I know I said last time that I would push my personal life under for a while, and make this a little more literary.  But this is a necessary exorcism.

Friday I went to a potluck with a number of people in my MFA program.  I made goulash from a simple recipe my mother sent me– the first such dish I’ve ever made.  Talked with Susan Straight, received a number of books.  And at about 8:30 I left and headed to Portland to see her.  Made it there around 1:00PM.   I won’t dwell on things because that’s not what this is about.

Portland is an amazing town.  I hate cities and I loved Portland.  It’s beautifully laid out.  The new buildings are pretty, the old buildings are gorgeous.  There’s enough old industry and there’s an absolute ton of art-blood to be found.  Hawthorne Street.  Wonderful place.  Buskers, coffee shops, record stores.  We saw Mimicking Birds at the White Eagle saloon, and they were pretty stellar.  I recommend them, highly.  We went to Powell’s and I picked up John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing, which I’m very excited to read.  We watched the premiere of the new season of Californication in my hotel room, along with Bored to Death, a pretty neat new show.

It didn’t work out.  Simply.  And I’m sorry for that.  Every girl I’ve ever loved I’ve wanted to love forever, but it hasn’t happened yet.  We tried our best, I think, I hope.  I fought like a bloody old cur, I know that much.

So, gave it my best, came home with my tail not quite between my legs.  But I didn’t feel all that bad.  I feel good about where my life is.  It’s strange, going 1000 miles in a day.  But good.

I got to see most of the land heading back that I missed going out.  Ridiculously golden hills.  Rolling gently but huge.  Plains covered in smoke.  Mountains.  There’s a good bit of Oregon that I actually liked, leaving.  Sheep country, from the looks of it.  I’m always rewarded by the country, the land.  Driving did me good.  A strange thing is that it felt good to get back into California.  That seemed somewhat odd to me, but it did.  And so did getting home.  This damn empty place and its poor lighting.  Life has carved away from me everything that tied me to any other place.  Right now it’s just me.  I talked to a friend that night before I left, pretty long into the night, and I told her that the one thing that hasn’t fallen through for me has been writing.  And that’s true.  Perhaps fittingly, it’s me and my writing from here on out.  Whatever comes after comes free of those old attachments.  You and me, California.  I’ve got the spirit of Bill Hicks on my side, so I think you’re fucked.

First fiction workshop was today and I was on the block, came out pretty well.  Lots of praise for my prose, dialogue.  Corrections for clarity and pacing.  Which were what I expected.  It was good just to do that again, to hear people talk about it.  And to get ideas for fixing things.  To think critically about fiction, to pit myself against my classmates and my professor– he said I was right about a certain line of dialogue, wrong about what fiction should do with it.  We construct lines to inform our reader, not just to recreate a reality as exactly as possible.  That’s a rough paraphrase.  I don’t know that I agree, and regardless, having reality as a standard is not a bad thing.  A lot of what is wrong with my work is a balance that needs to be struck between keeping a tone and letting the reader know more about the world.  I’ve always known that, but it seems like I’m going to get a little closer to a solution.

The good news finally came through.  I’m gonna have a short story out on Splinter Generation sometime in October.  Woo.  That everything?  I think so.  Lots of reading to do, not much writing.  Them’s the breaks for the moment.

Mm.  Couple odds and ends.  Some fun Byron corrrespondence, and an interactive map of banned books.

I’m gonna try to get this blog back on the rails, ignore some of my personal problems–I’m getting tired of rehashing them, stepping over my own tracks– and focus a little more on writing, and the reading thereof. In that spirit, a brief roundup of some of the very best things that have crossed my path recently.

An essay by Tim O’Brien on the “well-imagined story”.

An interview with Marilynne Robinson.

An essay on death and life, and the possibility of a moment of consciousness containing the universe, by John Crowley.

Today was the first day of classes here at UCR. The only class I had was Writer’s Life, which is exactly what it sounds like. I imagine instruction on how to properly smoke a cigarette and remove coffee stains from a shirt are soon to come. In all seriousness, a lot of it seems redundant for me, and I wonder about a course like this being included in a graduate program. We’re covering queries, how to submit work to journals, etc. I feel like that should be something people are already acquainted with. Be a great undergrad course, for sure. But here we are, a class full of folks of varying ages but several of us of the world, and we’re learning what to expect out of writing? I’m skeptical. I’m skeptical of the whole program, to be honest. I’m grateful for the opportunity and I will soak up everything that comes my way, but I’m not expecting too much. I’m not sold on the idea of teaching writing, even now. (And I know I’m late on that argument, see this article in the New Yorker, if you’re a rabid follower of litblogs.)  But the degree and the time spent are both going to be useful.  So.

