Men at work.

A strange thing happened last Friday night. I was up later than usual, roughly around 1:30 AM, so I guess it wasn’t technically Friday night but very early Saturday morning. Erica was fast asleep. I was up playing a few games of Call of Duty 4 to tire my eyes; once I was finished I went through the nightly teeth-cleansing ritual, turned off all the lights and electronics and wandered into a dark bedroom. We’ve lived in this apartment for a little over two years now and, in that time, we’ve grown used to the usual sounds, from late night traffic on the street outside to the trains that go by a couple of miles away to the clatter and clang of the restaurant kitchen next door. We’re even used to the weird stuff, like objects moving, things falling, and animals inexplicably appearing.

You might say that we’re settled. So when I went to bed that night, the sound of a garbage truck immediately caught my attention. Our apartment complex has a single dumpster. It’s the kind with brackets on the sides so it can be lifted with a front-side forklift. Now, the restaurant next door has a regular dumpster, which means they require a different type of trash truck. I have no idea whether we have the same waste management service, but I do know that the garbage is picked up usually Wednesday or Thursday morning around 6 AM. Now here it is, 1:30 AM Friday night/Saturday morning, and there’s a garbage truck picking up the restaurant’s trash. Maybe I’m a little paranoid just like Tom Hanks’ character in The ‘Burbs, and I’ll be the first to admit I’ve got an overactive imagination, but the garbage being picked up that late, on what is basically a weekend, seems a little odd to me. I go over to the window, pull back the curtain and watch.

The restaurant dumpster is about 50 yards away (if that), and the truck is silhouetted against street light affixed to a garage across the street. Two guys (presumably the garbage men) are standing at the dumpster. They seem to be talking. One is holding a bag of garbage. He passes it to the other. One shrugs. They continue talking with lots of hand gestures. Then they reach in and grab another bag. It’s held up, spun around, and stared at for a few minutes, before being set on the ground. This continues for at least twenty minutes. Each bag is scrutinized and deliberated upon. Unfortunately my weariness overpowered my curiosity and I went to bed, but I’ve been thinking about that odd scene for days now. I’m not a garbage man, nor have I ever been, so I don’t know what goes into the waste management arts, but I have seen them pick up garbage from time to time during the last several years, and they’re usually in too much of a hurry to give a damn about what they’re tossing away, much less discuss each and every bag. And then there’s this whole picking-up-the-garbage-during-twilight-hours thing that just gives me all sorts of bad thoughts. It’s my personal fear that, some day soon, I’ll see a local news report about a person who disappeared from my area and hasn’t been seen since last Friday.

Okay, Todd, that’s enough. See? Overactive imagination. Maybe I should become a writer.

tags: bad karma garbage men paranoia

June 10, 2008 | Filed Under Blog | 1 Comment

Epic fail.

I came across this via BoingBoing today and it started the thought-train chugging through my head, so I thought I’d pass it along to you. I think it’s something that should, at some point or another, cross your mind regardless of where you are in life. It’s about self-reflection, about your goals, your drive, and so on.

And it concerns J.K. Rowling.

Those of you who know me personally also know that I don’t care for J.K. Rowling. Not her as a person, but her work, and while I found the first Harry Potter book entertaining and well-written, the second one put me to sleep and I quit while I was ahead. And frankly I think I’m just sick of all the Harry Potter crap rather than just Ms. Rowling herself, but I digress. After reading and watching her Harvard commencement speech, I’ve a newfound respect for her, as a person.

If you still haven’t clicked either of those links up above, stop reading this and go read. I’ll still be here when you get back. So go.

. . .

Done? Good. I want you to think about your failures. I don’t know about you but, after reading the transcript (and later, listening to the audio), I started thinking about my own failures, and not just the ones concerning writing, but in life. And you know what? The woman is absolutely right. I may be sick to death of her literary creation and the mobs of hysteria surrounding it, whether positive or negative, but she’s got an honest-to-God point here, and I think it’s something every human being should think about.

When I was 18 I thought I’d be a successful author by the time I was out of college. I thought I’d have two or three good novels under my belt by then, raking in the dough from royalties and promotional events, so what would be the point of getting a focused degree, right? Sure, I was a writer, so I’d major in English – but teaching? No, no way, not me. I’d had enough of school as it was, so why go to the expense of money and time in order to remain there indefinitely? So English it was.

(As I typed that, I looked up at my framed English BA. It looked back with mocking approval.)

Let’s fast-forward seven years. Here I am, working a day job that, while I enjoy it, isn’t something I want to do for the rest of my life. I owe money on a car that isn’t the apex of “cool” (it’s a four-door Saturn, thank you, and it’s the best fucking sedan ever). I tune into news outlets like CNN. I drink coffee on a regular basis. Shirts of color other than black have started to permeate my closet (but within reason – darker, earth tones only). I call up my best friend from time to time to bitch about, of all things, the weather and gas prices. I’ve become the antithesis of who I thought I’d be at 25 and, in the eyes of my 18 year old self, I’m a complete and utter failure.

When I was 19 I wrote a pretentious novel about a wise-ass high school student who toiled away working a corporate retail store called Mr. Smiley’s. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever written because everyone I knew loved my first book. I thought I was being edgy, witty, and a shoe-in for first place in my uni’s writing contest. It was my masterpiece, you see, and I was already working on its sequel, a Dickens-length opus about pranks and mischief in my home town.

