I'm a maniac

I just did draft #9 of DL and finally think it's close to being complete...short of choosing just the right word for just the right reaction at just the right moment. Currently it's at 4000 words, exactly...and seems to like that number, no matter what I do. When the story becomes that precise it's probably best to leave it alone...only I can't help but go over it and over it to polish the diamond to the point it blinds whomever it allows in. Hence the reference to my maniacal nature. Somehow I know I'll stop buffing when the time is right. I sense it coming close...but still need to do one more pass, at least. Just to make sure the style is consistent and the tone is perfect.

I just remembered a class I took in grad school, for creative writing. It was headed by a published poet whose attitude was, "You're not a writer unless you can write poetry." Well...I have no tolerance for poems. There are some I like...some I like parts of...but to me poetry has always been a little too full of itself to carry any true meaning. Oh, I've had arguments with people who swear the true essence of literature stems from the poets. Browning. Keats. Whitman. Ginsburg. Angelou. But in poetry I sense people trying to say something without saying it and expecting the reader to work to find out what it is they're trying to say, and that's not really for me, I can be obscure enough without the help of nothing symbolism.

However, I do find myself liking lines that are not locked into the poetic form....descriptive phrases that could just as easily be found in a work of fiction. I think the one line in a classic poem that caught my attention -- and I no longer know the name of the piece, just that it was written a good 250 years ago -- was from a widow's lament for her murdered husband (he was Irish, his killer British gentry). To show the depth of his love for her, she noted he had "walls painted white for me." Those five words carried an entire novel of depth to my mind while the rest of the poem fell into typical stuff.

That's what I'm trying to do with "Desert Land." Have lines sear themselves into the reader's mind and build a world so real and deep to them, they can never forget it. I know some people will say I'm trying to write a form of poetry -- would that be like prose-poems? -- but I'm not trying to obscure the point I want to make by being cute with words. Or using them to dance with and show off my cleverness or facility. My words are solely at the service of my characters...and sometimes those words are harsh and brutal and cruel and prurient, but I fight to keep from letting them become the end-game for my story. They have to mesh with the reality of the world my people inhabit.

Rant, rant, rave...and back to that writing teacher and his attitude. I responded by writing a long poem about a boy taking out the garbage and set it to the cadence of "I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree." And started it with "Oft." He HATED it. Mission accomplished. To an extent. I'd always gotten "A's" in my writing courses; he gave me a "B"...which hurt my GPA. My first lesson in "No pain, no gain, and what the hell is wrong with you for wanting it to hurt? Idiot."

But that's just one more aspect of my maniacal nature.

Just another picture

I made a quckie panorama of the Falls taken at the end of February from the tower on the Canadian side. Not perfect, but give you an idea of how frozen everything was.

Nothing's going right

I only got to Niagra, Canada yesterday because the line of cars waiting to get over the bridge was massive. I then drove up to another crossing point...but that was even worse, so I drove back, parked and wandered about...then walked over the bridge and had dinner at an okay restaurant on the Hill. And as I slowly finished my Molson Canadian draft beer, I worked on DL. It was cold and windy, with occasional sleet trying to make it down, but I liked it. Nothing more to say...so here's some pictures. The first photo is the Niagra River a couple miles below the falls. The second one is from just above the Falls. The third one's obvious. The last two show how the Falls looked in winter and how they look now.

Still down about the ash

I hadn't realized how much I was looking forward to this trip to Paris till it fell apart. I even tried to talk the boss into letting me fly into Barcelona and take an overnight train up to the city. It would've put me in at 9am on the day I had to help with the fair's move-out, but I could've crashed at the hotel for a few hours and worked and still had all of Monday to do the city, like I'd planned. But it would've added 250 euro to the cost and now it looks like I'd have had to go BACK to Barcelona to get out of Europe, the way that volcano is going. It'll be interesting to see what happens with all those book dealers trying to get home on Monday.

I wonder what this means for the long term? If it keeps blowing for a year or two, like it did a couple centuries ago, Heathrow, De Gualle and Frankfurt are doomed as major airports for passengers and freight; it'll all have to move south to Spain and Italy...which may happen anyway, after this fiasco.

