwalk for a Unique Stunt Jump Bonus.

Home stretch on GTA III now. All the side missions are done, so it’s just a matter of finishing the ACTUAL game. Of course, the big problem is that every time I go into The Cave, I see Grand Theft Auto: Vice City staring me in the face, so the madness may continue for some time, which I will probably be killed for.

Darwin Was Right:

The stupidity of my cat amazes me sometimes.

I mean, he’s an animal, so it’s granted that he’s not going to be mathematically simulating the atmosphere of Jupiter using fluid dynamics equations, but STILL… You’d think he would at least only eat things that were actually edible.

I believe at the moment my cat is suffering from Anal Trauma, at least that’s what I’m calling it. It’s a condition where the cat develops a superstitious fear of the litterbox when defecating because he associates it with the pain. The reason he experiences pain is because he’s in agony when he actually defecates, but his little feline mind associates that with the box. NOT with the fact that he went and ate a handstrap for a cellular phone.

YES. Zero ate the little wrist-wrap hand thingy that was tied to my cellular phone.

The level of stupidity involved in this amazes even me, and I’m a moron.

It started when I noticed while grabbing my phone that I wasn’t feeling the sensation of the strap against my hand. When I looked at it yesterday, I noticed that it had been cleanly bitten through. I had seen Zero playing with my phone before, and even trying sometimes to contentendly gnaw on said strap, but after having left the phone out in the living room at bedtime, I guess he seized this as an opportunity to finally ingest the tasty morsel.

I didn’t know this, of course. I just assumed that he bit through it and played with it somewhere, batting it under the couch or something. At least until the girlfriend walked into the other bathroom, trying to figure out why it was stinky and realizing that Zero had once again gone into the shower stall and had left his package, INCLUDING largely intact strap.

Any cat owners out there who know how to stop an incredibly stupid cat from eating things that are clearly NOT food? I thought he’d have enough common sense to only eat things that could actually be chewed into pieces, but apparently he’s trusted that we, in our human wisdom, will save him from his own mental retardation. I think if Zero went to cat school, he’d be riding in the short bus, if you catch my drift…

I feel sorry for his poor little kitty colon, trying unsuccessfully to digest that…

It’s Not That It Needs Work, You Just Suck.

A couple of days ago, as a favor to my friend Ching, I read someone’s short story.

Perhaps it is professional pride. Or ego. Or just being nitpicky, but it annoys me when people (Particularly locals) get it into their head that because something is not involved in Science or Math, it must therefore be drop dead easy, and anyone can do it. These are the same kinds of people that think that Harry Potter is a get-rich-quick scheme, and that the only thing required to make that same amount of money is to have the patience to sit down, not hanging out with friends in bars or restaurants, and just crank the damn thing out.

I say all this because it seems that Ching’s friend has the exact same opinion.

She tells me that this friend of hers that she’s not THAT close to, just one day up and decided that he wanted to write a book. Apparently he had some publishing experience when he was 12 or 14, and based on that glowing assessment, has, after a hiatus of a decade or two, decide to get back into the writing game. So he asked Ching to look at his story. I guess she mentioned me, and he decided that he wanted a glowing report from a “fellow professional” and asked that I looked at it. So I did.

And regretted the entire affair.

I won’t paraphrase what I said. Instead, I’ll just the throw the e-mail I sent to Ching in its entirety right here:

I really don’t know if I should comment on this story. For the most part, it doesn’t work for me. If he wants me to, I can do a line-by-line edit and point out what I see as the difficulties, but to be completely honest, I think the story is nasty, somewhat pretentious, and entirely too self-centered on the writer himself, going “Look at me! LOOK AT ME!” and not the story itself. In general terms:

1) Conflict: Takes too long to get to it, and I don’t even realize that Gordon is going to kill himself until he thinks it. This is not necessarily a problem in and of itself as sometimes stories do take a while to get into the conflict, but your friend takes about three pages to do it, and in the meantime where other writers would give you pithy lines, or nice dialogue, or at least sympathetic characterization to urge you on, your friend presents a whiny, self-centered guy who you pretty much want to go commit suicide by the time his intention is revealed in page three.

2) Pace: Too uneven. Again, in those first few pages, it’s mostly just rambling thoughts, not adquately anchored with concrete details to where he is or what he’s doing. You get the idea he’s walking around, but the details are lost in all the rambling thinking of what is largely an unpleasant and incredibly unlikeable person. Again, this is not necessarily a big problem in certain cases if you want to have an anti-hero, but then
you have to pretty slick, and make the rambling thinking entertaining somehow, fun to read, compelling in some way. This Gordon guy just goes over a petty laundry list of complaints in a not very striking narrative voice, and for me, when I realized that THESE petty complaints were why he was going to kill himself, I disliked him even more. But that’s just me. He could also benefit by letting the story breathe a little bit more, ’cause he’s cramming way too much information into too short a space. There’s no rest for the reader. A personal preference of mine is more description, more details of the environment, which is not a big priority for him, he’s more focused on the thought processes.

