1) Yesterday I was reading Chuck Pahlunik's novel Diary and it filled me with tremendous hope. I really like reading bad books because I think they teach me better how to write good books. By the closing pages I was wrapped in the story, but completely annoyed by the crap writing involved.

"This is terrible!" I thought, enchanted. "I could do this! Already!" I feel the same way about Jonathan Safron Foer's new book.

But I had my third straight moment of clarity.

I know how to fix the problems. I know how to cut down the story. It's 440 pages. I can do better than that. Writing vacation ends tomorrow morning. I have to get up and start putting it all together within the next month.

2) Fuck. Last night at work I was lightning struck with my next novel project. I know how it will be structured, how it will sound. I know which characters will be in conflict with which other characters. I think of Joyce, Kafka, Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson. They wrote bad novels when they were my age. And then they gave them up.

Am going to do that?

Indie Rock Nightmare

"I don't know if I should tell you this," my new writing friend said the other day during a top secret novel discussion. "But I have premonitions. They always come true in weird, weird ways. I've dreamed about friends sneaking around with pills and confronted them about it later to find them already addicted. And last night I had a dream about you. You were in some kind of club/rock venue. And I could see you were wearing a purple velvet jacket and I was trying to warn you about something."

"About what?"

"I don't know. I woke up right then because I had a horrible feeling. I just think you might be getting into a bad scene. I feel like I have to tell you to be careful."

I was doing a story with a band tonight and I caught their first show. Afterward we did the rock-writing thing and when I was sick of hearing about their influences, we headed to the after party at a club/rock venue. There were several text messages on my phone from Annie asking where I was going with the band. I ask, diplomatically, whether she is going to a club down the street. That way I can avoid her for the entire night and pretend we're in a bad relationship rather than a hopeless breakup.

Sometimes I worry that I will never make it as a rock writer since I am not a socially awkward toad. Most people at the big magazines are five-foot-tall pimples in cargo shorts and wire rimmed glasses. They can sit through bad shows and bad interviews and drunken, guarded bassists because it's no different from their normal social life. But everywher we went, people thought I was in the band because I was also wearing fashion jeans and a black button-down. The only reason I looked different was because I was wearing a purple velvet jacket. (I had to find out, didn't I?)

The band goes in ahead and as I step into the bar I'm happy because they are playing a song I like. It's about a guy who has nightmares of seeing his ex girlfriend being out with some other guy.("Mr. Brightside")

And the first person I see as I walk in is Annie. Her hair is excellent and she's wearing a gorgeous rock-and-roll ensemble that I've never seen before. She sneers, gives me the finger and goes over to talk to some other guy.

Labels: Indie Rock Nightmare

Indie Rock Nightmare Part II

My chest begins to implode as I head to the VIP section. This isn't dramatics anymore, I think I may even have been limping.Please let this just be a nightmare, I think. Or some kind of reality-tv-music-video-shoot. the club has bought the band several bottles of vodka to help create the illusion of rock-and-roll. I sit down between the lead singer's wife and the band's biggest fan (a three foot tall midget).

I end up telling them both the whole story and the LSW says she'll stick by me. "If she comes over, tell me. And I'll pretend that everything you say is HA! HA! hilarious! And if she gets any closer I'll--" she leans over and whispers in my ear. "--whisper in your ear."

I then get the worlds smallest/most encouraging high five from the midget. None of my real friends are there. Just my scene friends. One of them comes up as I drain the bottle of vodka into my cup. He asks what's going on. "Me and Annie broke up."

"Annie...?" I tell him who I'm talking about. He says, "Dude I love that you are sitting next to a midget."

Annie texts me twice to ask where I've gone. She finds me in back and no amount of work on behalf of LSW can help. I have a hard time explaining how I would like to see her, but that I also hope that I never see her again, ever. She says she thought we were going to see the band and she invited me out with her for the night. Another band takes the stage at this club/rock venue and I can't scream loud enough to explain how I miss her but that doesn't stop me from never wanting to see her again. And I can't quite get across how the last place I could possibly want to see her is in a club setting.

(It's just not kosher. It's mixing life and death too much. Here's us: broke up. Here's me: imploding. Here's her: deciding which champagne bubble bath she'll step into later.)

"Why are you blowing me off?" she says. "And who the hell is that girl?" She's with the band. "With the band?" Not like a groupie. She's just with the band. "Where did you get this jacket?" It's a long story, but someone had a dream about me standing in a club/rock venue and wearing a purple jacket. But she only told me because she wanted to warn me that something bad would happen. "WHAT?" Nevermind.

