February 18, 2008

Downward Facing Narcoleptic

By Avery

The sun is missing, today. The rain has come down for hours, steady at times, drizzling at others. The wind is whipping through my opened windows, bringing into my office the day’s odd mix of warm humidity and chill breeze. I’m at my desk, staring at the screen with dry, scratchy eyes that are reluctant to stay open.

I’ve been working on my manuscript again, trying to trim it down before the next round of submissions. At this point, I think my generous word count is harming my efforts to secure an agent. So, I’ve begun another death-march through my work, killing as much as can be killed without harming the storyline. So, far, I’ve lobbed off a good seven thousand words. That takes me down to 155,000. A monster, still, I know, but a much smaller one than when I first started out. There are forty more chapters to go, and I’m hoping to make it under 149,000 by the end.

While necessary, this work is wearing on my mind. Everything is a second guess. Each word seems a weak substitute for a more brilliant, wildly elusive turn of phrase. The repetitiveness of the lines–lines I almost know by heart–and the endless stretches of white screen punctuated by little black symbols are having a soporific effect on me. I’m halfway between breakdown and shutdown, and struggling to stay awake.

I’ve made peppermint tea to stimulate my mind. I’ve gotten up and thrown punches at nothing. I’ve chased the cats around the house. I’ve tried downward facing dog to promote blood circulation in my brain. All I’ve managed to do is: 1) make myself run to the bathroom every six minutes, 2) pull something weird–and probably crucial–in my arm, 3) tripped over my fuzzy yellow raver slippers and nearly wiped out on the coffee table, and 4) shown my ass to the squirrel at the bird feeder. Despite all this rousing activity, I’m still sleepy.

Oh, wait. The water delivery guy is here. Well, that ought to keep me up for another five minutes. After that, I’m hitting the caffeine.

11 Comments | posted in Uncategorized

February 13, 2008

Today’s Thought — and It’s Not Mine

By Avery


Here’s a link to a post by RRN over at Any One Thing. He was kind enough to pop by here the other day, and, in reciprocating the poppiness, I found words many of us in this programmed-to-believe country would do well to consider.

So, have a look, and take back your mind.

Pollute Me

5 Comments | posted in Any One Thing, conditioning, free thinking, RRN

February 12, 2008

Free. My Favorite Word.

By Avery


Others have probably posted on this, but, I figured it’s such a good deal that it was worth repeating.

Our fantasy-friendly buds over at Tor are offering free downloadable SF/Fantasy books every week. Just fill out the little form I’ve so obligingly provided, register, and you’ll be sent a newsletter and a link to download the forever-yours file (yep, you get to keep ’em). First off is Mistborn by new author Brandon Sanderson, followed by Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. New authors and books will come every week!

Also, a more widely (at least from what I’ve seen) advertised deal from Harper Collins, where readers can read entire novels on their site for free. No playing Finders Keepers, here, though. Readers may only devour the pages on Harper Collins’ site, with no downloading or printing abilities. Still, The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho is up at present, and, from the bits I’ve read, the format limitations are worth the eyestrain.

Neil Gaiman will be pitching his hat into Harper’s new digital format ring, as well. If that’s not enough to send you into a twitchy-fit of joy, then listen up: he’s allowing his readers to choose the book they want posted. Readers can go to his website and vote for the novel they’d like to see posted.

It’s a smorgasbord of literature.

And it’s all gratis for our sticky little fingers.

Whee!

6 Comments | posted in Coelho, download, free, Gaiman, Harper Collins, novel, Sanderson, Scalzi, Tor

February 7, 2008

Making My Way Towards a Clearer Mind…or Not

By Avery


Deciding that television was rotting my brain (or at least seriously debilitating the part that allowed me to focus on one thing for more than ten seconds), I decided to shift gears and try some guided meditation. I found a few likely scenarios online and chose what seemed a simple task for my starting out: pretend to walk through a forest, cycling through the seasons until I ended up in a field of flowers under the brilliant summer sun.

I settled down and did the whole yoga breath thing, quieting my mind and relaxing my body. I closed my eyes and I was inside the fiery autumn forest–with Eric Idle. And so began the two-cent tour of my meditation.

“Right. If you look over here, you’ll see the pretty leaves. Do watch your step. Oi! There are some lovely ones over here. Alright, then, keep up. This way, please. This way.”

For several amused moments I followed Eric through the forest in my mind, watching his crazed hair and butler-ish charcoal suit duck in and out of the trees as he insisted I keep up with the tour. And then it hit me.

I really do watch too much TV.

15 Comments | posted in meditation Eric Idle

January 28, 2008

I Was Called "Emo" — and No One Got Hurt

By Avery


Two weeks ago, I received a frantic e-mail from my college roommate. It said something akin to, “Are you still as organized and neurotic as you used to be?” It seems finishing her masters and trying to raise a three year-old while pregnant with a second child had put her in the weeds household-wise. Always ready to help a friend (and more than gleeful for the opportunity to feed the OCD beast in my head), I took off for four days to help restore order to chaos. While I was there, my friend’s young daughter took to calling me “Emo,” which is the term for a maternal aunt in Korean. So, to my early dismay (and eventual delight) I was called “Emo,”and, as I hinted earlier, no one got their teeth kicked in for it.

