WWSW

Which, of course, stands for 'What would Shakespeare write?'  I remember a conversation I had with my daughter, Maddy.  We were discussing 'Romeo and Juliet,' and she said that of course, she had read it.  She was in school, after all.
I remember my days of reading the same play, and how much fun I had when I was even younger than she is now listening to a vinyl record of 'Macbeth.'  The witches and the ghost scared the hell out of me, and during the summer when I had the time I would stay up late in the living room, listening to it over and over again.  The power of the play enthralled me, but I guess I was too young to get all the mature bits.  Growing up, I was told over and over again, in a thousand subtle ways, how the Bard's work was high art.
Then, I got my hands on one of the various Complete Works.  I still haven't read everything, but imagine how shocked I was as I went through 'Titus Andronicus.'  That stuff was raw.  I knew then why I had never seen that play in any schoolbook, and I hated every English teacher that I had ever had for cheating me of it.  They tried to educate me, but all they did was take a still image of something that lived and breathed, and scrub it and bleach it to make it clean and sanitary.  Then they served it up with pomp and circumstance and said, 'Isn't this beautiful?'
These were the plays people went to see for amusement, not enlightenment.  They were the primetime of their day.  If Shakespeare was around today, he'd be writing 'All my children' meets 'Saw.'

First draft is done

It's done.  I finished the last chapter earlier today, and I got the last few paragraphs of the epilogue written while waiting for my meal at Outback.  The first draft of my first book is done.
I know there's a ton more work I'm going to have to put into it.  It has to be rewritten, and all the blank spots where I just put the main idea in brackets have to be fleshed out.  Plus I need resolve all the contradictions that I created when I was halfway through a chapter and thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool if I did it THIS way instead?'
I started this book a few years ago.  I can remember sitting in my room back at UTA and scribbling a few paragraphs, thinking how cool it would be to write a book.
If I'm honest, it's a big regret of mine that I didn't work harder at my writing back then.  I have no idea what Roja would look like if I had completed it, because so much of the book it filled with places and events that I only experienced later.  Maybe it would have been better, maybe worse.  Even if I didn't write my book then, I could have finished short stories.
This is what I want to do.  This is what I want to get up in the morning and think about while I'm eating breakfast.  This is what I see myself doing from this point on until I'm gone.
I already know which book is going to be next.

The home stretch

I'm working on the last chapter.  I've filled in a small gap in an earlier segment that I had left unfinished simply because I work on one at a time, on paper, and had tucked that one into my notebook and forgotten it.  Once I finish this chapter, the only thing left will be the epilogue.  I already know I'm going to let it sit and ferment for a bit before I start the rewriting, but just being able to type in the words, 'First draft is done,' will be pretty amazing.
I've done a couple of quick readings, and it's amazing how different the story is now form when I started.  I'll start a segment or a chapter one way, and in the middle I'll think, 'wait, what if --' and then make a left turn at Albuquerque.  Now all I have to do is finish the damn thing, and then rip through it from beginning to end and make sure it makes sense.  No problem, right?
Just like pulling teeth with a set of tweezers.

Oh boy, what a weekend.

So my wife and I went to ArmadilloCon.  She went to hawk her wares, and I went to pick the brains of any authors who were brave enough to subject themselves to questions from the masses.  We loaded up the truck, and left after I got off work on Thursday night.
We made it as far as LaGrange, when the truck suddenly stopped getting into any gear other than first.  We pulled over, and steam from the engine convinced us to shut it off.  It was late, and we were in not-quite-but-damn-close to the middle of nowhere.  Triple A proved useless, as we were farther away from a repair place than my wife's contract would make them tow us.  The only friend we had that was going to the con was already there.
We called an old friend who was over in San Antonio on business, and who had web access.  He was able to guide us to a hotel a mile down the road, and we crashed there for the night.  The next day, he drove all the way to LaGrange, picked us up and loaded our stuff (including my wife's entire booth setup) into his truck and drove us to Austin.  He helped get everything into the hotel, before he drove back to San Antonio.
My wife worked the Con, and I helped a bit, but sales were down from the previous year.  My wife, being a bit more socially minded than I am, asked around for anyone who had a truck and who might be willing to tow hers back to Houston.
One of the other writers at the con, a guy who had a table in the dealer's room, volunteered to help us out.  He not only gave my wife a ride over to LaGrange, but took her to buy a towing mount to pull her truck.  Of course, the damn thing didn't fit, and we ended up talking to the manager of the hotel, who was kind enough to let us leave the truck there until we got back to Houston and figured out a new plan.  During that part of the adventure, I was back at the Con, tearing down my wife's booth, loading it into the same truck of the same friend who had come all the way back to Austin, just to help us out.  Have I mentioned that he had his infant son with him?  This guy was carefully stacking our gear in the bed of his truck while also keeping his baby in arm's reach and out of trouble.  On our way back to Houston, we stopped to make sure my wife had gotten her truck going, which of course, she hadn't.
Eventually, we got back to Houston, and I'm now biking to work until we sort this mess out.  My wife is off to another Con this coming weekend, and I'll be stuck in Houston because I couldn't get time off.
Both the guys who helped us are owed major thanks, and if I can get their permissions I'll put up links to them.  They really pulled our fat out of the fire.