"Man," the midget says as I sit back down. "She's beautiful." I must give him some kind of look because he looks back and says, "Sorry."

In the subway station I sit down next to a blonde girl and for some reason I just say, "I ran into my ex-girlfriend tonight."

"How'd it go?" I tell her the whole nightmare. Outfits, setting, etc. We keep talking and get on the same train. She confesses that her boyfriend is moving up from Texas soon. He's moving in with her, but he doesn't know that she's been sleeping with some girl for months now.

We end up getting off at the same stop. She unlocks her bike and decide to get a drink. I don't know how much I drank in the club but every sip of the beer she bought me activated my alcohol levels more. Halfway through the beer I could feel half of the drinks I'd had all night. By the end I was drinking water and leaning heavily on the bar. We keep talking for a long time and she makes more terrible confessions about the guy she's been cheating on. It's really great to meet a complete stranger sometimes.

She gives me a ride home on her bike because it seemed like a perfectly good idea. I sit on the seat, holding on to her shakey hips as she peddles. It's one of those old vintage bikes and we're both pretty drunk. So everytime I lean around to see if we're going to die, I throw the bike off balance and almost kill us. She tries to sit down, which doesn't work because I am trying to have children of my own someday.

I can't believe that I'm actually giggling somewhat right now, keeping this girl from sitting on my genitals (what is it with bike seats? Do eunics build them?) and keeping any parked cars from slamming into us.

Labels: Indie Rock Nightmare

(Abandon, for now, my own personal drama and return with me to the terrifying process of novel writing.)

The hardest part--so far--is realizing that someone is going to have to read this thing when I'm done with it. And that someone won't read it because they're a friend of mine or because they are my supportive (ex-)girlfriend. The first person to read it (next month) will be someone who thinks that it can make them an amount of money. After that--if it gets that far--it will be read by someone else who thinks it can make their publishing company some more money.

But both of these hypothetical people will only even finish reading it if they think that complete strangers might pick it up in a bookstore, feel its gentle, matte finish, and read the inside jacket to find out just what the hell some asshole twenty three year old thinks he has to say to a world he's lived in for less than a generation.

So every week now I work on breaking the story down into four paragraphs. These paragraphs can't reveal the ending. They should, honestly, be skipped entirely by a good reader who may want to enjoy the story. They do have the benefit of being able to judge everyone's nebulous motives. But they have to be worth reading.

Liam hasn’t been to a summer camp since he was eleven. Mom dropped him off and Dad had to go pick him up. And that’s the last he saw of her. She’s somewhere in the country right now. But—seriously—isn’t everyone?
Hampshire’s mom drives him the other way crazy. He’s got two sisters and they both skipped out to the west coast as soon as they could. One of ‘em runs a camp and she got Liam and Hampshire jobs there for the summer.
Great, right? Try telling that to Liam’s brother. He won’t calm down until Liam finishes school and starts working for him down at the garage. Anything to keep Liam outta punching the clock at the goddam bomb factory with Dad. And anything—anything—to keep him from dipping out forever, like mom.
They’re going anyway. And they’re gonna take their sweet-ass time getting there. But when Liam finds himself wrapped up in a bizarre murder the boys can’t go home, they can’t go to camp, they can’t really go anywhere. Almost broke, very hungry, and out of ideas, Liam tries to find some of his lost relatives to hide out for a while. If they'll only pick up the goddam phone.

I will also freely admit that this is not the story I have written down right now. The story is have has is about the same two boys who get stuck in Montana (bizarre murder). They won't go to the summer camp but they were never going to a summer camp. So now, in order to have this story make any sense, I've had to make up some reason for them to be doing all the things that they are already doing. Which is easy, since I knew they will never be doing that anyway. You follow?

Okay, remember this? I'm here again. This was my rejected proposal from the English department last year at Kenyon. I wrote it at the end of a relationship where I was still in the early days and had not yet proven that the break up would be god awful.