The good news is that the prof, one of two, seems pretty great.  The missing prof is Reza Aslan, who you’ve probably seen on The Daily Show or Colbert Report.  A little awesome, yeah?  Getting taught by someone who’s met those guys, pinnacles of journalism that they are.  At any rate.  I wonder about how much I should discuss on here.  I doubt I’ll be slandering anyone but regardless my life is potentially in the hands of a UC Regent who stumbles upon this blog in a Google search.  We’re having a bit of a budget problem in California, if you weren’t aware.  Had a walkout today.

I’ve got a homework assignment to hash out and then I can get back to writing the novel, the title of which I think I’ll go ahead and spill in acronym format: AAM.  Just for the sake of quickness.  I wonder a little bit about how quickly I’ve gone through the first quarter or so of it.  26k in a month and a half.  Part of that time absorbed in a…well, let’s not talk about it.  Let’s just say I’ve been distracted a time or two in that month and a half.  So, a pretty good pace.  If it keeps up like that–it won’t– then I’ll be done by winter, probably.  Considering it normally takes me around a year to write a novel, that’s pretty impressive.  Could even start writing another before I leave school.

To finish: haven’t heard about that potential good news yet.  Makes me wonder if maybe the offer was rescinded, sadface.  And lastly, just stumbled on this blog, by one Lauren Leto.  Snide remarks on books, a fan of Murakami and Hemingway?  Can’t beat that.  Welcome to the sidebar.

Long Way Home and its brood are at heart books about two best friends.  Despite the distance between them through much of the books their friendship is always at play, often at the forefront of their minds–insofar as they think (Red’s more of a doer).  I’ve always found that immutable and often ineffable camaraderie to be one of the simplest and most sublime pleasures in life.  Big words for something simple.  Speaking to the guys in the audience, you know the feeling you get when you’ve got a friend that’d walk through fire with you, that has your back.  That will swing in at the last moment and help you down that pitcher.

I seem to have a hard time keeping these friendships.  I’ve had about three, but life is good about getting in the way of them.  Yesterday I said goodbye to my housemate from Ohio.  He’s existed on my previous blog as Viking, as he has a penchant for mead, facial hair, violence, and mead.  As we speak he’s riding his wagon through the borders of Indiana, probably, on his way to a town we both love, and will hopefully have a valkryie waiting for him.  I wish him the best.  This song’s for you.

For a meager update: I’ve been holding off on a writing post because I’m waiting on some good news that hasn’t quite come through yet.  Will let you know soonest.

Wordcount is 25,130.  T-4 days until my first class.  Rereading Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream. One of my favorites.  Talk to you soon.

My step-brother died in a car accident a day or two ago.  I don’t know the details and I don’t know what to make of it.  We haven’t talked in years.  He’s an ex-step-brother, I guess you’d say.  We hated each other for the better part of our time together.  He had it rough, rougher than I.  That’s my judgment.  What little I’ve heard says he might’ve been drunk.  Well.  I can sympathize with that need.

I went to Joshua Tree National Park yesterday.  It was supposed to be the first stop in our road trip, and it was important that I take it back for myself.  I don’t know that I succeeded on that front.  I packed up some saltines and jerky and water and drove out in the middle of the day.  The park is vast, beautiful, varied.  There are two deserts in the one park, and the vegetation changes so quickly that you can blink and not notice.  Ocotillo stretching high like many-fingered hands.  Cholla gardens.  And the Joshua Trees.  The northern part of the park is the attraction, and it is an alien place.  The trees are strange and the rocks stranger, smooth from afar but jagged to the touch.  There are veins in them that look just like thick scars and they run symmetrically across gaps so you can see where things used to be attached, or where rocks have dropped off and rolled.  I needed to be a little reckless and so I went off the paths and clambered around on the rocks, leaping from boulder to boulder.  Something about them demands that I walk on them.  I’ve scuffed my boots to hell and I’ve got long scratches on my forearm but it was worth it and I wish I’d taken a few jumps more.  I ended up crossing a split in a large formation by pushing along with my legs and back, seated on air.  The split then got so tight I had to pull myself along sideways only to find almost no way to haul myself to the top when the split ended.  But I managed.

