notes on a thing.

[miketsimpson-blog]

Good Beer, Bad Beer, and Soccer

I’d like to tell you about a bet involving really good beer, really bad beer, and also soccer, but first a clarification: Though you’d think it would almost have to be, “Bud Light & Clamato Che…

[miketsimpson-blog]

500 WORDS IN 20 MINUTES.

There’s almost nothing more completely pornographic for me than reading blog posts about how people work – oh, and what’s in their bag[1] – and it’s because that happens to be the case that I came across Lifehacker’s recent article on how it is that science fiction writer Jamie Todd Rubin works.  I’ve read exactly none of Rubin’s work (an example of which you can peruse here) (I’m aware of the inherent laziness of writing about a guy whose work I can simultaneously find but haven’t actually read, so [but it’s worth noting that his blog has an assload of readers, and my tumblr {which, when said out-loud, makes me feel like I’m a 13 year old girl who collects unicorn stickers} has a total of one follower, who I’m 60% certain is some kind of “bot”]) but he’s an interesting enough guy: he’s a paperless ambassador for Evernote, he’s deeply interested in metrics and self-measurement[2], he’s a writer, he seems like a pretty thoughtful person and as such I sort of found myself sitting up and listening a little differently when he wrote,

“I've written every day for the last 219 days, and I've only missed 2 days in the last 365! What I learned from the data was that I could write 500 words in 20 minutes. I usually have 20 minutes in a day to write, often after getting my kids ready for bed. The words add up. In a year since I started this, I've written over 310,000 words”

First of all, that kind of production.  My heart did a thing and then I went and sat in front of the mirror for awhile and just swore at myself.  On two separate occasions I’ve written about the inarguable value of not to breaking the chain and even in the last three weeks I’ve broken the chain a number of times.  And, then Rubin has to go and drop 310,000 words in a year all over our collective asses.  Awesome/Extraordinary/Dammit.

But what I’ve been stuck with since is the bit about writing 500 words in 20 minutes.  I started writing this entry 12 minutes ago, I’ve written nearly 300 words, I have no doubt that this will hit 500 words inside of 20 minutes.  But – and here I want to be careful not to set up Rubin against a claim he never made, and I also want to clarify that I’m not actually writing about Rubin himself but a general approach to writing that seems highly prevalent but not particularly closely parsed out – I’m not sure there’s much to be proud of either in my 400ish words in 13 minutes or ever in the conceit that there’s an appropriate ratio of time/words that should be “hit” for writing to have been “done” or for “value[3]” to have been “achieved”.  And I’m also not sure I agree with myself in saying it.  On the one hand, word counts sort of matter – words have to be written, progress has to be made, and if you’re going to exist in a universe where you don’t believe that to be true then you’re going to exist in a universe where you’re 41 years old hoping against hope that The Next Novel Is The One That Gets Published.  But on the other hand, there are serious, fundamental questions to be asked about “what counts as ‘writing’” on any given day, and how re-writing and editing is measured (if indeed “measuring” is an important factor in your process [as it is in mine]), and whether or not quantity and quality have any kind of relationship to each other whatsoever.  I think I think this but I’m not sure: wouldn’t I rather find that my time writing (be it 30 minutes, or 6 hours) had a particular feel to it – a particular “state” “achieved” – than a particular number hit?  Wouldn’t I rather feel good about the “how” of the writing as opposed to the “that” of it?

And unfortunately, the answer is: I’m honestly not sure.  When Stephen King talks about writing 6 pages a day, or Michael Chabon says he writes 1000 words/night, or Rubin writes 500 words in 20 minutes, what is the “work” that was done? Were those new pages?  Old pages re-written?  Is there time to honor craft?  Or is the “work” beholden to nothing but production, production, production – no matter how rote, how flat, how artless, how short in sentences and paragraphs[4], how dead in language, no matter how devoid of joyfulness, no matter how lacking in heart?

Honestly, I don’t know.