The only positive note for me is, "Desert Land" is close to being done. I'm about to start on my 8th official draft and I hope I've increased its intensity rather than diminished it. There's a lot packed into this story...maybe too much...but it's finally feeling almost right in the narrator's arc and the style is working consistently, now. Very immediate in nature. I also think having some anger at my current situation helped solidify the story's meaning. We'll have to see...because the next step is putting it away for a while -- longer this time, absolutely -- and letting it ferment like wine. Problem is, you never know how the wine's going to turn out till you uncork the bottle -- if it'll be beauty or vinegar -- but that's half the fun.

I'm now going to drive up to Niagra-on-the-Lake so I can at least say I got out of the country this weekend. I'm NOT in a US frame of mind...and if all I can do is Canada, so be it.

No Paris

I got all the way to Philadelphia before US Air decided to cancel my flight and there's nothing available till Wednesday or Thursday, at the earliest. So the trip's off and I'm heading back to Buffalo. I'm brutally disappointed...but you can't argue with Mother Nature, not when she gets pissed off.

So I guess this weekend will be spent working on DL and BC3. Not what I wanted to do.

Shit, I'm not in the mood for anything more.

Now PARIS is off?!?!?!?!

Dammit -- I've got all my paperwork, my hotel's reserved, I have everything planned out for my trip to Paris -- and a damn volcano has to pick THIS moment to blow. Why me? What does this always happen to me? Is there no one else in the world for the fates to play with so? (Picture rending of cloth and hear howls at the moon, here.)

De Gualle is closed, right now, but US Airways still issued me a boarding pass for my flights tomorrow. So...if I don't hear otherwise, I'm heading down. I have contingency plans -- flying into Frankfurt, Zurich or Barcelona -- but those mean less time for me in the City of Light and Kyle don't like that idea. I guess I'll know if I'm going when the plane does or don't take off. If I don't get to go, I'll really be pissed...but we have a contingency plan for that, too. Man, life can be such an adventure.

So I came home early and am keeping my eyes and ears open for the latest, and I decided to do another draft of DL before I leave. I was going to wait, but since I may be here instead of there, I may as well put my time waiting to some good use.

Oh...lord...does ANYone suffer as I do? ANYone? Sigh. (Picture a face full of ennui, here, along with a cup of hot tea and a chocolate biscotti.)

I found my ending at P F Chang's...

For BC3, that is. I went to the local Galleria Mall to visit the Apple Store, found they had a PF Chang's there and had some Orange Peel Beef and a Tsingdao beer as I went over the outline for the last section of this story...and suddenly I realized what it needed was a character from Part 1 returning and being beefed up, a bit. Then his history fell into place and the end of the story came together and I finally understood why Eric's using ice hockey as his metaphor. Seems that one beer and the peppers in the beef popped the dam behind my brain and now I'm aware of the road, again.

I now have some Euros on me and a new little roller-luggage piece that I can carry on all the way across the Atlantic and back. I'll only be in Paris three days so I won't need much in the way of clothing. I'll have a lot of paperwork but most of that stays there. It's going to be a cheap trip -- no rental car and my hotel's only 75 euro a night. I hope that's not a complete disaster, it being so cheap while still in close proximity to the Louvre. Of course, I'm not going the museum. You cannot properly see the Louvre in a single day, and I've a huge number of other things I want to get done. I went when I was last in Paris; I doubt it's changed all that much in 24 years. Except for that pyramid thing-y in the central plaza.

Besides, the weather's supposed to be fantastic, so I'm checking out some things for RIHC6v2 to make sure I didn't totally screw up and going to the top of the Eiffel Tower, again, and just plain wandering for the one day I have to do all that stuff.

Now back to work on BC3.

I should start reading the paper, again...

I used to read the LA Times, daily, when I lived in LA. It's not a great paper but it kept me up on a lot of things I wouldn't ordinarily have known about. Sometimes it even had interesting interviews. Of course, its penchant for taking the more conservative viewpoint on any political or social issue was irritating, at times, but I could handle it...except for the political cartoonist they used -- Michael Ramirez. He was such a right-wing ideologue so filled with hatred for liberals it dripped from the ink he used, I had to stop even looking at the Opinion page or I'd blow a gasket.

