head!

That’s the last word I’m going to write this year.

When I was younger, marveling at the hippies, there was a popular commercial on all the FM stations for a shampoo called Head.

Head shampoo is squeezy, so clean and easy the natural thing to do.  I know my hairs would rather have organic lather so I wash them off in Head shampoo!

Sold in head shops, a.k.a. stores that sold marijuana paraphernalia.  I’m pretty sure they even used the illustration from Job rolling papers for their logo until they probably got sued.

A few years earlier the Monkees, a.k.a. The Prefab Four, made a movie designed to totally put the final nail in their coffin as a bubblegum act.  With a screenplay written in part by Jack Nicholson, the movie Head was a psychedelic dadaist meditation on the disintegration of pop music.  It’s not for everyone, but I dig it.

Speaking of films, the word HEAD appears at the beginning of film reels (just before the “countdown” on what’s known as Academy leader) to let projectionists know which way to thread the film.  You would think this is obvious that the fist part unspooling from a reel of film is the head, but when it has been taken up on the other side of the projector gate (on a take-up reel, natch) what looks like a head is a tail and vice versa.  Consequently the end of a reel of film is also marked TAIL so that projectionists know which reels need to be rewound in their dark little worlds.

None of these are what I have in mind.  And to “have in mind” is to imply that there is something captured or trapped within my brain, that there is something I am pondering, thinking about, considering.  On this, the last day of 2008, what is foremost in my mind — when I’m not playing games with the family while the snow piles up outside, or making a tomatillo salsa for some tilapia, or dozing on the couch — is that I can’t figure out how to start this middle grade novel that has been dogging me since January.  From that moment in Vermont when I decided this was the story I wanted to pursue, through two advisors and countless beginnings, through exercise and revision, around essays and beneath the valley of contempt, this story has been rattling around inside my head.  Taunting me, hiding, yelling at me like some insolent child demanding attention and favor, this damn story just doesn’t seem to want to let go of the far corners of my gray matter.

In a few moments I need to get ready to trudge down the street to a party to celebrate the new year.  And among all the drinking and sugary treats and conversation, in the back of my mind will be the one thought I can’t shake, the one that defines the year 2008 in a sense, the one that causes me to write the last word I’ll write this year:

How do I get this damn middle grade novel out of my…

head!

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ugh

Isn’t that such a lovely word — ugh.  It looks like the last part of a word lopped off, the guttural punctuation of a much longer thought reduced to its barest necessities.  Even when that final h would normally go silent or become transformed (as in either through or tough) it manages to catch itself back of the uvula and grunt forward with one final glottal chip of energy all its own.

Ugh.

Through and tough, that pretty much sums up this past week.  There were storms and diverted flights, drives through neighboring states and sleeps in guest beds, meals piled upon meals and smothered with desserts. How did it get to be that a season of holiday has become a pageant of obligation and the endurance of duty-bound visitation?

Having missed Festivus this year, and not really looking to rehash the unsavory elements of the past nine days or so I’l just say that I find myself facing down the end of one calendar and thoughts of a new month with an urgency.  There is a growing vigor to my thoughts of revision, seedlings of ideas breaking soil, and the promises and hope of new projects, new readings, new adventures.

If this past years was one of transition, this coming year is one of transformation. to be followed no doubt by a little hocus pocus.

Hocus pocus?

Hocus pocus pilatus pas as my Dutch cousins would say when conjuring a rabbit from a hat. From bits of the Latin Mass Hoc est enim corpus meum and Sub Pontio Pilato passus (This is my body and Suffered under Pontius Pilate respectively) — or Hocus Pocus for short, a parody suggesting the act of transubstantiation being performed by mortals on earth.

Which is all we can hope for as writers, to change the substance of our words and images into something else, something that births meaning and fellowship and joy in others. If this holiday season was, for me, lacking in this magic, well, so be it. I have words to breath and stories to spell and — hope! — share.

