Official 2010 Write Your A** Off Day (Pt 2)

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I mentioned a “contest” of sorts in my post the other day about the New York Writers Coalition’s June 12 event: write 3,000 words on that one day, they said, and you could enter a drawing. Winner of the drawing would receive a free consultation with author Jennifer Belle. But I added:

…other than this email [from a NYWC publicist], I haven’t seen any official confirmation of this 3K-word challenge — like details about how the drawing will work — particularly for out-of-town writers. I’ll see if I can learn more.

Now I’ve got some of those details (thanks, Adaeze!):

  • First, sign up for the online “write-a-thon” here. You have to register, but it’s free.

Note: New registrations do not take effect automatically, but are human-moderated. This means you should expect a time lag before being able to do much of anything at the site. Do not wait until June 12 to register!

  • On June 12th, they’ll use the honor system. (My correspondent says, “We’re relying on them to be honest with themselves” — and I’ll wag my own index finger in your direction on this point. I mean, come on: it’s not like they’re requiring 3,000 tightly written words, right?)
  • When you’ve met the basic word-count requirement, you’ll post a comment on a write-a-thon thread they’ll open at the site.
  • At the end of the day, they’ll close the comment thread and draw a winner, announcing it at the site.
  • And then, finally, they’ll provide details to the winner about the logistics of claiming his/her consultation with Jennifer Belle.

If I learn anything else about the rules, or The Day itself, or Jennifer Belle, or… oh, hell: if I learn anything else about anything vaguely relevant, I’ll post the information here at RAMH. In the meantime, if you feel ready to take the challenge, hie thee to the NYWC discussion board and sign up.

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Official 2010 Write Your A** Off Day

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You may remember from a few months ago that Moonrat, that charmingly impetuous rodent, instigated an early “Take 2” of the Write Your A** Off Day which I myself pretty much ripped off last year, from the New York Writers Coalition.

As expected, the official 2010 version of Write Your A** Off Day will occur somewhat later. I’ve recently heard from a Coalition publicity official, who tells me that this year’s date is set for June 12. As before, if you will be in the New York City area on that date, the Coalition has all sorts of activities planned for you.

But my correspondent also tells me that they’ve put an additional twist on this year’s commitment to devote a day to your writing:

We’ve created the challenge of writing 3,000 words (about 10 pages) in one day, and we know you can do it!… In addition, everyone who completes the challenge and writes 3,000 words on June 12 will have the chance to enter a drawing to win a free private phone consultation about your writing project with Jennifer Belle!

Three thousand words in one day. You can do that, right?

(True, NaNoWriMo demands only an average of one thousand words a day. But this is a Saturday! Still a month away! Plenty of time to outline what you’re going to write, stock up on food and beverages, purchase tickets to send family members out of town…!)

Now, one caveat: other than this email, I haven’t seen any official confirmation of this 3K-word challenge — like details about how the drawing will work — particularly for out-of-town writers. I’ll see if I can learn more.

Update, 2010-05-15: I’ve got more information. See this more recent post on the 3K-word challenge.

In the meantime, what say? Give it a try? Launch yourself into a summer of big writing with one big day?

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Sorting Through an Old Hive

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As some of you on Blogger-based weblogs may know, a fraction of those sites recently had to convert from a particular old technology to a newer one. The owners of affected blogs received a series of email notifications from Blogger tech support, and by now any such sites have been converted over to The New Way… or can no longer be updated.

Running After My Hat is my first non-Blogger blog. But over the years — for myself and for others, some paying and some not — I have built and otherwise had a hand in contributing to a total of twelve Blogger sites. I got notifications that four of them had to be converted to Blogger’s current service level, and somehow managed to get them all switched over about a week before the May 1 deadline.

One of the four was a real relic — one I’d almost forgotten about.

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Identity Crises

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[Image: ‘A Little Family History,’ by B. Kliban]

From whiskey river:

Moment

A person wakes from sleep
and does not know for a time
who she is, who he is.

This happens in a lifetime
once or twice.
It has happened to you, no doubt.

Some in that moment
panic,
some sigh with pleasure.