3) Confused narrative voice: Your friend Darren isn’t quite sure what kind of voice he wants to use to tell this story. Sometimes it comes off as smart ass, snarky, early 20th century New Yorker, pseudo Alqonquin Round Table style commentary (And your friend is NOT Dorothy Parker yet, so the snarkiness is more mean and annoying than elegantly vicious) other times it suddenly slides into seriously thoughtful pontificating and it comes off as more soap-boxy than compelling to read and making me want to ask the same questions of myself.

4) Dialogue: My BIGGEST problem is that there’s a lack of distinction between the two characters. Particularly once the actual rooftop conversation ensues. When they’re both philosophizing they go on for long stretches bantering pithy observations and intimate personal details without indicators of who’s speaking, and since they both sound remkarably the same when they’re philosphizing, it makes it even more difficult to differentiate them when they’re being equally pretentious.

5) Nasty Twist Ending: This is not necessarily critical for “literature” which may be what your friend wants to write, but in the genre stuff I usually slum in, what he’s done is unforgiveable. He gave me a thoroughly unlikeable character, made him think thoroughly unlikeable and largely (I can hear Jags in my head rolling his eyes and saying “Get OVER it…” to this guy) trivial problems, and he turns around and pushes this other unlikeable though at least somewhat more innocent girl off the roof when he finds out that she’s the kid of the guy his wife just left him for. At the end of the story, I hate him, hate what he’s done, he hasn’t learned a thing, and neither, frankly have I, and I’m left feeling cheated, wondering “Why did I read such a nasty, nihilistic, unreedeming story?” It wasn’t a particularly well written “Some people are bastards” story which, at least, would justify the emotional cost of reading it, and if he wanted us to have any kind of sympathy or understanding for the guy afterwards when he starts to cry (In the rain. Argh…) he failed because the guy is so completely unlikeable that at the end, I’m just glad the story is over.

I don’t know whether you want to show this to your friend Darren or not. I don’t know the guy, don’t know what kind of writing he wants to do, but it’s very, VERY different from what I do. He seems more interested in flashy dialogue, big words, Big Themes and other literary mechanisms that force the readers to work really hard to get to the point. Me, I’m a simpleton, I just want to tell fun stories. In that sense, maybe I’m just not the right audience, and what he wants to do is give it to people that subscribe to “The New Yorker” and read literary critical theory journals for fun. I’m not one of those guys. I think stories should be sleek, easy to read, and should give the readers a reason to read, make them feel that they came away from the story with something valuable, even if it’s just a warm fuzzy feeling, or a new insight into human behavior or life, or something like that. Not alienate the reader, make them feel somewhat cheated and angry with the writer.

It seems to me that what he did was kind of a cross between a “literary story” with all that rhapsodizing about existence and suffering, and a Twilight Zone or Hitchcock story where the payoff is some surprising twist at the end. But in the end, a story about “Unlikeable guy makes himself even more unlikeable through self-absorbed, disconnected interior monologue, then makes himself still more unlikeable by having a seemingly Significant Conversation with young girl wise beyond her years whom he pushes off the building ’cause she’s the offspring of the man his wife left him for…” Man, it’s just… mean.

There’s also the usual stuff. Like many local writers here, your friend’s grammar is suspect at times (And these are definitely NOT typos), and his dialogue suffers from the local epidemic of “Big Words=Good Writing”, or, “Bombasticitis”. He must also find a much MUCH more subtle, or at least more interesting way of delivering critical information to the reader, otherwise he’s guilty of what writers call an “Info-dump” which is to break the rhythm of the story to bring readers up to speed on information the characters already know. Most common red flag to indicate this is the usual, “Well, as you know, Bob…”

Too often I get the sense that Darren is just behind my shoulder saying “Remember this! It’s important!” and that information is purely delivered in a utilitarian way, ’cause he couldn’t figure out a slick way to drop it in.

This is not the WORST story I’ve ever read. I’ve seen stuff a lot more problematic than this in my creative writing classes. But Darren should find a critique from someone who’s more interested in “literary stories” that concentrate more on cleverness than technique, because he seems more interested in being clever than writing well, and I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. I dunno… you read the story, see what you think… Myself, I think he’s got a long way to go before he writes the kind of stories that I like, but I make the disclaimer that I’m a simpleton that slums in “Genreville” and not a Literary Writer. Though I would still contend that he’s no Gabriel Garcia Marquez either, and HE’S a fabulous “Literary Author” who’s style is easy AND fun.

And, as Forrest Gump would say, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Life is like a bad writer. The plot generally sucks most of the time.