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poetry friday: an original

From Rachel I discovered from Gwenda (and she got it from…) the idea of posting the first line of the first post for each month during this past year.  After pulling these lines I thought “perhaps there’s a found poem in all this.”  That’s what I get for thinking.

I’ve made only a few edits for clarity.  And line breaks, of course, where I felt they made the most sense.  Or made me happy.

a line a month a year

january:
there are two types of writers, I’ve decided:
those who can make their own lives appear
as interesting and entertaining as their own writing
and those who can’t.

february:
long ago I found an ad
in an old National Geographic
that gave me one of those unintended moments
of enlightenment.

march:
my brain likes to worry things,
to mull,
to take it’s time sorting through
the vast card catalogs
to find just the right
references,
sources,
ideas.

april:
last summer
I managed to keep up
but didn’t feel I had the stamina
to go year round.

may:
old news for some, perhaps, but I
just crawled out from under my
deadlines
and have some catching up
to do.

june:
or is it
hot
when a wire
has juice
running through it?

july:
I have been sent on my way

august:
well, the month began with
a holiday, a rush
to get the kids off for
the summer, my resi-
dency for school, and then
a relocation to
a (much) larger home just
a few blocks away from
the place we’d been sequest-
ered to for the last four years.

september:
fall is the new year.

october:
as written:
this cautionary food-obsessed
tale of boys with eating disorders …
undercuts its serious message
with forced  humor.

november:
I was eighteen when I
was able to vote in my
first national election.

december:
well,
technically,
there’s some
paperwork to deal with,
and a bit of reading to do
before the next residency
in January,
but,

yeah.

Poetry Friday is at The Miss Rumphius Effect this week.

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poetry friday: the poetry of robert yamashiro frost

Facebook is an interesting phenomenon.  People from the past suddenly materialize.  Names and faces you haven’t thought about in forever… requesting friendships and sending messages, with little notes, just like back in grade school. “Will you be my friend?  Check one:  Yes.  No.”

This week I learned that a good friend of mine from high school, Dave Ross, died from cancer of the esophagus.  Two years ago.  That’s the downside to the magic of all this social networking; your first college girlfriend who you haven’t heard from in nearly two decades tells you that the person who introduced you to each other gets to be the one to tell you the bad news.

Dave was a poster child for ADHD before any of us even knew such a thing existed.  He wasn’t put on medication, he wasn’t sequestered into “special needs” classrooms, he just bounded around the room and everyone learned to accommodate.

Dave was passionate about anything he approached.  When he caught the filmmaking bug in high school he had more zeal about it than me, the self-proclaimed filmmaker of our crowd, and he drove me to make some of my best work.  We’d eat fast food in his beat up Plymouth Duster past midnight listening to Midnight Tracks and talking about girls and philosophy and the philosophy of girls.

He was the ultimate sports fan, bringing hockey sticks to basketball games in order to intimidate referees (and everyone else for that matter), a tradition he carried with him into his college days at UC Berkeley where he was a known fixture in the stands.  He once brought a tape recorder to a high school game and  narrated the play-by-play for the entire game for his own amusement.  Afterward he interviewed fans leaving the gym with what became a hallmark question:

“In your opinion, was it Culver’s victory or Torrence’s defeat that lead to the final outcome of this game?”

It was also at one of these games that we noticed a great player on the opposing team who was making shot after shot during warm-ups but was not allowed off the bench.  Dave thought this was unfair.  He looked up the player’s number in the program — R. Yamashiro — and began chanting his name.  Pretty soon he had us all singing to the tune of On, Wisconsin!:

Yamashiro, Yamashiro
Only three feet tall!
Yamashiro, he’s our hero
He plays basketball!
Yamashiro, not a zero
What was that you say?
Yamashiro, Yamashiro
Hooray for Russel K!

We had no idea what his real name was, but from that moment on we kept rooting for Russel K. Yamashiro to be put into the game, so much so that we became a distraction to the other team and won the game.  At least that’s how we liked to remember it happening.

