Trolling The Ancient Yule-Tide Carol

“Deck The Halls” must be my favorite Christmas carol. There are a lot of funny old words that come out during this time of year (honestly, “manger” is only used in conversation to describe one particular barn, and it always make me think of "A Clear and Present Manger"), but “Deck The Halls” not only have Fa-la-la-la-las, (which are much better than Little Drummer Boy’s morose Pa Rum Pum Pum Pums) and donning we now our gay apparel, but the rather peculiarly worded tradition of trolling the ancient yule-tide carol. But ‘tis the season to troll.

We’re coming up towards the end of the year which began by me deciding to write the novel I had been mulling over. Midway through the year, another project began, taking the home study courses for foster/adoption. And along the way, there was a video game to get out and another one to begin designing, trips to the Derby and the Bahamas, quitting smoking, some political matters to get involved in, and lots of not newsworthy but hilarious and wonderful time spent with family and friends to distract me from these projects.

This time of year is particularly filled with distractions. We’re not going anywhere, but we’ve got all the other activities with cards and presents and decorations and parties and dinners. Last night though I still managed to get twenty pages of rewriting on the latest draft of the novel done. There’s still a bit of paperwork to do for the home study, but the references are done (and, I hope, glowing). We’ll get bids on fencing the pool over the holiday, and the nice thing is that I got a little bonus at work to cover it. All the news today is about turmoil and recession, but my life continues on its lucky streak which has lasted nearly forty years now.

Maybe that’s the story. A cheery guy named Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet To Come to show him that life is actually pretty shitty. I like it. Next book.

Merry Christmas

Beach Reading

In 1620, a group of Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, prompting the first Thanksgiving in America. In 1648, another group of dissidents had an equally rough first couple of years of privation some distance south, as they founded the nation of the Bahamas on an island they called Eleuthera, meaning “freedom.” Since Plymouth, Massachusetts is frankly cold in November, my family decided to go to Eleuthera instead to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Eleuthera itself is ingénue actress shaped, three miles wide by one hundred miles long, but we spent the first five days of the trip on an island off the “main” island called Harbour Island, which is three miles long by a half miles wide. Fortunately it has a number of good hotels and restaurants filling up that limited space, and my parents, my brother, and my sister-in-law joined Ian and me there. And if the famous pink sand of the island wasn’t enough of a draw, there was the beach reading as I passed around pages of my novel, fresh off the press.

It would be a cold-hearted author who didn’t dream of reducing his sweet mother to tears, so that goal achieved, I mark the vacation a complete success. I have returned with great editorial notes from my family, who are obviously supportive enough to be kind in their criticism, but very good editors with different specialties, noting when I reference the wrong fish to be in a lake, when my pronouns get mangled, and when I make huge leaps in logic to confound the most patient of readers. They’re so fiercely loyal, though, I’ve begun referring to them as my bulldogs.

On the last couple of days, Ian and I explored the main island of Eleutheria, which while much more beautiful than my fictional Midwestern city of Athelstan, Ohio, had in common with it that the best years had gone by decades ago. From a visitor’s point of view, that isn’t necessarily bad: you have the beautiful pink powdery beaches which used to attract royalty not to mention hundreds of visitors every week to the three airports on the island basically all to yourself. The people of Eleutheria and Harbour Island are unfailingly friendly, but there’s no doubt they’re suffering as resort after resort shuts down in the wake of economic woes and the more dramatic effects of several bad hurricane seasons. There’s very little to do. It’s like arriving at a party in time to see the caterers taking down the buffet.

I am generally a very relaxed person, and after a week of enforced relaxation, it’s all I can do to keep from slipping into a coma.

So Near, So Far, So Good

Monday was a pretty eventful day on the two big projects. We met with our adoption/foster social worker for our first visit of our Home Study, and I finished the third draft of the novel. In both cases, it’s a little like being a skyscraper climber looking down, impressed with yourself on how far he’s come and perfectly aware how far there is to go. And then you plod on.