[1] To which I’ll full-force admit an amount of addiction that is borderline disruptive to my, like, personal life.  I’m not kidding when I say if there were a cable channel called, “Sort of Cool People With Interesting Bags Show You How They Carry Their Macbook Air and Moleskines” I’d watch it every minute of the day and divorce myself from SVU forever.

[2] The way that real people are; not the way that I am when I say idiotic things like, “Everything is measurable!” and then start to make a spreadsheet and then go make a latte instead.

[3] And obviously context matters, too.  The 500 words I write here exist primarily because I use this space as a way to do a kind of “stretching” before I do more serious/sustained work and as such I can blow through words in no time at all.  And maybe that’s what Rubin is referring to, and everyone else I’m sort of thinking about here.  All of which is to say I don’t want to set anyone up for an argument they aren’t in fact lodging. 

[4] This is the part where you say, “But it’s, you know, readable.”

[miketsimpson-blog]

Just a Few Thoughts on Infinite Jest, True Detective, and Narrative Machinery

It’s neither particularly efficient nor effective to run too far away from your influences and to that end I don't want to run away from my obvious affection for David Foster Wallace; so too do I not want to overwhelm everything else I say here by saying: hey, I really like David Foster Wallace.  Because: just as his imitators are generally lazy about the imitation (as I certainly am); so are his critics of his stylistic tics, and so too are the critics of those who are influenced by him.  I do happen to like David Foster Wallace, and I say that as a way to mention that I once came upon a thing where he spoke about the narrative shape he was trying to achieve in Infinite Jest, that he saw it as a kind of fractal shape, triangles piled on top of triangles, that it was written in the shape of a thing called a Sierpinski Gasket, and (my guess is) the purpose of mimicking that sort of obtuse shape-set was to figure out a way to meditate on narrative itself.  That there is an inwardness to Infinite Jest, an inwardness reflecting an inwardness, and that kind of perpetual repeating inwardness is a sort of what the book is trying to get at as it itself recurs re: the modern/contemporary world[1].

At exactly no point in time have I thought to myself, "Writing a long book about Centralia will reveal something about the contemporary condition", nor have I thought, "Here's a particularly torturous narrative form -- copy it!"  But it has occurred to me that there's a certain kind of joyfulness that comes with a longer form, an opportunity not only to look closely at torturous minutiae[2], but also to ask serious questions about how it is that information presents itself in the world you are constructing and as such how it is that that information speaks to the condition of the world you are creating.  And thus my original thought was: bury the narrative in a set of story lines that stretch across the page in the form of footnotes, and make sure there are multiple timelines that create factual dissonance, and, you know, make your shit really complicated.

But I had the opportunity to watch five consecutive episodes of True Detective a few days ago and it began to occur to me that there’s something interesting occurring in the narrative shape of that show that reminds me of Infinite Jest and in fact reminds me of A Thing I Can’t Quite Put My Finger On, But I’m Sure I Wanted to Accomplish.  Which is that the narrative is so divided – first of all, there are (at least) two separate timelines, and the earlier timeline is being parsed out by two separate re-tellings of that narrative, and the present-day-narrative (the one occurring in the interviews) has the weird obligation to simulatenously reveal things about the past (like, “What the fuck really happened back in 1997”) as well as the present, (“What the fuck is going on here?”) and somehow make both reveal the truth about...well, both.

Which is to say, there’s a kind of recursiveness there, a mirror on a mirror. 

True Detective is hugely uneven – sometimes great, sometimes a half-assed David Fincher TV show – but it’s a similar issue: that bigness (in Infinite Jest, in Centralia, in a murder investigation told over eight hours of television) allows that joyfulness mentioned above (that you can really let loose on whatever it is you enjoy doing) but invites a really, really large set of structural problems.  Because you can choose anything, you can choose fractals, you can choose a set of mirrors, and the thing that strikes me most is this: if your structural work is smart enough, 10% of your readership will notice it.

 But if it sucks, everyone will.