Dave and I also liked to play with slogans, poems, and quotes, adding and changing them as a challenge, a sort of call-and-response to see who could make the other laugh.  On one occasion Dave began with a few word of Robert Frost and I responded.  We had a good start with the first two stanzas and then stumbled.  Secretly I went back and finished the poem and submitted it to our school’s poetry journal as a joke under the name Robert Yamashiro Frost, where to my surprise it was selected and published.  I loved the look on Dave’s face, followed by the convulsive fit of laughter that was also Dave’s trademark, when he first saw it in print.  I finished it for Dave, partially wrote it with him, and can’t think of a better way to honor his memory two years after the fact.  I think he would have approved.

I make no apology for the juvenile nature of the humor, or the distasteful imagery.  We were teenage boys, this was who we were.

Killing Off My Horse on a Snowy Evening

I know these things, these things I know —
My house is in the village, though
You will not see me stopping here
To watch a dog make yellow snow.

The little horse must think it queer
To see Van Gogh cut off his ear
Beyond these woods, upon the lake
I throw my horse off of the pier

He gives his harness bells a shake
We bash his head in with a rake
The only other sound a-peep:
The drowning horse who’s still awake

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep
Yet I still have my quota to keep
And horses to kill before I sleep
Horses to kill before I sleep.

There’s probably some more conventional poetry over at Author Amok, where the Poetry Friday round up is this week.

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comic book superheroes and the fourth estate

(Doing a bit of housecleaning on the computer and stumbled onto this previously unposted bit.  I have no idea what set this off, though I do freely admit to being loopy at the end…)

There is no way on this great green planet of ours that I’m the first person to make the observation that a lot of the classic comic book heroes worked for or were somehow connected with newspapers.

Superman – Clark Kent, Lois Lane, jimmy Olsen, Perry White of the Daily Planet

Spiderman – Peter Parker, J. Jonah Jameson (and a staff of millions) of the Daily Bugle

Batman – Vicky Vale (among many) of the Gotham Gazette

Daredevil – Ben Urich, also of the Daily Bugle

Green Hornet – Brit Reid of the Daily Sentinel

Howard the Duck – Lester Verde/Dr. Bong of various tabloids

I’m sure there are more, those are just the ones I can remember.  I’ve come across Frank Miller referring to the reporter character in comics as an Everyman character, a stand-in for the rest of society, but I’m wondering if there isn’t something more in play.  Often there is a give-and-take between the journalists gathering information that the superheroes use, and sometimes the superheroes supply the news themselves.  The relationship is symbiotic, almost as if the newspapers were serving as publicity agents for the heroes, but even that’s not all.

Don’t these newspapers tend to operate under the same motto as Superman – to fight for Truth, Justice and the American Way?  I’m wondering of it’s possible that the superhero is the visual manifestation of the “mild mannered” journalist, rooting out and exposing villains, serving for the good of the public.

I think that’s something I’d like to see, but it would be tricky to pull off: the superhero journalist comic book.  I’m not talking about the reporter as a cover, but as the reporter as hero.  I look around at what passes itself as news, what passes as “fair and balanced,” and think it would be nice if we could have some better comic book role models

Yeah, I’m a bit loopy right now.

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death to the titular mouse

So I’m reading the PW Children’s Bookshelf and there’s Matthew Broaderick, still looking like Ferris Bueller, next to Kate DiCamillo in a publicity photo for the release of the movie The Tale of Despereaux.  I really have no desire to see the movie, and would have ignored the press release generally, were it not for the following words jumping out and slapping me in the face, demanding satisfaction.

…actor Matthew Broderick, who voiced the role of the titular mouse…

Is this the only way to describe mice in children’s books?  Seriously, this phrase is so overused it practically ceases to have any meaning, it’s so lifeless even it’s bleached bones have turned to dust.  A quick Google search of the phrase shows that it has been used to describe the aforementioned Despereaux, Angelina Ballerina, Charlie’s friend Algernon, Cookie Mouse, the Tutter character from an episode of Bear in the Big Blue House, Stuart Little, Ricky Ricotta, and any number of other media featuring a mouse as a main character.

