Category: friday pint

Tribal

I found a link to this by chance, and it reminded me of Solitaire.

The article doesn’t cover all that much ground, but the description of “urban tribes” as “loose networks of close friends, or tribes, [that] sustain each other emotionally and professionally for the years in between college and marriage” resonates with the connections Jackal has on Ko.

Although the people to whom the label is attributed tend to respond with “Fuck you, I’m not in a tribe.”

“Web” sounds so much better.

Ide Cyan

I’ve read elsewhere about this book, and find the notion interesting and familiar. When I was in high school and college, and imagined an adult life in the wider world, I saw myself in what might now be called an urban tribe. I thought of them as “my people” –” friends, lovers, older or younger, people who would help me move a hundred boxes on a Sunday, watch bad movies, make interesting food, understand how plumbing worked. People who would find me equally valuable. In some ways, Jackal’s web does this, but it’s heavily influenced by the corporate culture of Ko, where the emphasis is on the “greater goal” of business. The web is a community, but it’s an artificial construct based on age, and it’s in service to the good of Ko. There are people in America who think this latter quality is a good idea for us, too, so maybe it isn’t science fiction after all.

If you’re interested, there’s a “virtual tour” planned for this book, the brainchild of Kevin Smokler. I love this idea (here’s an article about it), and will be interested to see how it plays out. But I don’t love that he says “no genre fiction” in the guidelines (edited in 2008 to add: that link is no longer in service, so you’ll have to take my word for it). I infer he means “no crap fiction” and that he assumes “genre” and “crap” are synonymous terms. It’s too bad, and too easy. See my previous post for more ranting on this subject (grin).

Edited in 2008 to add: Kevin read this post and contacted me, and we had a good email chat about good fiction. A couple of years later, he invited me and Nicola to write this essay for his anthology Bookmark Now. Thanks again, Kevin!

What’s literature?

Been a while, but I’m back for a glass of something and some good conversation…

What’s literature? Tough one. For many, I think they can’t get past the boundary that a book has to have been taught in English class — high school or college — in order to be considered literature. Presumably, something has to be read to be considered literature, or maybe it had to have been read at one time. I’m thinking of a quote from the movie “Bullets Over Broadway”, where the pretentious playwright mentor of the hero proudly intones that all of his plays are specifically written to go unproduced. I’m also reminded of my freshman year of college, where my Intro to Literary Method teacher spent a class period talking about the concept of “dramatic literature”, or plays written to be read rather than performed. Then later the same day, my American Musical Theater prof talked about how the concept of “dramatic literature” is a crock — plays have to be performed to be fully realized.

So what does this have to do with literature? I think my point is that writing, in order to be relevant to anyone other than the writer, has to be read. But to be literary, it has to relate to the world. Now, a lot of writing takes place in the world without actually relating to it. Hell, some of Stephen King’s writing is like that. And I’m not talking about just dropping common references — a lot of writing does that as a short cut to engage readers. There’s a feeling to literature that I’m having trouble articulating (obviously). I think a lot of writing is intended to (and succeeds in) activating emotional reactions from its audience, but in a very superficial way, like movies made from video games instead of scripts, or quickie books written based on TV characters. In order to be literary, I think writing (or art in general) has to access emotions in a genuine way. I almost wrote a “lasting” way, but it doesn’t have to last to make an impression.

I guess I think Stephen King’s best work is literary, but no writer is always literary. I think a lot of people think that authors are either always literary or always not. But was Charles Dickens really writing at the top of his game all the time? Was John Steinbeck? Was Jane Austen? The answer should be obvious.

Well, that’s my two cents on literature. Here’s another related question, though, which is implied in some of my comments above: does a work have to be written to be literature? Can a film or a play qualify as literature?

Later, y’all.

Adam Diamond

I’m with your American Musical Theatre professor on this one. Strictures of form are essential. Goethe said, “In the limitations the master shows his mastery.” I do think that “literature” is a specific term that refers to prose or poetry, so I don’t think plays or films are literature, but the best ones embody the same qualities as the best books –” a good story, well told, about characters who are true even if they aren’t real.