The social worker was very nice, and gave us great compliments about the house, which was squeaky clean. Our cat Floyd was well-behaved, though after she played with him for a little bit, he got a bit of the “crazy eyes” and we knew he was ready to up the game to the thing he does where he closes his entire body on your hand like a bear trap. After we diffused that, I think we came off as the right mix between serious and easy-going, structured but not set in our ways. At any rate, she returned our Thank You email afterwards, which is something.

We have to finish our paperwork outlining out budget, doing maps our house with “fire safety routes,” getting references plus employer references, DMV records, proof of income (two paystubs), evidence of home owner’s and car insurance, our domestic partnership contract, and get the pool fenced. Hard to believe it, but the list used to be much longer, and most of the stuff on there is easily done. I mean, I need to show proof of car insurance at a moment’s notice, don’t I?

On the novel front, I finally finished the agonizing Chapter 3, and am rereading the book as a whole as quickly as I can to see how it all works as a whole. One of the things I’ve found tricky about doing a long piece of work like a novel is staying with a consistent voice. The tone I know can shift – there are funny scenes, there are sad scenes – but I’m watching out for changes in style.

So far, though so good. Ian’s reading it now, and I’ve sent a copy (with lots of admonitions that this is a rough, rough copy I haven’t even checked for spelling yet) to a friend who is in the medical / elder caregiving field to get her insight into the subject, since that’s pretty important to get right in the book.

This is the part where I talk about the enjoyment being in the journey not the destination. Is that the truest cliche or what?

Being The Perfect Parent In Eight Words Or Less

On Monday, we’re meeting with our social worker from the Foster/Adoption Agency to begin our home study even though not quite all of our paperwork is done. It’s a lot of thoughtful work to fill in some of the forms. One question, for example, is “How would you react to bedwetting?”. You want to say you wouldn’t shame the child and make a big deal about an occasional bedwetting. You want to say that if it were chronic or you suspected it was a psychological reaction to abuse, you’d seek out a therapist. You want to say that you would definitely clean the sheets and have some spare sheets, because even though that sort of answer seems overly obvious, there’s probably no such thing as being overly obvious when filling out a form that will be sent to a government agency . But you have four inches of black line to do this in, so you have to find just a few words to answer all that.

We’re nervous, and of course planning on spending Sunday scrubbing our house down and hiding our liquor and pornography.

And I’m finally, after two months of being waylaid by it, finishing Chapter 3 of the novel. It’s turned out to be quite a good one, but a bugger to write, with a sermon and two flashbacks, balancing action with exposition. There’s nothing like the feeling for a writer when your characters surprise you. Must be a bit like being a dad.

Dragged Kicking & Screaming Towards Doing The Right Thing

So my sister-in-law, Kelly, like me, doesn't have a landline, and like me, lives in California, not a battleground state, so she, like me, hasn't been getting robocalls. She did, however, this week get a call on her cell phone from the No On Proposition 8 (for those of you out of state, and even some of those of you in state, "No" means you're for gay marriage, and you're saying "No" to no gay marriage, and "Yes" means you're against gay marriage, and you're saying "Yes" to no gay marriages) and she told the caller to go on, that if this were a different issue, she'd be pissed about them calling on the cell phone. So she talks to them, and ends up volunteering to do some phone calls of her own.

And now she's going to UCLA on Saturday for an information session where they prep you to take a shift outside one of the polls during election day, clarifying Prop 8 to people. She asked if Ian and I want to do it too.

Short answer is: no, not really. I've given money to the Human Rights Campaign for the fight, and towards the No On Proposition 8 group specifically. I'm not rich, but I have more money than time. At least that's what my initial reaction was, until I started thinking about it. One shift on election day on an issue that's important and relevant to me. Kelly has a busy life too, but she's managed to find time to fight for my rights.

So, grudgingly, I'm tagging along it seems.

Guilt: a positive motivator.

Always Sweat The Small Stuff

Any big project, like a novel or adopting a baby, can seem overwhelming from the start, unless you begin with the easy, fun parts so before long, the progress you’ve made makes the whole of the project less intimidating. The downside is that the last 10% of the project takes twice as long because it’s the shit you never wanted to do in the first place.

