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The Writer Who Couldn’t ReadPosted by dhoffman on June 21st, 2010

Not me, thankfully, but I thought I’d share this interesting story from NPR about a writer who woke up one morning and discovered his brain could no longer process the written word.

It’s a harrowing story but one with a happy ending:

The Writer Who Couldn’t Read

More “on topic” it didn’t feel like it but it was actually a pretty good weekend for writing.  Pretty bad for most other things but I guess if you spend enough time in front of the screen, you can get some good stuff out.

I’m hoping this week is good, too, and I might be in sort of an interesting place come July (which is — yow — next week).

The Bret Easton Ellis “Interview”Posted by dhoffman on June 13th, 2010

Something about the following is just fascinating to me:

The Bret Easton Ellis Meets the Press Routine

It’s from Carolyn Kellogg’s web-site (I love the “who? huh?” link in the navigation bar) and, as someone who tends to read author interviews and wonder just how much is spontaneous and how much is — while not being untrue — engineered for the marketing process, it’s a great, interesting read.

Listen: if you’re Bret Easton Ellis (and if you’re reading this and you don’t know who he is, shame on you) of course you’re presenting at least a somewhat manufactured face to the press.  You’re a controversial figure and you’re fascinating, to boot.  The books you write detail a certain kind of lifestyle and, yes, readers expect their author to have real-world experience in such a lifestyle.

Not that anyone thinks, say, J.K. Rowling has a lot of experience fighting evil wizards.

Or that Peter Benchley has a lot of experience fighting sharks.

Or that Johnathan Carroll . . . actually, scratch that.  I met Jonathan Carroll once and it wouldn’t shock me in the least to discover he’s living 100% in the world he writes about.  And I write that in the absolute best possible way one can write such a thing.

Animals, to turn this around to me, is a story that has elements people familiar to me would probably not have a rough time seeing through the lens of knowing me.  Similarly, there are fantastical elements to the story and I hope friends and family wouldn’t read the book and think, “oh yeah, I could totally see him doing that”.

Writers write about “things they know” but how do you really limit what you “know”.  My next book is going to take place on a submarine, for instance.  Aside from the old ride at Disney, I’ve never been on a submarine.  Still, after thinking about and researching the story for more than a year, I think I’m comfortable saying I “know” the world of that submarine and her crew.

That’s what being a writer is all about.  You have an idea and you build a world around it.  Sometimes you write about the world outside your door.  Sometimes you write about a world that exists wholly in your own imagination.  What you “know” is what you see when you think about that world.

Dropping OrangePosted by dhoffman on June 11th, 2010

It’s been a hell of a week.  I’m sure I’ve said that before but it bears repeating in this instance.

Mainly, it’s been a “holy shit work is busy” kind of week.  That usually equates to “dammit I didn’t get to do a lick of writing”.  Well, I did get some work done Monday night, but that was for something non-Animals-related.  So it’s good, but it’s not as good as it could be.

When it comes to writing, I am greedy.  I want all I can have.  Which I figure is kind of nice because, ultimately, the more I “have” the more I get to put out there for folks to read.

At any rate, this is sour grapes and, if there’s one nice thing about a low-writing week, it’s that I spend a lot of time thinking about writing, having good ideas, sorting things out which needed sorting out.

And I did a lot of that.

There’s another nice thing about low-writing weeks, though this can vary; if I’m not writing, oftentimes it’s because I’m doing nice things with nice people — what work did to me this week was limit my ability to stay up stupid-late three nights in a row.  What it didn’t do was prevent me from going gaming on Tuesday night or watching The Great Gatsby with Jessy on Wednesday night.

So, it’s not bad, you know, just differently good.

Animals proceeds apace and it sort of feels like I’m sitting in a souped up stock car, gunning the engine, sending peals of rubbery-smelling smoke high into the sky, waiting for the light to shift from red to yellow to (finally) green.  I might be kidding myself, but I’m more than half-way through this draft and I’m hoping things are going to roll once that light does turn green.

As far as the other writing thing, that’s . . . well, I wouldn’t want to call it a “secret” project, but it’s something I’m doing for a friend and — right now — it’s not really something I’d feel alright posting about (not that anyone would see it here, eh?).  Should that particular thing proceed and grow to what my buddy is looking for it to be, expect a lot of links, embedded videos, the works.

As far as the title of this post goes, the “Orange” in question refers to little orange game pieces for a euro-style boardgame I’ve been dabbling with creating.  I was traveling into the office from a client’s location this morning when I had the idea to “drop” orange — not from the game, but from the gameboard.

It’s an odd thought, and won’t make much sense to, well, anyone but me, but that small change effects massive differences to the notion of the game.  Previously, having all the colors on the board (orange, blue, green, red and yellow) meant the game needed to work a certain way.  With one color off the board (orange is the most common color in the game) I can change the dynamic of how all the other colors work, and offer another level of strategy to players.

It’s pretty exciting.  Sort of like spotting a connection in a story you’d previously been missing.  So, that’s a nice thing.

Working in three different mediums, as I suddenly seem to be doing, it’s occurred to me that I may have accidentally worked myself into a place very much like the sort of place I’d like to be in life.  Creating things, creating different things and seeing them out in the world, if I had to describe a dream job, I think that’s about what it would sound like.

Holiday Weekends and New ThingsPosted by dhoffman on June 1st, 2010

Holiday weekends, as a rule, are never great times for parking in front of a flickering computer screen and writing.  It’s a weather thing, partially, but it’s also the fact that friends are around and it’s not socially acceptable to excuse yourself at ten o’clock when there’s company and disappear for four hours.

Still, not a terrible weekend, as far as things go.

Which is to say, the few days “off” were relaxing and great and when I sat down to write last night, Monday night, after the smoke had settled and we’d brought the towels in from the pool, I wrote about 1,400 words like it was No Big Deal and the bits of Chapter Fifteen I was fighting with myself over feel like they’re well in the past.

I thought about writing more but I made myself stop.  Didn’t want to overdo it and I had another project I wanted to spend a drop of time on, as well.

That other project . . . well, that’s under wraps for right now.  It’s pretty interesting and exciting but I want to make sure it’s going to materialize the way it seems to be materializing before I say anything official.  It’s a new thing, and a new way for me to do the thing, and that’s exciting.  Even if it doesn’t work out, it’s been a great exercise pulling things together and flexing the creative muscles in a non-standard way.

Also, in preparation for this mysterious thing, I decided to try something a little different for organizing my starting out thoughts.  Just an outline but it was SO effective I think it’s safe to say I’ll be playing with one of these whenever I’m starting a future project.

All I did was write out non-descriptive, non-dramatic, non-fancy one-liners for each basic element of the story.  So, “Amy goes for a run” or “Tommy goes to the laundromat”.  Simple as hell but by removing the flowery stuff I was really able to cut to the base of the story.  It took about fifteen minutes to put the whole thing together and then I just sort of sat back and marveled at what a useful tool it was.

Which is nice.  No long weekends for almost a month and it’s my goal to really get cranking on Animals now.  I’ve got this other thing, sure, and that’ll take up time.  But I would love to have a finished Second Draft by the end of the summer.  Something I could pop back to and tidy up and maybe let a few folks read so they can tell me how terrible it is.

That’d be kind of fun, I think.  Not the “Gawd, this sucks!” parts but the “Here, want to read this?” parts.

Something to look forward to, then.  Always good to have one of those floating around.