It occurs to me that I'm attempting to maintain one too many forms of writing. I have the novel that I'm working on, the ever-changing outline to that novel, this blog, a writing journal, a running journal, and the journal I maintain for my daughter. I always feel I'm neglecting one or all of these, and it's no wonder: what am I doing writing all these journals?

Despite the fact that it's terribly boring, I've decided to cut and paste the last ten days of my writing journal here today just so that I don't have to bother adding a creative blog entry. Perhaps it will be of some interest to other writers to see what another writer's daily writing journey is like...

5/14/07

Left the house at 8. Got a cup of Stumptown. Arrived at the office just before 9. Dicked around the Internet until about 9:30 before settling in. Went through some pages that I’d written on Friday and changed a few things. Flipped through the beginning of the next scene which I intended to keep, before working on the new ending to the Bridge of the Gods scene. At 10:30 got hungry and went down to get a breakfast burrito. Ate and listened to Pandora until about 11:10. Started writing again and wrote out a new dialogue to the end of the Bridge of the Gods scene, making it so that Mercyx questions Flynn’s sincerity, judged by the way he makes fun of Booker in his comics. Mercyx tells Flynn about the Jebus, and Flynn inadvertently laughs. Mercyx rides off. I wrote this straight through to 12:30—took a bathroom break and a trip downstairs for a soda. It’s now 12:40. Got through 15 pages and wrote over 1,000 words. Going for a long run and then will probably can the writing for the day.

5/15/07

Had trouble getting settled today for some reason. Didn’t start writing until 10:30—sort of dicked around the Internet. Cut some material and sutured some material back in, trying to write the minimal amount of material to grow the conflict between the comic and Booker. Added 2.5 pages and 300 words between 10:30 and 1:45. Going to pay some bills, do some nitpicky things and call it a day.

5/16/07

Got out of the house early this morning and began working without too much of the usual websurfing. Started writing at 8. Wrote slowly today, but the writing seemed stronger than I can remember it being in a long while. Wrote a lovely description of Douglas Yamhill’s Ben Dover books to begin a new sequence where Dougie suggests to Flynn that he not write down Booker’s speeches word-for-word but rather that he reinterpret it.
Added 4 pages, most of it new with a little cut and pasting of a description of Dougie that had been cut out earlier. 750 words. Ended writing at 10:30… going for a run and then have to get Ava at 1.

5/17/07

Got a very late start today. I really need to reduce the procrastination. Walking the dog and making coffee is one thing, but I really don’t need to spend 30 minutes on Sportsline.com. Still, I started at 11 and wrote relatively close to straight through to 1:15, adding 5 pages and 1,000 plus words. The scene at Ben Dover books is getting longish, I wonder how it will work with the pacing. Still, good to be adding a needed scene. Going to eat lunch now and then do some tic-tacky things.

5/21/07
Took the 18th off to go hiking on my birthday. Stayed home today and started writing early—around 8 A.M.—without too much web surfing. Finished out the Ben Dover Books section around 9. Did some laundry and then got caught imagining PCT trip. Didn’t get writing again until 10. Wrote a transitional section about bridges. This finishes Scene 14 on the outline. Tomorrow I will begin a rewrite of the next Booker sermon on authenticity. This will take some focus and doing. Wrote 3.5 pages today and 850 words. (No recycled material.) It’s 11:30 now… have to get Ava at 1.