On the novel, it’s been this terrible Chapter 3. Chapter 1 and 2 were about introducing characters and the situation, and they went pretty fast. Chapter 3 through 20 brought everything to a climax, and they went pretty fast. Chapter 3 is about making sense of the stuff that I wrote, trying to explain how any of this stuff is possible. In other words, it’s exposition, and it’s a drag to write in a way that makes it not be a drag to read.

On Saturday, I went to a pumpkin carving party at my little brother’s house and there was a psychic who had me roll a pair of dice as an answer to a question. I silently asked about the novel and got a 4 and a 5 which interpreted as, basically, pay attention to the details. Do sweat the small stuff.

The paperwork we’ve been putting off on the baby front is the short answer questionnaire which asks questions like “What are you limitations?” (One and a half lines to fill in the answer), “Describe your saddest day?” (Two whole lines to describe it), “How do you handle stress?” (Three lines!). I know that the agency is just doing their due diligence that I won’t fill in answers which say I like to do heroin every night, crying children make me want to bite things, and I enjoy sacrificing small, cuddly animals on an altar to my dark god. But I want them to like me, and think I could be worthy some day of a Greatest Dad In The World coffee cup, so I struggle. The usual bullshit answers don’t apply. In an interview for a job, we know “Describe your weakness” is always best answered as “I’m a workaholic” or another typical make-vice-into-virtue replies. But you don’t want to give a child to someone who says he’s obsessed with perfection, or phobic about disease, or anything that screams Daddy Dearest.

In the details and the limitations, I might just have to do the unthinkable and Be Honest.

Body, Soul, and Fingertips

Since the last blog entry, we’ve completed some more paperwork and done our LiveScan, where to the tune of $20 per finger, Ian and I sent our prints in to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (wasn’t one of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission report to get the intelligence agencies working closer together, and that’s why the department of homeland security was invented? And they can’t share my fingerprints?). I had this little fantasy that my prints would be matched to some unsolved cold case file, but no one’s come knocking on my door, so I guess I turned out to be not at least a known criminal.

The big expense still to come is putting a fence around the pool. We haven’t found anyone to do it for better than $2500, so that’ll be the one we’ll probably go with. Sure does suck to drop that dough before the holidays.

I will say that one result of this whole adoption home study is that I’ve become a much healthier person. Not only have I quit smoking, but as a result of my doctor’s recommendations (I had to go in to have a physical, and I hadn’t been to a doctor for anything in years and years), I’ve been eating better and exercising, and dropped 30 lbs. So that means I’ll be one of those slim, non-smoking dads? What fun are they?!

About the novel, I’ve finally gotten to a stage on the accursed Chapter 3 where it’s moving along. The tricky part is that I set it up that it is a series of flashbacks happening during a church service in January. I came up with a little sermon for my priest to give from the Second Letter to the Corinithians, Chapter 5 which would be appropriate for the flashbacks I wanted to give, and I got into the first of the flashbacks, and then I made the mistake of talking about the chapter to my brother and his wife, people who actually go to church. They reminded me that there are certain readings from certain chapters delivered at certain times of the year in the church calendar, at least according to the Episcopal church. I really hope that January is a fine time to read from the Second Letter to the Corinthians, or I can make the church a Presbyterian church or some denomination with a more relaxed view about when to read certain books of the Bible. I wrote to their minister for advice, but evidently she has more important religious duties than helping a non-religious novelist work out his Chapter 3 because it’s been a couple weeks and I haven’t heard back.

So, as usual, I assume it’ll all be fine and plod on.

Sometimes people mistake that for optimism when it’s just laziness.

The Dry Spell

I had been doing so well. Every day, something was written on the novel. Every day, we moved a little further forward on getting certified for foster adopt. I had really be impressing myself. The last month though, it’s been a crawl.