As Emo Avery, I suddenly realized the power the old(er) have over the young. My tiny minion wore headbands when I did, ate what I said was delicious, and, at my behest, announced to her mother (a former punk with undoubted visions of impending karma) that she was going to wear black lipstick. Unfortunately, the lyrics from The Smiths were too hard for her to manage, so, “Girlfriend in a Coma” came out as, “Boppy, boppy, bop.”

All of this potentially useless backstory leads me to a frigid afternoon when I was driving the clan to Ikea to purchase storage containers. There was a CD in the car stereo playing “kid-friendly” versions of wildly inappropriate songs by current pop artists. At one point, a childish female voice belted out something about being, “A very bad girl.” For a moment, my mind spun at the suggestive nature of those lyrics. After a few moments of indignation, I realized I was listening with my adult ears. While world-weary Emo Avery was picturing whips and leather, her inherited niece was blithely singing along, thinking this Very Bad Girl had just been busted coloring the walls purple with her crayons.

It’s all about perspective–first understanding ours is shackled to us much like our mortal coils, then realizing the need to try and step out of it, and ultimately accepting that no matter how much we want otherwise, our collective life experiences unfailingly filter our comprehension of the rest of this crazy, complicated race. As writers, we’re beholden to provide a glimpse inside the human condition, destined to forge entire people without applying personal prejudice. The question is, can we do it?

No.

Regardless of how fast we sprint, we can never outrun ourselves. And so our private filters color every page with our own experience, inserting the essence of our beings into each word we write or say, into every encounter we come across. But, it is the simple attempt to see beyond that allows us the chance to guess at the inner workings of others, to create new and interesting characters that live and breathe inside the ink we put down–and can occasionally help transform a string of horrific lyrics into pure innocence.

Thanks to Natasha (Spyscribbler) for a great post that solidified for me the importance of this seemingly trivial event.

10 Comments | posted in emo, experience, perspective, writing

January 16, 2008

The Cost of Contentment

By Avery

The Architect and I had an interesting discussion last night about the correlation between artistic inspiration and contentment–or rather, discontentment. We both noted when we’re happier, we’re less productive. When we feel domestically at ease, the creative urges aren’t so urgent, the drive to show the world our souls less demanding.

We’ve all heard the tales of the genius among us, the boozing, reclusive artists who always teetered on the edge of madness, spinning their masterful works while tap-dancing on suicide’s razor-thin edge. It is their work we grudgingly admire, our esteem tinged with notes of jealousy, tinted gray from pity at their usually disastrous ends. The question today is neither of their eminence in literature, nor their firm hold on the threads of desperation, but merely a question of whether or not their despondency gave fuel to their artistic fire. Did their singularity of purpose drive away all other earthly aims, making them intolerable companions, thus fueling their solitude? Or, did their wholehearted attachment to the pain of life, their complete submersion in every moment of despair, build the foundations of their brilliance? And, if the latter is the case, what would a struggling novice relinquish to attain that level of artistic supremacy?

For me, the answer is, not much. The Architect and I have had eleven good years, the most content of them being the most recent. While I crave even a fraction of the vision that drove our most celebrated authors to craft their respective masterpieces, I have no desire to let go the peace that has pervaded my life these past five years. Here, in my chilly, boxy old house I cook and clean. I grow herbs in the summer and fill rows of bird feeders in the winter. I make garish fifties-retro kitchen curtains and play with my cats. My life is simple and fairly uncomplicated at this point in my existence, and not at all conducive to crafting twisted tales.

In my younger days, when every event around me was a direct wound to my soul, when I was struggling to find both myself and anyone who’d date myself, I wrote much more morose material. Whether it carried the spark of genius–I doubt it. I suppose even then, my life held threads of joy, attachments both material and interpersonal that could pull me from whatever funk I at present wallowed in. These links to life obviously saved me from solitude and misery, but did they remove from me the chance for greatness? I’ll never know. For, despite my adolescent self’s best efforts, I managed to grow up fairly well adjusted.

Having a deficit of inner demons may not sound like it bodes well for one who writes of the dark, but the world is full of evil, torment and pain. It oozes from the pages of the paper every morning, glides from the pseudo-concerned voices of news anchors on a daily basis. It’s all there, ripe for the picking. I suppose in the end the dark doesn’t need to be my own, as long as I, in the end, own it.

What about you? What amount of happiness would you relinquish for a chance at pure genius?

12 Comments | posted in Uncategorized

January 11, 2008

What I did on my Christmas Vacation

By Avery

It was always dark (or crazy foggy) when we saw the cities, so you get stuck with the rest: an odd assortment of things that seemed cool or just plain amusing.

