Forest vs. trees

I had a fun St. Patrick's Day, and woke up not with a hangover, but a fever and a sore throat. Life goes on.

It's been something of an odd transition, working near full-time freelance hours. I've had some realizations that were interesting (to me, anyway).

The first of those is that freelance proofreading, if I can fit it around writing, might be a good thing to keep a hand in even while writing "full-time." It keeps one broadly- (as opposed to merely well-) read, and exposes one to the thoughts of people one would not otherwise meet. A writer needs to maintain human contact, and at least a semblance of varied activity, or else his (or her) stories will inexorably gravitate toward the anti-story: the protagonist, an old writer, living alone, runs out of ideas. (We might perhaps call this genre "anti-fiction," as, while it is not true, it is also paradoxically devoid of imagination or embellishment of reality.)*

Trying to work a real full day on my laptop, I finally got sick of screens. Because my work right now has to be done on my computer, if I want a respite it means doing my creative writing by hand.

Writing longhand is such a different experience. It's easy to forget this, but the writing process actually changes. At least for me. I can't write as fast as I can think. I can't type as fast as I can think either, but I think in fits and starts. When I type the pauses in my thinking are periods of silence and a stationary, blinking cursor. Writing by hand I can do my thinking while I wait for my hand to catch up with my head. There's time to revise while the hand is moving; draft 1.0 is really draft 1.5.

The extra time allows for sprawling, luxuriant sentences of the sort that were more common when everyone wrote like this. Heck, if I had to stop to sharpen my quill after every line, maybe I could make everything rhyme. To a certain extent, the extra time has to be spent embellishing the sentence at hand. You can't just buffer in a chapter of prose over an hour of diligent longhand.

Another thing happened with which I am pleased. I had come to a snag in Nenle (this is not what I was pleased with--the snag, I mean) and decided it might be worthwhile to summarize the whole story in one sitting in longhand. The point of this being that if I would need to keep to the essentials to fit it into one sitting, and if I got bored while writing any part of the summary it would stand to reason that that part would be even more boring fleshed out.

This proved very helpful. I had been getting bogged down, not really able to see more than a scene ahead or behind, wherever I was. The story was meandering and I was beginning to wonder if all of it had a point. This time I was able to answer all the "what happens nexts" while I still remembered what happened at the beginning, and the story that emerged turned coherent again.

I did this with Hengist a while back too, plotting out some emotional arcs that I thought had been lost in the noise of individual scenes. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that I can't do this until I've generated a lot of noise. If I just set out to concisely trace a story arc, I doubt it would be more than occasionally interesting. The story has to emerge from the noise, grow wild (hey, new metaphor), and then be tamed again (and another. Congratulations, you've mixed a metaphor from mineral, vegetable, and animal components--go to bed, Cory).

Good has come of it. I should probably make a point of doing it in the process of everything I write. It is so easy to get lost, or to labor over a sentence through a jeweler's loupe, putting the perfect polish on an idea that's just wrong.

* Yes, that is harsh to the point of pretentiousness. I should talk. Just because my ratio of artistic integrity to published work is a value of infinity doesn't mean the numerator is nontrivial.

Sometimes a title doesn't come to you in time

I completely forgot to spring forward last night. On the other hand, I got to bed early. Somehow I usually find myself awake at the DST changes. One of the consequences of getting to bed on time was that I neglected to get a blog post up by the end of Saturday. My apologies.

The big news this week is that the freelancing has paid off. I use "paid off" in the metaphorical, antithetical sense that it has supplied me with substantial work, not that it has paid me, but the money is forthcoming. I secured a rather large website proofreading gig that will be the equivalent of full-time work for more than a month. Consequently I am relearning some of those adult survival skills, like time-management.

Ironically, because of my contract, being employed doesn't feel all that different from being unemployed. It was a busy unemployed, after all. There is less concern about money. It will be nice to be in the black again.

I gave it a little thought and decided that it wouldn't do to talk about my freelance assignments in extensive detail here. At least, I don't think it would be professional of me to to talk about "their" work (as it becomes when they buy it from me) with the same degree of flippancy with which I talk about "my" work.

