io9 had a good article about what you can do if your novel goes off course (which is helpful for those struggling through NaNo this year).

All the outlining in the world can't keep your characters in check, unless they're the kind of characters that don't really have any defining personality traits and are just simulacra on the page. Hell, I have characters that have been in my head now for 7 years at least and around whom I wrote the plot, and I'm still veering off a bit from the outline because I find something else interesting for them to reveal.

For those curious, my process this year to keep myself on track is this: outline way more than could possibly fit into 50,000 words, AND just write as much as possible. I write more than I need, knowing there will be cuts. I write repetitively, because that way I'll hit on something I want to keep when I go back and cut out a lot of it. When I'm going through florid, repetitive descriptions of things, it jars my brain into thinking a little more about what's supposed to come next, so I don't need to struggle and think about it when I reach that point. I use a typewriter, so when I sit down, I usually spend a paragraph just typing, often in summary of the last section, and then spring forth into what I need to happen next. It makes it easier for me to connect what was going on the last time I wrote and what will come of it in the next hour or two I spend writing.

To summarize the great William Forrester, sometimes the key to writing is just to get into the rhythm of it, and then the words will come. Seems to work for me, anyway.

I think I might be enjoying the scathing takedowns of Foer's new vegan screed a little too much. But then, I guess I'm just the kind of guy who enjoy seeing the self-righteous people I disagree with on the most fundamental levels get their due.

That's write (bwahahaha typo pun!)! It's not only National Novel Writing Month, it's Natonal Novel Writing Injury Month. This is inevitable when using a manual typewriter (see icon), because, well, I'm not the most careful typist, so my fingers sometimes get caught between the keys if I get a little too overenthusiastic during a scene.

So yeah. I was writing about the descent into Hell today, and bam. Suddenly the cuticle on my right index finger is bleeding pretty badly. Oh, also, I cracked the nail on my middle finger, because I was typing so hard. Same hand.

MY TYPEWRITER IS A MILITANT LEFT-HAND EXTREMIST.

All the same, I managed to stay ahead of the curve even after taking 2 days off of writing. I'm even technically ahead of where I need to be at the end of the day tomorrow. I'm not doing too badly this year. :D

I am destroying my wordcount in NaNo this year, but that isn't the only thing I'm doing. Here's a poem I came up with about 10 minutes ago:

Trotting along,
Getting in my way—
Kitten butt.

Ah, there, isn't that nice?

So as part of my NaNo novel this year, I've been inserting pretty random and awful poetry. Believe me, if you are doing NaNo and planning to do this to boost wordcount, don't. I spent more time writing overwrought awful poetry that ends up being a mere handful of words in the same amount of time I could fill an entire page with random nonsense. Poetry is not a wordcount booster. But it's still fun all the same.

This is probably the worst of them so far, all filled with misogyny and attempts to be way too cool. Oh well.

The woman in the corner didn't see me
but I saw her, and I liked what I saw,
from the nipples poking at the soft fabric
to the legs that seemed to run from the floor
all the way to forever.
I wanted little more than to take her,
lead her to my loft in the uptown sky
and recline as her lips pleased me.
She could be my personal whore,
living out the fantasies she'd been too ashamed
to admit to, until the right man came along
and showed her how could it could be
to five in to the pleasures
that brought the most blood to her face
when the thought of exposure entered her mind.
My personal whore, rewarded for her work
by being worked over herself
and filled to the brim with the seed
that she wanted more than any other,
a seed which I was more than happy
to plant deep inside her womb.

I felt a little sick after writing it. But then, the guy into whose pen I put this drivel was not exactly the best kind of guy. He was the guy of guy who would write this sort of thing. And he was also the person person to die.

[Edited to fix some grammar and to say that, sadly, based on what little I've read, this attempt at bad poetry is my own bad attempt at some bad Bukowski poetry. Just wanted to make that clear.]

1) writers write, 2) readers read, and 3) everybody lives a nice modest life, 4) in relative obscurity, and 5) maybe one day, if applicable, a writer may be recognized, however mildly, for their contribution to literature.

Fatalistic as it comes across, I can't help but love this formula for its simplicity.

I, uh, changed my NaNo title.

Now it's Death Wore 13th Century Florentine Attire, I Didn't Ask Why.

Because in this story, the part of Death (or Ankou, bitches) is played by some guy who, in life, was once called "Dante Alighieri." Maybe you've heard of him. He's a cool guy who doesn't afraid of anything.

Gosh, I hope that doesn't spoil anything. As if I wasn't going to include a ton of clues to make the "big" reveal anticlimactic. Then again, I was on the fence about having a big reveal anyway.