What happened? The list of excuses is legion and sometimes legitimate. My parents came to visit. We took a long weekend trip. I caught a nasty bug. There are deadlines at work that need to be met. The end result is that I got out of the habit of working on the novel and filling out paperwork.

I have to finish Chapter 3 which is a difficult exposition-filled chapter where I need to give the reader a lot of information in an entertaining way. I have to get a fence built around my pool, attend a Water Safety class, measure all the rooms in my house, come up with a budget, get Livescan checked, ask some people for references, and sign here and here and here and here and here.

Doesn’t sound like too much, does it?

Okay.

Okay, today.

I’m off!

Book and Nanny

I am looking for a babysitter for my non-existent baby. I don’t know whether I need childcare for a boy or a girl, or twins, and whether we’re talking a toddler or a newborn. I don’t know if he or she (or they) have special needs, or requires medication. But in order to complete my home study, I need to have one or two babysitters, who have had their criminal background checks certified by Live Scan and updated tuberculosis tests and are certified in CPR and First Aid, for my mythical child. The chicken or the egg question may be still up in the air, but I can tell you that the sitter comes first.

I haven’t started any interviews, but I’ve done plenty of other things for my theoretical baby. I’ve quit smoking, like I mentioned in the earlier entry (9 weeks, 2 days, 10 hours, and 48 minutes according to Quit-o-meter on Facebook, saving me $327.25), have started exercising more and eating better, since in addition to getting a babysitter for my non-baby, I’ve had to get a physical. On Saturday, we’re also getting our second estimate for a pool fence. Wouldn’t want our fictional baby to drown.

On the subject of my baby who is fiction rather than fictional, and may or may not be drowning, the second draft is going very well. Some chapters are better than I remembered them being, and some are a little … bloodless. What’s supposed to happen in them happens, but it just reads, in technical terms, kinda blah. My plan is that after I’m finished with the second draft, I’ll put the book aside for a couple weeks, and then attack it fresh. I have to finish the last chapter and completely rewrite Chapter 3 before I can take that kind of a break.

I had hoped to have it in good enough shape that my parents could read it at the end of August when they’re visiting L.A. Will this motivate me to bust my ass and get it done? … Hard to say. My motivations are a mystery to me as much as anyone.

That will be something I’ll have to say in my interview with my no doubt bewildered nanny-to-be.

Feeling A Draft

The first draft of the novel is done, and I’m afraid to look at it. It weighs in at 90,270 words and one has to wonder, how many of them are utter shit?

I know that some of these words are definitely going to be deleted in the second draft. This is not just playing the odds, which would be fair enough, but it's also a matter of knowing how I write. Example sentence: “She threw a bright shower of red [red spring flowers] at him, and rushed back into the field without a pause.” When I wrote that, I had an image in mind, but I didn’t want to say that the character throws red geraniums at him, or red tulips at him, or red begonias at him until I had done a bit of research and found what red flowers would be growing in southern Ohio in the Spring which would have a nice, satisfying petally showery quality to them. If I were more of a gardener (I actually worked for two summers as a gardener in southern Ohio after high school graduation, but that was long ago), or I lived where my novel is set, and it was that time of year, I might’ve immediately known what to write there. Since I don’t, and it would really trip up the flow of writing the scene, my habit is to throw in a couple of brackets to communicate with my second-draft-writing future self, and move on. Otherwise, the temptation of losing myself in endless google research into the flora of vernal southern Ohio would be too great.

I know some of these brackets are really lazy. I’ve bracketed character’s last names, not sure if I’ve given them already and unwilling to do a search, and addresses, and even – if memory serves me right – one part where I just knew I had to describe something in a flowery, poetic way and I didn’t have time that night.

What I am less looking forward to is marrying some pretty different tones and styles, and deciding what’s best for the novel as a whole. I’ve talked to some writer friends of mine who have taken years to write their books, and I have to imagine my problem is not all that bad since I’ve only had my couple dozen different moods, and levels of energy, and alcohol consumption, and distraction of 2008 to try to reconcile into one reasonably coherent whole.