[1] I know how ridiculous that sentence is.  Maybe it’s just a big, messy book.  But there’s something sort of cool about imagining it as a kind of perpetual folding-under, I think.  And cool to try to understand what that means in practice.

[2] That’s the biggest bonus, obvs.

[miketsimpson-blog]

"The Difference Between Good and Bad Writers"

Let me open with a brief point of comparison.  I’m a singer, and to the extent that I am I’ll end up singing pretty much anywhere I go.  For example: I can’t drive a car without singing all-up-in-it.  For example, if I’m hanging out with a friend there’s a pretty good chance I end up singing for a reasonable percentage of the time we’re together – like, in the middle of the conversation – and the song has a better than 50% chance of being mostly falsetto and the lyrics will more likely than not be something like, “Here we are.  Drinking coffee.   Fuck yeah drinking coffee!  Fuck yeah!”. 

(Fin.)

 I’m not a terrible, terrible singer[1] but I’m also not a good singer.  On a very good day I’m a marginal singer (but an exuberant one!) and because I am and because I’m wired a certain way I persevere.  I sing, and I sing, and I sing, and I drive my loved ones further and further away[2].  I listen to music all the time, and I sing constantly, and here I am: forty one years in, still singing marginally.  Enjoying it, and driving everyone else around me pretty much crazy.

I mention this all because I’m struggling to figure out a way to internalize and accept most of the Thoughts On Writing that I read on Blogs About Writing, and this morning I made the mistake of going to The Most Ridiculous Writing Blog in the World[3], reading a few entries, and then focusing what little energy I have in the morning on a blog entry that has accumulated 191 comments to date and also happens say – an actual quote here – “The difference between good writers and bad writers has little to do with skill. It has to do with perseverance.  Bad writers quit. Good writers keep going. That’s all there is to it.”

Never mind the terrible writing that happens to exist in this syllogism re: writing, the notion that “perseverance” is the only difference-maker here is insane in exactly the same way that Hallmark gift cards are insane.  The real difference maker, of course, is ability – and much like singing, and kicking a football, and painting, and dressing in such a way as to make your pants match your shirt – there is an amount that practice/work/perseverance[4] will enable you to improve at your craft.  And the time you’re willing to research it will help, too.  And the tool box you decide to develop matters.  And how much you read, and how much you talk to other writers, etc. etc. etc.

But at the end of the day, this: I’m 41 years old, I’ve been singing since the day I could speak, and it’s helpful for me to know that the thing I love doing more than almost anything else remains something at which I’m absolutely terrible[5].

    [1] Which is to say: I’m nothing if not exuberant, and as far as I can tell you get some number of points just for that, right? [a]

[a]  Though admittedly, when I get into the singing-thing people around me – people I love, trust, know, etc. – shake their heads sadly and say, “Oh, no.  Oh, no.” in the kind of grim way you do when you’re watching Planet Earth and that one hyena with the weird leg gets eaten by an alligator or something.

[2] To keep the parallelism going – just like your blog does!  Zing!

[3] My longtime readers will know it to be the one blog I can’t keep away from .

[4] The thing is, I’m not even sure “perseverance” is the right word.  I think “showing up” or “typing stuff” is probably the better terminology.  Which isn’t to say there isn’t an amount of rejection and things of that ilk.  But honestly: turning on your computer isn’t the same thing as Stepping Into the Breach.

[5] It’s “sort of” important to know that this is all moving in the direction of a much larger criticism of how deeply embarrassing and fundamentally incorrect writing blogs – with their snappy one sentence paragraphs, and their FOUR HELPFUL TIPS IN BOLD, and their soulless photographs, and their vaguely inspirational messages – are about the practice of “actually” “writing”.

Which is to say: your blog sucks, Jeff Goins.  Still.