That night despite the possibility of rattlesnakes and spiders or whatever I slept out under the stars with just my sleeping bag, the way I seem to do when I’m in a desert.  I saw satellites and the long arm of the Milky Way.  So many stars.  I saw seven shooting stars through the night and I wished on four of them.  The rest I let go.  I won’t tell you my wishes but I will tell you why I quit wishing on them.  The last several years I’ve been of one mind about everything, and those years were among the happiest in my life.  I lived exactly how I wanted and if my paths crossed with others either we went right along or our paths ran parallel, for a time.  And when they diverged they diverged.  I don’t regret any of those times but there are a few that I feel bad for.  I was an ass during those years but I was likable and I knew where I stood.  Before that and now again, there’s this other.  He’s a bit of a fool and he’ll work like a dog to please you.  The former came about because of the latter, actually.  So there’s this dichotomy that I’m not describing very clearly but what it comes down to is that there’s the fool and the ass and despite their names they don’t get along.  I’m primarily the ass and I can’t reconcile the fool unless I embrace him and right now I’m caught in the middle, driving through the desert and feeling for a hand that isn’t there.  Being out among the stars and hearing the crows and coyotes and seeing the sun rise among the rocks and come out over the plains and even now seeing the soot on my hands and smelling the smoke, feeling the cuts, these things are bringing me together.  The problem is that I put a lot of work into trying to do it another way, trying to see things differently.  So going back into that desert, standing out under the stars alone again…if it’s not throwing that work away it’s sealing it up and hiding it.  But this is where I am.  I’m in Riverside, a desert that is not a desert.  It’s warm and the sky is always blue and the water is always cool and I’ve got time to kill, for now.  Letting those stars go was a part of accepting all that.  If you do the math you know I’m still on the other side, still waiting, still looking up.  And part of me probably always will be.

There’s this mountain in Joshua Tree, more accurately there’s this part of a range, and you can drive up to it and it overlooks the Coachella Valley.  You can see for miles.  There’s a mountain on the Mexico border that’s visible, there’s San Jacinto, and all of the cities I passed through to get to the park were laid out before me.  The San Andreas fault is right there.  But right there too is Los Angeles, is man, in thick haze and pollution that says that so long as I am here I will never be in the desert.  Not like I want.  It reaches all the way out there.  I know I’m drawing conclusions on places I’ve rarely been to and spent a scant amount of time in but I think my conclusions were correct even before I got here.  This is the place where people go to sleep.  You come here to fool yourself.  It’s the Land of the Lotus Eaters.  And I won’t have that.  I’m not letting the fact that life kicked me in the teeth give me reason to eat that fruit.

You’ll find I’m not one for titles.  I want to preface all this by saying that I am a writer–shock– and alongside sleeping, breathing, eating, and the latter’s natural follower, writing is something that keeps me together.  Like all writers I fuck with things a little.  I smudge here, smear, stretch.  My novels are never about myself and I’d like your opinion on whether or not the characters are like me or not.  But that’s beside the point.  I don’t write about myself.  I just don’t.  The faculties I have cannot be employed in an inward manner.  Like using a microscope to see a microscope.  “A man’s at odds to know his mind because his mind is aught he has to know it with.” ~ McCarthy.

I’ve tried writing short stories from personal experience.  I haven’t been able to since I started seriously writing.  Since I graduated from Wittenberg.  My uncle died of cancer very recently and it has had a profound effect on me.  A lot has happened in the past two months and very little of it good.  But try as I might I can’t bring these hands into myself to write out my pain.  Even saying that, “my pain,” sounds silly, false.  I imagine a lot of writers would tell you that these things that have happened to me are fuel, and I should keep them close to my chest to keep them burning.  I agree.  You’ll forgive me if my mind is wandering and my point obscure.  I’ll get to why that is in a moment.  I wrote a story about Lindsay.  The beginnings of one.  If you’ve gathered from below you’ll see things didn’t work out the way we intended– not nearly.  We ran up against a lot of problems immediately and some of them are mine.  Some are hers.  Part of it was this place.  She said it was soulless and I agree with more certainty as I go along.