I'm re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring for what I'm realizing is the first time. I read most of The Two Towers and Return of the King last year or so, but I realized that I hadn't started from the beginning since the first time back in 2001 or so, which is much longer ago than I realized.

I always maintained that Fellowship was flawed, with issues of tone, pacing, and scope. I don't quite disagree with myself, but keeping in mind some comments of Girlfriend's, and just now having left the house of Tom Bombadil, I see how the book functions better on its own terms--terms we hardly ever engage it on, knowing where the story is going.

The comparison of Robinson Crusoe comes to mind: a novel that felt compelled to tell you about the protagonist's backstory in its entirety before getting into the "plot." The novel was a new thing at the time and you couldn't just dump people into it. I suppose the same was likely true of epic fantasy before LoTR: you didn't take your characters directly from obscurity to world-scale events in an unfamiliar world. Of course now we do that all the time, jaded and genre-savvy as we are. We tend to go too far, I think (or maybe only I do) and regard everything that happens in Emond's Field or the Skywalker homestead as filler. (Do we ever shed a tear for Luke's friends, stood up in Tosche Station with an armload of extra power converters?) Tolkien, at least, begins with a quest that works better in relation to what comes before than what comes after.

Still playing Skyrim. I returned to the main plot and actually met a character who might be interesting, and a plot that might be interesting, too. About where they steal a page from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Then, you see, there are these dragons...

Is it great? No. But so far I've been more excited to see butterflies than dragons, and maybe with some plot that will change. Unless, you know, the butterflies are coming back...

Plans have been made to visit Seattle in June. Or was it July? Plans have been made. It's exciting, and at this moment feels closer than it actually is.

Nor any drop to drink

This morning I spent some time wondering what if anything I could blog about. The absurdity of this becomes apparent when you understand that the basement had already flooded at this point. I suppose I was not yet at the griping stage of the crisis, but I am now. Certainly, the adventure grew over the course of the day.

Why was the basement flooded? Well, I'll tell you. Because this house sits on a funky little slope, the back door is set into a recessed cement alcove, a few feet below ground level. There's a drain in the bottom, which is why it didn't turn into a pond during Hurricane Irene. But what, you may wonder, if the drain were to clog, say with mud? Well last night, amid an intense but not special thunderstorm, we discovered the answer to that question.

There was mud. The back door is next to a closet and, beyond that, the laundry nook. The tile pattern on the floor in the closet has been completely obliterated by mud, to the point that I, who have had little business with that closet, did not realize it was not simply a brown floor. The laundry nook fared better because the water had to seep through a carpet to get there, and the carpet acted as a sort of filtration system. Unfortunately, the nook was strewn with more than a few things which interact badly with water: mostly the flowy things Girlfriend wears as she flounces and flits about. There were losses, some of which I hope are reversible, but I fear some items have flounced their last.

The room, which doubles as Girlfriend's bedroom, had become positively marshy. Interestingly, the water flowed in a mostly straight line from the door once it hit the rug; if it had spread evenly it would have ended up under Girlfriend's bed, but she was spared that. The slight slope of the floor directed the water in riverine fashion.

The situation cried out for a wet vac. Our need to get to Home Depot cried out for a car. As did we, when we got to the empty Zipcar space outside the Metro station. We stood around a while waiting for the car to arrive. We scoured the parking lot in case the last person had parked it in the wrong place. We called Zipcar for help. Eventually we discovered that the Zipcar at the Metro station was not the one we had reserved. That Zipcar was cleverly hidden in an apartment complex next to where they said it would be. The agent we got on the phone could tell us where it was, more or less, but not how to get there. With guesswork and perseverance, we ultimately found the car. It was as close as I have ever come to experiencing Skyrim in real life.

We got to Home Depot. We didn't buy a wet vac per se. Instead we bought a device which claimed to be able to turn a bucket into a wet vac, and also bought a bucket. While Girlfriend was returning the car to its nest, I was home getting a head start on the vacuuming. Sort of.

