Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

National something something Month

by

This is the fifth year I’ve claimed to participate in National Blog Posting Month AKA NaBloPoMo, and the third time I’ve failed at it.

In 2007 when I failed I got engaged. In 2009 I failed less spectacularly, but wrote an EP of new songs I’ve been playing ever since.

This year I wrote another EP of songs!

Oh, and as of 3:30 a.m. this morning, AN ENTIRE FRIGGING BOOK.

Behold this dancing monkey as he informs you that I wrote a frigging novel.

Yes, if you’ve been keeping up with the tiny graphic on the sidebar or my endless authorial ramblings on the Twitters, you would know that I’ve been hard at daily work on a novel for National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo, which charges you with penning 50,000 words of fictional first draft in 30 days – 1,667 a day.

I found myself 10k words in the hole a day after Thanksgiving, but I was less worried about making up the missed words than I was that my natural stopping point in the story wouldn’t carry me past the 50k mark. However, last night the final chapter of my plot just kept going and going across 8+ hours of writing until I finally finished it at 4,500 words (9% of the entire book, at this first draft stage), sobbing on my couch at 2:30am with 50,227 words.

Then I plugged the whole thing into NaNoWriMo’s word counter, which counted me about 1k short. I expected that, since my counts have always been about 2% short when I use the website, but I was secretly hoping that it would resolve itself magically when I submitted my final text.

Nope.

Winner. Yep, that's my name.

Luckily, I’ve had a clear-as-a-bell vision of an epilogue for a week now, and I spent the hour deliberately dashing it off in one solid peal of writing to qualify for the official 50k mark on the site without having to make any serious expansions to the rest of the text, aside from a quick reread of the final chapter to catch obvious errors (come on, this is me, there’s no such thing as ‘no editing’).

There’s been a fair amount of polemic against NaNoWriMo, claiming it generates wasted time, false hope, and bad manuscripts. Well, sure. But, dudes, I wrote a book – actually, just a third of the entire story I want to tell, but still weighing in at roughly 243 paperback pages even in first draft.

I’ve always had the ability to write, and the intent to write, but this is still my single longest piece of actual, non-hypothetical, well-past the outline stages fictional writing by a factor of at least three (even as CK has swelled to over a million words – 20 NaNoWriMos worth of text).

So, was it a waste of time? Maybe. Isn’t everything? Why do I blog or play music? Why do people who I look down my nose at for watching television watch television every night? We all have our reasons.

What matters this weary morning is that last night I finally finished the first draft of book I’ve been conceiving and reconcieving since I was riding the 2 bus in 7th grade. Not only did I finish a first draft, I finished one of my current five big goals in life (having already taken a pass on having abs in 2010), and NaNoWriMo helped to inspire that.

So, my thoughts on National Novel Writing Month? In a word?

AWESOME.

PS: Many of you have kindly and without any regard for your own time or sanity asked to read some form of this novel. I absolutely will be posting an excerpt sometime soon, but not the entire thing as, theoretically, it is just a third of said entire thing, which means I have as many as 100k words left to write, as this was never really plotted as a standalone piece.

Of course, neither was A New Hope, so there is some precedent for this sort of thing. (Not that I’m comparing it to Star Wars.)

Fear not. The end goal is definitely to serialize the entire thing in some form here on CK, possibly as a podcast or graphic novel. (Do you like to draw, animate, and/or photograph such things? Because I don’t. So leave me a comment.)

In short, ask me again after I get more than three consecutive hours of sleep.

Best albums of 2010? Help me!

by

Now re-revised(!) (as of 12/6) (through 1/1/11) to include new LPs I’ve picked up and suggestions from readers.

If you’re a big music fanatic/critic, I want/need your help in populating my list of eligible Best Albums of 2010.

Amongst the 952 projects that I took on this November, I’ve begun to think about the “Best of 2010” albums list I’m going to compile next month.

Mozella's Belle Isle was retroactively my LP of the year in 2009. Do not sleep on this album, dudes. Trust me.