Art is not theory, it’s connection. It’s not about thinking, it’s about doing. It’s an interaction between people, across a spectrum of immediacy that ranges from live on stage to words or images whose creators are no more than mulch and memory. When it comes to fiction, I’m not interested in realigning the post-modern literary paradigm through radical re-interpretation of established form. Blech. I want a good story, well told, with some sort of resonance and meaning that I can connect with. I want it to be particular, the way our tastes and experiences and notions of ourselves are particular. That’s part of my definition of good writing. But do we really need three hundred pages of ten-dollar words and tortured metaphors to get there? I don’t think so.

I recently judged a writing competition with two other writers. One referred to himself as a noir mystery writer, the other as a literary writer. We had an interesting disagreement about what should constitute a winning entry, and eventually found ourselves on opposite sides of the border. The entry that these writers preferred was controlled and structured and obeyed all the rules of reasonable prose, and it was boring. Nothing happened. All telling, no showing. An adjective or two for every noun, an adverb for every verb. A theme constructed in crystalline sentences and unconvincing dialogue. I would rather pound my head against a brick wall than read a whole book of that stuff. But they liked it because it was “good writing.”

We disagreed not so much about what good prose is, but what it does. I agree with you, Adam, at heart it’s about emotional truth (which is how I’m paraphrasing your comments, let me know if that’s not right). I’m not sure it’s possible to successfully express precise emotional truth in bad prose, but I am sure that it’s possible to write beautiful prose without heart, without a human center.

So much of what is pointed out as “literary” prose seems to me to be almost a purely intellectual exercise in vocabulary and structure and style. All these things are necessary, but they are tools, not substance. A novel shouldn’t be “about” voice or theme. Yeesh. It should be language in service of story. It should create people the reader can connect with in some way, and things should happen to these people that matter to them, and to us.

And of course there are many literary novels that do exactly this. I think my biggest grump comes with the idea that genre, by definition, cannot be literary in this way. Genre can be crap sure, and it can also be literature –” but try getting the literary establishment to think so. It was interesting at the judging meeting. Everyone was comparing writing experience, seeing who could pee highest up the wall. The New York Times Notable Book thing is a clear contender in this regard, and the LW’s eyebrows went up a notch when I mentioned it. Then he looked at the book. “Oh,” he said. “Science fiction.”

Emotional truth

Been a while, but I’m back for a glass of something and some good conversation…

What’s literature? Tough one. For many, I think they can’t get past the boundary that a book has to have been taught in English class — high school or college — in order to be considered literature. Presumably, something has to be read to be considered literature, or maybe it had to have been read at one time. I’m thinking of a quote from the movie “Bullets Over Broadway”, where the pretentious playwright mentor of the hero proudly intones that all of his plays are specifically written to go unproduced. I’m also reminded of my freshman year of college, where my Intro to Literary Method teacher spent a class period talking about the concept of “dramatic literature”, or plays written to be read rather than performed. Then later the same day, my American Musical Theater prof talked about how the concept of “dramatic literature” is a crock — plays have to be performed to be fully realized.

So what does this have to do with literature? I think my point is that writing, in order to be relevant to anyone other than the writer, has to be read. But to be literary, it has to relate to the world. Now, a lot of writing takes place in the world without actually relating to it. Hell, some of Stephen King’s writing is like that. And I’m not talking about just dropping common references — a lot of writing does that as a short cut to engage readers. There’s a feeling to literature that I’m having trouble articulating (obviously). I think a lot of writing is intended to (and succeeds in) activating emotional reactions from its audience, but in a very superficial way, like movies made from video games instead of scripts, or quickie books written based on TV characters. In order to be literary, I think writing (or art in general) has to access emotions in a genuine way. I almost wrote a “lasting” way, but it doesn’t have to last to make an impression.

I guess I think Stephen King’s best work is literary, but no writer is always literary. I think a lot of people think that authors are either always literary or always not. But was Charles Dickens really writing at the top of his game all the time? Was John Steinbeck? Was Jane Austen? The answer should be obvious.

Well, that’s my two cents on literature. Here’s another related question, though, which is implied in some of my comments above: does a work have to be written to be literature? Can a film or a play qualify as literature?