Someone had stolen the hose from the vacuum box and replaced it with a beef jerky wrapper.

Let me say that again. Someone had stolen the hose from the vacuum box and replaced it with a beef jerky wrapper. Where there should have been a four-foot-long black hose, there was none. Where there should not have been the empty wrapper of a dried meatsnack, there one was. I guess the tube is ventilating a meth lab somewhere.

Home Depot was very good about exchanging our box for one that had not been pillaged. Transportation for that endeavor (since Girlfriend had returned the Zipcar) was provided by Girlfriend's extremely helpful uncle, who had driven over to lend a dehumidifier. In fact he lent another wet vac as well.

With two wet vacs and a dehumidifier we set about reclaiming the wetland in our basement. Because it had been created by human construction, and because only a rudimentary ecosystem had developed, the paperwork was minimal.

On an wholly unrelated note, I acquired and dispatched another freelance gig this week. Hopefully, I can build some sort of momentum.

You are what you eat, part 2

I sometimes (periodically, perhaps) forget just how much what I read affects how I write. The problem is that I hate to be exacting about what I read based on how I'm writing. Lately I've been stalling out in my writing time, doing a lot of world-building and a bit of poetry when plot and prose felt like tar pits. A little of it is having come to a tricky point in Nenle, but this would be less of a problem if I felt agile when I came to it.

Last night I realized that I've been reading more verse than usual,which might explain why my prose seemed to dry up and I was starting to get drips of poetry. I put The Fairy Queen aside at the end of Book 1, because it was moving just too slowly for me. I made use of my Kindle and picked up Pope's Iliad (after, you may recall, putting down his Odyssey). That has been more agreeable. For one thing--and it feels like the sort of thing that shouldn't matter, but does--the lines are arranged in the free Kindle edition like blocks of prose. The rhythm and rhymes are still clear, but the momentum keeps up better.* Which is to say, I'm actually enjoying The Iliad, which makes it more frustrating that I apparently need to read something else.

But I do. I wish I had a better grasp of my intellectual nutrition. The Iliad lacks something that I need, but to extend the metaphor, it's not hamburger. Or, at least, not cheap hamburger.** Perhaps it is more like spinach, if I liked spinach. Broccoli?

The problem ("the" problem) is that, unlike food, I tend to read one thing until I'm done, if I can help it. I'm a fifth of the way through The Iliad and if I had my druthers that means I would keep reading it until it was done. But the month or more that would probably take me is too long to be banging my head against my writing. I need propellant. Or, to return to the food metaphor, six weeks of broccoli would be very bad for me, not least if I followed it with a month of potatoes and a (moderate) three weeks of beef.

But that's the way I read. For one thing I don't read exceedingly quickly, and for another I have safeguards in place to keep me from sinking an entire day into reading if I have anything else to do. I don't think I can read more than one narrative at a time and keep them all in my head, either; I certainly don't think I could keep the Greeks and Trojans straight during a detour through, say, Anathem.*** Last night I picked up The Lord of the Rings again, and I feel more limber already for being half a dozen pages into Chapter 1, but while I read that I'm not reading anything new.

It's a dilemma, and a frustrating one. If it were only a matter of reading what I liked it would sort itself out relatively quickly. Where I run into trouble is the things I like that don't feed my writing.

I wish the next issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction would come. That's good fuel, but it only comes every other month.

When I started this post I expected to segue into another topic by the end, but now I can't remember what it was. That may just mean there will be another post close on the heels of this one.

* It would be interesting if this were toggleable in long verse narratives. We surely have the technology, and maybe someone has already done this without my notice.
** I had a surprisingly good hamburger last night at a bar called The Heights.
*** Another thing I got for the Kindle, since the hardcover edition of Anathem weighs 80 pounds and only fits through doors standing up.