I get that the word titular indicates a reference to the title character, but I suspect it’s a phrase that sticks with people because it echos the phrase tit mouse (which is actually a bird), and that it’s entirely possible that people don’t know what the word means and think it’s a synonym for “cute and diminutive.”  It could also be one of those words that persists because of the puerile nature of those who first encounter it during puberty.  Consider a class of junior high school boys who, upon hearing the word and believing it has something to do with mammary glands, collect and propagate its misuse.  Dude, the latest issue of Maxim is totally titular!

Language.  Some words are like burrs in socks, designed to be carried by unwitting hosts to a new destination, inspiring the invention of Velcro.

But it’s done, it’s over, it’s beyond its expiration date. I officially declare the phrase “titular mouse” to be no longer of any value and that it shall be stricken from use for at least a decade.  You call yourself a writer, a journalist, a wordsmith?  Surely you can find another way to describe the title character of a book, especially if it is a mouse.

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poetry friday: sinterklassgedichten

Somewhere in my family tree, back about 17 generations or so, there’s Dutch blood.  I never really felt like anything more than an American mutt until my first trip to the Netherlands and then, wow, did it hit me.  It wasn’t necessarily that I looked like these people (though natives did keep stopping me for directions) but there was this vibe.  You know that vibe?  It’s that thing you feel when you walk into a strange, new location and the first word that comes to mind is home.  Not like the comfort of the home you grew up in but something deeper, something in the bones.  The DNA is singing to you.

In the Netherlands the holiday season is a bit different.  First, they don’t celebrate the arrival of some mythical elf flying around with magical deer but an actual person, a Saint named Nicholas. Over the years it’s been shortened a bit, ruined by language, and you get both St. Nick and Sinterklass.  He dresses like a bishop and rides a modern steam ship through the canals of Amsterdam.  The patron saint of children. I never really got into the Santa thing as a kid, but this Sinterklass I could get into.

I’m going to be partially biased about liking this tradition due to the fact that the Dutch equivalent of Christmas Eve is on my birthday, December 5th.  After decades of having a “lighter” birthday because it was so close to Christmas (or worse, the dreaded “we’ll make Christmas twice as big” when the birthday was skipped) I think I’d rather have my birthday on this Sinterklassavond.

Because for adults it is about poems as much as it is about gifts.

See, the usual stuff for kids is the gifts left behind by Sinterklass and his assistant, a strange blackface character named Swarte Piet (or Black Peter, I kid you not), but for the adults the gifts are elaborately wrapped and accompanied by a poem.  The tradition is that the poem is personally written – not some mass-created Hallmark moment – either about the recipient or about the gift itself.  I think it’s great tradition and something I have wanted to incorporate into my own life but somehow can never get it together.

All of this to say that I was curious to see what, exactly, these poems looked like.  What are these Sinterklaasgedichten that the Dutch write to one another?  It sort of boggles the mind to think there is a national celebration that includes people writing and sharing poems with one another.  What is wrong with America, why don’t we do things like this?  We have birthdays and Valentine’s Day and any number of other special occasions and not one of them includes a national tradition that incorporates poetry.

Curious, I stumbled upon a site on the web designed to help the poetry impaired with their Sinterklaasgedichten.  They had a number of ready-made poems based on gift items and on personalities, which in and of themselves were amusing.  A poem for aftershave, and another for socks, and one for “horse stuff.”  And on the personality side there was “for a waitress” and “for a lazy student” and “for a father with a mobile phone.”  Best part of all, thanks to the imperfection of various internet filters, are the English translations of some of these poems.  Such as…

agenda/calendar

Een nieuw jaar, een nieuw begin
Hoe vul jij dat straks in?
Is het hard werken tot je pensioen?
Of heb je ruimte om iets leuks te doen?
Een weekendje weg, een avondje uit.
Je maakt een afspraak, neemt een besluit.
Een cursus of een vergadering
je weet het bij benadering,
maar welke dag was ‘t ook weer?
Zet het in deze agenda neer
zodat je niets meer vergeet
en niet te laat komt op je date!