Later, y’all.

Adam Diamond

I’m with your American Musical Theatre professor on this one. Strictures of form are essential. Goethe said, “In the limitations the master shows his mastery.” I do think that “literature” is a specific term that refers to prose or poetry, so I don’t think plays or films are literature, but the best ones embody the same qualities as the best books –” a good story, well told, about characters who are true even if they aren’t real.

Art is not theory, it’s connection. It’s not about thinking, it’s about doing. It’s an interaction between people, across a spectrum of immediacy that ranges from live on stage to words or images whose creators are no more than mulch and memory. When it comes to fiction, I’m not interested in realigning the post-modern literary paradigm through radical re-interpretation of established form. Bleh. I want a good story, well told, with some sort of resonance and meaning that I can connect with. I want it to be particular, the way our tastes and experiences and notions of ourselves are particular. That’s part of my definition of good writing. But do we really need three hundred pages of ten-dollar words and tortured metaphors to get there? I don’t think so.

I recently judged a writing competition with two other writers. One referred to himself as a noir mystery writer, the other as a literary writer. We had an interesting disagreement about what should constitute a winning entry, and eventually found ourselves on opposite sides of the border. The entry that these writers preferred was controlled and structured and obeyed all the rules of reasonable prose, and it was boring. Nothing happened. All telling, no showing. An adjective or two for every noun, an adverb for every verb. A theme constructed in crystalline sentences and unconvincing dialogue. I would rather pound my head against a brick wall than read a whole book of that stuff. But they liked it because it was “good writing.”

We disagreed not so much about what good prose is, but what it does. I agree with you, Adam, at heart it’s about emotional truth (which is how I’m paraphrasing your comments, let me know if that’s not right). I’m not sure it’s possible to successfully express precise emotional truth in bad prose, but I am sure that it’s possible to write beautiful prose without heart, without a human center.

So much of what is pointed out as “literary” prose seems to me to be almost a purely intellectual exercise in vocabulary and structure and style. All these things are necessary, but they are tools, not substance. A novel shouldn’t be “about” voice or theme. Yeesh. It should be language in service of story. It should create people the reader can connect with in some way, and things should happen to these people that matter to them, and to us.

And of course there are many literary novels that do exactly this. I think my biggest grump comes with the idea that genre, by definition, cannot be literary in this way. Genre can be crap sure, and it can also be literature –” but try getting the literary establishment to think so. It was interesting at the judging meeting. Everyone was comparing writing experience, seeing who could pee highest up the wall. The New York Times Notable Book thing is a clear contender in this regard, and the LW’s eyebrows went up a notch when I mentioned it. Then he looked at the book. “Oh,” he said. “Science fiction.”

Buncha stuff about writing

So here’s what happens a year after the publication of a book….

There are no more print media reviews (although I give thanks on a daily basis for the internet, and bloggers, bless you all).

Most of the awards have been given out.

The trade paperback publication is still months away.

The author is up to her ears in two or three new projects, all of which are exhibiting a strange “running in place” energy. Lots of work and creativity going in, very little to show for it. I’m sure that some law of writing physics is attempting to reveal itself to me. We could call it the rising blister theory, but that would be inelegant. Let’s call it critical mass of narrative. Then let’s buy it a beer and try to persuade it to relax a little….

All this by way of explaining the lack of updates in the last 2½ months. It’s been very easy and enjoyable to disappear into the new book and the details of the everyday. I think it’s partly an effect of summer. But now that fall is rolling in, I’m preparing to be more engaged with the wider world. I love autumn — it smells and looks and feels right, a little wild, a little sad, with unexpected moments that feel like some internal space has just opened wide.

In that spirit, I have some things to share.

I’ve been noodling with a “links” page on this site, but I find that deciding what to include on such a page is a bit like choosing a tattoo. So instead, every so often I will stop in to the virtual pub and post things that been meaningful or interesting to me. Here are a few:

Open Letters. This site is no longer active, but is available in a complete archive state. There’s some great storytelling here. People are amazing. I miss the hell out of Open Letters.