[miketsimpson-blog]

A Certain Kind of Tension, As Certain Types of Decisions Are Made

 When I set out to write The Hole I decided I was going to effectively ignore all the trappings[1] of writing fiction that had made me so unhappy beforehand and just – in a sort of quasi Kerouac maneuver – “just write it all down” the way I wanted to.  I had this idea that writing and reading could be a more expressive iteration of who I am than the kinds of things I’d written before[2], which each felt hand-cuffed in a certain way[3].  And in fact when people who loved me and cared about my read my “work” they’d say something like, “This is really good.  But it’s not what I thought you’d write like?”[4] and what they meant when they said that was, “This is really, really dull.”

 So I set out to write, and not care about, I don’t know, Certain Elements of Fiction Writing With Which I Struggled[5], and just to follow what was interesting to me and see what happens.  And what happens is I’ve written this weird thing that moves in a variety of speeds, that is a little inconsistent in voice, and if often hugely bizarre.

 And here’s the thing: I don’t hate that.  In my head I’ve sort of had this idea that I’m Empire Building. That the book should have the feel of things I’ve loved all my life: David Foster Wallace, and 80’s hip-hop, and long-winded role playing games, and David Eddings’ series, and The West Wing/The Sopranos/The Wire, etc. etc.  Forms of art where a certain kind of mythology takes over, and where a certain kind of intentional inefficiency is important. 

 But there’s a second tension that has occurred to me over the past week, re-reading Junot Diaz and (barreling) through Gillian Flynn’s ridiculous/often awesome Gone Girl all day today and trying to work as many days in a row as possible on my own work.  That inefficiency is also inefficient, that there’s much to be said for  really pure narrative, that it’s a fine line between One Thing and Total Self Indulgence, etc. etc. etc.  So I find myself thinking, “Alright.  Don’t get rid of the two page footnote where Cranston drives through Ashland, but maybe consider re-distributing it?  And using it much later?  And also, make it a chapter?” 

 Which would make the reading way better.  But the tension again: who am I serving in doing what I’m doing?  And why?

  (the chain = 4 days today.  And that’s a record).

[1] Wherein “trappings” = “things at which I failed”.

[2] I’ve made mention of this a number of times earlier, but I think at some level that’s what this project is supposed to be about: trying to forgive myself of earlier expectations and failures, trying to remind myself that I’m a pretty talented writer and a reasonably interesting person, and then allowing myself to take advantage of the way I’m wired as opposed to trying to re-wire myself.  And hope against hope that all that messy wiring will work reasonably well with whatever amount of skill I’m already carrying around with me.

[3] George Saunders often talks about his early stuff as feeling as if he was writing with, “one hand tied behind his back”.  As usual, his thinking here is really acute (can things be “really” acute?  Or is that a binary?)

[4] True story.  There was A Girl Who Had A Crush on me a bunch of years ago.  I moved from the town I knew her in to a totally different part of the country and never knew it; then she sent me these emails that were really incredible things and reframed the way I knew her, spoke to her, considered her, all the great things that such feelings can do.  And then she asked if she could read My Novel.  And I sent it to her.  And the radio went silent almost immediately.  So.

[5] And admittedly was really crappy at, also.

[miketsimpson-blog]

But What Are You Editing “For”? Or, “To”? Or, Like, “At(?)”?.

In terms of progress, I’m all meta right now.  I completed the first draft (of the first section) of The Hole a few months ago, and then literally did nothing.  And by the way, that “nothing” wasn’t tactical; I just didn’t do anything with it.  I think I read some part of it one night; I’m 100% sure that if I did I had been drinking.  Afterward, I did nothing.

