Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, October 31, 2005 The Pitch: It's like The Draughtman's Contract meets Drowning By Numbers! See? More.(Double-bonus twee points for those of you who added "Glass" to the end of that para.) One of the other things mentioned at the dinner on Saturday was posting the novel I was writing on this blog. I'm very reluctant to do this--for one thing, I barely finished Nano last year and if it hadn't been for quiet days at work following Thanksgiving (allowing me to have three days where I wrote 36,000 words total), I wouldn't have. The idea of agreeing to post my blog, and then having everyone look in each day to see nothing makes my soul itch. I'm also loathe to do the huge amount of typo fixing it would take for me to post this stuff. But, you know? I might do it anyway, convert one of the blogs I'm not using to do so, or create a new blog so that I can post from oldest to newest and not make you scrawl through pages of digital photos. In any event (and I will let you know, I promise), I'll tell you a little bit about what I want to write this year; if nothing else, it'll allow you to take vast amusement at how differently things'll turn out. This year, I'm writing a murder mystery: to drop some obtuse high concept, I'm looking for it to be Great Jones Street meets Silence of the Lambs, although if I can get Meeting People is Easy crossed with The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of the Old Mill, I'll be happy. The protagonist is the lead singer of a successful rock band on tour--they've been big for a while, so they know how to tour and survive. An FBI agent comes to the band with letters from someone who says they've been killing people after the band's shows, and that they'll keep killing until the cycle's complete. The FBI agent, a fan of the band, managed to get himself assigned to investigate the band's tour since the easiest way for the killer to pull this job off is to be a member of the band's road crew...or a member of the band themselves. And then hijinks ensue, yadda yadda, killings, blah blah blah. Having done Nano beforehand, I know that I'd need, if I wanted this to be remotely possible, to do a buttload of research and a lot of planning. So far, I've done the planning--I have my obscure plot hatched, the killer picked, the red herrings assigned. I'd like there to be some doubt about whether the narrator might themselves be the killer, but you know, whatever. Part of me would be just as happy to write:
Yeah.... that would probably do me just fine, actually. Okay. Work is for working (or looking like I'm working). That's enough for now. posted by Jeff | 8:57 AM | The Pitch: It's like The Invisible Man meets Mute Witness! Good morning.My thanks to all of you who asked me when I was going to start updating this thing again, but were kind enough not to ask me why I stopped. (It probably helped that all of you were actually at the wedding.) In some ways, I've been holding off posting again because I'm not sure what direction I actually want to take this blog, but I've also been reluctant because I haven't wanted to try and sum up everything that's happened. I mean, the best day of my life happened while I wasn't blogging. To not try to sum it up feels like a betrayal of the point of a blog, doesn't it? Or does it? But I figure as long as we can agree that I'm not going to be writing about my wedding here because it's too big a subject for me to write about, I'll get back to boring you about what movies I'm seeing, what games I'm playing, and my obsessive-compulsive approach to writing. After all, tomorrow is the first day of Nano 2005. Thanks to the time change, I was able to get up good and early and go write at a nearby cafe, see if I still had the stuff. I wrote eighteen hundred words in 40 minutes. They were very, very crappy. I've still got it! Since moving in with Edi, my writing habits have altered, and it's time to alter them back to something a little more consistent. Thanks to writing for the CE blog, I'm writing between eighteen hundred and three thousand words a week, and I'm still logging about seven thousand words for the monthly newsletter, so my yearly totals are all nice and plump (close to a quarter of a million words a year). But they're barely my words--although reviewing comic books has helped me writing clearly and concisely, it's still just blurting out opinions about other people's work--and it's not the everyday endeavor it should be: I write the newsletter of the course of one week, and I write the blog's reviews every Saturday, and the rest of the time I'm just hanging out with my beautiful wife or playing fucking video games, or spending too much money ordering DVDs off the Internet. It's hard to keep striving for stuff once you get more than you ever thought you'd have--I'm secure, happy and content, and life actually rewards you at this stage of things for paying attention to it, and there are so many easier ways to shut it out than sitting down by yourself and expressing oneself. (And no matter how rewarding that experience can be, it still takes a toll.) One really has to be driven in several different ways to keep pursuing this, after a time. So I'm getting myself back on the trail, and sniffing around to see if I can still find the scent. I'm doing Nano this year as a way to get back to writing every day, and if all goes well, I'll be writing and revising at a regular pace after that. I've told people that this will be my last Nano until I manage to take something I've written and brought it to market; my hope is that this will stave off the urge to be a once-a-year novelist through the miracle of Nanowrimo, and continue to produce. And the entry after this should be a lot less boring, I'm also hoping. Those of you who stuck through all of this will be rewarded with more of the same. At the delightful dinner Edi and I had with Nancy and Chris this weekend, Nancy and I talked a little bit about how, ultimately, people read blogs to hear that person's voice, to get a little snapshot of how that person lives, and what they're thinking. I can do that. Again, thanks for sticking around. More to come. posted by Jeff | 8:32 AM | |
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