Beautiful Handcrafted Animals

I’m not sure if I can embed a video in this, or not, but if you want to imagine the song from the end of Portal while you read this post, that would be just fine by me.

Here’s a link: SONG

I could spoiler-tag that, as it’s the end of the game, but I imagine anyone it might mean anything to has already seen it, etc., etc., worlds without end.

So, how’s everyone doing?

As some folks, who’ve asked me in person (or the internet variation on such) know, I’ve been having the devil’s own time connecting to this blog. Until just now, of course.

Clearly, I have gotten back in.

Beautiful Handcrafted Animals still sits, neatly piled up, waiting for me to dig back into it (just in case that’s why you’ve found yourself here). It’s resting right now, as am I.

Also, I got myself an Amazon Kindle. If you don’t know what that is, it’s essentially an e-book reader on steroids. Electronic paper means you can read without eyesore, and using minimal battery life. Plus, you can buy a book “on-the-go” which is really just a non-fancy way of saying you can flip a switch, connect to Amazon.com and buy (at a heady discount) any of the 90,000+ books currently available via their Kindle store.

It’s pretty sexy.

We got my Dad one for his birthday, back in December, and it’s taken literally until right now for mine to arrive. It sits, waiting, charging, next to my keyboard.

One of the very nice things about this Kindle is you can download, for free, a sample of any book you might be interested in reading. I’m sure normal humans would use this to test out a book, or see what they thought of the author, but I’m using it as a sort of “shopping cart” for Kindle books. Grab the first chapter, and then I don’t have to worry about remembering what it was I wanted to read later on.

When you buy a book, it takes about a minute to download. When I think of all the crappy books and magazines I’ve bought, over the years, racing through Penn Station, so I’d have something to read on the ride home . . . well, its’ very nice.

Right now I have some twenty-odd books on my Kindle. These include:

• Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter books
• W. Somerset Maugham’s, Of Human Bondage — which seems to just be too damned thick to take with me in any other format
• All three His Dark Materials books
• Heinlein’s, Stranger In A Strange Land (I hope it’s the unabridged version)
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (for like, six bucks — how could I resist?)
• The Caitlin R. Kiernan, Beowulf movie adaptation, which I also could not resist.
• A couple Douglas Preston / Lincoln Childs books, mainly solo efforts I haven’t read yet
• William Gibson’s, Neuromancer
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby (I think it was $0.99, for pity’s sake)
• Clive Barkers, Imajica (great, heavy, book)
• Joe Hill’s, 20th Century Ghosts
• Aaaand, another twenty or so “sample chapters” of other things.

This crazy thing weighs about the same as a trade-paperback. So I’m carrying all that around with me, in a form-factor about the same size as a book I could blow through going downtown and back uptown again.

Amazing.

I’m reading a lot now (as you might imagine — I’m just polishing off Christopher Priest’s, The Prestige, the basis for the Christopher Nolan movie), and that usually means I’m not writing. That’s okay. I’m getting ready for a break and that means writing, writing, writing.

What else? Oh, we went for a double-feature this past Saturday, catching Enchanted (we loved it) and The Orphanage (uh-mazing). We still want to see No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and we’re aiming to catch at least one of them this Saturday.

So, what’ve y’all been up to?

I’m pleased to report that folks have actually been harassing me for not updating this blot. Good work, team!

I have actually gotten some writing done, though not nearly as much as I might like. I have a “good” explanation for this, though, so I don’t feel nearly as badly as I probably should.

Okay.

I posted last month in my post, How Good A Movie is The Mist? that Jessy and I went to see the new Stephen King / Frank Darabont movie, The Mist (as the title of said post may imply). This turned out to be a mistake, oddly enough.

Seeing the movie made me curious to read the book again. So, I did. Reading The Mist again made me enjoy reading on the subway (I try and not read when I’m actively writing, especially in the fashion of NaNoWriMo. I tend to pick up things other authors do, tricks they pull, and that changes the book I’m writing). So I grabbed a copy of Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca and gave that a read.

That’s a hell of a book, it is.

Only problem is, the language and descriptions are of a completely different style from what I’m using in Animals. I set down to write one night and found myself fairly exploding with flowery prose, long descriptions of moonlit vistas, etc., etc.

It was bad. Very bad.

So I’ve put myself on a little fast, slammed on the brakes and froze the works right where they lay.

It’s been about a week since I finished Rebecca and I think I’m feeling up to it again. I even had a good idea (always a good sign) as I was walking Jack The Dog this morning.

So, I’m hoping to spend some time alone with the PowerBook tonight. I won’t likely get Galen and company to the end of the book before going away for the holidays, but they’re still right where I left them, and I will have my laptop (though I tend to not write when the scenery changes — force of habit).

Keep harassing me, though, folks. It is working, and helping. I just had to move past another author’s work and get back into my own head.