What I do here is not writing.  It’s pissing out my ass and it always has been and always will be.  I can’t synthesize my thoughts about myself and my experiences into a cohesive whole like I would put into my real writing, and so it goes here.  I can’t I think because, despite writing being a function of my health, it is not a power to be used on myself.  That’s selfish.  I write about people worse off than me, better than me.  Soldiers.  Fathers.  And without that cause I lose interest.  How many self-portraits are considered masterpieces?  How many autobiographies?  I use pieces of my life because my experience informs everything.  But beyond that.

There’s a line in my second book.  The main character is talking to a woman who’s about to leave him.  He says that he’d give her the world.  And she replies, “what am I supposed to do with it?”  That’s from experience.  And laying in those little pieces can be soothing.  I write all of my past into my books, really.  But if you take apart your life and change the pages around, put some in one book and some in another, it’s not the same thing.  You have somebody else’s life.  Spread it across characters, and who’s to tell?

I had these feelings, through the week.  Ones that I want to record.  There are times when I think my life is worth telling– really, you spin it right, I can sound downright fucking dramatic.  One is that brief moment when you wake from a dream, ever so brief, in which everything is fine.  I even dreamed of how awful things were, and waking from that dream it was like a second in heaven.  And then I woke up and she was beside me, back to me, and I remembered.  I’ve rarely crashed so hard to earth.  The other feeling is that no matter how many times I tell you I will never convey to you how special you are, and I fear that you won’t be told that enough in your life.  I’ve said it to you all before but it bears repeating because these are good things, and good things should always be told.  You make me want to be a better man.  A man, period.  I can’t say the same for most people.  But you do.  I fight with myself over this because even you don’t agree– that people should change like that.  I put myself on the line and I think I have stepped over boundaries that I shouldn’t have, compromised parts of myself.  And maybe I should never have done that for you.  You didn’t ask me to, but it was part of trying to make myself better.  And I’ve grown.  So I won’t call it a mistake.  Or regret it.

I’m going to take us down another tangent, quickly, before I go.  I have a tattoo on my left wrist that reminds me that I’m part of humanity, and that I should treat people accordingly.  I feel like I should get at least two more reminders: one that says to shut the hell up, and another that reminds me to keep myself right.  Confucius say: man can’t fix his family without being fixed himself.  I’ve always believed that, sarcasm aside.  After this probably I need some time to fortify myself.  I believe it’s time to walk out into that great desert for a while.

“Bonedriven” from Bush’s second album, Razorblade Suitcase.  I grew up on this band.

I know there’s no reason for things like this.  No higher order, at any rate, than cause and effect.  But I like to weigh things, proves they’re real, maybe– being heavy.  I took a wonderful trip last year that ended in a speeding ticket.  Without that the memory of the trip would have no roots, no grounding, no solidity.  It may have floated up in the wind and been gone.  So having you here, your back to me when you read this, probably, downstairs while I write.  What we face is perhaps that weight that will make this real.  I told you very rarely do these things go perfectly, do they meet your expectations.  And so this is what we get.  A series of decisions that you can line up if you want, you can string together, but the end result is nothing you have control over.  I get you heartsick, calling me a stranger there in the tiny twin bed, already hot.  You get me pensive, worried, quiet.  I have to struggle with knowing that all I can do is let time pass, prove to you that I am myself.  Fight myself, in a way.  Your image of myself.  You probably imagined I’d sleep more.  I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve slept less and written more in the past two days than the three before them without you.

I was able to nap for an hour with you, then I got up and wrote a while and when I laid back down you let me hold you.  It’s these things that I have to cling to.  Because I know you’re unsure, and I know that I can’t force anything.  I went for a midnight swim and the water was cold and the air, too.  The moon and the big palm by the pool.  The light turned off as I was getting out.  I’d hoped maybe I’d catch you on the stairs, coming out, maybe even just to sit and watch.  But when I got upstairs you were still asleep.  There’s very little I have to hold in my hands right now.  It’s been a long day, and I have a feeling I won’t sleep more than a few hours until this is settled.  Maybe not even then.