How each kind later envies the other,
who must so love their lives.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

We don’t have to hate ourselves for our own vulnerability. We don’t have to hate ourselves for what life has done to us. We don’t have to hate ourselves because hurt or loss or longing has gotten to us. Our desires will always be with us in some form, keeping us firmly attached to a world that will hurt us. We must come to love ourselves, love our life, in its vulnerability, in its impermanence, not in spite of all its flaws, but because of them. Because the vulnerability, the changes, the flaws make us who we are.

(Barry Magid)

…and (italicized portion):

Making art and viewing art are different at their core. The sane human being is satisfied that the best he/she can do at any given moment is the best he/she can do at any given moment. […] Such sanity is, unfortunately, rare. Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product; the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers’ concerns are not your concerns (although it’s dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.

(David Bayles [source])

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Real-Life Dialogue (Household Hints Edition)

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The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA. Family gathering for Kentucky Derby viewing: gambols and gambles. Much food and beverage being prepared and consumed. He has just returned to house after walking Pooch. Everyone but She is in the living room, talking, laughing, watching TV.

He: [entering kitchen, where He knows She must be] We had a productive walk— What?

She stands before open pantry, laughing madly, pulling things from shelves and dropping them on floor.

She: I can’t find my baking soda!

He: [mentally running through menu items, not remembering any which involve baking soda] Your, uh, baking so—

She: Yes! Baking soda! I can’t find it!

She shuts pantry door, which immediately springs back open because of heap of boxes, cans, and canisters on floor.

He: What do you need baking soda f—?

She: [reaching back into pantry, emerging with familiar dull-yellow box; running around to front of stove, and still bursting sporadically into demented giggles] I need it for the fire!

He: Er, the fire—?

She: Yes! [yanks open oven door] The fire! The potholder fire!

She points, needlessly now, to a flaming mass of thick furry dark-blue fabric on bottom of oven. The oven is filled with smoke, and also with a pan of oven-broiled sandwiches for the Derby Day crowd. She dumps half the box of baking soda on the erstwhile potholder, and shuts the oven door.

She: I dropped a potholder in the oven.

He: Yes, I noticed. But the—

She: I knew baking soda would put it out safely.

He: But the, uh, the pan—

She: [leaning back against counter, sipping at mint juleps] You should never use water on an oven fire.

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The Self I Cannot See

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From whiskey river:

Life continuously refuses to show us the plot. The desire to give it shape, and by shape, meaning, is so great anything will do. But Orwell would have us stand against all the “smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don’t cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being.

(Terrance Keenan [source, including the first three sentences])

…and:

Self-Portrait

Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers – but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor’s profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I’m no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife’s face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don’t know.
I’m truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that — so far —
belongs to me.

(Adam Zagajewski; translated by Clare Cavanagh [source])

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Review: Enlightenment, by Maureen Freely

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My review of this novel is now online, over at The Book Book blog.

I don’t normally write reviews of books which I don’t recommend. I don’t even like to. It’s possible to have fun with a writing a bad review, yes, a sort of malicious glee. But the fun is diminished — especially in reviewing a debut novel, like Enlightenment — by knowing what the author often had to go through for his or her book to see the light of day. So many good books await our attention, after all: why beat up on one that didn’t succeed for me?

Enlightenment was a special case. I began it with — and was for a while sustained by — high hopes. The exotic, almost completely unfamiliar setting (contemporary Turkey); the tangled web of international relationships both during the Cold War and post-9/11; the jacket copy description; even the cover — it all said that the book would appeal to me, a thought-provoking relief from my usual fare.

But wow, I didn’t like Enlightenment much at all.

And I was disturbed that I didn’t like it. When I finished it I checked up on the bona fides of the jacket blurbs — maybe they’d just been highly selective, y’know? Not only did it receive high critical praise, but reviewers often praised it for elements which I thought to be missing, or at best unconvincing.

So I don’t know. Maybe I was just in a weird psychological place for the first quarter of the year. Whatever the reason, frankly, I’m not even convinced by my own review — so do read it skeptically.

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“Ye Gods — Not That Again…!”

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I‘m going to start this post with some music which did not bore me at all.