@U2. The best U2 website on the planet, in my opinion.

Arizona River Runners. I took this trip nearly 20 years ago (edited in 2008 to add: and had hoped to go this year) and my heart has been full of canyon since. Along the trip, the guide stopped the boat by a wall that went up and up. “Touch it,” he said, and when we did he told us the rock was nearly 2 billion years old. The Grand Canyon is the closest thing I know to a cathedral.

An amazing poem by Wendell Berry. An acting teacher gave me this when I was at college a thousand years ago. Along with getting genuinely excited over a monologue I did one day, it’s the nicest thing she did for me. She also taught an improvisation class one summer that gave me one of the cruel moments of my life, and would be another Open Letter, if…. This poem is reprinted by permission of the publisher.

A website chock full of computer wallpaper. Amazing photos and graphic images of all descriptions. My mom, the Master of Web, turned me on to this site.

DATA. If you have email and a phone, you can help persuade the US government to keep its promise to help African nations work against poverty and AIDS. Make a difference in the world.

MoveOn. You can have more than just a vote, you can have a voice. This is the best organized, most effective grassroots organization I have ever seen. (Edited in 2008 to add: And I unjoined a couple of years ago because they lost focus on the electoral process and started trying to stick a hand in every issue under the sun, and it all started feeling a little too much like lockstep politics to me…)

From time to time, I will also pass along articles about publishing. It’s a wacky business; the more I learn, the more I shake my head. I think there are some changes coming, although I’m not sure what they are. It seems to me to be more and more difficult for a writer to a) break in to the business, and b) maintain a career. Having accomplished (a), I find myself concerned about (b). Reading articles like the ones below helps me understand how fortunate my experience with Solitaire has been in many ways (especially given the poor reviews in the trade — Publishers Weekly and Kirkus hated the book), and also how much more fortunate I will need to be with future books.

“It takes more than talent to become a best-selling novelist. Timing, marketing, and luck are also key…” (from the Boston Globe)

“Of the 60,000-some books that land in his office yearly, Steve Wasserman, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, has room to cover only about 1,500…” (from Poets & Writers Magazine)

“Look up a book on Amazon.com, and the first media review you see isn’t from a well-known book review outlet…” from Slate.

And other news: Stephen King is getting a National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. Big smile from this side of the room. I’m delighted for him, and also delighted that the National Book Award had the guts to acknowledge that storytelling and characters who talk like real people, as opposed to speaking in ongoing tangles of metaphor and endless irony, have a huge place in the general reading experience. (Edited in 2008 to add: Here’s more about that.)

I am pretty tired of what passes for literary fiction in some circles these days. I prefer good writing to bad, but beautiful prose is not an end in itself. At least, I don’t think it should be. Nicola says that if you can see how much work the writer has done, then the writer hasn’t done enough work.

I’ve been following the commentary on the New York Times website regarding the award for Stephen King. It started out with (predictably) a lot of people being very fussed. Then there was a round of supportive posts from people who decided to come out of the closet as those who like a good read, and the literary canon be damned. For a while, the discussion flows along the lines of Oh no! versus You go, Stephen! Then it moves into consideration of what makes a work literary, which to me is a much more interesting and slippery question. I’d be interested to hear what people think — what’s “literature,” anyway? Any takers?

Cheers to you all.

Mementos

Hi Kelley,

I am planning a 15th class reunion and we are wondering what are some of the mementos we can give our fellow classmates?

karla and bessie

Hmm. It seems to me that mementos fall into two basic camps: the commercially easy but relatively impersonal, and the lots-of-work-for-you but more personal. I suppose it depends on how much you like your class and whether you really want to (or have the time to) do a bunch of work just to give them a gift.

I’ve been to reunions where the main mementos were T-shirts and/or baseball caps. Neither of these excited me particularly, but they certainly aren’t bad in any way. Deciding what design to put on them can be fun, and they are easy to get produced. There are also things like mugs, calendars, etc. that can be produced with photos or text. On the work-your-ass-off side of the scale are the customized items –” music, photo albums or montages, reunion books. The CDs I made took me at least 150 hours of planning, programming, duplication, and graphic design time, and I would assume that other customized items would require a similar commitment.