5/22/07

Big zero today. Just couldn’t get it together. Had to take Ava into school at 9. Got home, got all my stuff together, put my laundry away, and finally managed to get out of the house close to 10. Got to my office at 10:30 to the sound of very loud construction. Farted around for fifteen minutes before deciding to run some errands. Returned a lamp, got some library books, and then got a call from Andrea offering to pick me up and drive me home. Figured it was a good idea, given the noise at my office. She decided to take a long lunch, much to my chagrin, and I didn’t get home until 1:30. By then I was depressed and sat around reading my new books until I had to get Ava at 3:45. Sigh…

5/23/07

Set down at the computer around 7 today. Spent an hour dicking around. (I’m very obsessed with this potential hiking trip that I want to do with Joe—the Northern Loop on Mt. Rainier.) Getting to writing was difficult—I needed to make sure the continuity between this speech and others before it was right, and revising this sermon seemed daunting, but eventually I got started. Wrote an intro to the sermon introducing how Flynn was beginning to see Booker as a real preacher, added a quick ditty about the Portland weather (a habit at the beginning of these sermons—is there some reason why I’m including them), pointed out the growing discomfort between Flynn and Booker, and then had the lesbians break the tension by arriving on the scene. I added 930 pages, and then pasted in a bit of stuff from previous introduction of the lesbians to Flynn. A total of 4.5 pages with 2 pages of cuts. Finished writing at 11:45. (Total length of novel has gone down to 440 pages from previous versions.)

Labels: Writing Process

During one of my not infrequent evenings of aimless web surfing, I came across an article about Jane McGonigal, a young woman who has predicted that a game developer will win a Nobel Prize by the year 2032. While I'm attracted to the both the arbitrariness of her having chosen the year 2032, the eccentricity of her pursuit of such a precise goal (it doesn't seem such a stretch to think she's envisioned herself as the recepient), and just her general geekiness, what struck me about her this prediction was how essential it seems to me.

One of the "games" that Ms. McGonigal has helped invent, is a month-long Alternative Reality Game (which, as all gamers must do, has been acronymed ARG), called World Without Oil. During the month of May, players of the game simulate a world oil crisis. They blog about the crisis, send video, and walk (or bike, or take public transportation) around imagining that oil prices are skyrocketing.

I'm not sure if the game has resulted in any major breakthoughs in how people should deal with an oil crisis (From the time I've spent surfing the WWO website, it seems to have merely encouraged an uptick in creative writing, photography, and gardening) but I liked the general tenor of it.

I wonder if we need this sort of game. If the warnings of the entire scientific community can't stop us from continuing a carbon pollution that very well may destroy the planet we live on, and if the laws of supply and demand don't stop us soon enough, how can we get everybody to stop?

I mean, seriously, the inconvenience of taking my bike everywhere, while every motorist who comes up behind me raises the hair on my neck, is just too much to do alone. It's simply not very fun, and I end up in my car again.

But if we all spontaneously started playing a game and tried to make it a new human adventure...

Paul Semel posted a nice interview of World Leader Pretend on his blog Riott.com.

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel, World Leader Pretend

I've been thinking lately about an interaction I had with Monica Drake, who was lamenting some negative comments in a review of her book Clown Girl. The reviewer had said something about the book being over-the-top and its main character histrionic. Monica's reply was something to the effect of, "Duh, it's a book about a clown!"

(And Monica, I know you've got your Google Alert turned on, so when you read this please correct me on my paraphrasing. I've never been a very responsible journalist.)

I love writers that can do what Monica did, where the writing style matches the personas of its characters. The Catcher and the Rye was such a break-through because of this. IMHO, it's an underappreciated trait.

Labels: Book Lovers

It was interesting reading Zadie Smith's book On Beauty immediately after reading an article by her titled Fail Better about how author's tend to drift away from their original purpose when writing a novel. (Sorry, the link to that article is dead. It was originally printed in the Jan. 20th edition of the UK Guardian.)

The novel was incredibly ambitious. It tackled topics as diverse as affirmative action in American colleges, interracial marriage, the psychological effects of religious belief and/or disbelief, and the way American's perceive beauty. It was philosophical, yet carried enough of a thread of a plot to keep the reader interested. It had all the makings of a work of great literature, and then, well, then it dissolved into a very tangled story of dirty fifty-something college professors (yes, that's plural) sleeping with YES, FUCK ME undergrads.

This isn't to knock the book. It was definitely on the verge of greatness--it just, well, got lost in its own expansiveness and needed a quick and cheap ending.