But I’m excited. I’m thrilled actually, which is about ten times over excited. I realize I need to say that, since I like to sound ambivalent. Like my previous post about the adoption process. My folks didn’t want to reply right away with a “Hoy! That’s great!” or “Jeez! That’s terrible!” because they couldn’t tell what I was thinking about it.

And I am thrilled about that too. I mean, I'm buying a new car, since my current two-seater bachelor roadster won't do. I'm getting a fence built around the pool. I'm over the moon, actually, which is ten times over thrilled.

I guess that’s something really basic that writers and dads need to be able to do: communicate.

Another Chapter One

I’m still not smoking. Four weeks, three days, and some hours according to the little thing I put in Facebook to track it. And I hit 80,000 words tonight, though I’m not quite finished with the first draft of the novel.

I have started on another project which has been interesting. I’m looking into becoming a father.

On Thursday, my partner Ian and I went to the Southern California Foster Family & Adoption Agency, at a complex in east Los Angeles called St. Anne’s, which is a hundred year old maternity home for teenaged girls. Since we missed the orientation last Thursday, we met with Robyn, one of the directors of the program before hand. Basically what they do is concurrent foster/adopt to solve the old chicken-or-the-egg dilemma where California only likes to place children in foster homes which want to adopt, and it’s next to impossible to adopt (unless you go private) unless you’ve already got a foster kid. So at the end of the eight week course, we’re going to be certified as both foster and adoptive parents to get the system running.

The meeting consisted of us, two other same-sex male couples, one other same-sex female couple, five opposite-sex couples, two single men, and one single woman. One of the first things that was discussed was how a child gets put into foster care to begin with, and it’s always an accusation of some kind of abuse, from abandonment to sexual abuse to physical abuse. As a result, very few of the kids are without some kind of issues, and the agency has begun offering therapy, since according to Robyn, “All the kids need it.”

Not surprisingly, older kids are the hardest ones to place. Over 50% of the kids are Hispanic or “mixed” Hispanic (as George said on Seinfeld, “I don’t think that’s the word we’re supposed to use.”), about 20% are black or “mixed,” and the rest are white, Asian, American Indian, or some other group. Pretty evenly divided boys and girls.

We talked through the flowchart of what follows what, and a couple things struck me as being particularly peculiar about foster/adopt, beginning with the first phone call saying a baby is available. We basically have 24 hours or less to say yes or no. So, that’s pretty alarming to imagine 24 hours before a baby comes into the house, whether you have a crib or not, whether you’re in the middle of crunch time at work, or are about to leave on a trip, whether you’ve done any research into day care or nannies … You just have to say yes and accept the lightning strike, I guess.

Then there’s the whole legal aspect of it. The schizophrenic part of foster/adopt is that the baby is put with you because you want to adopt it, but the state’s interest is in trying to get the birth parents to step up and show they can handle it. So there’s court hearing after court hearing, and visit after visit from social workers as well as court-sanctioned visits from the birth mother and/or her family. So you bring into your house these people who basically abused the baby you’re taking care of, and you’re being all chummy with them to facilitate them taking the baby away from you. It’s vitally important we treat them with respect, for the good of the kid. It sounds tough.

Now, it sounds like a fair amount of negatives, but Robyn said that as awkward as the system is, it’s so much better than the old one, definitely for the kids and also for us. It goes from foster-to-adopt being a many year process to being potentially less than a year. Oh, and we have a couple fifty page applications to fill out, asking such loaded questions as whether our childhood was happy and how we would raise a child of a different race “respecting and teaching them about their culture.”

Overall, it’s such a strange dramatic mixture between the inspirational and the depressing. We decided it’s a good thing that our home life is utterly, utterly devoid of high drama.

The novel, however, is just reaching the moment of high drama, which is why I have to sign off.

More to come …

Smoke and Poetry

I took almost a week off writing to quit smoking.

Writers just tend to smoke. It’s the image we have of writers from old black and white photos and movies, of the man pounding feverishly on the keyboard, an overful ashtray at his side, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Then he pauses, inhales, exhales out a plume of smoke together with inspiration – “That’s the word I was looking for: lachrymose!” he mutters and returns to the banging of the keys.

