Slow Wifi should be illegal

I get WiFi free at Best Western and normally it's good, but tonight it's as slow as a backwards snail.  All I wanted to do was veg in front of the computer and surf the web, but the signal keeps popping in and out and I'm in no mood to wait.  So I'm finishing this posting and gone.  Gotta be up and at it tomorrow morning for a possible packing job.

I really enjoy book fairs.  At least, the antiquarian ones.  The dealers are such characters.  Mostly unfocused and scattered all over the place, trying to open display cabinets with the wrong keys and rushing about trying to find a good deal and complaining about the layout of the fair and dissing each other behind their backs and being charming and insistent and so certain they're the center of the universe, you almost have to agree with them.

The venue looks right for a book fair -- a long, LONG former fruit warehouse or something, built of wrought iron and glass, that is lovely to look at but needs constant repair.  Last time the fair was in San Francisco, it rained and dealers had to put up plastic everywhere to protect their stock.

And some of the things you find there -- like an early copy of J. R. R. Tolkien's first published poem from 1916 (?).   Architectural drawings for a windmill from the 18th century.  Framed Audubon prints (that were probably cut out of an early edition of the book to sell on their own;sacrilege!).  A 4" thick book on how a lady should keep her house.  You wonder about finding some totally obscure volume?  I bet that someone at this fair can help you locate it if they don't already have what you want.

I was too busy to do much real looking.  Maybe sometime later in my life, when I'm rich and famous, I can just come in and wander the aisles and contemplate my wishes and hopes and dreams.

Right now -- I'm too beat to continue.

Seeing old friends who are new

Wandering through the California Book Fair I ran into people I'd known or worked with when I was at Heritage Book Shop, and none of them looked any different from when I'd last seen them, two or three years back.  Dunno why I'd expect that they would.  Guess it's because I'm feeling so different.

Anyway, one just had a new baby and she still looks slim.  Another one's in the process of moving to Portland, OR and still has the exact same hair and clothes he's had since I met him six years ago.  Another left a steady job in Delaware to be with his girlfriend in LA and work at slave wages.  But the best was seeing this one guy I'd been crushing on at HBS...and is still crushworthy, to the extreme, because he's just as fit and trim and properly hairy as he always was.  And just as difficult to talk to.

I worked fairly steadily at the fair packing books for dealers and clients to ship but still managed to do a little work on LD.  Going through each chapter over and over and over is helping clarify the story and also makes certain I catch more of my typos and missing words.  I think the opening three chapters are a lot more involving, now...but I won't know till I get feedback on them.

I like the direction Daniel's taking -- having more spunk and attitude to give the reader an idea of where Ace sprung from.  I guess just keeping at it, polishing and honing and digging in deeper is my method of writing.

Jeez...if that's the case, I'll be working on POS till Im 90.

It's an addiction

I had dinner with two of my oldest friends, last night -- Karl & Carrie Armstrong.  Karl & I've known each other since college, when we were both taking film classes, and started out planning to make movies together.  Carrie's his wife.  In fact, we all did help each other out in various projects over the years -- Karl directing, me writing -- and she became an actress.  He's an editor now for an animation company and she can be seen as the court reporter in "The Social Network."  So...after dinner he and I were talking about plans for the future and I found myself slipping back into my "it's just possible" state.

That's when I start thinking, "If I could just sell one script for Guild minimum, I could live in LA and work as a writer and everything would be perfect."  I quickly convince myself that's all it would take -- working up just the right screenplay to convince someone it's worth making this into a movie.  My work's just as good as the other crap that's showing up in theaters, these days -- hell, it's better.  Everyone who's read my scripts tells me my characters are solid and real and my stories interesting.  All I need is one break and the world will see I'm the next Orson Welles and Karl is the next Stephen Spielberg.

It's the stuff Hollywood dreams are made of...and maybe it was true, once upon a time...even as recently as the late 80's, when independent features could use special tax breaks to secure funding and video rentals were beginning to explode across the country.  But then Reagan killed the breaks and a lot of crap got made so the Indie market collapsed and was folded into the studios...and now everything operates under different rules.  Rules I can't figure out nor can be bothered to learn, because what they want to make is not what I want to write.