(A new year, a new beginning.
How do you fill it later?
Is it hard work until you retire?
Or do you have room for something fun to do?
A weekend getaway, a night out.
You make an appointment, take a decision.
A course or a meeting
you know the approximate
but what day was it again?
Put it down on this calendar
so you should not forget
and not too late for your date!)

You know what?  It’s not a great poem, and it’s not supposed to be.  It’s supposed to be honest, and heartfelt, and personal.  The Low Countries aren’t unnaturally populated by a race of poets, they’re populated with people who value the thought that a personal poem is an appropriate form of expression for a national holiday.

Poetry Friday is over at Wild Rose Reader this week.

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what’s in a name (like mine)

A few weeks back on the school forum a lot of us were talking about the famous and infamous people we shared names with.  Generally, the less common your surname, the greater a chance you have of being unique.  Then again, there can be enough people with the same name that you could be classified by the distinction of your occupation.  Say, Jesse James the outlaw verses Jesse James the, uh, husband of Sandra Bullock.  And I once knew a guy named Dred Scott who was a white jazz musician.  Or there’s that guy Michael Bolten in that movie where…

Anyway.

I few years ago I discovered, with a minor amount of horror, that my efforts on an indie film I participated in when I was in college generated an entry in the Internet Movie Data Base.  The problem was compounded when a number of credits started popping up under my name for movies I had absolutely nothing to do with.  Turned out there was a person whose last name was very similar to mine and people had posted our credits interchangeably.  I even had an “aka” that linked to this other person.  Eventually that got cleared up and now my one lone credit hangs out on IMDB as some weird appendage to my life history.

Oh no, wait.  It says alternate name: Dave.

It’s odd, but I can pretty much sort people into two categories, the Dave and the David camps.  Skipping those people who knew me as Dave in junior high for a moment, those people who have met me since high school, those people I have introduced myself to, have always met David.  The nickname Dave never felt right to me and once I took ownership of my name I felt pretty strongly about it.  The problem is that people view them interchangeably.

If I introduce myself to someon as David and within moments they immediately go with the familiar, Dave, then I pretty much know how the rest of our relationships are going to go.  If someone introduces themselves as Margaret you don’t turn around and start calling them Maggie, or Marge, do you? That would be presumptuous and rude, would it not?  Yet people don’t seem to have the same hesitation about calling me Dave as though they had known me since junior high.

It’s a small thing, and I’ve gone beyond correcting people because I have learned that the vast majority of those I’ve corrected don’t see the problem.  It’s a paper cut of an insult, a gnat-sized bit of disrespect, but it tells me so much more about that person than they’ll ever realize, and I carry that information with me forever.

Now, that just sounds petty.  It isn’t.  Not much.  I don’t hold grudges.  I just have come to learn who I can trust at first meeting and who has to earn that trust the hard way.  Down the road some offenders have managed to discern my preference and correct themselves, but by then we’re on good enough terms that it almost doesn’t matter.  Almost.

But what’s realy eating at me isn’t the first name any more, it’s the whole name.  Google has created this odd environment where, periodically, anyone can basically Google themselves and find out what they — or others with their name — are doing in the world.  And suddenly having a preference on my first name doesn’t seem like such a big thing. My namesake is a Certified Massage Therapist in Colorado. There’s another me in Tennessee petitioning for habeas corpus relief.  A me that’s a police officer in Alaska, a me that’s a former Public Utilities Commissioner, and a me who is associated with M.A.D.D.

While it’s impossible for everyone to have a unique name in this world I’m lookin down the road and wondering how much I really want to go with my given name as my professional name.

I realize this is ridiculous.  If I were to turn out to be an award-worthy writer and my name were Barak Obama no one would confuse us. And since there isn’t someone with my name working in publishing, much less in the field of children’s books, it isn’t like there’s going to be much confusion.