I'm thinking this because the Pulitzers were awarded, yesterday, and the NY Times and Washington Post got several...and I'm wondering if it's just because they're the Times and the Post. Gleaning my info strictly from the web, I've grown to see both papers as collapsing icons of truth now used to proselytize in the name of their conservative masters. But I don't actually READ either paper...and that's not right. If I'm going to bitch about something, I ought to know what it is I'm actually bitching about...and make sure that bitching's from my own experiences and not someone else's. I don't like it when people deign to tell me what my opinion should be when it's the right wing nuts doing the telling; maybe I should be more careful not to fall into that same trap with the left wing.

I'm a liberal, no question, but I don't follow ALL liberal thought blindly. I support the right of Israel to exist and think 85% of the Palestinians' troubles stem from their own actions. And while I opposed the invasion of Iraq and think the Bush administration belongs in jail for war crimes, and I hate the idea of how many Iraqis were probably killed, I'm glad the initial invasion went without huge numbers of casualties against our soldiers; it could have been a bloodbath all the way around. That it still became one wasn't the soldiers' fault; it was the fools running things who made the situation so much worse for everyone involved.

So...I think I'll start reading the "New York Times". Of course, that's between moments when I'm writing or working or just trying to be human. Doesn't leave many minutes in the day.

New York is done...

And aside from working till 2 in the morning and nearly sending a piece to London that had Had HAD to go to Paris, it went all right. I suppose. It helps to have 6 double-checks on everything to make sure it's all the way it should be, because when I rush or get tired, I stop being a detail guy and make snap decisions...and that's not the best thing to do about stuff like this. Everything has to be right or it all falls apart. Fortunately, in Paris we only have one truck to load and stuff to return to London instead of a half dozen directions...so it might be all right. We'll have to see. If I screw this up in any way, I might as well pack my bags and head back to Texas.

I couldn't get into "Mother Ireland" at all. But I brought a book titled "People Power" as a backup. It studies Peace/Conflict Resolution Organizations in S. Africa, Israel and N. Ireland and how they're helping or hindering the process of finding peace in those countries. It's an 8 year-old book and I already detect a hint of anti-Zionist bias in it, but they still make some very interesting points. For instance, even though a lot of media focus is on high-profile politicians and leaders working to settle these situations, it's the grass roots groups who wind up getting the populace to either agree or disagree with the compromises that become necessary. So even though an agreement may be found, the people who have to live under it might decide not to unless they've already been shown how it's beneficial for them and not just told, "This is how it is, now." That might be why it's been so hard for the Good Friday Accords to take hold, especially on the Protestant side. It wasn't until Ian Paisley , the rabid anti-Catholic, began showing himself working with Gerry Adams, formerly a member of the IRA, that things began to settle down and now only the fanatics are the ones causing trouble...only to piss off their leaders.

This is already helping me figure out things about section 3 of POS and the peace group Brendan's sister, Mairead, is part of. Who knows, maybe I'll actually get the book written some day.

Time for a break

I'm now at the point where I don't know if "Desert Land" is working as a story, so I printed up a copy and put it in a binder and set it aside and will not look at it again till I'm back from Paris. I needs the space to regain my perspective. I also need to finish my taxes and this has been a major distraction.

I'm taking an Irish book to read on the plane to and from New York. It's called "Mother Ireland" and is a curiously uninvolving meditation on a woman's life in that country and how she feels about it. There's a lot of narcissism floating around in it, like her viewpoint is the only viewpoint one should have...but it does offer me clues as to the basic nature of the society and they ain't pretty. Which is good.

I'm also taking this break from DL to work on BC3. It's back to offering me suggestions on how to string the bits I do have written together.

I won't be using much of what little French I know in Paris. My contact there for the book fair gently let me know my choices of words can be confusing. Meaning it's better if I just keep to the polite and hold off on trying any true conversations. Oh, well. I have a long way to go before I'm good at any language, even English.