But that didn't stop me from thinking about it, just like a junkie contemplating just one more fix or a smoker wanting one last "last cigarette."  And I'm still telling myself all I'd need to do is pull together enough money to make a good micro-budget movie that'd kick butt and force people to take notice...which is REALLY easy to do, right?  It's crazy.

But it fits my mindset.  My genetic makeup.  I still bite my nails and hate to drink any soda but Dr. Pepper and always order cheese enchiladas at a Mexican food restaurant and get just plain lazy when confronted with a pile of work so put it off.  Nothing special about me, there.

And yet...I still dream...and think, "It's possible."

Straight guys

I had an early lunch with my Russian buddy, Val, yesterday before heading down to San Diego, and we had an interesting conversation about Amazon's banning of my books.  Normally I don't relate my chatting with friends on this blog, but this one...this one helped me see something I hadn't really consciously considered, before.

A little background -- Val's VERY straight.  When we first met, he was bedding 3-4 different women a week, and I could see why:  dark, sensuous good-looks; sexy accent; total focus on the girl when he's with her (I actually watched him pick a cute one up in a cantina on 3rd Street, once; did that make me his wing man?).  He's now approaching 40, divorced once and "born again" (but I don't hold that against him; it gives him stability), and he's aiming to be a rock star instead of an actor.  He's also wildly misinformed.

Most of his misinformation about politics and conspiracies comes from manipulative scum like Tom Liekas (sp?), Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck with a healthy sprinkling of various right-wing freaks.  This part makes me uneasy because their ranting is usually aimed at liberals like myself, but when I point that out, he assures me they don't mean me; they just mean the people who are misusing the system.  Doesn't make sense...and yet, it does.  The old "I can't be racist because some of my best friends are black" line of bullshit to mitigate the hatred they spread.

But that's not what snuck into me.  It's while we were talking about "How To Rape A Straight Guy" being banned thanks to that "reporter" for Fox in Seattle.  I mentioned it seemed more like she thought it was a book about women raping men, because she hadn't done any research into it, and he said a woman cannot rape a man.  Which is nonsense.  It's rare but it can and has happened.  And I'm not talking statutory rape, where an older woman has sex with an adolescent boy, but an adult male like Val being forced to have sex with an adult female.  He says flat out, it's not possible, and I could not show him that it was.

That made me realize, most straight men have no idea how their body works.  They think in order for them to have an erection, their mind needs to be telling their dick they want one, and that's not true.  It's more difficult to get one if they're freaked out or disconnected, but it can still happen...because an erection is a physical response, not an emotional or mental one, and can be brought about even in the face of pure terror.  I read articles about fighter pilots in WW2 thinking they were going to die in a dogfight and finding themselves with raging hard-ons during the battle; a couple even mentioning that once they'd seen they'd won, they'd ejaculated and they never felt that high, again.

I sort of reference this in "Bobby Carapisi", where both Eric and Bobby are screwed up, emotionally, after their assaults because they both "got off" on it, which in their minds meant they liked it.  But I don't think I brought it out, well enough, that this is somewhat normal (even considering the circumstances).  And it would be even more likely if the assailant was a woman going after a heterosexual man, because there's already a physical interest in getting laid, there.

Hmm...does that make sense?

I guess I'm rambling on about this because this chat with Val finally showed me most men think they control their dicks, but they don't.  Nor do their dicks really have complete control them (as many Dworkin devotees seem to believe).  It's the one part of the body that has a head of its own (pun intended), and I think I could have made it clearer that it can't be programmed like the rest of the body can.  If it's gay, you can force it to lie to itself for a while, but eventually it'll rebel...and suddenly you're a right-wing GOP homophobe caught in an airport bathroom with a semi-cute blond cop, because nothing else will make that head happy.

Hmm...I think I just convinced myself a dick DOES have more control over its man than I think.  So how can I use that for one of my stories?