I can imagine lots of things that might be fun to do, but it’s not clear to me how feasible they are. Given time, you could project-manage a huge collaborative memento –” everyone (who wants to) contributing a message to the class, or a piece of art, or a photo they took, that embodies their experience at school.

My take is that mementos, whether mass-produced or personally crafted, should be A) something that people can actually interact with (read, drink from, laugh and wonder over, or use in their everday world), and B) something that will reconnect them with their school experience. Giving them an object with the school’s name tastefully silkscreened on it does not, in my opinion, accomplish this: they already know the name of the school, after all. But something with a picture, or a text memory, or a special class motto, might do the trick. Mileage varies, as always.

You will have to pay for this stuff up front and collect the cost as part of what you charge each person to attend the reunion, unless you are fortunate enough to have a school budget already available for such things. So be warned: stuff is expensive (grin). If you want to make sure everyone in your class gets a memento, and not just those at the reunion, then the people who come to the reunion pretty much end up covering the cost of the mementos (and shipping) for those who don’t. Charge accordingly.

You haven’t said if this is a high school or college reunion, or anything about your class. I’d be interested in hearing more: where did you go to school, and what was it like? Are you happy about being in charge of this event? (I can imagine it being equal parts fun and nightmare, myself.) What are you hoping for?

Good luck with it. I hope you have a blast.

Sharing spaceships

Wow. That was really wrong. She WAS a pig that day. I just lost a tooth yesterday afternoon. It had to be pulled out. It’s not a good tooth to lose because it’s a first molar (provides the vertical stop). My dentist is a cool guy though. He’s a bit on the eccentric side, but he’s great at what he does. He gives me all the Novocain I need and never tells me, “…it’s pressure, not pain”. I probably would have fainted if a teacher did that to me.

I should have said that the spaceship set is an interior one. My friend’s parents were kind enough to let us have their basement (3/4 of it). We’ve got an engine room, a transporter, a command center, turbo elevators and a forward viewer…complete with a starfield. It looks like the inside of a spaceship. On film, it looks amazing. So, we are definitely proud of our set. For EXT. SPACE scenes, we use a model. Alx made it out of a digital alarm clock and other household items. All painted up, you’d never know. We made a lot of our own props.

Unfortunately, we’ve had a few setbacks. I can’t play Agent Tallent because the girl who was supposed to play Nate, pulled several “no shows”. Since Tallent doesn’t appear until later, I have to play Nate. So, I have to exercise. I despise exercising. And the thing is, I’m in pretty good shape…just not “Nate shape”. Then I have to Tallent search (ha! couldn’t help it). There’s quite a bit of stupid shit popping up. I won’t get into it. I will say that we are not freaking out about stuff like we used to, so that’s good. And, for something that is low (super-low) budget, Wayfarer 1 is looking great. We are very excited and extremely pleased.

I will definitely let you know when the website is up and running (shooting for Nov). Even better, I could send you a cd. Could I do that??? Perhaps through some c/o address or other? In fact, if anyone here would like a FREE cd, just email me with the information and I’ll send it out. Uh… I’d be a little sketched about giving my address to a stranger, so I’ll understand if no one wants a disc. But, there are always p.o. boxes and c/o’s and fake names, etc., etc. So really, feel free. Keep in mind though, that it will be several months before any of this happens.

Arrivederla!

Lindsey

That’s nice of you! I will definitely take a CD when they’re available (I will send you contact information privately). I hope some other people will take you up on it; it’s good to Share Art.

I think it’s fantastic you built a spaceship in the basement. I regard it the way I regard being an astronaut or a spy or a sixth dan black belt in aikido –” something cool for which I have neither the talent nor the predisposition. A real wow, people are amazing moment. You go.

I am not a plant

There’s a discussion on Nicola’s website (scroll down to the last question) about the role of music in her work. I’m curious about how you use music in your writing? Thanks.

Anonymous

I’ve been enjoying that conversation. Music has always been essential to me, but it took that question and Nicola’s response to make me think in more detail about how I feel about music and how I use it in my work.

