First Offenders

Do Not Leave Me, Summer

So I looked at the calendar this morning and school starts exactly two weeks from today. WHAT??? Are you serious? How can that be? I mean, just last week, I, as King of the Room Mothers was putting together the finishing touches on the Kindergarten End of the Year Party. It was just last week, right? It wasn't? Really? I should probably stop drinking then.

Anyway, summer is pretty much over and as much as my child is ready to go back to school, I would prefer that summer never end. Even though it's 167 degrees here in Dallas and we haven't seen rain since 1974, if I had a vote, I would vote for summer twelve months out of the year. I need the pools to stay open and the sun to stay out and my tan to stay dark and the smell of grilled meat to stay in the air and the flip flops to stay right by the door and the sidewalk to stay hot enough to fry the bottoms of your feet and ice cream to taste unimaginably good at eight o'clock in the evening. It's always depressing to me when all that goes away and I usually go into a little bit of a funk.

And with only fourteen days left, I keep asking my daughter "What she would do these last few days before school starts?" and I keep expecting to hear "Let's go to Disneyland!" or "Let's go to the beach!" but instead I get "Can't school start TOMORROW???"

Freaking nerd.

When I was a kid, I can remember trying to squeeze every last second out of the final days of summer - staying at the beach until I was already an hour late getting home, playing pickle out in the yard until it was too dark to see the ball any longer, getting up earlier just to make the day feel longer, anything that I could think of to hold off that first day of school. STAY AWAY, EVIL TEACHERS!!! KEEP YOUR TEXTBOOKS AND YOUR DETENTION AWAY FROM ME!!!

Did you used to dread the start of school? How did you spend the final days of summer?
Jeff

(P.S. This post idea was totally not mine. I am so mired in not wanting summer to end that I couldn't even come up with a topic. Totally suggested by a clever friend who I will now owe...)

BABES IN JOYLAND
I defy you to find any man in his mid to late thirties who after hearing Belinda Carlisle's name doesn't go "Oh man. SO hot." Try it today and tell me I'm wrong. Just walk up to some guy in his mid to late thirties and go "Hey do you remember that chick who was the lead singer of the Go-Gos? Belinda something?" and his eyes will glass over and he'll respond "Carlisle. Belinda Carlisle. Oh man. SO hot."
Belinda Carlisle - Mad About You

THE DAY AFTER THE DAY AFTER FINISHING A NEW MANUSCRIPT

I finished a first draft of a new novel manuscript on Wednesday.  As soon as I was done, I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Oh shit, this is shit.  What a pile of steaming shit.  I can't believe I spent so much time on this awful, smelly, wretched pile of steaming shit."  Then I got a bad taste in my mouth, went downstairs, and stared out the window for, like, hours.

(Don't worry. Seems I do that for every book.  I pretty much did the same thing for Yellow Medicine, too, and look how that turned out: January Magazine Best of 2008 list and nominee for Crimespree Award.)

After finishing one of these, which is usually a project that takes up nearly a year of my time (and sometimes over), I push it off to the side and try not to think about it.  But what do I end up doing?  Thinking about it constantly. Thinking about mistakes I'm sure I made.  Thinking about how thin some of the scenes are and how I can beef them up with details.  About characters who need more personality.  About all the blunders because I actually tried to write a real mysterythis time, and I'm too stupid to plot one of those.  Most urgently, of course, I think about how no one will give a fuck about this book.  Oh, don't even pull out the old "I'm sure it's fine.  I like your stuff."  I'm not fishing for compliments so much as I am just telling you what my brain does to me every goddamned time.

So yesterday...I read a bunch of stuff online, then went out to mow the yard.  I made lunch for my wife.  I read another huge chunk of James Lee Burke's Rain Gods.  I watched episodes of Judge Judy and Wild Russia on the DVR. I thought about the pile of crap file I'd just spent months writing.  More staring out the window.  I picked some of our tomatoes out in the garden.  I went to the library but didn't find what I was looking for.

But in the back of my mind, I said, "Tomorrow I will get right back on the bicycle and forge ahead on the newnew manuscript."  See, I always have several things going at once.  There's one noir novel that I tried to trick myself into writing "a page a day.  Just one itty bitty page!" It's currently 11 pages long, haven't touched it in weeks. Then there's another one I'm really hot to get going on, and I've got a couple of chapters already in the bag.  (And let's forget about the one dealing with characters from the Billy Lafitte world, which is now not even on the back burner, but actually in the deep freeze wrapped in unmarked tin foil under the fake Bigfoot corpse.)