 A month or so ago I had a nagging feeling that I needed to “officially” “begin” the second draft or I’d be talking about it while I was lying on my deathbed (“I’m just working a few things out in my head...”), and then last week I sat down and sort of half-heartedly pronounced, “I’m beginning the second draft now.”  There wasn’t much in terms of process or certainty in front of me, it just seemed like I needed to sit down and turn the light on and kind of pretend to start re-writing it.  Since, I’ve re-read it (sort of closely), I’ve re-read the first chapter (more closely), I’ve thought written about it, I’ve written about writing about it, and now I’m sort of stuck with the ugly truth that to actually re-write it I need to actually re-write it, and to do that I need to know something about what I’m re-writing toward.  I’ve made a few notes from all the re-reading, like:

Where’s the fucking dad?

and:

Move more efficiently;

and my favorite so far:

Make Gracie feel like a funnier weirdo

but there isn’t a whole lot of sense of how to accomplish any of it.  Which is maybe why I feel so psychologocially weird about taking out a pen tonight and Beginning to Begin.  Which is also maybe a marker for why writing can feel as if it’s incredibly hard.  Because we all crave clarity, we all crave certainty, and at some point in time in this process there is neither.  There’s only the hope – supported, in my case, by absolutely no evidence whatsoever – that somewhere deep down I know what I’m doing, that talent will be a guide, and that if I mark up enough sentences something important will happen on the page.

  (the chain = 2 links long).

[miketsimpson-blog]

Don’t Write The Ending. Unless, You Know, You Think You Should. Whichever

I’ve made my way through something close to three novels in my lifetime.  One I wrote (reasonably romantically) in an attic in Portland. In writing it I knew it was a complete disaster, but I was twenty-three years old, I had recently been left my an Important Girlfriend, there wasn’t much that made sense in my life without either college or Important Girlfriend, so I wrote a novel.  It was terrible; I’ve never loved writing anything else as much as I loved writing that terrible novel.  It was structured pretty simply, it was deeply romantic (because, I wrote it), and from the first second I began writing it[1] I knew exactly what the five pages of the book were going to be.  I hadn’t quite backwards engineered it, but I knew the scene exactly and in fact wrote the thing very early on in the process as a way of knowing what I had to “get to[2]”. 

This novel – The Hole – on which all of this quasi-meta-writing hinges is Novel 4[3], and at some level a litmus test for whether or not I think I have this kind of thing in me anymore.  But for the first time, quite literally for the first time in my “writerly life”, I’ve kept myself as far away from the ending as is possible.  I have a vague thought about where it may land – a resolution for the problem that (may or may not be) the center of the entire thing.  But I’m trying as hard as I can to keep away from those ridiculous thoughts about finishing it, publishing it, the fame that I’m sure will accompany it, the women I’ll bed, the French cafes at will I’ll be accused of plagiarism, etc. etc.  For right now, I want to get back to a place I was way back in Novel 1 – where the act of writing felt performative, felt joyful, felt fully expressive of all the things in the world I happen to love, hate, consider and reconsider, worry about, etc.  Which is to say there’s a sort of bullshit zen thing here where I want to remember to stay present in the page-paragraph-sentence I’m working on and avoid almost everything else. 

But in saying that, it’s hard for me not to wonder about this: what would it look like to truly backwards engineer a novel?  Beyond, say, outlining it?  What would that process look like?  What questions would you ask yourself?  What kind of word counts and language types and sentence structure would you allow yourself (and, of course, what would you avoid?).  

One of the more interesting aspects of working on this book in particular is the length of it’s “sections” – each are long, each are more than 25000 words in length, and in each serve as sort of ridiculous smaller novels and in its inside of those sections that I way to experiment with shape, structure, and – of course – this notion of backwards engineering.  Which gets back to the ultimate tension I’ve been thinking about – does that kind of structure[4] somehow infringe upon your ability to perform on the page?  Or, in a very White Stripes kind of way, allow you to do your best work?

[1] I have no recollection of that moment, but how much do I wish I had?  What would that moment of Absurd Writerly Triumph have looked like?

[2] Also, because the ending of that novel was very much an outcome I had badly for in my own life and so that ending became a very familiar fantasy I’d run myself through.  Which of course is why I wrote the novel in the first place – to justify the huge amount of my own life I had invested in imagining that ending.  And it’s worth saying too that my life had taken a turn towards the ridiculous – I’m sure I’ll writing something about it later – that really justified the depth to which I needed that ending to somehow just, like, occur. 