7 Comments | posted in Uncategorized

January 9, 2008

Happy to be Back

By Avery

Well, that was the most eventful Christmas ever. The Architect and I shared Christmas with my family. One of my nephews hurled all Christmas day, supposedly too excited about Santa to keep his food where it belonged. The Architect and I woke up at four (we didn’t really sleep, so I guess the technical term would be ‘got up’). We made it on the road by five and drove sixteen hours, stopping only for bbq in Georgia. We arrived at my brother-in-law’s house around nine o’clock that night. I, too, must have been overly psyched about Santa’s arrival, because I promptly started to hurl and didn’t stop for ten hours. Let me tell you, there’s not much worse than defiling your nephew’s private bathroom in a brand new, upper six figure house and then having to take his Big League Chew stash out of its storage bucket so you can continue hurling in that when you’re too weak to get out of his bed. The next morning, he said, “Avery, was that you?” I supposed he thought it was the Architect making that god-awful noise. Or, maybe a Yeti mystically sucked into his bathroom, trapped and unable to work the door handle.

I recovered after a day or so and we set off on adventures to St. Petersburg and Tampa. We picked vegetables and fruit from my brother-in-law’s fields (he owns a produce company) and hung out with some friends of his on New Year’s Eve, drinking somebody’s homemade blackberry wine, which, happily, did not cause blindness or more upchucking.

We left for Orlando New Year’s day and the warm weather departed with us. It was forty degrees with high winds two of the four days we were there. The parks were packed with people and there was no getting on any of our favorite rides. My appetite had returned somewhat, so we found some really good dinners, our favorite being at Todd English’s Bluezoo. We did manage to see the dancing Christmas lights at Disney MGM. Although the fake snow they blew into the streets was less a novelty and more a reminder of just how cold it was (especially since it had been eighty just a few days earlier).

The drive home Saturday was long and torturous, mostly because of the impending drive up the Eastern Shore of Virginia once we crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. In the daytime, the bridge/tunnel is a beautiful sight–a serpentine structure grazing just above the water for twenty miles, vanishing here and there as it dips underwater. But, at night, it’s just a stretch of dark, surrounded by denser blackness on all sides. In the distance its string of lamps halt as if you’re about to reach the end of the world, and it’s only when you’re right on top of it you realize there’s a tunnel ahead. Once on the other side, there are two painful hours of fifty mile-an-hour nothing to navigate, the drive permeated by the stench of chicken farms and punctuated only by a handful of one-light towns with twenty mile-an-hour speed limits and loads of bored cops just waiting for your speedometer to creep a single notch above the posted limit.

Still, despite the numerous pitfalls, we managed to have a good amount of fun. And now all I’ve got to do is shake this cold my Florida niece was generous enough to send back with me.

Speaking of sharing, I’ll put up some of the better photos of our trip in the next day or so, once I feel well enough to mess around with Photoshop. In the meantime, I’ll be making the rounds, checking out how your own holidays went.

8 Comments | posted in Christmas, Florida, Vacation

December 20, 2007

Sub-Tropical Well-Wishes

By Avery

It’s about that time. In a couple days I’ll be headed to sunny Florida. So, in-between packing, wrapping and worrying my cat’s controlled heart condition will mysteriously become symptomatic the moment I step foot out the door, I’m going to wish you all a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a blessed Yule, and a joyous any other holiday you care to celebrate.

I’ll be back after the new year with glorious tales of sunshine and 85% humidity. Until then, go enjoy your families. Like it or not, they’re pretty much the only ones who’ll always love you and be proud of you, despite the fact you put disgusting things in your stories.

Have a happy one, kids!

13 Comments | posted in Uncategorized

December 14, 2007

The Big Guns

By Avery


Yep. I want an agent so bad, I’ve turned to the Big Guy. Thanks to this site, I got a response right away. Seems even He isn’t going to make me any promises though. Dang!

Hi Avery,
I got your note. Thanks for writing!
I am writing you here. Right on your screen.

I like writing this way. Because you see my note right away!

You are already all grown up! It is hard to believe!

I’m really glad to hear you have been good most of the time.

I am very busy again this year. So much to do before Christmas! The elves and I are having fun. We are making presents. And we are shopping for presents too. Mrs. Claus is supervising.

You should see us all running around. We look like a merry go-round!

Blitzen is sure he won’t catch a cold this year. (He catches a cold every year. Right before Christmas!)

He is wearing a red coat with a big hood to stay warm. Only his nose pokes out. He looks like a red coat running around on four legs.

Well, back to work. I’ll try my best to get you the things you want, representation by a literary agent and all. Hmmmm. I had better not promise, though. Because I can’t be sure.

This is a great time of year to be very, very good. What with Christmas coming….

Merry Christmas!

Your friend,
Santa Claus

5 Comments | posted in Uncategorized