Adventures in Baltimore

Presidents' Day weekend was a nice one. Girlfriend and I went to Baltimore, about as spontaneously as we do anything. That is, we wanted to do it. On Friday I did some research on what you can actually do in Baltimore. (The case for the city up to that point had rested mainly on proximity.) On Saturday we started actually planning it, looking at train tickets for Sunday morning and Monday evening, and reasonable hotels for in between. So as it had turned out, there are several good museums in Baltimore as well as an aquarium, but their hours, combined with the hours Girlfriend needed to be back in DC to get work done, were generating headaches. We'd be rushing to get there when there wouldn't be much to do, then rushing back to get back to work. I was beginning to wonder if we actually had time for a vacation, and was getting ready to call the whole thing off, when Girlfriend asked me, "What if we go tonight?"

It was 3 p.m. at this point and I had already made a hotel reservation for Sunday night. The deadline for cancelling that reservation was 4 p.m. the day before, or one hour from then. But over the next hour she convinced me she had the right idea. We canceled the reservation with five minutes to spare. We booked a different room at a different hotel and bought train tickets for 7 o'clock. Then we ran around the house throwing things into bags, swung by the pharmacy to pick up a prescription I had to have refilled that day, ate dinner at the mall food court, and were off.

I forgot to account for the track work on the Metro. We had a long wait for the red line to get us to Union Station. But, there we got, timed so perfectly that you would have thought I knew what I was doing.

So, there's a Quality Inn in Baltimore that's surprisingly nice. Actually, possibly the nicest hotel I have any memory of staying in. (I think the place in Westport was, on the whole, a better experience, but that was a family operation. Also, we got trapped in the parking lot by an elk.) Booking the room at the last minute apparently brought it back into our price range, so hooray for that!

Girlfriend particularly liked the window hangings.

She made a nest there and hibernated until Monday.

As you can see, Girlfriend remembered to bring her camera, which means I get to put pictures in this post.

We walked out that night to get drinks and some food. We had a frustrating time at the bar we finally settled on. It's partially, but not entirely, their fault. For example, it was unfortunate that they were out of Blue Moon. It was my fault that, when browsing their remaining beer selection more or less at random, I forgot what's special about O'Doul's. Similarly, it was not their fault that my girlfriend is passionately averse to the substance known as "nacho cheese," but it is their fault that their menu specified mozzarella. (It was special. Or supposed to be.) And ultimately it is on me that I didn't send either of these things back.

Downtown Baltimore looks pretty nice. On the walk back we saw the back of the Baltimore Basilica.

We intended to circle around to the front at some point, but didn't get around to it. We also saw the Washington Monument (not that one) and got a shot of that in daylight.

Commemorating George Washington's imprisonment atop the tower of Orthanc.

We found The Walter's Art Museum, and that's a pretty cool (free) place. We got to the bulk of it in our two hours or so there, but could have spent two, or six, more. I'll share one bronze thingy that caught my eye:

It was maybe one or two feet tall. That's the Fall of Adam and Eve, there, but what got my attention was the monkey munching away in the background. Conjures up some fun thoughts. Of course Darwin wouldn't come along for another two centuries or so, and inasmuch as this prefigures him it's a coincidence. The monkey, according to the museum card, symbolizes lust and foolishness or some such. But I like to imagine him a step behind Adam and Eve, waiting for his turn.

The chunk of the museum I found most interesting was an eclectic collection organized as the sort of things an Enlightenment-era nobleman might accumulate. An 11-inch Egyptian "mummy" filled with corn sat on a shelf under a Mesoamerican stone "idol," with cards explaining not only what they were, but what the people collecting them in the 1600s thought they were. A narwhal horn hung, contextless, on the wall. At least, I couldn't find an explanation. It looked about 10 feet long--much too big to have been passed off as something that grew out of a horse's forehead, as I understand they had been.

We went down from there to the Inner Harbor to check out the National Aquarium with some of Girlfriend's relatives. The aquarium's exhibits were interesting, but the layout made for a tightly-controlled experience. I felt like I was on an assembly line. It was dark, and hard to get good pictures.

Guess.*

But there were some successes.

There's a rainforest exhibit too. I found out what a Screaming Piha sounds like. That's something that stops being fun right away.

All in all, a good trip, a good break. I discover, over and over, how nice it is to just up and go somewhere with Girlfriend. We might go back to Baltimore some time. Then again, we might pick a completely different destination at random.