I use my words like tools, like weapons.  Two things I’m finding that my father gave me: the need to do something, anything, in the face of a problem; and insomnia.  Put those two together in a situation like this and I’m utterly useless with a lot of time on my hands.  Writing this is something like stabbing myself in the back.  Who is writing this?  The me with his fingers on the keyboard, or the me you want, the me you want to call?  Does it prove we’re one in the same?

I am tired.  And I might sleep if I can settle these drowned butterflies.  I will fight the urge to try to hold you.  I will wait.

It’s been a topic whirling around the various lit-and-writer’s blogs lately, what with the economy, the Kindle, and, well, technology as a whole: what role does the writer play in this climate? Comma, what role does the writer play beyond his or her own writing?  Comma, what is all this technology doing to us in a broader sense?

So, for those of you unaware, publishers have started selling the writer as much as the book.  The writer has become a product.  It’s a good thing I’m as dashing as I am.  The problem is that I’m a firm believer in the author playing as small a role as possible outside of the creation of the work.  I’ve long known that’s impossible–here I am, blogging– so let’s say I believe in the Coma of the Author, or the Severe Beating of the Author.  Not quite the Death.  As publishers push writers to sell their books in more active ways, as we are driven to blog, tweet, and have a beer with our readers, our work not only becomes minimized but colored.  This is of particular concern, I think, for writers of literary fiction.  You’re here, and you know me already, probably.  But consider a reader who sees my name on the shelf (let’s hope) and picks up the book.  Likes it a lot.  Looks me up and finds that it’s a kid, essentially, who wrote this book about all kinds of things that he’s never experienced–knowledge that can lead the reader in one direction only: away from my book and to me.  To quit theoretically tooting my own horn, pick a literary giant.  Someone really big, you can’t imagine them putting on their pants.  Now sit down and have a meal with them.  Holy shit, Hemingway chews his food like everyone else!  Now he’s got hamburger in his beard.  Now he’s going to the bathroom.  These are human realities that I don’t think the reader needs to face when considering a work of fiction.  I just don’t.  You have to come to terms eventually with the fact that your wife or husband or whoever does, at times, have all manner of rude bodily functions.  You don’t ever need to think of that when reading.  The Sun Also Rises never poops.  Hamlet never farts.  Hell, Hamlet never farted.  Crude humor, I know, but you get my point?

Until I’m established, I am going to fight for exposure.  I’m going to blog.  I’ll make jokes, I’ll talk about what I eat or drink or how I met a smelly Jehovah’s Witness.  I’ll be real world.  It’s necessary.  And it may even be necessary after I’ve got some exposure.  And if that’s true, so be it.  Because what is most important to me above all is that you read my writing.  That’s first.  If I can get that done, then I’ll start worrying about how you read it.  You’re one mouseclick away from an excerpt of my real writing and it is quite different from what you find here.  The space between these two things enriches your knowledge of me.  Not of my writing.

As for things at large, you can make a lot of arguments about all manner of inventions over time, for good or ill.  What if the gun was never invented?  A: We’d still be killing each other with swords.  People make do with what they’ve got and these advances don’t go away.  You can ignore them if you like but the world is going to intrude on you or someone you know.  That being said, I don’t know that it’s true for these advancements.  And, honestly, if I can draw a crude parallel before establishing anything else: What if the gun was never invented?  A: We’d still be killing each other with swords, and we’d be forced to look our opponents in the eye.  I say this to make you wonder about the psychological and moral implications of technology.  The barest, raw result is that someone is dead.  But what has changed in the mind of the victor?  Bear with me.  The first link above goes to Sonya Chung’s latest post.  In it she talks about these coming advances.  I argued in the comments section (go there for the full, I’m not copy-pasting) that the iPhone, Googlemaps, GPS, Twitter, Fmylife.com, textsfromlastnight.com, all these things are reducing our need for interaction in the real world but more importantly, in the case of the latter three, are commodifying what experiences we do have for use on the internet.  Our misadventures (I bring myself up on purpose) become a sort of online currency or hold a point value in a game that goes unscored and unrewarded except through some manner of internet back-pattery.  The ultimate result of all this is that interactions will become a luxury of their own–we’ll simply need the time we save with an iPhone so we can do…whatever.  Tweet.  What we lost by the gun we’re losing by the phone: eye contact.  I could count on my hands the number of people who have addressed me or acknowledged my existence in any way while walking down the street here in Riverside.  What’s worse is that I’m already coming to accept that.