So rah rah!  Let's get back to the W(h)IP! (or the "Work (ha!) in Progress").  I mean, I've been dying to get to it for months, licking my lips and counting the days until I wrote END on the previous steaming, rancid, mushy, humid, embarrassing pile of feces...and here comes Friday morning!

I didn't do it.  I hadn't "recovered" enough to sit my ass down and focus.  Also, the routine of writing the book hasn't quite sunk in yet.  On days previous when I decided to lay down tracks for it, the thing spilled out of me, seven pages a day (and trust me, they're not bad pages).  I can't keep up that pace, of course, but it means that the story is rich and full in my mind, and I'm seeing it like a movie in my head.  Good sign.

But not today.  Just wasn't in me.  Probably not tomorrow either, as we'll be out roaming, enjoying the weekend. And I've only got a week left of summer vacation before meetings on campus start.  Once the semester is underway I will be plenty busy with classes, administrative work, visiting writers, committee meetings, etc.  *Whew*  All that difficult manual labor out in the hot sun!  I know!

That's okay.  I'll find the time to carve out novel writing in the midst of it all.  I always have. 

Just not today, tomorrow, or...hell, probably not Sunday either.

Instead, I'll keep slogging through Rain Gods (I like Burke, but get to the action already!  Enough with the pages and pages of a character wondering if he/she is worthy of living due to past bad choices.  We get it!), watch Penn & Teller's Bullshit, follow the #CreoZerg threadon Twitter, listen to badass tunes on Blip.fm, find out if my wife's old Ford Explorer is worth keeping or clunking, play with the cats, and watch it rain.  Tonight, we're off to a neighbor's house for some socializing. 

Come Monday, I'll be itching to write, and also to start revising the pile of crap.

I'm sure of it.

Any "Hey, I finished that! Let's celebrate!" rituals? Or, like me, do you secretly loathe what you just accomplished?

Friday Bonus Music Video (Blitzen Trapper "Black River Killer"):

Holy crap! Look at the time!

By Alison

So I read Jeff's post, hum a few bars of Waterfalls without thinking at all about his book club question and the next thing I know, it's like six hours later and Neil is putting horrible images in my mind of Kate plus 8 starring in slow-motion music videos and I STILL HAVEN'T BLOGGED!

What the hell is wrong with me?

What's that you say? Wrong, wiseass. I've actually been busy outlining! I'd decided to try writing this book I'm working on without an outline -- because so many writers do this and love this and I thought it was worth a try -- and everything was going fine until one morning, I woke up in a cold sweat thinking, "Oh my God I HAVE NO IDEA what is supposed to happen in my book!" It was an awful feeling -- something like paralysis of the brain, with a huge helping of Itotallysuck thrown in for good measure. "I'll never write a word again," I thought. "And the world will be better for it."

Once it hit me that I'm on contract with a deadline looming -- and besides, curling up into a fetal position isn't really a valid life-choice -- I put the pages aside and did something a little more practical: I started outlining. It was hard at first, but now that I've got 13 single-spaced pages of plot and dialogue snippets, I've been really enjoying this. I'm almost done with the outline (hense being tardy on other stuff like blogging and eating and registering for freaking BoucherCon. Must do that today.) But by and large, the outline is pretty good. And I'm breathing the world's biggest sigh of relief. The outline may change as I write, but with this thing beside me, I can write a book the way I like to write books -- which is running through a whole bunch of pages a day, checking off scenes, telling a story with an eye on the horizon. In short, knowing where the hell I'm going with this.

I've always admired those outline-free writers. They seem so spontaneous and creative and conduit-y. You know? In my heart of hearts, I feel a little inferior to them. But if Im inferior -- if I'm that much weaker or more pedestrian or less loved by the Muse -- so freakin' be it. My name is Alison. And I'm an outliner.

Are you an outliner too?

The FOFO Book Club

I really think we need a book club here at FO. I think it'll add to our serious legitimacy around the Internets. Because you know, when people think of serious legitimate websites, we are usually in the top three. Anyway, I think we need a book club. So I'm opening up nominations for the Very First First Offenders Book Club That Is Being Started With Good Intentions But Will Probably Dissolve Into Something Ridiculous. Rules of the VFFOBCTISBSWGIBWPDISR will be discussed at a later date. Like if/when we actually choose a book.

So let the nominations begin pouring in....or trickling...
Jeff

BABES IN JOYLAND
I hadn't heard this song in awhile, but I heard it over the weekend and now its stuck in my head. I hope its now stuck in yours.