[3] Sort of.

[4] Here, I’d briefly reference the lengths of wallpaper Kurt Vonnegut writes about in the first chapter of Slaughter House 5 – among our most performative and joyful writers covered yard after yard of wallpaper with colored lines to map out his novels.  How much would I fucking pay to see those?

[miketsimpson-blog]

A Few Thoughts On Time (Which May Lead To A Larger Thing About Backwards Engineering Novels Later On).

 Long time readers[1] here know that I have a particular fascination with the relationship between personal productivity theory and novel writing – in particular because writers seem so committed to the purported “mystery” of writing that merely getting in front of the computer and turning it on seems to fit their general definition of efficient productivity[2] -- and as such I have a particular fascination with Cal Newport’s recent post about mapping out all the minutes of your workday.  I’m on the second day of The Chain (which means, record set); I’m feeling the opening whispers of a pattern to my work (starting the timer, considering process, writing for 15 minutes here, then digging into the book) and to that end my work has the early feel of something like a loosely organized soccer practice: it could be worse, but it could be way, way better.  It’s interesting to reconsider how my 30-45 minutes are applied daily and wonder why it is that I’ve fallen into the patterns that I’ve fallen into, and what relationship “time planning” can have on the quality of my work.  Which is to sort of wonder out-loud this: if the goal is to write interesting sentences, and to “perform on the page”, is there a way to design each “session” in order to maximize my potential so to do?

  Or, would I be better served putting on a cozy sweater and drinking chamomile tea?

    [1] Ahem.

[2] It’s worth acknowledging here that it took me about five months to begin this second draft of The Hole, so I don’t want to color myself as the person who sort of says, “Just write, fuckhead” or something like that.  But there’s different shades of productivity, and the thing that interests me right now/today (and perhaps ongoing[ly]) is what it means/looks like to “be a productive writer” because in truth it’s probably not good enough to “just write the first word” (which seems like the kind of happy-crappy advice that has been self-proliferating on the writing blogs for awhile now.[a]

            [a]  This will no doubt become something of a meme for me, but the fact of the matter is this: just writing anything isn’t “enough” for one to “be” a “writer” (whatever that loose terminology means) in exactly the same way that Me Taking Pictures of My Dogs With A Nice Camera doesn’t make me a “photographer”.  Productivity counts, for sure; as does craft; as does process; as does intent; as does (other things I haven’t thought out right now).   I bring this up merely to reference the above footnote tangentially by saying that there is a direct connection between “being a writer” and studying craft and performing on the page and I think it’s pretty much insane for certain writer’s blogs (I’m looking at you, Jeff Goins) to purport otherwise in order to see more inspirational ebooks.

[miketsimpson-blog]

Just A Few More Thoughts On The Chain, Broken/Otherwise

On Friday, The Chain was one day long and on Saturday it was no days long and today it’s one day long again and if I’m lucky I’m going to tie the Record Chain Length if I can just get my ass in front of the computer tomorrow.

Friday, I was sort of meditating on the difference between how this process feels and the way it felt when I was in grad school, when there was nothing in my life but page counts and word counts, when I lived in a five hundred square foot apartment next to a gas station in Syracuse and – girlfriend in another country – there was nothing to do but write, and edit, and think about both.  It was an intensely romantic period of my life, there were entire weeks when I left my appartent only to buy microwavable frozen chicken sandwiches and beer at the gas station next door and even then I was acutely aware of exactly how deep I was in my own work[1].  So much so in fact that as the novel morphed over the years I found myself even writing the novel into the novel, talking about writing it, I remember incredibly clearly sitting on the front step of my girlfriend’s house in Slough, London at five in the morning, smoking a cigarette and thinking about the book and then almost immediately seeing that moment as the beginning of a kind of exit strategy for the final chapter of the book[2].  The moment itself was fine enough, but the take away is the same as it was on Friday: that my whole life was imbued with moments exactly like that, and that I was always watching myself watch, wondering when the next electric moment (like that one) was going to strike, worrying I might not have a pen on me when it did[3]. 