Maybe it’s just that everyone used to smoke, and we tend to revere the old novelists and poets of the 20th century most that writing and smoking seem to go together. Look at any old picture of any of the lions of literature, and there’s bound to be smoke in it. A cigarette as an accessory may point to the writer’s toughness or his insouciance, his manic intensity or his savoir faire. Visually, of course, it’s hard to beat: a smoke-filled garret looks a lot better than it smells.

I was already a prolific writer but I picked up the habit of smoking just before college, twenty years ago. I was so baby-faced and soft that if I didn’t smoke, the next best thing to do was get a tattoo. And in the late 80s, in the deep south, everyone seemed to smoke. The few people who didn’t seemed almost apologetic about it.

Through my 20s and halfway through my 30s, I couldn’t smoke at work, but that was about the only place I didn’t, and it gave me good reason to take plenty of breaks to puff away and think about video game design (“That’s the creature I was looking for: a goblin with an uzi!”) and screenwriting (“That’s the direction I was looking for: CUT TO!”). At home, in the car, in restaurants, in bars, I smoked and smoked and smoked. I met people smoking. We were friendly, bumming smokes with each other, lighting one another (a very intimate gesture when done right), falling into easy conversation while holding our cigarettes just so in a way which Freud would certainly recognize.

Bit by bit, I started smoking less and less inside. Probably in part because more and more of my friends didn’t smoke and I didn’t want to stink up the place. I wouldn’t smoke in my own home office, but go out on the balcony and then when I got a house, out on the back patio. There was still a ritual, but smoking was separating itself from writing.

I’m not an idiot though. Or not entirely an idiot. I decided that I had to quit before I turned forty (full disclosure: I had also decided that I had to quit before I turned thirty, and then thirty-five), so I went to the Meridian Center for Hypnosis in Westwood last Wednesday at 9:30 in the morning and let them do their thing to me. Honestly, I didn’t think it took. A few hours later, the cravings were intense. The next day too, and the next. What was missing for me though is the existential angst that hit me on my previous attempts to quit smoking, the certain knowledge that this wouldn’t work, that it was only a matter of time before I started back again.

So tomorrow will be one week since I quit, and last night I wrote five hundred words on the novel. And they were five hundred pretty damn good words.

Writing What You Know

It is inarguably the number one cliché of creative writing classes “Write what you know.”

In my professional career as a video game designer, I’ve written about three hundred sword and sorcery fantasy stories, dialogue from postapocalyptic soldiers, storylines from the perspective of giant robots that turn into cars, and conversations between 18th century pirates. In my semi-professional career as a screenwriter, I’ve written a dozen scripts where people are dealing with ghosts, serial killers, monsters, and saving the world with super powers. In my burgeoning career as a novelist, I, a 39-year-old man living in Los Angeles am, naturally enough, writing the story of a 82-year-old woman living in the fictional town of Athelstan, Ohio.

Why can’t I just write about me?

Thankfully my life isn’t dramatic enough to make a good story. To be entertaining you have to have conflict on every page of a novel, screenplay, or video game script. At best, my life would be a sitcom of the old-fashioned variety, with minor hassles that need to be dealt with and then everything is tied up neatly in 23 minutes including subplots and some pointless but funny scenes thrown in.

And then there’s the simple fact that as working video game designer, I gotta write what I’m told to write. I was never filled with a burning desire to expand upon the adventures of He-Man, a footnote of 1980s Saturday morning cartoons notable for his blond pageboy haircut and musclebound physique, too gay to be gay, and his battles against Skeletor, but that’s where my paycheck was coming from, and that’s what I did. And a reviewer was kind enough to call my effort on that “competent,” which is as good as I could hope for.

Unless you’re Emily Dickinson, and probably even then, as a writer you write to be read. You want the characters to fascinate, the theme to enthrall, the pages to fly (except when the reader pauses to reread the part where you describe an asphalt road with such lyricism it brings tears to the eyes), and copies of the book to be in every man jack’s hands.