Flight paths

My hotel is situated almost in the middle between the flight paths of airplanes landing at LAX.  During the day I've watched 737s and 747s and even an Airbus 380 glide in under the gleaming sun, and at night I can see their lights hovering for miles in the distance as they line up to take their turn.  Some go to my left, some go to my right, their wings spread wide and gentle, their wheels down and ready to reconnect with mother earth like geese retaking their place on the still waters of a lake...and I just watch for a short while, fascinated.

This is way too symbolic of my world, at present...hell, since I was born.  I sit in the middle as activity whispers past me.  Not partaking so much, just observing.  As if I was meant to do nothing more than report on the lives I saw as they were lived by others.  In all my stories, I've used aspects of what I've seen as well as experienced, what I've learned about as well as had first hand knowledge of, what I've wished for as well as avoided, what I've done right as well as done wrong.

Even now while gazing out the window at the passing parade, I consider each plane holds hundreds of people, each with his or her own wishes and hopes and dreams.  Maybe ten-thousand flitted past just as I wrote these words.  A friend of mine once said he couldn't look out at the LA basin from a high vantage point at night because of the overwhelming sea of lights glimmering below.  Each one represented a person and the concept of that much humanity in one place overwhelmed him so much, he feared he'd fall apart.  I used that for the basis of a character in a book I started titled "The Golden Sea."  But I started it too soon...before I really understood what he meant.

But now I do.  Jet after jet after jet after jet zips back down to earth and the sheer number of them and the  realization of how many individuals have passed makes me a bit dizzy.  But it's a good sensation...one that tells me I have yet to begin to even scratch the surface of the world in my stories.  And it pushed me to remind myself that no one lives forever.

So...to quote Henry the Second in "A Lion In Winter" in response to Eleanor of Aquitaine's suggestion they do just that, "Do you think there's any chance of it?"

Rose petals

I had a 4 hour plus flight from Buffalo to Las Vegas (where I changed planes) so worked on LD's second and third chapters.   And didn't like the pacing in them.  It seems once Daniel gets to the cabin, things sort of go stale and tedious...but then, like a budding rose, ideas began to show up to make the story more compelling.  I've got 4 pages of notes -- well...2 full pages, really, just folded into looking like 4 -- and now know how to drop the whole bet aspect of the story, completely.  And Daniel's coming across more like a person as well as the main character.

What's fun is, the scent of these ideas has wafted over to POS and I can see a growing problem with the story of Brendan -- that he could easily wind up being the only truly realized character in the whole thing.  Can't have that; makes for  unreality and unimportance.  So I also have notes for that.

It's been a LONG day.  I got up at 6am to make my flight, thanks to the snow from last night, and the plane was PACKED.  Not one spare seat.  Grr.  Now it's 1:30 am my time and I'm about to crash and burn.  More tomorrow night, maybe...depending on if I can find a Starbuck's that's open late.  The WiFi in this Motel 6 actually seems to be going backwards, it's so slow.

Transferance

This is Bruno...which is probably not his real name because I know he's used others -- Mario and Ralph, to name a couple.  I can understand why he keeps his true identity as much a secret as one can in this age of vanishing shadows and instant info.  His offering to the world is a fantasy, and too much awareness crushes the dreams that stem from it.

To put it bluntly, he's a nude model who's done some kink and jack-off videos and such.  Nothing more, that I can tell, but enough to inflame the intolerance crowd, should they find out.  Body-wise -- he fluctuates between being sleek and being a tad beefy, and he shaves his chest (which to me is close to sacrilege).  Not a bad actor in some of his videos.  Comes across as a little on the Jersey side of manners and speech.  A real "I'll do some shit for money...but only to a limit" kind of guy going nowhere near the "gay-for-pay" label.

I've never met him, but he's formed into something elegant deep in my soul, for want of a better word.  Sometimes I look at his image and worlds expand around me.  I hesitate to call him my muse, but he's been the visual model for two characters in my books -- Shays in "How To Rape A Straight Guy" and Bobby in "Bobby Carapisi."  (In fact, putting his face on Bobby's tragedy helped shame me into finishing the novel.)  Plus I almost used him as the model for Jake in "Rape In Holding Cell 6" and probably would have if I hadn't run across Will Fennell's images in DNA Magazine.  For a while I wanted to meet him, but now?  Now I don't.