Following the top-five prologue to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, the narrator eases back into his sofa chair, the one that Laura won’t take when she moves out, and muses about his love life. Having ended a relationship of eight years, he does not know what to say, really. Hopeful, open-minded, repressive, he thinks about the next person he will sleep with. Has he already met her? Do they know each other? Or will he just know it when he meets her? For the night, he knows that this feeling will pass, that soon he will no longer be satisfied with a hypothetical future, but the possibilities will be enough to send him in to work for the day. He’ll figure it out when he gets home.
As I come to the close of a nearly two-year novel project, I find it hard to spell check the final pages. What will I do with myself when I no longer talk to people and pretend to listen while thinking, We weren’t broke, but we weren’t fixed either, that’s a terrible sentence. Why haven’t I deleted it yet? I should go home right now and cross it out so I don’t forget. Of course it will never be over. I will rehash. I will revise (again, again, again). I will see it someday and hate myself for leaving the punctuation as such. In the end I will abandon it, hopefully in the capable hands of another, and begin anew. As I look to my senior comps in creative writing I wonder about the story I will hand in. Have I seen it’s first draft? If so, how will I know it? If not, where will I be when the foundation hits me? Last week I became convinced that the perfect first line would be, “And pretty much right after that, she left.” And then this week, she dropped out of school. But will the final project give me autobiographical goose bumps? Or will I find myself at work one day, as I did with her, and realize that the one, at least the one for now, will not be the one that wowed me right away, the one that came to me so easily, but the one I overlooked.

And that's where I am right now because--and this is the nicest part of dating a catholic girl-- I have no reason to believe that Annie will not join a nunery. I know I'll probably become the first human to ever sublimate at room temperature if I run into here when she's with another guy.

But now the end of the relationship only means freedom, spare time, pocket money, more daytime cell phone minutes, later nights (or earlier if I chose), complete control of movie rentals, etc. One time I even wrote a novel about this feeling:

People flood the sidewalk as the movie lets out. We swim up stream from the couples who pass by, finishing oversized sodas and talking—I was so scared…I could believe…Did you ever think that he would…Never!...Do you think there’ll be a sequal? They look at us and remember how they felt two hours ago. How they had no idea how the movie would end or what was up ahead. And some of them smile on us the way people smile on you when you’re eighteen. It’s all down hill from here but you have no idea do you? No. You just don’t know. You have no way of knowing for sure and you never will until it’s too late. But I envy that expectation. You’re like pregnant women, you know? All cute and smiley. You even glow a little, but it’s only because you have no idea what the fuck you’re getting into.

Annie and I just broke up under what seem like amicable terms. I'm not exactly the kind of person who deals with things well. My first response is to be filled with a deep sense of personal satisfaction because I have written a chapter about break ups that is so cursed that even spellchecking it has become perrenial relationship suicide.

My second response is that I should not be a single person in New York City on a saturday night. She and I were planning on going to my uncle's beach house for the weekend and it might be smart for me to go there right now anyway.

My third response--just in case you worried that I might not be delighted by my own dementia--is that I know that Annie hasn't finished the manuscript. She is, in fact, reading the chapter that I have supersticiously incarnated as evil. She still has a hundred and fifty pages to go. I worry that the manuscript will become like the child caught in the middle of a divorce.

I'll pretend like she doesn't care about it any more and that she's hurting it, but really I'll just probably end up using it as leverage for getting back at her. You were supposed to pick up the re-edits half an hour ago. And now you just show up whenever you want to? For the last ten months she has provided me with financial, emotional, and editorial support. I honestly am not sure if I could have finished it if it weren't for her. And now I feel like the only thing I can do is what I do best: pretend this isn't happening and turn the worst parts of me into the motivation I need to finish this.

I don't want to change the characters now that I've been through what I've been through. I don't want to name the most awful character in the story Annie. I don't want to change the ending because I am not a sadder by wiser man. I just want to believe that I've actually done something.

1) Annie and I--in a much needed escape from a city that was attempting to evaporate--borrowed Ben's car and drove to the end of Long Island. Which apparently has a bustling wine country. Hilarious afternoon spent swirling strange colored wines and trying not to act like complete snobs.

I had an entire post drafted on this topic on May 23, but through the wonders of stolen wireless it got lost. Basically it was about what a failure I've been this year. I graduated college with the journalism experience of many people I know who have life insurance. Blessed with three years of clippings, I knew that I would never have to go to graduate school in journalism, never have to cover school board meetings in rural Iowa, etc.

This is mostly because writing is an incredibly fulfilling occupation, which means it does not have to pay well. Anyone can do it. But I didn't want that life. At least not right away. I wanted to sweat and to have a punch clock and to never think of The Elements of Style during my workday. I wanted to live in a cheap apartment, to enjoy my foodstamps, and to atone for my four years in a rural Ohio literary summer camp.

Basically I wanted to be sure that I knew how my characters backs would ache at the end of every day. And here I am a year later. Wine tasting.