But I’m still thining of changing my professional name.  I figure I have to do it now before I publish, otherwise I look like I’m trying to hide something.  But I’m not.  I just want something unique that pops out, something that (along with my stories and their titles) stands out among the fray. Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain had their reasons and didn’t seem to suffer for it.  Is it so wrong to want to literally make a name for myself?

I’ve tried anagrams and amalgams of odd influences in the past.  I’ve written letters to the editor under the name Roscoe Nickel (because I wanted to give more than my two cents worth), I’ve gone lower case, and with just initials.  Today I thought of one that’s a pip.  It’s lively, it’s unique, and best of all shows no hits on Google.

Avid Zey

I’m sure Suze is going to hate it.  maybe some of you might as well.  What say you?  Is it all folly?  Should I just worry about the writing and stet the name?

Can you tell the semester is over, and that I’m avoiding catching up on my reading?

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poetry friday: self-indugent nonsense edition

In my early teens growing up in LA I couldn’t wait to have a car so I could go exploring.  Public transit sucked, and getting around on a bicycle, though liberating, was dangerous.  I was too young to actually appreciate how much better getting around by bike was until I had a car at my disposal and the novelty wore off, another digression for another day.

I remember one day a friend of mine had heard that there were t-shirts available at a record store in Westwood, about a 7 mile (and one hour) trip by bike from where we lived. You have to understand, we were young, and the height of fashion for us was a shirt featuring a famous Los Angeles intersection immortalized in a song played on a (then) local radio show hosted by one Dr. Demento.  No one but a true insider would understand why were were proudly wearing Pico and Sepulveda t-shirts, and that’s just the way we liked it.

We had a vague sense of where we were going — it was a pretty straight shot up one of two Boulevards that followed the 405 freeway — but on our way home we somehow managed to find ourselves on a side street and landed in Santa Monica.  Lost and disoriented, we stopped to find a bathroom and get directions.  We went into a bookstore and while my friend found a friendly shopkeeper to direct us I found something wondrous and fascinating on display.

A calendar.

No, not a calender, but something more, something wholly subversive and delightful, something I was sure should have been illegal.  It was called The Wretched Mess Calendar, created by one Milford Stanley Poltroon, and it was hilarious.  Each month was renamed to some sort of theme, and every day was some sort of invented holiday.  Most of the holidays were puns or a play on words or a turn of a phrase — what more could a boy want.  I was in heaven.  Illustrated with clip art and copyright free photos from the early 20th century, it was an exercise in anarchy, as good as any American Dadaist tract.  And before we left to find our way home, I bought it.

Inside, there were all sorts of comments and jokes in the margins, but the centerfold held three things so magical I can practically still see them as clearly as if the 30-plus years since haven’t passed.  One was a section of Yak facts, all of which were totally invented (“Yak’s prefer mozzarella cheese”), and another element was a calendar made entirely of Sundays with the instruction that it was there if you ever needed a month of Sundays for some reason.  The last tidbit was a single poem, a piece of nonsense so perfect that I marveled at what sort of mind could conceive such a rhyme.  It went like this:

There’s a little man inside my head,
He’s wearing purple hose.
He uses my eyes to see out of
And throws garbage down my nose.

Oh, but that’s not all.  You see, there was another little ditty on that page as well, that had to do with hose and a nose, but with entirely different results:

Late last night Old Man Mose
Stuck a length of garden hose
In his ear and out his nose
“Freshens the mind,” said Old Man Mose.

Who was this poetic genius, and how is it I could never find anyone who had ever heard of The Wretched Mess?

Milford (Stanley) Poltroon was, to the best of my internet abilities, the pen name of a former West Coast advertising man named David Franklin Bascom.  Details are sketchy.  He may have quit advertising or he may have retired (a 1912 birth date is listed, which would have placed him in his 60s when I first discovered him) and took up fishing; wrote a couple of joke books on the subject of fishing (How to Fish Good and The Happy Fish Hooker) and apparently either had a syndicated column or a magazine (or both) called The Wretched Mess News.