I have my outline well on its way for this year's NaNo. If you're interested in following my progress, I'm estevus there (don't ask).

My novel this year is called Kind of Like Dante Did because, well, I couldn't think of anything better, and I didn't want to write yet another NaNo named after the main character.

Happy writing to everyone else who's participating!

Lately nothing has really warranted a full-blown post from me. I think mostly because there's not been enough I could be a full-blownhard about of late.

In the spirit of things, here are a few links I've found amusing/annoying/something-in-betweening in the past few days.

• Jonathan Safran Foer is disappointing, more like. Then again, I see the phrase "newly converted vegetarian" and immediately lose any credibility I was intending to give him, especially when he goes on to say things like "I find that disappointing — that his shtick is much more important to him than what he knows to be right." What's really disappointing is the immediate assumption Foer makes: that Bourdain agrees with everything Foer says in his book.
  But then I'm not surprised that a once-untouchable wunderkind (yeah, he wrote a couple of books a few years back, from what I understand) is saying something downright annoying about someone else--guy's got a new book to promote, and a new agenda; so, WHATEVER IT TAKES, MAN.


• And speaking of agendas, here is a good discussion about what it is exactly that makes us prefer either books or eBooks over the other.
  Have I mentioned how much I love the comments sections at HTMLGIANT? The people there actually discuss things!

I've read somewhere that dead men tell no tales, but I think Vonnegut managed pretty well with this story.

Someone at work was giving away free books last week. A box full of Dune hardcovers, and a box full of good books. I saw that there were a couple Vonnegut books in the mix, and was hoping that maybe there was a fresh new copy of Look at the Birdie. (I hadn't realized at the time it's yet to be published, so sadly, there was none.) But I did snag a copy of As I Lay Dying and Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.

I had a brief inkling of my own idea for adapting P&P for this year's NaNo, but opted instead to finally write an idea that's been sitting in my head for nigh on 7 years now. It's about time I got it out of there to make room for newer things.

(And because I know you were wondering, yes--I do indeed have, inexplicably, three separate bookmarks for the NaNo website, all of which must have been created at different times to different purposes.)

Courtesy of, oh, reading Ulysses and suffering insomnia:

Whiskeyed breath
And the sharp caress of his stubble
Against my cheek.
Plants there a kiss
Fertilized not by love
But routine.
Routine bears no fruit.
The mattress warps
Around his gravity now.
Soon sleep, and he blows
Malt against the wall
He always faces at night.
Back to back we sleep,
The beast with no backs.

Grime on the wall where her head
Used to rest, when she reclined in bed beside me
Reading—never a book I'd recommended,
But something instead from the bestseller list.
She read to have something to do, not
In pursuit of enjoyment or knowledge, but
Instead pursuing some neutral state
Where she'd be too occupied to be bored,
But too disengaged to be busy, almost like
That state I reach when I sit, and I float
Between one active thought and the next.
And it hit me then, like a slap in the face
Delayed by months apart, or even in the
Years we'd been together, that maybe all
The trashy reading she'd done in that time
Was what had kept us together, where
Her mind was too busy to think about
All the things she could be doing if only
She'd not been chained to me.
But you can't float on forever, so I guess
That was why she finally put down the book
And picked up her coat and left empty
That space on the bed. I ran my fingertips
Across the mottled surface of the grime
And imagined she could feel it,
The soft caress of those in-between times.

And this is something I read: Why do we still read Dickens over 100 years later?

I'll save you the trouble of reading the whole thing if that isn't your style. Here's why we read Dickens today (emphasis mine, of course):

My search for an answer continued but never with success, until one year the little flicker came – not surprisingly – from another high school student, whose essay I was reviewing for a writing contest. "We need to read Dickens's novels," she wrote, "because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are."

And now I'm off to continue reading Ulysses, which I started again a few days ago courtesy of an early morning bout of indigestion.

Tonight's the last night in our crappy apartment, and tomorrow will be the first in our awesome new one (which will probably start looking crappy by the time we're ready to move out, because my whims are fickle and ungenerous little bitches).

Anyway, I came here to say first and foremost that this post right here, this one here, is part of why HTMLGIANT is my new favorite internet web magazine about literature, of the future! That string of adjectives got jumbled somewhere along the way.

No internet from tomorrow til Monday. Whatever will I do with myself? Oh, right, cleaning, and unpacking all the things I spent all day packing.

I'd have and love any day.


I'm not terribly happy with the whole "hangs like death" thing--quelle fucking originalité!--but the rest is as good as it will ever be. Still working on a couple other poems, too, one of which will definitely be posted in the future.