My Typed Page

The library, the library, oh how I love the library. I walk through the doors of the local branch, well it seems, twice a week. There are many reasons to go to the library. But I just go for books. (another reason to go there follows)

Typically when I go to pick something up I have books to return. My recent trip was no exception, four or five books to return, and one or two to pick up. Dirty secret time.

I do not read all of the books I check out. If I do not like a book or the whatever about it I stop. I do not have the ability to read through things at my s l o w reading pace just cannot afford to keep a book.

There is another reason to not finish a library book. On Writing, Stephen King, being an example. I got it from the library and decided it was a keeper. So I ordered a copy and returned theirs when it arrived.

Another reason to get something from the library (referenced above) is the Oxford English Library dictionary. It is that edition with citations for a word for as long as it has existed. You are in need of what “making love” meant 100 years ago? That is the place. Etymology? You have it here.

Hmmmm, I guess I should include Kanopy the movie source mentioned by someone here a while ago. Great films. Even great documentaries.

Digression: While you do have to wait a year to get season two of Cowboy Bebop you can, if you are OK with the differences in the plots, wait? you get a different but mostly the same sets? It is different enough to watch the animated original. Tonight I heard my wife singing. It was Fly Me To The Moon. Why that? It shows up during bits and pieces of the plot. This triggered a bit of disagreement about it.

That is jazz.
No it’s not. It is good.
It is JAZZ.
No, it is good.

My wife hates jazz.

MichaelRpdx :: rkmm 2021-11-28

Reading takes time. A lot of time that I used to have more of. There was a time when I bought a book, say, The Getaway from Jim Thompson, and I would finish it in a night. What is this all about? Buy something to read for pleasure and then the pleasure was over so quickly. What is up with this? I forced myself to read slower. There was nothing to be gained by reading quickly. Now after having a stroke I read even slower. It is too bad that I may only have one reading speed. A fast and a slow would be nice. But I do not and so it is.

I was (finally?) reading On Writing by Stephen King. I do not recall reading King before now. I had seen movies based on his books, “Carrie” comes to mind. None of them inspired me to read him. But here I am reading ON Reading a little late for getting advice about wait a minute, the book is On Writing not Reading, sheese, now you know where my head is at because he spends a lot of time advocating reading.

He is a slow reader. That is his description. He gets through seventy or eighty books a year. (Which I misread as seven or eight books a year) He reads a book everywhere. Waiting in line at the grocery store? He is reading. That applies to any situation. He spends an hour a day on a treadmill, reading. Even driving. Audiobooks before you snort out the coffee you were drinking.

He also goes on a rant about TV. You have heard of authors who would rather do many things besides watch TV. King is among them I enjoyed, as in laughing out loud, at many of hi his statements about watching TV. I will close with a favor

Note:

Reading takes time,
and the glass teat takes too much of it.
– Stephen King, On Writing

Yes, it does take time just like opium does.

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm      2011-11-23

KORT Grangeville! and You’re listening to the voice of the Treasure Valley, KYME Boise. Those are (or were in the case of KYME) variants on station ID, required by the FCC to be announced every hour. They were both pivotal pieces for me. KORT was my first real job. I even spent the afternoons at KORT for the spring semester of high school as an “intern®?. Which translates to unpaid labor. KYME was a low wattage, daylight only station. When I started there the did no live people on air. It was just spin the records and play the spots.

In both of these, I learned to write, Hey! For pay!, 30 seconds spots. Where spot is the radio language for advertisement. 30 seconds in which to convince the listener to buy the something you spent 30 seconds telling them about. You really cannot say much in 30 seconds, according to Kim Day, the former KYME Program Director and long term friend of mine, you can get in 70 to 90 words, The big problem was writing a beautiful spot, with some beautiful twists to the language and then give it a whirl. Um, no you cannot give them a 45 second spot. You had to keep it to 30 so I would delete a few word here, a couple words there and try it again, Now it was down to 35 seconds. So I tried talking really fast and, nope that did not work. Rearrange some text and then, finally, it was down to 30 seconds.