2) Having Annie read the manuscript gives me this guilty freedom. Every morning I wake up for writing time and have to figure out what to do with my day since I shall not be killing any central characters, making anyone fall in love, having anyone's car broken into, or causing any characters to explain why they've left their spouse.

Sometimes I write about rock music. Sometimes I read novels. Today I finally watched Super Size Me and went for a run out of obligation.

She's almost done and we've agreed not to talk about it until she is. Which means I end up asking about it every time I see her. She begins to tell me a central problem. I get defensive and tell her that it will get sorted out later in the narrative. She reminds me that this is why we agreed not to talk about it until later.

So far she also seems to like the parts that I wanted to cut out. There's a part about two hitchhikers that I pretty much ripped out of a Joseph Campbell/Carl Jung set of narrative paper dolls that came in my high school english text book. They are--guess what!--two guys who are like the two central guys, but not like them. You see?

She has given me back the first two parts and they taunt me in my sleep. Psssst! Hey! Pick me up! Wanna know what your girlfriend really thinks about you? It's all here in my margins!

Moments ago I left and un-airconditioned church in Hartford where I watched my mother get ordained. I was sitting there, realizing that my god father was somewhere in the room and that later I would have to answer as to why I don't go to church anymore. The best I could come up with is that I don't feel like I get anything out of it. No community, no good music, no fellowship.

And right then the plot solution for my project struck me in church. I realilze that I'm making things too complicated by wanting to resolve tension too soon. I need to let the main characters just be in deep shit for a few chapters.

The collection plate came around seconds later and I thought, Do I have to tithe for that?

1) Julia left The Futur@heads after party early. I was there for very important rock journalism reasons and hadn't realize she left. "Goddammit," I screamed into my cellphone later. "I've been waiting all week to turn to you and say, Man, this is way better than when we were hanging out with The Kill@rs last week."

2) Last night I was carrying two propane tanks to my brother's truck. It was an awkward load because, in the interest of time, I was wearing his backpack leaf-blower, feeling like The Rocketeer. But since I didn't want to blow up I kept my lit cigarette in my mouth, away from the propane as I walked up the hill behind his house. "It's good to be home," I said.

Remember me whining about this?

August 1, 2004

There's a section in the fiction project I've worked on for the last three years wherein I bring the comparison of a solitary friendship to that of a marriage. The two main characters really hate eachother by the middle of the story. I'm in the third draft and I've never made it through the entire section without having someone break up with me.

I'm in that section again. It's terrifying.

Right now I'm reading the new translation of Camus's The Stranger. I wish I had been well-educated enough to have read the old translation high school but, as I will mention daily, I was in the dumb kid classes and our novels were selected based on their pictures.

It strikes me as the perfect novel. Today mother died, I went to see her body. Then I met a girl and something strange happened.

This is all by page 24. What the fuck am I doing for 200 pages that is so goddam important? Tomorrow I have to get up and edit again. I should be finished. My new favorite thing is reading it as though it were an actual book. I sit and I flip pages and ignore the glaring structural delinquencies. It's great.

The biggest problem is that until just now (page 281) the main character didn't know how to be alone. But if every chapter started with one of his descriptions, he could be alone for the entire novel and still have a surprise ending:

If you wanna believe in God, or if you already did and you just wanted something to hold onto for a few hours, you woulda today. As soon as we left Idaho He put on this little show for us upstairs. Hampshire missed it, but he always does. Four miles over the border, the sky clouds over and goes dark. And I mean get-the-Ark-dark. Then a thousand angels get outta a thousand tubs at the same time. First just a sprinkle as their feet drip, and then they pull the drain plugs. Big sheets of rain hose Washington down. Ninety-foot evergreens along the highway hold out their hands to collect the water as their sap buckets overflow. Their branches hang low, sopping. Maybe they weren’t evergreens, but some kinda Weeping Evergreen. After five minutes of this, the sun comes out before the rain even slows down. It pokes through a cloud, and then another cloud takes a break and more sunlight comes through there. So now the big drops of rain get lit by the pure white sunlight. A sunshower to re-start the morning. The wet limbs glow under the Lamp. Bright greens and browns purify all the air in the car and spit pure oxygen back at us. The rain cleans the road and washes the bird shit offa the peak in the windshield that both wipers miss.

At a very young age I had to accept that I would never be a rock star because my parents would support me too much. They came to visit me today and I will never have good novelist friends--and maybe never live as a write--because I get along fantastically with my parents.