* It's the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

Step 2: ???

No more stabbings since last post. The world is more like it should be.

Since I last mentioned it I have both completed and been paid for my first freelance writing gig. (I am currently trying to leverage a satisfied customer into more business, one way or another.) It was Girlfriend who pointed out to me that I have been paid for writing. That's a milestone in its own right, one I've been waiting for, and one I almost missed because it didn't happen like I thought that it would.

I don't know what milestone will come next. None follows as a matter of necessity. I had decided not to submit my fiction where it would be published for free, since I don't need anyone's help to publish for free. (I'm doing that now.) Consequently I imagined being published and being paid as a single event, occurring at two distinct but connected points in time. I don't think I'm counting freelance copy writing as being published, though, although at some point a person other than myself will be publicizing words I have written for their own purposes.

I don't know why I enjoy (or at least insist on) splitting hairs about exactly what has and hasn't happened yet. I could make a distinction about copyrights, and say I look forward to being paid for a license, rather than for my entire copyright to any given thing. In this case I have sold my copyright entirely. There are words that I have written--some of which I am proud of--that I do not own, and could technically be sued for publishing. It's an odd, interesting, somewhat unsettling state of affairs.

It still remains for me to be published in a regular sense, to be paid for fiction, and to make enough at any sort of writing to cover my expenses. When any of these happens, you will surely hear of it.

In lesser news, the new Xbox 360 came in the mail and works as it should, which is a comfort to me.

It amused me that the new, major update to Dwarf Fortress was released on Valentine's Day. This one has vampires and other undead, a massively useful tweak to the interface which would be tedious to detail, and the profound enmity of my very soul. This last feature is implemented as a bug which causes it to crash when I try to save. I did not realize that this degree of frustration was possible.

This. Place.

This. Effing. Place.

I don’t think anyone necessarily should have seen it coming, but this is turning out to be a rather luckless location that I’ve moved to. Let’s review.

Before I moved here, Girlfriend did. I’ll give the area a pass on the sweltering heat in August, because it was August and actually pretty normal. I consider the real what-the-luck to have started with the earthquake on Girlfriend's second day of work. Then came the hurricane and the power outages, that very weekend if I recall correctly. Then the brawling teenagers in the driveway who broke down our basement door. The carbon monoxide leak.

This is all before I moved in, mind you. Things have been relatively low-key since then. The heat went on the fritz. The light fixture in the kitchen contrives to drip when I shower. While I understand that heat in the summer is the cost of doing business, I do hold it against the area that this winter there has been perhaps an inch of snow, total.

Last night someone was stabbed directly in front of my house. Directly. In. Front. You can’t see the blood on the sidewalk from the front door, because the two-foot hedge is in the way.

Okay. Before going further, I’ll let you know that the survived. He walked a few blocks until someone helped him. That’s basically all I know. I didn’t see anything.

Understanding that I am not remotely the person most inconvenienced by this, can I complain? Can I point out the maddening fact that this is the second time in six months that a stranger has bled on this property? May I point out that this is a row home, but these two incidents most emphatically happened in front of this house, not the contiguous houses on the left or the right of it? It’s not the neighborhood. I mean, this isn’t Medina, Washington, but we aren’t all averaging four assaults per street address per year.

I don’t know how awful it would have been to have seen that. There is something unsettling about having it happen within fifty feet of you and not finding out until a police detective knocks on your door and asks if you saw or heard anything. Answering “no” felt like a personal admission of failure. The callousness of me, the gall, not to notice a felony being committed through the bay window of my living room. Not to even be in the living room. What else could have been so important?

Ironically, the only one of us who saw anything at all was the one who wasn’t in the house. Beka had passed the victim and his good Samaritan a few blocks away while driving to the gym. I managed to feel somewhat useful by calling her up, and hooking the police up with her.

Of mild professional interest, last night was the first time I invoked the emergency clause of my contract and waived my unfinished requirements for the day. It was not quite the sort of emergency I had imagined when I wrote the clause, but I couldn’t concentrate.

Some days are better than others.