The calendar, and later when I discovered copies of the Wretched Mess Catalog and News, were done in a style not unlike the zines of 80s and 90s.  Offset print on colored paper, they represented the same sort of aesthetic I aspired to as a sixth grader when I had hoped to start a publishing empire with my collection of illustrated puns.  It wasn’t until after I left college that the ‘zine world opened up and, for a brief time, I participated in the folly.  The echoes of Milford (Stanley) Poltroon and his Wretched Mess enterprises could be heard in all I did.

I don’t mean to suggest here that Bascom/Poltroon was a brilliant poet.  What I have come to understand was that he was, in essence, my touchstone, further proof that adults weren’t all serious. When you’re a boy on the cusp of puberty with a sense of the absurd and a fear of mediocrity, it’s a comfort to know that there’s still hope to grow up to be absurd.

It’s my birthday today.  When I grow up I want to be an inspirational absurdest for another generation.

Poetry Friday is hanging out with Mommy’s Favorite Children’s Books today.

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goth icon exposed as fraud!

Sometimes I think my desire to write tabloid headlines is a missed calling.  Or is ti even a calling at all?

So over at Children’s Illustration they stumbled onto a post over at BoingBoing, which discovered this little tidbit on a site called You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice, which I am now passing along to you, in case you missed it.

So I wonder how many goth kids who dig Emily realize that she’s perhaps tapped into some subconscious part of their childhood reading?

The thing is, artists and all creative people will borrow or appropriate influences.  Classically trained artists actually learn to copy the masters to better understand their methods and processes.  Once they have mastered the masters they then strike out on their own, usually in a style derivative of their influences which serves as a sort of journeyman-ship. Mastering that and breaking free, they become their own masters.

But rarely do imitations make or deserve more attention then their influences.  And the Emily brand is not small potatoes.  In the end, I wonder if I could do what Rob Reger did, if I could live with copying something so plainly obvious, and make a ton of money off of it, and be content knowing that I made my name off someone else’s words and images.

I think not.  Which I guess is why I’m stll poor and Reger is probably lauging all the way to the bank.

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two down, two to go

Well, technically there’s some end-o-semester paperwork to deal with, and a bit of reading to do before the next residency in January, but, yeah.  Half way through the MFA. It’s a little weird to think I’m only 13 months away from being done.

And then what?

So Suze asked me how it felt and, honestly, this felt a little anticlimactic. I think after October’s triumphant completion of the first draft, and November’s beginning of a new YA story, the revisions and essays didn’t feel all that inspiring.  The things on my mind right now are the next residency, picking a topic for my critical thesis, figuring out who would be best as an advisor.  Is it wrong to want someone who will let me slide by with a serviceable thesis so I can get back to the “real” work, the manuscript revisions and the new ideas?  Should I be thinking about stretching out a bit, checking out poetry (which scares the bejebers out of me), or picture books?  How much reading do I want to do right now, and do I want to read with an eye toward a thesis or to get some classics out of the way?  Some many questions zooming around, no room to enjoy the moment.

It does feel like I made a leap, or a turn, or some sort of break with my previous writing these past few months.  Writing the piece I sent in for the January workshops I wrote at a much slower pace, and with such deliberate steps, that I felt like a kid the first time on the bike without training wheels.  I’m wobbly, but under my own steam.  The complexity of what I attempted was more than anything I’d ever attempted before, an odd balancing act between a number of characters. And it’s funny.  At least I think it is, I hope it is.  That’s part of what I’m hoping to find out.

But I could tell, even while writing it, that my brain was synthesizing all these elements I have been learning, and studying, and writing essays about.  All these lessons about character, and establishing conflict, and trusting the reader, trusting the narrative, they are started to coalesce.  And for the first time, true third-person, not some fake first-person telling the story in third person.  As I write there is this pompous voiceover in my head, an unseen character narrating the story as I go.  I don’t know who this is, but he seems to know just what to say and how wryly it should be delivered.

Half done, mid-way, a turning point.  Deep breath.  Onward.

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