books

Everything is awesome

I had a pretty good day.

I’ll admit, I’ve been ignoring this blog somewhat of late. Since the beginning of June, some twenty days ago now, I’ve only posted here five times. And three of those posts were lyrics quizzes. While those are (relatively speaking) my most popular posts, they’re not exactly personal or content-heavy.

But there just hasn’t, frankly, been a whole lot of content going on in my life right now. There’s lots to do at work, but the mad rush that marked the beginning of the year has slowed down, as I’ve handed books over to production, and I’ve even managed to take a couple of days off this week. (Today, Friday, marks second day of my four-day weekend.) I expect lots of small crises to continue between now and the fall, but I’m hoping it won’t start getting really hectic again until sometime in October. (I’m going to Banff for two weeks at the end of September, so it had better got get hectic then if it knows what’s good for it.)

I’ve been writing some, but struggling with it, knowing where I want to go with a couple of stories but not really sure how to get there, and struggling also with that thing I always do, editing too much as I go along. (This is why I have too few finished first drafts, but it’s a hard part of my brain to turn off.) My weekly free-writing group didn’t happen last week, hence the lack of a sixth post here for June.

But again, today was a pretty good day.

I woke up around six o’clock and took the dog for a walk, then decided instead of going back to sleep, I’d finish reading Caliban’s War by James A. Corey. (The version on my Kindle said I only had about ten percent of the book left.) The Expanse books have really been terrific so far, and I have to thank Heather for recommending them. (I believe she’s already well into the just-published fourth book in the series, so no spoilers please.) I may take a short break, just to re-orient my brain and read something else, but the third book, Abbadon’s Gate is high up on my to-read pile. (Not literally; it’s on my Kindle. The way the second book ends, there was no way I was not going to immediately buy number three.)

I went for lunch this afternoon, indulging in a local sushi and Japanese buffet place I really like. Between the spicy tuna rolls, raw ginger, and wasabi, my sinuses have never been so clear. But I think I settled that I don’t care for raw octopus. The texture is just…no. Still, it was a good meal.

Then I came home to fold laundry and watch The Lego Movie. You know, as one does on his day off. The movie was a lot of fun, pretty clever, and I say that as somebody who’s never really be a Lego kind of guy. (I mean, I played with them, a little, when I was a kid, but Construx were always more my jam.) If you haven’t seen it, it’s where this post’s title comes from. (If you have seen it, sorry for getting that stuck in your head again.)

And I wrote. Of course, it wasn’t any of the short stories I’ve got percolating, but the silly fake advice column I’m revisiting for Kaleidotrope, but it felt good to get my brain working like that again. And though I’ve had no feedback on the two fake advice columns I’ve written so far — last spring and summer — I’m actually strangely proud of them. They, along with the horoscopes — which are surprisingly tough to write — represent the kind of thing I was to do more of with the zine.

Anyway, it was just a really relaxing yet productive day and I enjoyed it. I don’t know that I’ll have a lot more to post here tomorrow, but we’ll see if I can’t get at least a couple more posts in before the end of June.

Wednesday (also: not my squirrel)

Another decent day, with lots of work to do. I didn’t miss my train tonight, although there was a train delay this morning, which I guess is the universe’s way of evening everything out through aggravation.

Meanwhile, I finished reading Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, which I liked until the end, when the book just kind of ends.

And I somehow reached an ending on a short story I’ve been writing. This one’s pretty short, less than two thousand words, but the ending just kind of happened, and I’m kind of happy with it. I still need to take another look at the story with fresh eyes, and tidy it up, but I’m looking forward to sending it out and starting in on something else.

And that was Wednesday.

Saturday

I got word yesterday of some fraud on my debit card — no, I wasn’t at a Charleston service station, thank you very much — so I had to go into my bank this morning to pick up a replacement.

The rest of the day was even less exciting than that. I re-watched Clue for some reason — it’s on Netflix, so, y’know, there — and the latest episode of Hannibal. I read some Kaleidotrope submissions, and I finished reading What Is the What by Dave Eggers, a novel based on the life of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng.

