Riverwords

Today was a day of trains and zoos and Spiderman. My son turned three, and we spoiled him as much as we could. Pizza and waffles. Tigers and frogs. Cake! Oh my.

I’ve been reading Cryptonomicon, and finally reach that page count where I’m suckered in. Stephenson’s chapters are frenetic minutiae with kick-in-the-gut closers that keep me turning the pages. The book is thick — over 900 pages. At my careful pace I’m not likely to finish soon. But, I’m hooked on the interwoven story line of WWII cryptography and millennial Internet biz wheeling and dealing. I’m eager to see where it all goes.

A friend and I have kicked off a writing exercise exchange to keep on task. We started with a simple 1,000 word piece with bite. I quoted a snippet in the previous post. I surprised myself with a simple, straight-shooting piece of fiction that I turned out to enjoy quite a bit. Our next step is cleaning up the 1,000 words, maybe expanding them into 2,000.

Now if I can catch a break from all the homefront activities to repair some water issues on the house. Once I get that cleaned up, it’ll be a load off my mind. I’m always amazed how stressed I get with home repairs, even ones that aren’t worth losing sleep over. Give me a week, some drywall patching, a new window sill, and I’ll be young again.

I got into a voice working on a short piece. A friend and I are working on some writing exercises together. Our first item is a short, tight piece involving a man and woman who have some relationship — either family or sexual.

I floundered around for ideas, but the one I couldn’t keep out of my head was simple and straightforward. I think it’ll become part of a larger piece I put together. It’s about a guy who comes back to Iowa because his Dad’s been missing for months, and he needs to put his Dad’s things in order. I’m still working on even the very short vignette, but I surprised myself with some details:

The refrigerator thrummed needlessly. Mitch stood, scratching his torso beneath his wrinkled white tee, staring at the empty wire racks. Only a paper plate sprinkled with baking soda remained. His sister Julia had cleaned the house in the summer, when the rotten things within had shriveled, forgotten and neglected in those strange weeks when everyone they knew trekked through the spring mud expecting any moment to find Charlie Hammond’s dead body. When they all stopped looking Mitch went back to work and Julia spent a day throwing out her father’s foil-covered Tupperware filled with mold and muck and pouring out a slush of milk that curled in her nostrils and reached down to yank at her insides. She drank one of her daddy’s last beers – a Michelob Light –  alone, sobbing on the kitchen floor until school let out for the day.

One of my favorite authors died tonight. Kurt Vonnegut was 84.

Loving his goofy, bleakly humored novels seems like some guilty pleasure to me. I remember once when I went back to visit my favorite English professor at the University of Iowa years after graduation, he asked me what I was reading. Already embarrassed that I hadn’t been reading much at all, I told him the only thing that was true. “Some Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions.”

I get the feeling he bit his tongue to keep from revealing some displeasure. “Oh that,” I could almost hear him say, like I was reading stuff that’s too damn easy! Maybe I was wrong. Hell, at least he got me to read some Jonathan Lethem. Good ol’ Brooks.

It’s just whenever someone asks me my favorite authors, I keep thinking saying Vonnegut is like saying “Well, I read this book in high school and it was funny and good the end.” I’m supposed to say clever bullshit like “So-and-so has such incredible structure!”

Breakfast of Champions is probably my favorite novel. I mean, the guy draws a picture of his asshole for crissakes, which makes me laugh. Yet, every time I read it — it’s among the very few books I’ll read over and over again – I just about die inside for ol’ Kilgore Trout. Poor bastard. Today, I think I know how he feels.

Make me young. Make me young. Make me young.

Nothing?

So it goes.

The Iowa weather’s turned cold again. We had wonderful weather, spring waking up the ground and the trees. Now, there are lazy fat flakes in the morning sky, just enough to remind me that April likes to tease.

I got used to the warmth, actually. Seven days in the Carribbean will do that, extreme sunburn or not! We spent St. Patty’s day drinking with the Irish, and days after slurping down enough rum to make us forget the sunscreen. Somehow, along the way, I managed to shed enough stress to actually look forward to coming back.

Back home now, things are mostly the same. Still no movement on any moving, which is to say that our real estate saga continues.

Canada gets all the good stuff! She’s just wrapping up her master’s degree; next weekend is her final class. And, just yesterday she received the work transfer she requested to return teaching at the city’s academy high school. She’s thrilled, and I’m proud.

For years, I’ve been so busily distracted on a number of personal projects that I’ve neglected reading. But, I’m happy to say I’ve been reading a lot lately. I read Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons (A-), which is a wonderfully troubling book, despite appearances to the contrary. I also read John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (C+), which was a quick and dirty read, and that about sums up it’s quality, too. Entertaining, but not terribly so.

I’ve got a stack of ten books, and my goal is to read all of them before year’s end. Given my slow pace, that may be quite a feat! I snuck in the Scalzi book as well as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. But, otherwise, the books are:

• Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (Read! A-)
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (Read! B+)
• The Road by Cormac MacCarthy (Read: A-)
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Read! A-)
• White Noise by Don Delillo (Read! C+)
• The Wizard by Gene Wolfe
• Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk
• Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
• Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

I’ve also got The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester sitting around somewhere. The rest of my (many) books are packed away for a move that never happened. I can always unpack them and come up with several more lists of ten!