Just like we’re always gonna kill each other, whether by rock or sword or gun, we’re always going to interact in some way.  There are basic interactions that won’t change.  You’ll need to go to the grocery, or get your maid robot repaired, I don’t know.  There’ll always be bars.  But these interactions are being devalued.

To be sure, I’m not innocent.  I’m four days from meeting Lindsay for the first time.  We’ve only spoken online or on the phone.  I’ve gotten postcards from her, my only contact outside of electrical currents.  Obviously I’m blogging this.  It’s all pretty inevitable, I think.  There will be less value put on interaction.  Period.  I will have to sell myself as a writer– which, oddly enough, is going the other way of the technological trend, come to think of it.  But I’m all for fights and hard work.  So let’s make a little ruckus for the passing of “how about this heat?”

Today has been horrible.  Unequivocally.  From about hour two onward.  But I remembered what I was thinking last night.  Various little thoughts.  Moments in my life, memories that bring me pleasure.  And I remembered it today, thanks to Clowncar, when he said “gravy.”  I had a physics teacher who said that.  He was also my geometry teacher, and pre-calc teacher (he flunked me in that.)  He was really, really tough.  Called me unteachable at one point–and was probably right, as far as pure math goes, in physics I think I got a B+.  But he would scrawl so passionately on the board, following equations to their end result, and he was ecstatic with it.  I think most kids thought he was a little crazy for it, but it always made me happy to see him so happy.  The relationship he has with numbers is very much akin to mine with words, I think.  When he reached a certain point in the equation, once you’d narrowed things down, he’d say, “then it’s gravy.”  I always liked that.

I’ve considered myself lucky for about as long as I’ve had enough of a mind to really see how lucky I am.  Probably 18 or 19.  Around then I started reading up on Friedrich Nietzsche, most famously known for his theories of the Superman, bent toward ill by the Nazis.  He had a lesser known belief (seemed a little cobbled together, to be honest) called Eternal Recurrence.  Nothing more than a heaven for the Superman.  What it states is that at some point the world starts over from the beginning.  There is nothing else.  Just the world on infinite loop.  Since learning about this theory I’ve used it to judge my life.  Would I want to live through it again?  Yes.  I would.  Forever.  I don’t know that there are many people who feel the same.  You might want to change a breakup, take a little more time at the stop sign, that sort of thing.  Or you might not like your life at all.  Me?  Play it, Sam.  I want it all again.  I guess that means I’m pretty happy.  Even in the bad times.  And wouldn’t you know, between starting this post and finishing it, the night’s turned around.

For those of you who are counting:  2 1/2 weeks on the job with the third novel– 12,734 words.  8 days until Lindsay comes.  I’ll be pretty happy with myself if I can reach 20,000 before she gets here.  Hopefully some other writing news tomorrow or soon after.  And maybe I’ll get around to discussing something literary after that.

She made a 19 second video of herself, in her room, at the mirror.  All manner of disarray, bottles of all those mystifying things men have no use for–scarves(?), beads, makeup brushes.  There’s a nice song playing in the background.  I can see her chair, her desk, something on the mantel.  But it’s taken me a long time to see those things.  I have to force myself to look away from her.  Head cocked, curious.  Just that little gesture, perhaps the only personality you can glean from the clip.  And I’m entranced.  She’s beautiful.  Each time I see her, each new picture, she seems to change.  And in each she is beautiful.

She had the day off today, so we got to talk.  She helped me with some writing, we joked, we imagined, we quizzed each other on our futures.  I insisted on cows, chickens, pigs.  She would have none of it.  Well, okay, maybe chickens, because you don’t have to kill chickens.  I told her if she would bear with me these two years I would follow her anywhere.  We talked and talked and said goodbye three times and each time we came back.  She teased me about saying I love you.  I won’t say it until I meet her.  And that’s how we both want it.  But in the meantime it feels so natural to say, it’s been so long since I’ve said it.  After each part of our last goodbye it came, flitting in between, almost escaping.  She told me that she wants me to say it when she doesn’t expect it.  I thought, surely she won’t expect it now.  But of course I didn’t say it.