So can the story of an old woman in made-up town have that sort of effect?

I hope so, but it’s been a busy couple of days, and I’ve only put another 5,000 words into the novel, and I’ve taken about 2,000 words out. The slow slog towards first draft is slow and, needless to say, sloggy.

But I know this old biddy like she was me.

Writing and the Writer

A friend of mine, Jai Clare , wrote about being a writer and whether one is still a writer when the creative juices are dry and one doesn’t feel “that pressing need.”

I’m not a disciplined person. If I didn’t enjoy writing, I wouldn’t do it – or at least I wouldn’t do it with any dedication, a couple hours a day.

I think there’s a writer’s personality type, which isn’t all that common. You tend to be an introvert who, paradoxically or not, likes people. Well, I like people anyhow. A writer can be more misanthropic than I am, but he has to at least be interested in people. On the other hand, you have to enjoy time on your own without people, and feel energized by it and not lonely.

You have to have some encouragement. I hear stories about writers who come out of families who didn’t read or who didn’t appreciate their talents, but at some point, someone had to say that something they wrote had merit. Rejection is part of the job, but you have to believe that what you’re doing is worthwhile to someone other than yourself, and have some basis for believing that.

The novel I’m working on now is technically my second. My first one I wrote in seventh grade. It was a murder mystery titled “A Little Madness In The Spring,” about competitive serial killers, father and son, killing off people at a college reunion in order of the squares on a Monopoly board. The detective was named Alabaster Cox.

Since then, I’ve been working as a writer and designer in the video game industry, and with my brother, I’ve written some screenplays which have been sold or optioned if not actually been made into movies or TV shows yet. Video games, TV, and film are obviously the most financially rewarding media, but there are certain stories which seem best suited to ink on paper. There is also a part of novel-writing which appeals to the autocrat in me. Obviously, when I finish my first draft, I’ll have friends and family read it and take their opinions into consideration, and down the line, there will be agents and editors, but ultimately I am the author. If it’s bad or good, it’s because of me, with no excuses, like a screenwriter might have when an actress butchers his lines, or a video game writer whose cutscenes get cut because the animators don’t have time on their schedule to do them. If it doesn’t sell well, of course, then I might have excuses. We’ll see.

I don’t expect to get rich writing novels, though that’s an agreeable possibility.

Right now, I’m 70,000 words into the first draft of my novel, and I’ve been told that it has to be 80,000 words for anyone to look at it … though there are obvious exception, like Nicholas Sparks’s “The Notebook,” which was 50,000 words. Still I have two and a half chapter to go, so I’m not concerned about length.

Insert obvious male joke here.

The Derby and Eight Belles

Hello. I don’t know what the tradition way is to start these blogs, but if it’s anything like starting a story, I like to jump right in.

The purpose of this is to talk specifically about a novel I’m writing, but I’m going to back my way into that. One of the chapters in it has the main character going to a fictional horse race in Kentucky, and I’ve just gotten back from two real horse races in Kentucky, the Oaks and the Derby, so I’ll start with that and work my way backwards into talking about the book.

Last week, I left on Monday night, flying from Los Angeles to Louisville. I checked into a very Victorian bed and breakfast near the university called the Inn At The Park. My family and I were the only people staying there until the weekend where the rates went up nearly 10 fold, as they do throughout Louisville in anticipation of the Derby.

Tuesday through Thursday, my cousin Paul took us on tours of the state, from the Derby Museum where we boned up on trivia to the Kentucky Horse Park where we met several champion horses and boned up on more trivia, to Berea, a little college town off in the mountains where we looked at folk crafts. Mostly though we drove through Kentucky, past all the great, vast, green, hilly lawns of one horse “farm” after another, separated by ribbons of white and black fences. We also went to a stud farm to see Smarty Jones, the Derby winner of 2004, the Preakness the same year, and second in the Belmont Stakes, so almost a Triple Crown Winner.