I liked the book, particularly Deng’s voice that comes through as a character, and the way the story is structured, but I’m not sure it’s brilliant or illuminating of the human condition. If it weren’t a true story, for instance, I don’t think I’d have liked it half as much. But still, it wasn’t bad.

I am glad to be finished, though: I’ve actually been reading the book since late February, and it will be nice to move on to something else. According to my Goodreads challenge, I’ve only read 12 of 1 book for the year.

This evening, I watched Akira, which was…strange. On the one hand, it’s a very straightforward post-apocalyptic psychic powers kind of story. But it’s also…strange. I’m tempted to look into the original manga, which apparently goes into a lot more detail.

Anyway, that was pretty much my Saturday. I didn’t do any writing today, though I have been writing every other day this week. It’s not been great — I’ve filled several pages in my notebook but wouldn’t necessarily want a lot of it in the final story — but it’s keeping the story alive for me and moving me in the direction I need to go with it. So there’s that.

The last three days (again)

There’s not a whole lot to report, actually.

The weather, while it has taken a turn the cold and flurrying since the weekend, hasn’t been the soul-crushing winter that the rest of February was. Then again, it also beggars belief that it’s the end of February already. It’s a shorter month, but not by that much. It’s still early days, but I may look back and remember it as the longest and shortest month of 2014.

At work, I handed over a book to production, and I don’t think I was quite prepared for the huge feeling of relief that would follow. But the handing-over itself? That was just a lot of paperwork and formatting and back-and-forth with authors. I’ll have two more books in quick succession that will need to go into production very soon, and I think the feeling of relief was only because they couldn’t be handed over immediately. (One manuscript has permission issues for which I’ve contracted a freelancer, and the other isn’t expected until Monday.) I had a little breathing room, in which I could focus on some other smaller projects — I have manuscripts out for review, I’m mentoring someone (and worried I’m just giving her busy work to do) — and finally typing up my notes from my campus trips a couple of weeks ago. I’ll be on campus again tomorrow, headed to Stony Brook University, unless illness or weather unravel those plans for a third time.

I finished reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. It’s an interesting book, one that I’ve actually attempted to read a couple of times in the past. I’m not sure exactly why those attempts fell apart on me like they did, since it’s actually a really good book and maybe one of Dick’s more accessible, less out-there books. (I’d actually started reading The Divine Invasion, then quit maybe a hundred pages in when I learned it was the middle book in the so-called “VALIS Trilogy.”) The book is an alternate history, of a world where Nazi Germany and Japan won World War II, and I think Dick makes a really smart move centering most of the action in Japanese-controlled San Francisco. The book is less about the mechanics of this world, the kind of thing you see in countless “what if the Nazis had won?” stories, and more about using that world to look at our own. If it had been set in Germany, or Nazi-controlled New York, it would have been a very different book.

And that’s about it, really. Just a handful of decent but uneventful days.

William Faulkner’s Sanctuary

I really enjoyed reading William Faulkner’s Sanctuary. It’s one of his earlier novels, and of those I’ve read I think one of his most poetic. Faulkner can be something of an acquired taste — it took me several attempts to acquire it myself — and does require close attention to even figure out what is going on. (Even after I’d finished, the Wikipedia entry for the book held some surprises on that front.) Often, Faulkner is more about the rhythms of the language than the simple straightforwardness of a plot. But I submit that when those rhythms are really working, there’s nothing like them.

For instance, there’s this:

Screenshot 2014-02-13 at 5.34.45 PM

And this:

Screenshot 2014-02-13 at 5

And this.

Screenshot 2014-02-13 at 6.21.45 PM

None of which tells you what the book is about, but at the same time maybe tell you everything. I’m moving on to something different, I think — Phillip K. Dick, I think, though he can be no less an acquired taste sometimes, a difficult read. But I really did like the book a whole lot.