Tag: Writing

  • ODDS and ENDS: Getting Started, Oh Tottenham, and Bloody Mary Brunch

    (Forgetting her’s the nature of my flight…)

    Boy, do I suck and starting something new. And I also suck at just getting back to good habits. I say this because I have found a way to completely, and in the most air-tight form of rationalization, not go to the gym for a month. Even this morning, I was ready to not go to the gym, and I made sure that I did not go. Do I feel good about this decision? Absolutely not. Will I go to the gym on Monday? Odds are that I will not. Yes, indeed; I have found a way to squander the entire month of September. To a degree, I have impressed myself. You may think that this is easy to do, but it is not. Okay, okay, okay… Tuesday of next week; I’m going to the gym.

    Wow! Tottenham Hotspur sucks this season. Really sucks. They suck in a way I thought was impossible to suck. There was no way they could get worse than last season. No, no, they found a way. And they spent a shit ton of money, and somehow they suck even more! They are at the bottom. Completely at the bottom of the Premiere League table. Sitting at #20, with two points. Incidentally, their two points is equal to as many goals they have scored this season. Just… wow. Now, as a Cubs fan (and the Cubbies did get eliminated from the playoffs recently) I know what it’s like for your team to be at the bottom. And normally I would say that there is only one direction, and that’s up! But in the Premiere League, there is relegation, so we might not have hit bottom yet.

    Saturday, I have brunch plans, which sounds fancy, and a little pretentious… All of that is true. But it also means morning/day drinking in a very socially acceptable way. Happy weekend to all, and to all a good drunken afternoon nap.

  • My Story Won’t Work, But That’s Okay

    I have been working on this one short story, off and on, for like four months now, and the thing just won’t work. I’m on my fourth draft of it, which also means that I am attacking it from yet a new direction. I would like to say that fourth time’s the charm, but at this point, I would just be happy with a glimmer of hope that I am moving in the right direction.

    Which brings me to this question; When should I throw in the towel on this story?

    But as soon as I asked that question, it made more sense to invert the question; Why haven’t I given up on this story?

    Well… I think it’s funny, and original. I think there is a kernel of truth in it, which needs to be shared. And I like working on it, though it does feel laborious at times.

    Now, I do write stories which, I know while writing them, are complete pieces of shit, or when I finish them, confirms they are pieces of shit. I’m not being hard on myself, these things are garbage, but I know the exercise of writing a story is important too, even if no one will ever see it. And sometimes I have to get a story out of my head so I can move on to the next thing.

    Not this story… it keeps poking at me, and won’t let me leave it alone. I hate rewriting, but it keeps pushing me to take another crack at it.

  • Personal Review: “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson

    Up until a couple of months ago, I hadn’t ever heard of Denis Johnson. (And yes, the rock I live under is very comfortable.) I found out about him from a review of Ted Geltner’s biography of Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures. From that article, I was intrigued and put Johnson’s Jesus’ Son on my reading list.

    If I had pushed myself, I could have read the book in a day, but spreading it out over three seemed more appropriate. A couple of things jumped out at me, besides the fact that it was a quick read. First, this book of short stories just oozed 90’s literature, which is strange as most of the stories take place in the 70’s, while the stories themselves were written in the 80’s, and only published in 1992. I can’t fully say why it felt so 90’s, but it Gen-X despondent seemed to be lurking in corners. The second idea the book presented to me is that the drunk/addict poet or writer is rather cliché now. Maybe not as drunken muscled as Hemmingway, Kerouac, or Burkowski, but the stories in the volume ran in the same vein. Here, we are presented with pretty much the same first-person character from story to story, who is too poetic to be a regular run of the mill drunk. No, this is the tragic drunk writer whose writing is their only salvation – the thing that keeps them going.

    That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the book. No, I was struck at how simple, and effortless everything in the stories felt. It carried such weight but drifted on the air. The destruction of a character’s life never felt so beautiful and fragile. No, I get why Jesus’ Son is placed on best of short story collection lists, year after year. Johnson’s stories and writing style has clearly been influential. I was about half way through “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” when it dawned on me how many flash writers must consider Denis Johnson a primary source, with his books lovingly squirreled away on their shelves.