My mindset was a tight, brief statement. This made coming up with 10 pages of whatever for a term paper a real bear for me. I failed miserably at that effort.

I have spent years under the delusion that I could not write much at once. You’ve seen my pages of text. They are my upper limit. Until. Until NaNoWriMo came around again. I had first heard of that event tow? four? more? years ago. Hey, I can try that. I can try that and keep notes on why stopped me. In mid-October, I signed up. I broke the news to my wife. She was and constitutes to be very supportive.

Going in I set some rules for myself. Let us do 2,000 words a day. None of this hitting 1,667 words to scrape by. I worked on what to write about. If I had problems coming up with something in the last two weeks, well tough on me. I would start with multiple topics. If I ran dry on one subject I could switch to another. There were a couple of things I wanted to describe, my scar collection for example (some people have tattoos, I have scars) on I had those lists as a pressure release valve. If I needed to get the last 2000 words it was off to one of the list items.

Today I hit the 50,000 target. Now I have another 7 days to fill it out. 50,35 words to date. I figure I have another 13,336 words to go.

MichaelRpdx :: rkmn 2021-11-22

There are books that are purported to be prose. In reality, they are poems in a very long form. It would be good if I could remember one or more of them right now to use as an example but with my memory I cannot remember them now. Fortunately, I have other poem sources that are in email archives, on YouTube favorites, and a new source of poems. Yes, I do have the ability to recall all of them. I would like to share them. We get lots of poems here on One Typed Pages, I would like to share these as a thank you to all of you who have shared your poems here.

On YouTube search for “Ours Poetica” it has been a varied group of poets sharing their own and their favorite pieces. They have been somewhat sporadic of late but they seem to be back recently.

Poem of the Day, from the Poetry Foundation, is a daily email usually at night to start your day with a poem. They seem to rotate through people and select the poems ad the variety is very wide.

Also in the daily email set is Poem-a-Day which is very similar to Poem of the Day. They always deliver different poems so…have a go at these guys, You can find them at poets.org online.

Austin Kleon a once a week email list writer this week included #4 in his list of things that may be of interest. He is currently halfway through some humongous book from Iain McGilchrist. While poking around he discovered his (McGilchrist) daily poem reading. I listed to the first and then scrolled down through the list. It is not doom scrolling it is enjoyable. Anyway, as I – was scrolling down to fin the end of the list I quit in the 70s somewhere. There are plenty of poems to listen to there. Search for him by name.

Hopefully, you will enjoy one or more of these poem places online.

MichaelRpdx :: rkmm :: 2021-11-21

May the gods and goddesses for give my typing today.

When you do any sort of marathon like event, be it physical, mental, psychic, or whatever, you hit a wall. You come to the point where it is only your will that keeps you goining. (goining? Where the hell did that come from?) keeps you going. It did not take much for that feeling to hit me. By which I mean I was not one of the people well trained who could do an event. I should have planned it better. Nah, not my type of thing to do.

Gee doing that thing sound like fun. I think I will do it. And so I would. Just dive into the whatever and give it a whirl. Then the hosts would feed me and give me advice when I arrived an hour or two after the cut-off. Eventually, I would get fit enough to do the thing. Imagine your own thing here.

Even as I got to be good enough to do the thing there was a point about three-quarters or eighty percent of the way through the thing where it, the wall would hit me. And I thought to myself, “Why are you doing this? What are you trying to prove?” And the good thing for me in that situation was there was no way to stop, step off of the situation and quit. The only option was to keep
going because that was the way out, the way to quit.

I kind of have that feeling right now. 50,000 words? What am I doing? What am I trying to prove to who? And worth of all, how can I get a One Typed Page typed today. I have already typed four pages of single-spaced stuff. (500 words on a page, a little over 2,000 words per day) But here I am. Typing to all who will read.

Here is the odd part, as I type for the event that will not be named, is I feel that I am just getting started. It took me the first 20,000 words to figure out what it was that I am writing. Now is the time that I can really type, to keep going.

What the hell?

