Month: November 2021

It is hard to type. Very hard to type with staring your way on its way. There are 43 turkeys staring at me. Tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after that until Thanksgiving arrives. I think. They may not leave quickly. They may stay the weekend. 42 of them, all staring at me.

In San Antonio, New Mexico, there is a bar and cafe that has been there since 1945. They serve, among many other things, what is, or perhaps was, the finest Green Chili Cheese Burger in the world. Better than the Owl Cafe in Albuquerque. Certainly, I had a few whenever my travels took me south (I lived in Albuquerque from 1985 until a day before 1990) I would have one. So that has been over 30 years and I still remember the Owl Bar & Cafe’s green chili cheese burgers. I cannot think of another burger or sandwich that sticks in my mind.

There are other foods I remember from New Mexico. The Frontier’s breakfast of which there were several things to have and none stood out. There was Fry Bread cooked in a cast iron skillet under the open sky in (sorry to say) a reservations food by the road. There was a question, a first for me, when I ordered chilie for lunch I was asked what kind I wanted. ?? Red or green? I had to answer green because I had never had it before. There was a place right around the corner, a Mexican place I usually had burritos there. But one day I ordered posole. “Do you know what it is?” Sure. They had me describe it. And then, only then, did they serve it to me. And it was free. They did not seem to believe that I liked it.

What a memory lane today.

——- MichaelRpdx :: h3k
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To quote:

This book is for Anthony Neil Smith who taught
me how to be awful and own it. We don’t do
safe fiction up in here!
— Victor Gischler

That preface is to Gestapo Mars. On the back cover among other things, it is described as “Extraterrestrial Espionage with Sex, Violence, and Nazis.” The book, I do not dare to call it a novel, delivers on all promises. What stops me from calling it awful, shit or other things that I dare not put in print is I read the entire thing. Yes, it delivers sex. Yes, it delivers violence. Yes, it delivers Nazis. It delivers all of them, ALL of them in abundance. Especially the violence and Nazis.

There are plot holes that look like a baby crawling through, a grandmother tottering through a football team to score the winning, come from behind touchdown. The holes are that big. Carter Sloan comes through all of the holes, despite the ships and comrades he leaves behind.

But it is awful and there is a lesson there. As Austin Kleon and lots of other people have said: you need to do the bad things before you can do the good. If you are stuck with your protagonist not able to do what you want, have he/she do it anyway. This is fiction you are writing. Have your star Character do things that are out of character, that does not make sense, that are dumb (from the hero s perspective) Have them do that. You are still writing. You get to go back and rewrite it. And again, and again, But when you rewrite it you know what direction to avoid, what to have the hero do.

This is all how I keep up with my draft. I do not stop writing until I hit my daily goal. I know, I KNOW, a bunch of stuff won’t last. But it is out.

— MichaelRpdx :: h3k
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PS. If you are participating in the thing whose name I will not type and you think or know you are too far behind to make the “goal”, Keep On Going. The idea is to write for a month. Maybe with a big goal. But truthfully the goal is to keep writing. Kinda like One Typed Page.

Keep your fingers moving. Be specific. Lose control. Don’t think. Those four rules, or “rules”, are the basis of writing, according to Natalis Goldberg. (I keep trying to write Goldman, go figure.) Do not think about punctuation, spelling, or all that stuff. Just get it out.

I am most of the way through week one of the thing that will not be named. I have had two huge interruptions. One was being at the hospital for a nuclear based test. That started early, at 7:30 with no one else in the waiting room. It was a stress test. “Some people say they feel like they have run a marathon.” I did not feel that way. I got home, sat down, wrote 4700 words. Then I felt like I had done something, not a marathon, but it was something and I was tired.

The second time was when I was writing cancer memories. It was going slow. At breakfast, I was asked, “should we but up this tarp to protect the shed?” We needed to get the tarp onto the shed. A grapevine had its way with the roof, sending roots down through it. I looked up. It was a sunny day. Our forecast had been for rain. Rain all day. Rain all day every day for the next week. It was sunny now. “yes, we should.” and we did. We got the tarp on top of the shed. Then it was time to write and to write about things I really do not like remembering as vividly as 1 did this day. I looked up MOPP and the side effects and a “for 20 years there is a 20% chance…” When I was treated it had been in successful use for five years. This 20% over 20 years? That was still to be discovered. In fact, when I first heard about a 20% chance of developing a secondary cancer, it was over a 10 year span. But 1 found out about that side effect after they had just over 10 years. I did not know about the 20 year span until I was writing today. Lucky for me I did not get a secondary tumor. Now I am into different side effects.

I have kept my fingers moving, I do not think about spelling, too much, Specific? You can judge that. Lose control? I dunno. Do it, does I, do I lose control of my typewriter and let the keys do their thing? Ask it. I have kept up my pace. I still have enough stuff in my brain to type a single page or a part of a page after my 2,000+ words to keep to my goal.

—- MichaelRpdx :: h3k
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PS You can name it if you like. I am just tired of typing the mixed case word.

Does your typewriter sign? Does it sign to the deaf?
Does your typewriter sing? Does it sing to you?

Can you hear the typewriter sign in and singing to all about?

This typewriter sings throughout the night and the day though I cannot hear it often. I cannot hear it singing at night or in the day.

Until. Until I sit with it and start to caress it.
When I caress its keys then I hear it cleanly.

I hear it clearly. And I type.
Were your fingers deaf? So deaf you could not hear your typewriter sign.
When you cannot hear it sign you must rely only upon its singing.

Upon the sticks of the keys pushing down the levers
through the body to spring the key head to strike
against the paper through silk or cotton or sometimes nothing at all.

What does your typewriter sign?
What does your typewriter sing?

— MichaelRpdx :: h3k