Texas heat, current project, and Norway

Newsflash:  It's hot.  It's hot everywhere, but down here in the southern part of the US, we're in a heat dome.  Which means right now we're the last hot dog on the grill, the one that the cook forgot all about, and we're going to be cooking here for a while yet.  Most of my poor wife's garden has died and withered, except for her mutant tomatoes, which are still producing. (I swear those seeds must be from the land around Chernobyl.  Nothing else could explain how the plants are still alive)

I had my daughter down here from Ohio a couple of weeks back, and my writing got put on the back burner.  Now that I've picked it up again, I'm cranking out Mister Donovan's Cadillac, a fun little piece that I started some time ago about a company man with a company car, one that gives him a little too much information about his perfect wife.  I actually might finish the first draft either tonight or tomorrow, depending on how I feel.  My insomnia has gotten a bit worse lately, despite the fact that I'm getting up a little earlier in the mornings and hitting the treadmill.  Then it's back to Roja.  I could wonder if my creative procrastination about finishing my first book is due to dread of exhilaration at finishing it turning to letdown, (something that happens in my head quite frequently.  Graduating from boot camp felt -- odd.) or from knowing that the next step is getting it rewritten, a process which I compare to pulling your own wisdom teeth out with a pair of tweezers.

In the news right now is a twit named Anders Behring Breivik.  This guy apparently saw himself as a crusader, and determined that it was his solemn duty to save Europe from the Muslims.  Shortly after he set off a bomb and shot a whole bunch of people, everyone who he idolized broke all speed records in distancing themselves from him.  Can't say I blame them, but it's a case of too little too late.  Breivik, in my humble opinion, was less motivated by duty than by ego.  He says he was fighting a good fight, but look at what he did, and didn't do.  He didn't run for office, saying "Elect me and I'll get rid of all the Muslims!  They'll never set foot in this country again!"  He didn't run down to his local recruiting office and say, "I want to join the army!  Can I go straight to Afghanistan?  I want to fight Muslims!"  He didn't run down to the nearest fjord, buy a boat, stock it with supplies and guns, and then sail it to Morocco, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, and launch his own one-man amphibious landing, jumping ashore with guns blazing.  All of those would require work, the threat of humiliation, and the last two would actually be DANGEROUS.  He stayed at home, in a country without the death penalty, where he was warm and comfortable.  He set a bomb, and he shot some kids.  In all the news about this tragedy, I have yet to hear that any of the people killed were even Muslim.  He killed the people who had the misfortune to be in arms reach.
That's not the tactic of a crusader.  That's the showing off of a coward.

"This is getting better by the minute" - Predator

So now I read that Borders is going mammaries skyward.  I was originally going to title this entry 'Now what?', a quote from the movie Deep Rising, which is one of my wife and my favorite movies.  It's said nearly a dozen times in the film, just as things are about to get worse.
I can rationalize it to say that in the end, this is good for the industry.  If Border's couldn't make it out here in the real world, then it needs to evolve, or go extinct.  Natural laws have no pity. (You can look that one up)
But of course, those same laws apply to me, and I have no desire to go extinct.  Forgive me for sounding cannibalistic, but this means that the distribution portion of the market for the stuff I and all my fellow writers produce is now that much smaller, so now there are a lot more of us on a very small island looking at the same, solitary can of beans, and each other.  That's the trick about writer's groups and making friends at conventions:  Unless you don't write fiction, the people you're smiling at and talking to are your competition.  Back when I trained more actively, my sensei and I were having a discussion about all the end-of-the-world scenarios that were being tossed around, and the subject of food came up.  He said, "I'm never gonna starve.  There are too many steaks walking around on two legs."
That said, I'm going to get back to my writing.

By the way, how fast can you walk, or run?

It's ----ing hot.

Been back from A-kon for a few days, and have been fighting 'Con crud' pretty much since the moment I got in the door.  Sneezing and coughing all day long would be bad enough, but down here in Houston we're in the middle of the worst drought in a century.  I would say that it's hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, but the truth is that if you took an egg outside, it would hard-boil in the shell before you could crack it open.  So in the middle of this, what happens?  A water pipe in my yard breaks because the soil, clay-based, has contracted too much for the pipe.  Trees and grass are dying all over town, and the street in front of my house is under an inch of water.
First draft of the 'The Necromancer of Kitty-kitty' is done, and I'm going back to finishing Roja and doing a re-write on Dirty.  While I was up in Dallas, I told Necromancer to a couple of the girls working Claudia's booth, and there were gasps and giggles, so hopefully it's a good one.
At dinner tonight I came up with one of the little tidbits that so often give my wife reason to wonder why she actually married me.  I imagined someone going out to eat at a Chinese restaurant, and as they walk out the door, presumably in view of other patrons, casually pulling out a half-dozen dog collars of various types and waving to the staff as they say, "Okay, see you guys next week."

By the way, if I never write another word as long as I live, it's all my daughter Madyson's fault.  She happened to mention this game that she plays on the computer, spider solitaire.  Having never even heard of it, I looked under my games file, and foolishly opened it up, just to see how it was played.  Now I'm hooked.