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.