No, not stops.  No stopping.  Stopping is not-so-much.

But after the marathon 9,000 words on Friday, I needed a break.  It felt kind of funny not writing on Saturday, but I made myself stick to it.  I played some Rock Band.  A little WoW.  I took a nap.  Tried to take Jack the Dog for a walk (too windy and no hat cuz I’m stupid).

I wanted to write last night but it got late on me.

I’m intending to pick things up tonight.  We’re on Chapter Fourteen and I need to get Galen and company out to Minnesota and then back again.

Here’s a story that won’t be in the book.  I’d like to work it in (it was in a previous draft), but the way I’m doing things, I don’t think it’ll make the cut:

When I was in college, Freshman year a bunch of us drove with some buddies out to the Twin Cities for the weekend.  We had one guy’s truck.  Doug was his name and his truck was falling apart.  In that sentence, “falling apart” means “the engine caught fire every twenty minutes or so”.

Yeah.

So, we had to stop every twenty minutes or so, pull over to the side of the road, and let Doug spray the engine with one of the fire extinguishers he kept in the back.  He told us the engine was leaking oil (this seemed like a bad thing to me at the time) and that when the engine heated up, the oil would set the engine aflame.

Yes, we drove from Madison, Wisconsin, out to Mineapolis, Minnesotta like that.

It took the better part of eight hours.

It should be a 3-4 hour trip, max.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, once we got the rhythm of  stopping the truck to put out the engine down, we made him stop whenever we saw cows along the side of the highway (read: often) SO WE COULD MOO AT THEM.

I don’t remember the ride back taking as long, but it’s vaguely possible I was too hungover / too still drunk to actually remember.

I’d like to include that in — I’d intended to have Galen and Joe laughing about the story, relating it to China.  But the way I’m planning to do things now it’s just not in the cards.  So there you have it, MY version of the story which I was planning on adapting into the book (I’ve done this with a few things, including an awesome conversation my wife and I had about subway lines and the five boroughs of New York City).

Someday I’ll tell you about a friend of mine who convinced should pronounce “cow” with a long “O”.  Like it rhymed with “tow,” for instance.  Three years later, he was still doing it, and instructing others to do the same.

The math is kind of scary but I think I might have written almost nine-thousand words today. To put things into perspective, that’s NINE THOUSAND words.

Today.

And by, “today” I don’t even mean, “I stayed up to five in the morning freebasing espresso beans, drooling on myself.”

The NaNoWriMo deadling is 11:59pm “Local Time”. Whether that means midnight EST, where I am, or midnight local time in their part of the world (I’m assuming they’re on the West Coast for some reason. Doesn’t it seem like all stuff like this is out on the West Coast?) I don’t know. Fortunately, I was able to get my act together and get it done with time to spare.

Now.

The book itself is not, technically, done. There are as little as 10,000 words and as many as 20-30,000 words remaining to be written. I’m alright with that, though. The goal of National Novel Writing Month is to pen a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I’m just amending that slightly to read, “50,000 words OF a novel in 30 days.”

Semantics, really.

It’s my goal to continue as I have been for the next few weeks, and have the first draft done before Christmas and New Years. Then I will put the book aside for a couple weeks or a month, and revisit it with the intention of cleaning up what I just spent a month writing.

After I got “done”, I did copy/paste a small section of the book — one of my favorite bits, as it happens — under their “Novel Excerpt” section. I don’t think it gives anything away (except, maybe, a character’s name). It’s a cute little section and I’d encourage you to check it out.

Here’s the link to my NaNoWriMo page, one more time for 2007.

Also, here are screenshots of what you see when you “win” National Novel Writing Month:

And here is their chart tracking my progress:

You can click on either of those pictures to see a larger screenshot. I didn’t want to break the page by posting the originals there. I think you can see it for yourself, if you visit my page, but I don’t know for sure.

Thanks, if you came along on this little journey with me. Thanks, also, if you’re one of the many folks who’ve been harassing me to get my ass in gear this month. And to answer the question everyone seems so excited to ask me about, no, you can’t read it. Not yet. But when it’s done, when I’ve gone through the horrible, horrible draft sitting on my desk and fixed all the terribly embarrassing inconsistencies, removed all the dreadfully boring parts, figured out just how to handle plot points that take place before the book somehow at the end of the book without having two chapters of flashbacks . . . when THAT happens, then maybe you can read it.

Oh, and keep harassing me for a couple weeks. I’ll keep the daily word counts coming. Promise.

Ahhhh . . . 50,000 words.

Going to finish this section (it’s actually a good place to stop for the night, the end, interestingly, of Chapter Thirteen, all of which I have just written) and then have something to eat.

I’m hungry and Jessy’s Chinese smells good.

49,000 . . . doobie, doobie do . . .