I’m a verbally-centered person. Language is my primary tool to ground myself, to express myself, to connect with others. That’s part of the writing deal, of course, but it can be limiting. Some things are not so easily expressed in words. Sometimes a person just has to dance, or cry, or throw their arms out and try to hug the world. Music is my conduit to this part of myself.

There are things I’ve learned about myself only through particular pieces of music that have taken hold of me throughout my life. Music is one of the few things in the world that I respond to by wanting to move, to feel, to think, all at the same time, instead of giving preference to thinking as I often do. And it has meaning for me beyond just the words and the beat. Some music has become a part of my self-identity in a way that’s hard to articulate –” not just I like this or I get this but I am this: this particular intersection of rhythm and voice and word and sound is about me, for me, of me.

My work so far tends either to use music overtly in this way, or to pretty much ignore it as an emotional force and just treat it as another feature of the environment. Strings is an example of the former, as is my most recent (unpublished) story in which a woman imagines herself a rock star. Those stories are, in one particular way, the most revealing and personal pieces of fiction I have written. In Solitaire, music is background.

It’s hard for me to imagine using music in my work the way Nicola does in hers. We have a fair amount of overlap in our musical tastes, but we experience even the music in very different ways. What a surprise (ironic smile): Nicola and I are different. Different people, different writers. Segue to one of my hot buttons: I get grumpy sometimes at assumptions that my work must automatically always be informed by hers, as if she were the sun and all the rest of us are plants or something. Someone commented online a while ago that since Nicola and I are partners, I had clearly modeled Solitaire on the themes of Slow River. I find this more annoying than I can possibly express.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not slamming your question –” in fact, I appreciate the careful setting of context (“this discussion on Nicola’s website made me wonder…”) without the actual request to “please compare and contrast yourself to Nicola.” And of course I do compare and contrast myself to her, as she does to me. Maybe I should give her approach to music-in-fiction a whirl just to see how it goes. It’s good to stretch. But I’m not sure that I could assign specific pieces of music to a moment in the story without wanting to go all the way with it and turn it into the sort of experience for the character that it is for me. And that’s not always right for the work.

As I write this, I am listening to what I think of as the early Aerosmith “trilogy”: Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic, and Rocks. Steven Tyler is wailing about being back in the saddle again. The bass line kicks ass. I am dancing in my chair. Time to go do some work.

Dreaming big

Congratulations on an awesome book! I hope you succeed beyond your wildest dreams and have a life of writing, beer, and Nicola.

Cara

I must admit that succeeding beyond my wildest dreams is a stretch goal, because I dream big. I’m thinking, well, okay, what’s my wildest dream of success, and I can’t even post it here, it’s just too over the top.

I find that I am not embarrassed to have these dreams, which are a very powerful force in my personality and my life. But I am sometimes embarrassed to share them with other people. The endless question: what to reveal, what to keep private. It’s hard to have precious things misunderstood or dismissed. Yet I also believe that dreams are harder to achieve if they are too closely guarded, never made external in any way. It seems to me they need to be expressed somehow, even if it’s just out loud to myself in a field miles from nowhere in the middle of the night. It’s mighty powerful to say, “I want this.” It sets up echoes that come back at the damndest times.

So thank you for your kind wishes. I hope so too. I want it.

New cover

This one is for everyone here… And for the occasion, I’ve brought a huge punchbowl of lime jello (it’s spiked). However, there’s a catch: There is only one spoon. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be communal. I did bring a package of plastic spoons for the seriously cootie conscious. But I must say that it’s not as fun that way.

I was just wondering what everyone thought about the rumored cover change for the 2004 paperback Solitaire.

I like the cover the way it is, but something about it has always (well, since the day I picked it up) reminded me of Tori Amos. I think it’s the little open square. There’s nothing wrong with Tori Amos (two words: Kate Bush. I’m being cursed by a Tori fan right now, I’m sure). Has anyone else felt that way about it? Perhaps it wouldn’t look so “Tori” if half of her face was being pulled away…like the painting (the one that was in the style of Munch’s, The Scream) in Solitaire. Or, if half of her face was white with a black smudge for an eye…like the other painting. I think it will be interesting to see what changes, if any, are made in the cover.
 