Anyway, I'm not writing this to knock Zadie Smith, who is an ungodly talented writer, but rather myself. I'm deep into what is now the seventh draft of my next novel. It was intended to be an expansive treatise on what's wrong with religion in America. I had written six-hundred odd pages, most of which was my main character going off on tirades, and the plot wasn't even close to tying together.

I've been, honestly, very close to complete dispair and utter defeat. But after taking three months off from writing, I came to the realization that despite the fact that most novels are generally some 60,000 plus words, the great works of literature generally only make one or two simple points. I'd been trying to make hundreds...

On the surface, it seems ludicrous that a novel can only make a couple of points. If I'm simply trying to make the point that:

1) The way Americans think about religion needs to drastically change.
and
2) My generation's ironic and fatalistic outlook is putting the world at great peril.

it would seem that I could do so in a few paragraphs--why do I need to write a whole novel? Well--that's just it--it often takes some 60,000 plus words to convince someone of something. As adaptive as we are, humans are still resistant to change--it takes a novel and then some to get us to alter our behaviors.

So anyway, I'm dropping nukes on the suburban sprawl that my novel has become, and trying to keep the book entertaining while I make a few points. Let's hope whatever emerges isn't too mutated for publication.

Labels: Book Lovers, Writing Process

I'm a little miffed that it took me this long to notice the SF Weekly review of World Leader Pretend that came out last month. It was positive and insightful. (They took a slap or two at the end, but that's pretty much boilerplate review writing.)

I do have to say that there's this funny premise that appears in reviews of World Leader Pretend where people assume that since I wrote a book about online gaming I'm some sort of technology guru.

Frost (himself a refugee from the S.F. dot-com world) shows definite promise as a writer, with a better grasp of emotional and linguistic nuances than one would expect from a techie, and knack for poetic use of cadence and repetition in his lengthy sentences.

They're surprised when they find out that the book carries an emotional punch. The truth is that I'm a psychology major who spent his early twenties attempting to save the world, who subsequently failed, and who came to San Francisco at the beginning of the dot-com boom when tech firms were hiring everybody with a pulse. I'm so not a techie. I always tell people (in jest) that my book is for the girlfriends of gamers, not the gamers themselves. True gamers would pick apart all the book's implausibilities. I was merely fascinated by how online gaming sort of inadvertantly caused the formation of these impromptu international communities, and the possibilities this created in terms of global understanding and togetherness.

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel, World Leader Pretend

David Rochester and I took my blog post On My Wasted Education a step too far.

I came to the realization, a few months ago, that I wasted my entire education. I had known that I wasted grade school, high school, and college (I wasted grade school because I didn't want the other kids to know I already knew all the answers. I wasted high school because I hated being at an all boys prep-school. And I wasted college because I was always wasted) but what I hadn't known was that I had also wasted graduate school.

This realization came to me after I got World Leader Pretend published. After all those years of thankless work, I finally had a book out, and I wanted, more than anything, to hear people talking about the ideas behind the book: how the Internet formed all these international communities, and how simulataneously cool and scary that was. But what I got instead was critiques of the writing--this was good; this bugged me; this made me laugh, etc.--all the same crap I got before it was published.

I wanted to tell people that it was different now, that it didn't matter.

But then suddenly I heard myself in all these voices, and I got really, really sad. I had spent all of graduate school reading all these books, and all this nascent writing by my classmates, and always all I had to talk about was the quality of the writing, rather than what it was that drove the writing.

Like I said, sad. In the end, does it matter whether writing is good or bad? We're all out there trying to express ideas--trying to get people to see the world in a different light--and yet when it comes to someone else's writing we stick our noses in the air and ignore what this other human being is trying to say.

Anyway, I've resolved to never critique anyone's writing again. (Which I suppose eliminates the likelihood that I'll ever be a college professor. I could never grade...)

Labels: Book Lovers