MichaelRpdx :: rkmm 2021-11-20

One Typed Quote seems to be taking off well. I put up a couple. It is pretty easy to do and I have hundreds saved up, Are you familiar with the Unix game (??) called cookie or fortune? That is where I have my quotes stored,

Once again I sit here with my version of the “Loyal Royal” with – ideas about what or how to type are scurrying about looking for anything to be done than to occupy my brain. “Write it down,” he says, “Write it down before you fall on your knees in thankful praise,” My advice to others. Because I, quite obviously, had no need to write things down,

Take a gap, watched movies, yep nothing to share.

MichaelRpdx :: rkmm 2021-11-19

One Typed Quote #1:

She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.
~- Philip Marlow

She tried to sit in my lap while_I was standing up.
~ William Faulkner

Both from an internet search,
Who you going to believe?

One Typed Quote #2:

Words matter.
Kindness matters.
We matter.
And I think,
on our best days
we are doing our best work
when we can connect and
remind each other
of these simple truths.

– Kent Peterson on One Typed Page

Does this work? I chose the RED option on an all black ribbon. You can tell I have a lot to say tonight. The thing who shall hot be named because I do not like camel case as something to type that thing is draining me of things. Where things are my ideas for stuff that ‘s not part of my brain. I can only thing of thinks that I need for the next 2,000 words. Am I blathering? Well so I am blathering. I blather at times like this. It is more important to get “it” out of my brain.

I am a person who has not read everything. Where everything is all of the popular stuff like Noir, SF, where everything includes all of the well-known stuff. Today I am talking about Stephen King. I just sever got interested in King. Until last night when I started in On Writing. It seemed like a good thing to read while attempting to write a novel. Hey, if I get stuck hopefully he will have some advice for me to use. So far so great.

One of the things he includes in the book is a list of hundreds of books he has read and likes enough to list here with a bit of advice that he is not recommending the books. They are books he liked. I checked for Joe Hill to see if he was listed. I mean c’mon he is your son. There are none of them listed. None.

How can this be? I checked Hill’s list of published novels. There they were, including NOSlA2 and Horns and other things I would think he would like. Then while reading I say a mention of his brother being 55. Quick mental math indicated this was written in 2000. I checked the page in the front of all books and WOW this book was written, published in 2000.

Just goes to show that Stephen King is not a psychic.
Though maybe he just does not want to reveal the future to us.

MichaelRpdx :: rkmm 2021-11-18

PS: If like my proofreader (who lets a lot of things slide) you do not know what camel case is, it is a mix of upper and lower case words. It was (is?) a fad with computer people. Example: NaNoWriMo

If you would like to get good at something there seems to be one way to get there. To illustrate the way I am going to quote Art & Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orlund.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produces, all those on the right side solely on its quality.

Yes, to grade the people on the left he would bring in a bathroom scale and weigh whatever they made. 50 pounds an A, 4O pounds a B, etc. The other group could be judged on whatever they made. A single piece, albeit a perfect one, would merit an A.

Then a curious thing emerged. The works of the highest quality all came from the quantity group. It seemed the quality group people had spent a lot of time theorizing about what made a good pot. The quantity group just cranked out stuff.

This is similar to the writer who produced 500 words a day, every day. Or William Gibson who once said, “I have spent just about as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television.”

This all came to mind after I verified that I had typed 2185 words today, bring my daily total for (OK, this once) NaNoWriMo to 38, 152 words thus far. I have come to some realizations about this process. A lot of these words are destined for the delete bin. But I do not think I could get the good stuff without the bad. There are sections to my “book/novel” A starter, a foreword section; a Text bit that is the main piece; two parts that do not fit they are lists as in A Book You Can and Should Write, Recipes and Scars; there is a Trash section when I and my brain cannot agree on what to write at the moment.

But this is a “First First Draft” and it brings back a memory of the advice from Ira Glass. That starts with, well near the start he wrote “You make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.” Yes, you understand what it is to be good, you recognize it, but not yours. You know that your work is not that good. The most important thing to do is DO A LOT OF WORK.

You would think I could type better, but hey, choose your battles.

MichaelRpdx :: rkmm
38,152

And yes, this applies to all kinds of work.