    The final thought that I had while reading this book was that these stories felt like they were fun to write. Some books can feel laborious – not to read that is – such as writing it took time, work, dedication, perseverance to deliver the story exactly the way the writer wanted to tell it. Jesus’ Son felt like it was a blast to write. Either making it all up, or using real life situations, or maybe combining it all together, the end result was a book that felt like it was just as entertaining to write as it was to read.

    Having said all of this, I must now return to my home under the rock. There, I will toss this book up on the shelf, with all the other collections of short stories that I own and wonder how did I miss out on Denis Johnson when he was alive?

  • I’m back from fishin’ (Unedited)

    In reality, I was traveling to Texas to visit my family, especially my father. See, back on Labor Day, while my dad was staying with my brother and his family, my father had an angina episode. Though scary as all hell, it wasn’t a heart attack, and he is fine. He’ll have some follow ups with his doctor and cardiologist, but on the whole, he’s fine. I was staying with him for the week, to make sure that he took it easy and recovered. Besides, I like spending time with my dad. And I got to see my whole Texas family, so considering what had happened, it actually was a pretty good trip.

    Before the trip, it was awful. I got a call from my brother saying that Dad was having chest pains and they were taking him to the hospital. My brothers and sisters-in-law did a great job of keeping me and my family in the loop on what was going on, but being 1,500 miles away, all that it created in me was a feeling of powerlessness. Cheering on from afar, but knowing there was nothing I could do other than get on a plane.

    Funny how there are still instances and situations that I can find myself in that just smack me down to feeling like a helpless child.

    Though I told myself no to go there, not to think those thoughts; I did. I thought of living in a world without my father. To exist orphaned, no parents, lost and adrift. So what if I am middle aged? My folks are supposed to be here forever.

    But I already lost my mother. It will be six years this October. I can feel the gloom building in me as I get closer to that date. It’s not as bad as it was. I’m healing, learning to remember all the things that made her a wonder mom, and all the quirky weird stuff that she did that made her uniquely our mother.

    Just not ready to lose my father.

    And I haven’t, for which I am thankful. Still got some more time to make him laugh.

  • Just Some General Bitching (Unedited)

    I’m having a hard time getting myself motivated. To do anything, really.

    Doesn’t help that I got two rejections in the last twenty-four hours. But this is part of the gig; Lots of rejection, and trying to not let it get to you. I’m at the point now where I am beginning to think that the story really isn’t that great. Or it needs a rewrite. Or maybe I just need to burn it and rid it’s presence from my life.

    The other thing is that I have spent the past hour catching up on my flash reading. I subscribe to a large number of online journals who email out flash fiction, and I have fallen behind of late, or the whole Summer. Anyway, I’m trying to get on top of it, and see what is worth reviewing. Nothing has been peaking my interest, and I started to think maybe it’s not the fiction, but me. Maybe my head isn’t in the right space for this.

    Time to take a break.

    More like changing gears, because here I am working on the blog. I have to get in my 1,000 words a day. (You know, it’s not so much writing as it is typing, and I think somewhere Truman Capote is laughing with me.) The only way to get better at something is practice. Practice! PRACTICE!

    As I sit here, I remember once, maybe back in college or sometime in my past, there was this writer complaining how much they hated blogs and bloggers. They said it was useless writing as all bloggers do is bitch about things in badly written ways. I don’t think writer was totally wrong.

    Yet, I feel that someone needs to sit down here and take a stand to say that some writing should just bitching, complaints, and listing of grievances. Isn’t bitching a form of expression?

    Sure, it would be better if I could string this expression in a clear narrative form, that has a well-defined beginning, middle, and end – with that end being a wonderful conclusion the initial thought. That would be nice and clean and concise.

    But life is messy and not clean, and sometimes this human experience is muddy, and gross, and undefined and rough and jagged. And uses bad grammar and has typos or type-o’s, or however one would spell that word.

    Sometimes you just got to get it off your chest to move on. And sometimes you want to scream into the void that a blog. A testament, a covenant that this moment existed, and was real, and had a value to no one else other than the person who wrote it.

    There you go.