In the 3rd grade, my mom got rid of cable. I got in trouble at school for drawing inappropriate Halloween scenes. It was an art project –” we had to cut out a haunted house. This was done with black construction paper. Then we had to paste it onto Manila paper. The houses had windows with shutters. In each window, we had to draw something scary… for Halloween. While everyone else had pumkins, bats and witches behind their shutters, I had a severed head on a platter, a blood stained crucifix on a blood spattered mattress, a hand clenching a bloody machete, etc., etc…. My brother, who is seven yrs. older than me, let me watch the movies he and his friends watched. We didn’t even get the movie channels, but everyone knew that if you undid the cable box and stuck a pin in a strategic location, you’d get them. So, I saw “Friday the 13th”, “Halloween”, “The Exorcist”, “Heavy Metal”, “The Wall”, “Trilogy of Terror”… you name it. Needless to say, I had a different idea of “scary”. And maybe, for more personal reasons than I thought, I’d like to see a more dramatic cover (minus all the blood, of course) –” something in the style of Estar.

Anyway, that is all.

Lindsey

I’ve just recently seen the new cover and it rocks. I think you will not be disappointed. It’s fantastic, I love it, and it’s very different from the current cover.

It’s designed by Archie Ferguson, an artist and designer who works for Knopf and has designed a truckload of wonderful covers including William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.

This could have come out of Estar’s brain, for sure. I will be interested to hear what people think of it. I’m feeling quite fortunate. I’ve had two great covers with very different images –” two chances to reach different audiences.
 
The Scariest Movies In The World for me have been Alien, Jaws, and The Haunting Of Hill House (the original, not the silly remake). Anyone who enjoys great writing and has never read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, yikes, do yourself a favor. She wrote beautifully. Other scary novel favorites: Ghost Story by Peter Straub, The Shining by Stephen King. It’s always a treat when a writer is good enough to tell a frightening story without having to serve up a buffet of body parts. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any other of the million billion Grade-B horror movies or novels running loose in the world just don’t do it for me. Graphic violence is no substitute for good writing or good storytelling.
 

A sad and lonely pig

Thanks for the round! It’s great that you had so much fun at your reunion. I didn’t go to my 5th or my 10th. As much as I loved my school, I couldn’t wait to leave. A girl I had a crush on found out about it and the last six months of senior year were a bit unpleasant. I don’t know what I ever saw in that girl. She wasn’t a nice person to begin with. And I ate pickled herring for her!

I’m so happy that you’re curious about the project. I don’t get to discuss it much with my friends because they’re not really into it. They don’t understand why I get so excited over something as simple as diffusion spray.

I get what you mean about process. I think that a year and a half ago, we had some “bad process”. Each of us had a specific need that wasn’t being met. But we didn’t communicate our needs. And that led to a lot of frustration. Then Alx (how he spells it) wanted to hurry up and film. I didn’t see the point in rushing, especially since the characters weren’t fully developed. And Rich was a “Silent Bob” of sorts.

Now, things are different. We have a master plan. So, when stupid shit pops up (and it has), we work through it more efficiently.

Wayfarer 1 is a full length digital film. But, we have to film it in parts because we don’t have a lot of money. We refer to each part as an episode (i.e. Wayfarer 1: The Search for Devil’s Tower). Even then, the “episode” is broken down…to a 15 min. short. We hope to put one out every 3 months, but we’ll be happy with one every six. And we’ll be even happier if we can create a little underground buzz.