This weekend I was in Potter County -- +/- 130 miles away from Centralia, but in a town (Galeton, PA) that probably isn’t now so different from the town Centralia was.  The rough bars, the cold diners, the old main street, the store fronts, the struggling public schools, the bone-chilled Pennsylvania winters, the fracking, etc. etc. etc.  And the thing that strikes me right now is this: it never once occurred to me to notice a single thing, I didn’t write a thing down, and in the end the only thing that came out of it in terms of me and The Hole is that the chain was broken one day before it achieved record-tying length.   

[1] Which isn’t to say I felt good about it, or something particularly tiresome like that.  But is to say that I knew I was working a lot, and the depth of my relationship to my work (which I’m feeling really self-aware about right now because of the douchiness inherent to the phrase, ‘My work’”)

[2] Which admittedly sounds awful, but it worked.

[3] As such, the obvious concern is: will I ever feel that way again?  Is it even possible for me to feel that way again?

[miketsimpson-blog]

On Breaking The Chain

There's this sort of apocryphal lifehacker story about Jerry Seinfeld -- which he himself disputes -- that he invented an idea that to be productive you basically need a calendar and a red pen and your job in life is to not "break the chain".  My attraction to lifehacking is sort of like an attraction to car accidents -- there's a pornagraphic element to it; there's a "I can't stop Looking At This Thing element; there's a, "Every time I open up this website I hate myself even more" kind of thing too --  and nearly everything I read there (and I read a lot of things there, sadly) feel so absurd and redutivisit that I end up a slightly angrier/more stupid person merely for my five minutes there.  Every two hours.

But the notion of not breaking the chain is one I’m trying to wedge into my head, one I’m trying to adopt as I work through draft #2 of The Hole.  The highest writerly ompliment I’ve ever been paid came at the hands of Robert O’Connor, who once told my parents I was a “workhorse”: I put out 50 pages a week, I worked no fewer than 25, and the only thing I ever wanted to do was write more, and edit more, and when I hear a sentence I liked (or a commercial, or a moment in a song, or anything at all) it went into my novel.  There were a number of problems with that book, but it was as full and complete an expression of who I was as is imagineable.  Now, though, I feel differently about my work: that over the course of the day -- between my wife, and my work as a teacher and a coach, and a new father of twins, and a person who Likes To Watch Television, I don’t feel that the book takes up any space in my mind when I’m not in front of it (which I worry about [when I remember to worry about it {which is also a thing I worry about all the time}]) and thus: I don’t want to break the chain.  I got two days in, and then The Weather Went Fucking Nuts, and the chain broke.

So I’m back on today.  The chain’s longest length is: two.  And today I’m at: one.

But still.

[miketsimpson-blog]

Getting Here

I wanted to write the book for a long time -- I didn’t get around to it, and then over the course of a month or so this summer I decided, “I’m going to write it” and because making thiings (even marginally public) somehow makes things better, I wrote it in three page junks and sent my friend pdfs of those three pages (sort of) every night.  The project itself was sort of diversionary -- that was the point -- and (for the first time in a long time) a lot of fun to write.  I had this sort of vague notion of where I needed it to get and getting it there was sort of the entire purpose of the project.  And I had this idea too that if I wrote it in this way I would be able to remove a sort of natural backwards-engineering thing that I tend to do where I try to imagine The Thing As Completed Art.  Instead, I was just sort of stuck worrying about whether or not the three page bits made some kind of sense, and where actually fun to read.  And thus the challenge was entirely different: make the pieces fun to read.  

And that’s what I did.

But last night I began the process of draft two (after a long, long period of not) and I’m in the earliest stages: just reading through, trying to observe, trying not to edit too much.  And ultimately this: trying to move a thing from something that was just a lot of fun to write into something cogent, and thoughtful, and wise?

Night two editing The Hole.  Here we go.