Edited to add November 13, 2007:
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Read! A)

Edited to add September 5, 2008:
A Gentleman’s Game by Greg Rucka (Read! A)
Private Wars by Greg Rucka (Read! B-)
Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Read! B+, No blog review)
The Alchemist by Paul Coelho (Read! D)
White Noise by Don Delillo (Read! C+)

Edited to add October 14, 2008:
On Writing by Stephen King (Read! B+, No blog review)
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Read! B-)

Tags: Books & Reading, Review

It seems lightning does strike twice. Unbelievable.

We had a signed contract to sell our house. Again. It is now meaningless. Again. No sale, no deal, back to where we started. Last time it was the buyer had no power of attorney because he had some mental deficiency. This time, it was some woman who broke up with her boyfriend, and her credit ain’t enough without him.

This is the second time we’ve done this in as many months. And, once again, we had a new house picked out, ready to make an offer on.

Canada was crushed, in tears. I’m just angry, which is odd because I thought I was past that with numbness now. Whole new levels of anger, what fun. We’ve been trying to sell our house for — not an exageration — over two and a half years.

We had to give up the house a good friend built for us because we couldn’t sell. It went to someone else, months later, after everyone had thrown money in a hole first. He hasn’t really spoken to us since. We estimate we’ve shown our current house to at least 100 different people, perhaps as many as 150. Which means we’ve changed our schedules and cleaned up the house top to bottom no fewer than 70-80 times. That alone is very stressful.

We are literally paying people to buy our house (that is, we’re losing money on the deals we’re agreeing to in the order of a few thousand dollars). Right now, all my things are in boxes behind me. But, they have nowhere to go.

I know how they feel.

I turned 32 today. And, here I am too tired to type much else. I’ve entered a new position at work, and it’s kicking me to pieces. I’ve been toting around a new Moleskin journal like some kind of totemic fetish, and all those damn blank pages are getting heavier in my pocket.

My wife and I have been trying to sell our house for over two years. Just before Christmas, we tried to figure out what to do about it. It ended in a humorous bet. I bet her that our house would not sell by next Christmas. She agreed, being convinced the house would sell well before. The loser of the bet would have to feed Marlow, our dog, every day for six months. Right now, we trade off days to feed Marlow, and it’s become the dreaded before-bed, colder-than-a-grave-digger’s-ass task.

So, in good humor, I had been feeding the dog every day since I learned we sold the house. Yesterday, I found out reports of my loss had been greatly exaggerated. I’d say I’m surprised, but I’m not. The house deal fell through because the buyer (I use the term loosely) is mentally incompetent.

That’s right. Only people who cannot make contractual obligations because of some unusual disability are crazy enough to buy our house. Which means, of course, that they can’t buy our house. And they didn’t.

By my count my wife has about five days of catching up to do on feeding the dog. Hey, I’ll take what I can get at this point. I’m so beyond anger and frustration I don’t even have words for it anymore. So, I just laugh about it, but really feel pretty hollow.

For over two years, my wife and I have tried to sell our 105-year-old home. This week, we did it under less than agreeable financial terms. We’re eager to move on.

Of course, this happened the week I started a new role at work managing a staff of seven. 

I spent last night collapsed on the couch in my khakis and unbuttoned shirt, watching a rerun of last year’s Superbowl and drinking tea. Between thoughts as I drift to sleep I keep piecing together a starting point for the fiction I want to work on. And, yet, not a pen to the page, not a keystroke typed.

Things are bound to stay crazy. Here’s to hoping the house we haven’t identified just yet has a cozy little office where I can string some words together into something resembling an actual story!

It’s a new year, and with it came a couple big changes for me. One is my resolve to keep writing here at Riverwords. To that end, I’m going to alter the settings for comments so that they immediately appear.

Our Holidays were wonderful and relaxing. It was a joy to watch the kids go wild on Christmas morning, and we had more than our fair share of parties, good wine, food, and family and friends.

The other big change I mentioned was a shake-up at work. On my first day back to work after the long holiday vacation, I found out my job has been dramatically changed, and that I now manage seven people. It means I’ll also have to manage seven days of fewer hours. It’s simultaneously exciting and dizzying, as the shift is a significant one at my company.

But, the good news is that I’m just starting some work on a new piece of fiction. I’ll be sharing portions of it here this month.

Happy New Year to everyone.

When I went to college, I went hoping to be a novelist. I left hoping to find a job as a journalist. Somewhere in between I pursued creative writing academically, and managed to take a few superb classes all while taking other classes on literature.

I left with a solid education. I knew next to nothing about stories.

When I look back at the last time I actually did creative writing, I cringe at how awful my understanding of stories was. This past week, I’ve been skimming through some of the books I bought for creative writing classes. I’m amazed at how differently I read them now.

Then, it was practically a cargo cult mentality — I nodded when writers wrote about stories being character driven. Then, I’d go try to mimic stories by creating allegorical symbols and the most transparent characters one can imagine.

I would create plots, sometimes elaborate ones, and fail to see that anything I wrote like that was either caricature or motionless prattle.

I was obsessed with prose. I conflate good writing with good prose, and had no idea what a writer actually does, and more importantly what a writer actually says.

Now, years later, I do have a much better understanding of what stories are, how they work, and how to create them. I learned it, oddly enough, in another obscure medium. I hope in ten years I’ll look back on now in amazement how foolish I was writing this very entry.

The trouble now is that the more I learn, the less certain I am of my ability as a writer. It’s the usual nonsense writers allow to trespass in their brains so they can prevent themselves from writing.