That being said, our first short is almost finished. We have to re-shoot the first two scenes and the last scene. Then Alx will compose the soundtrack (he was in a band once upon a time…big in Germany and Japan). We borrowed music from The Matrix, Aliens, Sneakers, etc. for our “in house” copy. It will be a few months before we pass it out to people at the sci-fi convention. Oh, and the Renaissance fair. Then we’re going to set up a website where everyone can watch it if they want to.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote five new scenes and made up two new characters (Agent Savage and Agent Tallent. They’re the elite members of the Recovery Team. And they just so happen to be remote viewers). Now, I do believe what you said about good process, but I have to tell you that there’s nothing like a good sign to go along with it. I was on the phone with Alx, discussing my idea and explaining why I thought Nate (lead female) should refer to Savage and Tallent as “the Swanns” (after Ingo Swann) –” I got a call waiting beep. Normally, I’d ignore it. But for some reason, I clicked over. It was my neighbor from across the street. “Lindsey, you have to come outside! There’s a swan in my front yard!” I had just said, “swann” to Alx and now there’s a swan. I’m not embarrassed to say that I took it as a sign.

Anyway, one of the ideas I came up with has something to do with a response you gave here in the pub. Our main characters work for Mr. Timm. He’s the head of the spy ring, but no one actually sees him. His spy ring is called, “the gameboard”. There are two kinds of spies and they are called, “players”. Then we have our tactical remotes and recoverers. And then there’s Mr. Timm’s right hand woman. She runs the show from behind the scenes. One day, I was thinking, where the hell are these people operating from? Then I came up with the idea of EXALISSE… a company that manufactures boardgames and trading cards. It’s a front, obviously. And it makes sense. That’s not stealing anything, right? I hope not because it’s so perfect.

Until July, that’s pretty much it for Wayfarer 1. In the meantime, I have to grow some hair. Right now, I have what I like to call a “feminine fade”… it’s what I have to tell the hairdresser to keep her from squaring off the back of my head. I’ll be playing Tallent. She’s going to have a “dragonballZ” kind of thing going on. Oh, Wayfarer 1 is our spaceship. I don’t think I mentioned that. And yes, it’s a really cool set. We built it ourselves.

Just one more thing… I liked your response to that question about what you hoped to accomplish in the next 25 years. I think all of it is possible. Even the U2 thing. Screenwriting, once you have a vision, is pretty easy (somebody probably wants to shoot me for that). And it’s even easier if you have Final Draft software. It’s the rules that are tricky sometimes. But we’re not sending our script to anyone (though we are getting a copyright), so I’ve broken quite a few of them. Our actors are not professionally trained, so I use more description than what is allowed, in hopes that it will get them to that place. If that makes sense.

Well, take care.

Lindsey

Oh, yeah! What was that 4th grade teacher like???

Well, this all sounds pretty cool and I hope it’s working out, although I’m trying to imagine where one builds a spaceship set without upsetting the neighbors. If you will let me know when your website is live, I’ll be happy to link to it. And if your superspies want to use a games company as a front, more power to them: it’s certainly a chaotic enough business to hide any amount of ulterior motive or general wackiness.

My 4th-grade history teacher was a mean and angry woman. She also seemed, even to my nine-year-old self, sad and lonely and confused by a world that had backwashed her into a dead-end situation. In the 1960s it was hard for suddenly-divorced or widowed women in their 40’s and 50’s to find lucrative, soul-satisfying ways of taking care of themselves. My grammar school was a place where some of them ended up. Some of my teachers were there because they loved their work, and they made a huge impact on me. But some of them were there because they lived in small windowless apartments and made daily choices between the electricity bill and the new timing belt for the car. And they’d never even heard of a timing belt before, because their men had always handled that, and maybe the car mechanic was bullshitting them about the whole thing. How to know? They didn’t have college degrees or special skills or even much practice at mapping out a life, and they understood that there weren’t many options for them. Those people had a huge impact on me too.

Anyway, long story short: my history teacher disliked me intensely. Maybe she didn’t like any of us, I’m not sure, but I’m positive about me. One day I was in the girls’ bathroom alone. I had tooth that was just loosening, but not nearly ready to come out –” just at the point where it moved slightly and bled a little if I poked it with my tongue or finger, which of course I was doing all the time. This teacher came into the bathroom and found me in front of the mirror with my mouth open, poking. So she took some dental floss out of her purse, pinned me in a corner while she wrapped it around my tooth, tied the other end around the doorknob, and slammed the door. It hurt, it bled, it scared me, I cried, and she was happy. She may have been a nice person in some other areas of her life, but that day she was a pig.