On Saturday nights, our local public-radio station broadcasts a program originating in Chicago, called Midnight Special, whose slogan, per the program’s Web site, is “folk music with a sense of humor.” And the other night I just happened to catch a song called “Don’t Make Me Sing,” by an artist named Greg Greenway.

Now, Greenway — check his Web site — is a serious guy: not a “comic” performer, as a rule, although he obviously has a good sense of humor. But he’s been singing in small venues long enough to have seen a wide range of audience response… not all of it applause. “Don’t Make Me Sing” adopts the point of view of an audience member with things on his mind other than the person onstage.

I’ve transcribed the lyrics below the audio-player widget (please let me know of any mistakes); as you will see, this live performance comes with a certain amount of… well, let’s say it departs from what seem to be the “official” words. (In a performance captured via YouTube, Greenway manages to get through the song with somewhat less, er, distraction. Once he gets started, that is.)

 

Lyrics:

Don’t Make Me Sing
(by Greg Greenway)

I ate at the bar
I surveyed the space
Two tables from the stage front
My favorite place

I was bursting with pride
I was flushed with success
I’d had to ask her out six times
Before she’d finally said…
…Okay.

Then this guy started singing
It was a pretty good show
Then that telltale expression
Don’t even go there — oooh nooo…

refrain 1:
Don’t make me sing
That’s why I paid to see you
It’s a show business trick,
Singer/Songwriter shtick
Why don’t you write something new?

refrain 2:
Don’t make me sing
Don’t even act like I should
Give me a break, I’m on a first date
Why don’t you write something good?

We gave it our best shot
We gave him a chance
Until he turned into Barney
In combat boots and black pants

[refrain 1]

Everybody!

[refrain 2]

I gave into peer pressure
I sang with all that I’ve got
She used to be smiling
Now she’s checking her watch

[refrain 1]

Don’t make me sing
They hit me up at the door
I did my job all day
Why should I have to pay
To help you do yours?

Don’t make me sing
Why don’t you try something else?
If I had a good voice
I’d be up there myself

[refrain 1]

[refrain 2]

I’ve been thinking about the song quite a bit since Saturday. Aside from enjoying the rhyme and melody (and of course laughing at the sense), I’ve also tried (and failed) to come up with analogy, for writers and readers, to the live singer/audience dynamic which Greenway depicts so wryly.

At first I tried to think of readings I’d attended — what do writers ask of their audiences on such occasions, which audiences might be unwilling to grant?

But the real analogy, I believe, isn’t in the live performance of a written work. It’s in the general unspoken contract between writer and reader. This is the contract which takes effect when you sit down in your favorite reading chair, open a new book, and begin to read.

What little gimmicks do writers rely on which drive you crazy, make you twitch, maybe make you wish you had picked up that other book instead? For example: cliffhanger chapter endings, maybe? gratuitous insertion of untranslated foreign words and phrases? picaresque plotlines? (Note: this is a question about writers in general, or writers in a particular genre, not about a specific writer’s tics and foibles.)

And if you’re a writer, have you — in horror, no doubt — ever found evidence in your own writing of something which drives you crazy in others’? If so, what (if anything!) did you do about it?

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Just Wait

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[Image above from The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, which observes:
“I guess if you don’t just go grab a seat you may never get one.”]

From whiskey river:

The swarm of words
and little stories
are just to loosen you
from where you are stuck.

(Shitou Xiqian)

…and:

O, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or cow.  And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning… or wise… And still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.

(Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund [source])

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The Face of the Writer

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Just found this at Jesse Kornbluth’s Head Butler site.

The subject of the post was James Frey, author of the Million Little Pieces bogus memoir of a few years ago; I liked what it said about writers and writing, and liked the Orwell quote very much:

Contrary to what Frey, his publisher, Larry King and Oprah believe, writing is not a career. For some writers  — for the writers who, I like to think, will endure — it’s a calling. Those who write especially well are like priests. It follows that books are sacred texts, and that the best ones — even the best novels — faithfully deliver what the writer believes is the truth.

That is why we have favorite writers, just as we have favorite musicians; their works “speak” to us. And it is why we have very definite ideas who they are. George Orwell ends his essay on Charles Dickens by addressing this:

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

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