They came into the city today and we saw dinosaurs in a museum, tried to find where John Lennon was shot, and then hung around in my former corregated box factory apartment. "Look at this space!" They said, scaling the library ladder that leads up to my level. "You should get a couch!"

I showed them the fuscia velvet sportcoat I wore to m0therfucker and my mother checked the label to see where she could get one herself. I took them to the first Thai meal my father has ever enjoyed. And together we checked my email to see if I had any more exciting, non-paying assignments at the music magazine.

My Mother--who was just offered a position at a prestigious church in a New England suburb--sent me this song to help me deal with my problems of growing up and failing at life.

KATE MONSTER:
I wish I could go back to college.
Life was so simple back then.
NICKY:
What would I give to go back and live in a dorm with a meal plan again!
PRINCETON:
I wish I could go back to college.
In college you know who you are.
You sit in the quad, and think, "Oh my God!
I am totally gonna go far!"
ALL:
How do I go back to college?
I don't know who I am anymore!
PRINCETON:
I wanna go back to my room and find a message in dry-erase pen on the door!
Ohhh...
I wish I could just drop a class...
NICKY:
Or get into a play...
KATE MONSTER:
Or change my major...
PRINCETON:
Or fuck my T.A.
ALL:
I need an academic advisor to point the way!
We could be...
Sitting in the computer lab,
4 A.M. before the final paper is due,
Cursing the world 'cause I didn't start sooner,
And seeing the rest of the class there, too!
PRINCETON:
I wish I could go back to college!
ALL:
How do I go back to college?!
AHHHH...
PRINCETON:
I wish I had taken more pictures.
NICKY:
But if I were to go back to college,
Think what a loser I'd be-
I'd walk through the quad,
And think "Oh my God..."
ALL:
"These kids are so much younger than me."

The Best Day Yet

When I'm writing, I have a hard time beating up on my characters. I remember the day I wrote what I read today and I thought, Man, how could I have someone robbed when I care so much about them? But now that I read it over I am very happy to see them get mugged.

The First Half drags. There's set up. You meet people. You need a reason to listen to them.

The Second Half is what I'm here for. Things are unfolding and they are only unfolding because they were set up long before. Now I need to find a way to have everything set up right in fewer pages without the front half looking like the board game Mouse Trap!

Two Things That Bother Me About Youth Culture

1) Why do people always hook up after they go out and dance together? I mean, let's say it's friday. If you're lucky enough to have a job you probably worked all day and then got all done up, danced, got all sweaty, and went home with someone. Do you really want to get naked or be naked with someone after filling your clothes with 20 hours of sweat? You wouldn't want to make out with someone after you met them at the gym, would you? Maybe this is why alot of people date people at work.

2) The word "going out" is just bad grammar. In Junior High it meant nothing since one couldn't really go anywhere. And even now most of the couples I know now rarely go out together. They go around together, they certainly go home together, but it seems like the longer people are together, the less they want to go out with eachother. A dear friend of mine is married for citizenship reasons and he was telling me how much he'd love to erase his memory with me for the night, but he couldn't. Cause his wife was already going to the same party.

But what kind of a world would it be if your Aunt asked you at thanksgiving, "Hey, so are you going in with anyone cute these days?"

1) Today I got to page 240, which is the halfway point. In writing class they always say you can't hold on to your lines. "You have to murder your little darlings." Right now, since I'm trying to read it as a whole, I find myself leaving my maimed darling crying on the floor, starved for attention, formula, and meaning.

And then today the main character hit his stride. After 200 pages he has a voice. After 210 he gets to be in a room by himself. It takes a secret sharer to get him to open up. And it takes the form of a hitchiker with similar tattoos and the same size pants.

Since I’m not that great of a guy, I sat through his story, listened to his troubles and could only think of my own life. Every word he said pinged some detail from the place behind us. Or in front of us, depending. I know that’s not the greatest thing to say, but it doesn’t make you a fucken saint just because you don’t think like that. You probably buy wall calendars and flip over to see what the picture’s gonna be on your birthday right? And this is how I see people sometimes. I'm always looking for where I fit in. Same thing happens in movies. I was and someone gets thrown outta school or their husband leaves them for someone with more cards in their wallet and I think, Wow. Can’t believe that. It’s like someone stole my thoughts and the filmed’em. Wonder if you grow outta that or if I’m always going to look at people and read them as some fucken horoscope that I can untangle to mean something about me and my life. That’s the other thing: you read other horoscopes or just your own? See? Back off.

2) The girl who threw me the napkin last week came back to see me DJ again.