Naturally that second novel was the biggest piece of shit I’d ever written, through and through, and it didn’t place at all in that contest. It put people to sleep when I read it to them and that’s no lie or exaggeration. Its sequel died seventy pages in, and justifiably so. I didn’t write anything for about a year after that novel died. I’ve since deleted it, and thrown away just about every trace of its physical existence, though I suspect my mom still has a copy squirreled away somewhere. The other novel, all seventy pages of it, is gone and erased forever, and good riddance to that.

At some point during the last year and half of college, I started to wise up. I was humbled by my peers and the professors I respected with scathing critiques. I bit my cheeks rather than retort at the typical response I received from folks upon learning I wanted to be a writer: “Well, you can always teach, right?”

I thought I’d be set in four years, without having the slightest idea how the industry worked, or that it was even an industry at all. Those were halcyon days with sparkles in my eyes and big plans on the horizon. And then I failed miserably.

If I have a point, which seemed so great in my head but now seems to have strayed so far from Ms. Rowling’s own speech, it’s that I’m still chugging along even after slipping through the cracks of every hope I had for myself. Like Ms. Rowling, even after hitting bottom, she kept writing. This past Fall I found myself unemployed for a brief period of time, and during those two weeks I was scared to death – not just for my immediate self, but for Erica, our future together, and my own future. I wasn’t homeless, I didn’t starve, and even though the money was starting to run out, I briefly felt what it was like to be there at the bottom, and the hell of it was, that wasn’t even the bottom. Not by a long shot.

But I learned from it. I think about that moment of time every day. I think about where I am right now and, even though the future is always uncertain, it’s a heck of a lot better than it was seven months ago. I’m still writing. And even though ALT didn’t do as well as I’d wanted it to (another epic fail!), I didn’t turn tail and run.

Embrace your failures. You’ll be better for it.

If you read the article like I asked you to, you wouldn’t have needed me to tell you that, and on that note, I’m done rambling on with the self-help crap. Time to get back to writing, for what else is there than to drown your sorrow in an ocean of ink?

I hope everyone had a good weekend and that no one melted from this hellacious heat wave.

‘til Tuesday,

tags: failure inspiration writer things

June 9, 2008 | Filed Under Blog | 4 Comments

Entertaining the point.

Is it June already? Wow. Only four posts in the month of May, too. Apologies for not keeping up with this thing. Between sickness and apathy and writing and movies and gaming, I haven’t really given much thought to blogging, though I’m going to try and make up for last month by posting somewhat regularly this month. With six days into June, I see I’m doing a great job already!

Anyway.

A friend of mine posed this question to Phill and I last night, and I thought I’d pass it along to you folks as well, because it’s an interesting question to consider. He wrote:

What do you think the most important part of a story is? That it carries a profound message/point, or that it is entertaining?

Don’t cop out and say a mixture of both. I’m interested to learn which one holds more weight with you.

This was my response:

You made a good point about the entertainment aspect being a vessel for profundity. I happen to agree. Suck the reader in with an
enticing premise, engaging characters, and whatever else, and while they’re completely immersed, slip the “big message” in under the
radar. Some stories are more subtle than others, but this is usually the end result. The reader, whether they came for a lesson or just to
have a good time, is going to walk away with both, whether they realize it or not. That’s the beauty of the entertainment vessel.
It’s sneaky.

I’ve found that, in my own experience, if I begin with a message but nothing else and have to construct the entertainment around it, it
will fall apart. It’s happened a number of times. That shitty story I wrote back around Christmas about zombies and
consumerism is a perfect example. The consumerism came first. The zombies were the vessel. And it didn’t work. It was too bogged down.
It wasn’t fun to read.

On the other hand, ALT was formed out of a number of entertaining scenarios (well, that I found entertaining at least), and the
“message” came later, facilitated by what was happening in the story. It’s rare that I’m able to make a story work with a message at the
start and nothing else. There are a couple of exceptions (Suburbia and Jeff come to mind), but otherwise it’s all about entertainment
value front and center. Maybe it’s naive of me, but I think the average John Q. Reader doesn’t want a profound message. They had
enough of that crap in high school and college (I know I did), and just want an escape to another world, an extraordinary situation, and
so on. Package a story or a book with a byline like “A profound message (with an entertaining story)!” and you’ll get tepid reaction,
but say “An entertaining thrill ride (with a moral at its heart)!” and folks will be more inclined to read it.

I think that’s why Dean Koontz is so successful. Just about every one of his novels has a point at its center, whether it’s a moral or
commentary about a current event (Dark Rivers of the Heart is a good example), and the folks who read between the lines can enjoy the book
that much more, but most of his readers are the folks who see his paperbacks in line at the grocery store, are intrigued by the premise
and entertainment value of the tale, and so drop their six or seven dollars (when did paperbacks become so expensive?) to get away for a
few hours a night.

This is stuff I like to read. I’m going to paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk here because I don’t have a direct quote, but: I wanted to write
stuff that I’d want to read. So here I am. You can preach and sermonize all you want, but unless you’ve got the entertainment to
frame it, no one will pay attention.

Oddly enough, my response was the complete opposite of Phill’s, as he argued for the message, and I argued for entertainment value. Ultimately, though, we both leaned toward the cop-out answer in some ways, because I don’t think you can avoid it. It’s almost like they go hand in hand.
So now it’s your turn, my fellow writers/editors. What are your thoughts on the matter?