[miketsimpson-blog]

Notes on a Thing

I had this idea that it might be useful to spend five minutes or so reflecting before I launched head-long into actually doing work; then I had this idea that there may/may not be some utility in making it a little public; then I had this idea that the utility may come in the form of a blog/spot on tumblr/whatever.  What I want to do is: do the reflection part.  What I don’t want to do (in particular now) is spend forty five minutes trying to expain the why part.  So this is the why part: I’m working on the second draft of a novel I hope to sell.  I want to reflect.  This = that.

[miketsimpson-blog]

On Kerouac's Birthday

It’s possible that the worst exhibit in San Francisco’s Beat Museum is the weatherbeaten Hudson they’ve lamely parked by the cash register and attached to a small printed note that reads, “Did Neal Cassady steal this car?”  Even the note looks embarrassed for having to be there.  The old car is just some old car, it may or may not have been in Denver around the time that Cassady was stealing such cars, and as if to hammer home the loose association this car can claim to the Beats there are a pair of skis lying across the passenger seat.  Did Cassady steal the car?  Well – it is a car.  So it’s possible.  But it’s not at all likely, and still less likely that he’d then gone, you know, skiing[1] or something.

Much of the Beat museum operates on the guiding principle that “Thing X May Remind You of Not-Present Thing Y”.  It’s less a collection of Beat Memorabilia and in fact more a collection of "Things Similar to Things Jack Kerouac May Have Used -- or Not Used -- When He Was Doing Something"[2].  As such you sort of split your time there trying to engage the collection in a meaningful way and just chuckling at the lunatic hokiness of the place[3].  But in a back room on the first floor they loop a Kerouac documentary that contains some reasonably startling video of mid-sixties Jack, bloated and crazy, vigorously explaining the vast intellectual distance between his work and “the damned commies and hippies” who followed after him[4].  Kerouac sounds impossibly self-involved and a little confused – to anyone with even a passing interest in the man it’s uncomfortable stuff.  But just after that footage, the documentary returns to his revelatory reading on the Steve Allen show (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzCF6hgEfto), where Kerouac is breathtaking and magical, where he speaks with clarity and authority, where he weaves in and out between the first and last pages of On the Road without ever turning a page.  Steve Allen gamely accompanies him on the piano, and Kerouac delivers the finest reading I’ve ever heard.

We were in Rock Springs for Kerouac’s recent birthday in reading aloud from On the Road in the morning and “Mexico City Blues” in the evening that disparity between the vital Jack Kerouac of the 1940’s and the lethargic, difficult Jack Kerouac of the 1960’s was once again omnipresent.   I’ve been thinking since that perhaps therein lies the real attraction of Kerouac – that he spent the bulk of his life trying to claw his way from beneath that magnificent legacy he accidentally created for himself, that his own mythos moved faster than he could, that he never quite could get out in front of his own terrible shadow.

[1] For those of you who enjoy detail, the skis were Volkls from about 1993.

[2] For a good example, the Beat Museum has collected “period furniture” (period not identified) as proof that Kerouac himself may have sat down.

[3] It helps not at all that City Lights sits about a block and a half away.  City Lights is somehow a more magical place than it’s own towering legacy: aside from being a terrific bookstore, it feels exactly how you hope it might.  Never mind the ghosts in the second floor, in the basement, of Kerouac and Kesey and Dylan and pretty much anyone you’d ever want to meet; nevermind the ongoing hope of bumping into Ferlinghetti himself and having the opportunity to say – in an offhand way – “Are you Larry?”.

[4] His assertion here is that the commies and hippies “missed it completely” but, as happens over and over with the Beats, though he is very clear on how badly “it” was “missed”, he’s pretty opaque when it comes to what the missed "it" is.

-Mike

Pinch pots out of Salt Flat Clay:

  The Rocks at Medicine Bow:

Betty Hoop & Menagerie:

Adair, Iowa:

Sketchbooks (for more information, see the entry below).