It’s a very childish thing, this.  When you don’t look at it sympathetically.  From inside it’s wonderful, and if you know how it feels it can be, from the outside, too.  That’s a very backwards way for me to acknowledge that this isn’t the sort of thing you’re probably coming around to read.  I promise more literary things are on their way.  I have more misadventures to share, and hopefully some good news following that.  In the meantime, a long-neglected meme from my friend, Clowncar.

——–

Fifteen books that will stick with you through life.  Whether by irritation, enlightenment, or pure enjoyment.  Feel free to add your own in the comments.

1. The Sun Also Rises ~ Ernest Hemingway
2. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West ~ Cormac McCarthy
3. All the Pretty Horses ~ Cormac McCarthy
4. Gilead ~ Marilynne Robinson
5. White Noise ~ Don Delillo
6. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ~ Haruki Murakami
7. On the Beach ~ Nevil Shute
8. The Iliad ~ Homer
9. The Grapes of Wrath ~ John Steinbeck
10. Moby-Dick ~ Herman Melville
11. Paradise Lost ~ John Milton
12. The Antichrist ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
13. The Collected Works of Lord Byron ~ Lord Byron
14. The Executioner’s Song ~ Norman Mailer
15. Islands in the Stream/ The Garden of Eden ~ Ernest Hemingway

I cheated a little.  You’d get quite a litany of Hemingway and McCarthy up there if I didn’t throw in a little variation.  Honorable mentions go to Suttree, For Whom the Bell Tolls, No Country for Old Men, The Complete Plays of Sophocles, some Mencken, As I Lay Dying, aaand…let’s say a smattering of Bukowski and Yeats.  You see how I have to bend.

I’ve written more here since I’ve gotten the blog together than I wrote in a month at My Heart’s Porch.  May be something you’ll have to get used to.

The above is Modest Mouse, a band I could go on and on about.  They’re great.  We’ll leave it at that.  The first post here, “The Blog That Ate Itself,” is a riff on one of their albums.

I’ve been skipping over an important part of my life here.  It could be that I’m trying to rein myself in a bit, make this place more formal.  But that’s dishonest to the purpose of this blog, if not the site, and I’ll never be able to confuse my writing with my blogging, try as I might to blur the lines on here at times.  So, without further distraction: I’ve got this lady friend.  We’re counting down the days until we get to see each other–we’ve never met, see.  But we’ve talked for what seems like ages.  We have all the inside jokes of a couple and we complete each other’s sentences and we have trouble sleeping or doing pretty much anything without hearing the other’s voice.  It’s not perfect, but I’m finding it’s much closer to than I’ve ever been before.  We both write.  On opposite ends of the spectrum.  She’s masterful at delving into the mind, digging up pieces of heart, laying things bare.  I…write dirt good.  Which isn’t trying to sell myself short, but sometimes I’m in awe of her ability.  I wouldn’t even know where to begin.  That’s the craft.  And that’s her.  I don’t think I can do much better.  And if I can I don’t want anyone to tell me.  Have I mentioned she’s pretty as the stars at evening?

I made good on my vow and got through 2,000+ words.  The count is up to 8,386.  I couldn’t tell you the last time I wrote so much in a day.  What’s more, I finished off with a really decent scene, ended up surprising myself, tying things in where I didn’t know I could.  I love the work–now if I could just get paid for it.

Which brings me, sort’ve, to my last point of the evening.  I fired off a quick thanks to the editor of The Collagist for the encouragement, and he sent a reply right back.  I’ve had some dealings with editors before, and publishers, and agents.  And they do a good job of making me seem little even when they’re apologizing for half-year delays.  But Mr. Matt Bell has proven to be cut from a different cloth.  So, if I seemed halfhearted in my endorsement of the journal before, let me put that to bed.  Not only is The Collagist a tight piece of work, it’s also run by a damn nice fellow.  Can I cram any down home sayings into this paragraph?  No?  Then I guess we’re done.  Go take a look.

While I’ve got you on the horn, have I mentioned Circumlocution to you?  They’re in need of fiction submissions.  And I can vouch for one of the editors as being something like a saint.  I wouldn’t be sitting here today without his help.

Is this what the lotus does to you?  It’s not quite so soothing as I thought it would be.  Maybe I’m too far from the ocean.