I like to believe my interest is more than just a crush or lust or anything as childish as that.  Because he has shadows in his eyes...and that suggests facets within that may be worthy to embrace.  And such a notion fascinates me.  I want to know him...but not in reality...just in the realm of the possible, where truth is determined by the self and not imposed by others.  He offered a gateway to that realm, and I'd have been a fool to not pass through it.

But were I to actually meet him...were I to learn his true name...I halfway fear the gate would close.  And I'd rather not take that chance.  Some aspects of life are far more important than the rest and should be sheltered and nurtured, like roses in a private garden offering beauty and grace...and thorns to remind you not to get too close.

And this is Bruno.

Rearranging the dirt

By the time I have the first chapter down to what I want, I'll be ready for Social Security...if the GOP hasn't killed it by then.  This section establishes what Daniel's character is and he's still being too indistinct for me to keep going.  I try, but my writing freezes up.  This usually means something is missing or wrong in what I've got and I just need to keep circling it till I can figure it out.

In the script and play versions, the story starts when Daniel gets to the cabin and everything else is filled in as we go along.  But that seemed to mess with the pacing.  To me, farce is best when it doesn't give you time to catch your breath before it's on to the next comment or laugh or setup.  "His Girl Friday" is like that; you have to watch it 2-3 times to truly appreciate the story.  Doesn't hurt that Rosalind Russell gave an old pro like Cary Grant as good as she got in the movie.

In the book, I've expanded on the characters as characters and now Daniel's bland in comparison, so I actually wonder why anyone would be interested in him.  And maybe that's the problem. He's vanishing by becoming a supporting character in his own story.  He needs something more than a sort-of psychosis to him.  He needs life.  Spark.  Magnetism.  Without know it.

It's interesting...Brendan in "Place of Safety" had no hesitation in owning the story.  It was his and his alone, and all else was there to illuminate him, and some parts of it are truly dynamic.  But Daniel is still in shadow.  He needs to come out.

Of course, that could be why Brendan scares me a little while Daniel is my doppelganger.

Hm...maybe making it Tad who talks Daniel into the bet is wrong.

Speaking too soon

Lots of ice and slush mixed with snow meant I didn't get into work till nearly 11 am and then a steady snow in the afternoon covered my car completely.  Had to dig it out.  One should never thumb one's nose at Mother Nature; she'll cut it off.

Got nothin' else to say.  Total blank.

I hate editors

I was reading through my copy of the anthology that contains my novella, "Perfection", and realized the guy who edited it changed my style in a couple of places.  Sometimes I deliberately have sentences run on and on for effect...and the little shit took out my commas and broke the sentences up, lowering the emotional impact of the final words.  I hadn't noticed that before during the proofing and haven't read the story in the book, before.  I'm actually pissed off.

I mean, it's still a solid story and builds to what I think is a satisfying conclusion, and most of my points get made, despite the editor's messing with my work, but this is what I get for not double-checking everything anyone ever does in regards to my writing.  I have my style and that is that.  If you don't like it, don't read it...but don't fuckin' mess with it without my permission.  Shit.

But I get this crap from all sides.  My scripts -- everybody wants to change them.  My storyboards -- yeah, let's do this...oh, no, do that, instead...and on and on.  Even when I'm talking to a client on the phone at this job, I'm getting told not to be so forthcoming with the information, to the point where one of my bosses snapped at me that "the client didn't need to know we're doing that" when it was the CLIENT who told me we were.

I'm not making sense and I don't feel like trying to.  I'm a pissy-cat, right now.  Better to go lie on a heating grate and let the warm air soothe my foul mood until the next nap-time, or something.

Snowstorm's coming.  Should be interesting.

UPDATE:

Wimp of a snowstorm, but some nice heavy icing underway.