Friday was the Oaks, and it looked like rain. My mother managed to talk her way into getting a forbidden umbrella into the race track after cajoling the security guard into looking the other way. As a preview of the Derby itself, the crowd was pretty well-dressed in their seersuckers and big silly hats in the boxes, though more mixed at the betting windows. I was keen on trying on some exotic bets I had learned to make – partial wheels on exacta boxes and the like, but I had most success with the conservative bets of $2 Shows on the favorites. They also have a Daily Double where you can pick the winners of two separate races on that day, and in a special rule for that weekend, you can bet on a race on the Oaks for Friday and the Derby on Saturday as part of the same Daily Double. I went ahead and put $2 on the favorites, Proud Spell for the Oaks raced by Gabriel Saez and Big Brown for the Derby raced by Kent Desormeaux. I figured the odds against chosing the winners of two races were against me enough that I might as well pick the favorites in the big races.

I would have bet on Eight Belles, who was still on the program as the heavily favored choice at the Oaks. There was a lot of speculation on that Friday over whether she would race at the Derby or the Oaks, and she was on the program for both. She ended up scratching in favor of racing at the Derby, so I went with Proud Spell.

Before the actual Oaks race, the storm finally broke and after a half an hour of hoping it would let up, we left. Luckily we had our one umbrella and when we worked our way under cover to the gates, we found the abandoned umbrellas of people who had their confiscated ... Well, let’s just say we got back to the car several blocks away and were relatively dry.

We saw Proud Spell win the race back at the hotel.

The next morning, we got up early to go to the governor’s breakfast in Frankfort. It was spitting rain still as we had our country ham and grits, shook Steve Beshear’s hand, and toured his house. It was still spitting rain when we got to Churchill Downs in time for the second race, but soon it cleared, and the sky was filled with white puffy clouds and then clear blue.

My brother, who has a friend who knows a lot about horse racing, placed a number of exotic bets, but I stuck with the conservative $2 Shows, not aiming to make much money but just to have a horse to root for – though, of course, winning a bit is always good. I placed one silly bet: a $1 “Hi-5” where you pick all the horses in a race in order. The odds of winning are as infinitestimal as winning the lottery, but the prize was a $100K Mercedes and I thought why not. I don’t remember what all my picks were but since I already had Big Brown for my Daily Double, I bet on Pyro as the winner for that one. I didn’t bet on Eight Belles at all. There were so many other favorites to fill out a Top 5, and I picked Adriano, Colonel John, and Gayego to go alongside Pyro and Big Brown on my ticket. Obviously, I wasn’t even close at the end. One dollar down the drain, a ninth of the cost of a mint julep.

It was a great race. The crowd roared when Eight Belles surged ahead, leading for most of the race, and roared again when Big Brown – who though he was one of the favorites was expected to have trouble being in the 20th position on the edge of the race – tore ahead. There was a blip on the giant video screen at the end, and it wasn’t clear whether Horse 20, Big Brown, or Horse 5, Eight Belles, was the winner. We cheered when it was clear Big Brown had won, and I had my Daily Double.

There were two more races to go, but we had to leave after the Derby to go to my Great Uncle Harold’s retirement center for dinner, so we went in to cash our tickets. My cousin Paul stayed behind to see the governor give the award to Big Brown. He thought it was strange that the ceremony took so long to get started, and in retrospect, he thought he saw some “activity” out on the track, but it was far away and unclear what it was.

In line getting cash for my winnings, I talked to some other fans, who were enthusiastic because they had placed bets for Shows and Places on Eight Belles, and her odds were so unfavored, they were going to collect big. No one knew that they were collecting money on a horse who was already dead.

When we arrived at my Uncle Harold, a friend of his who was joining us at the dinner told us about Eight Belles breaking both of her ankles and being euthanized on the track. We went in, sure that the story couldn’t be true, and we went to the television room where an old man was sitting watching the next race. We asked him if he had heard something about Eight Belles being injured.

“She broke her legs, they shot her,” he said with a strange smile.

It was apparently good TV. I’m glad I missed it.

Post 1

Testing