I haven’t done such a thing for a long time, because I haven’t bought and listened-to enough LPs in most years to issue anything like a definitive list. Last year when December rolled around I checked out all of the year-end lists and was shocked that I hadn’t even heard of most of the discs past the top few.

As a result, some of the 2009 albums I played into the ground this year I didn’t even hear until January of 2010 – namely, discs by MoZella, St. Vincent, A Fine Frenzy, and Thao with the Get Down Stay Down. I’m still finding 2009 favorites – the past few weeks I can’t turn off the K’Naan record.

This year I really think it’s going to happen, because I’ve been making a point of cruising New Release lists at least once a month for highlights. That said, I need your help in catching the LPs I’ve missed so far.

First, we have my list of eligible albums already owned or heard – numbering 78 over a hundred more than 175. I already know I have some heavy favorites in this group, as well as some clunkers. [Read more…] about Best albums of 2010? Help me!

Now I’m a bassist

by

We just loaded out from my first Philly show as a member of Filmstar.

Bass was played. I did not magically forget how to do it when we got on stage, which was a great relief. I had worries that I was going to look down and suddenly discover the bass was totally alien to me, like I was holding an accordion, or something else arcane that I don’t know how to play.

Bagpipes, possibly.

It’s weird to be sitting on the bottom of the mix. With Gina everything has equal weight – guitar against guitar, vocal against vocal. Either of us can dip out for a second and things stay in motion.

With Filmstar if I stop playing there’s no bottom! The bottom falls out.

Well, after one experience with that early in the set, I learned my lesson pretty quickly.

The other strange thing was being so LOUD. I am not a loudness junky when it comes to music, so I’m not used to the way instruments and amps resonate differently at higher volumes. It kept taking my by surprise.

It was a good set. Fast, a few bumps, but nothing I’m going to hold against myself forever.

So, yeah, now I’m a bassist. Seriously, me as the rhythm section? Where do I come up with these ideas.

autodidact to the death

by

I am sitting on my couch, gradually tearing my hair out, trying to figure out why various PHP MYSQL Update queries that worked in PHP4.x don’t work in PHP5.x.

Because, on the list of “things I am” in addition to being a communications professional, songwriter, blogger, novelist, and bass player, I am also an occasional software engineer.

Remember how I started the month with a post about specialization? Well, I am not especially specialized in hard-core PHP programming. I know the equivalent of a Cure2 spell in PHP. And, to continue a wobby analogy, this is a website with a lot of hit points to recover.

“Nerd” was implied on that list, right?

bondage is progress

by


Oh, the things I'll do for my art.

Last night E tied me to a chair in the middle of our freshly painted dining room so I could research my novel.

You see, last night I was blasting out words at an amazing pace on the El when it came time for my protagonist to be cuffed to a chair.

Despite many contortions on the El, I couldn’t figure out how far he could stretch, or if he could stand up and walk. The lack of detail was killing me. My nonstop flow of words dried to a trickle.

I hurried down our street, rereading what I had written on my laptop, only twice stumbling off of the sidewalk and into hedges. I unlocked our front door, flung it open, and announced to E:

Honey, I need to you to tie me to a folding chair and take pictures of it!

**

I’ve always been afraid that I don’t know enough to be an author.

I’m obsessive about details. I always have been. As a kid I would compare stacks GI Joe file cards to make sure their stories were consistent.

Oh the irony: Gina the chemist is writing a book and a blog, and Peter the communicator is learning chemistry.

I love getting lost in the fictional histories other authors have created, but I never thought I could create one of my own. I mean, have you watched the special features on the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition DVD? Tolkien wrote entire history books about his fictional world. He wrote a frickin’ language!

Me? I’m not well-traveled. I don’t know much about history. I haven’t taken science class since the 90s. I don’t know how anything works or how to take it apart or how to turn it into a bomb. I don’t even know the right way to describe a lot of things, like architecture or clothes.

That’s why I like writing songs. Songs have their own internal logic. Sure, they might reference something in the real world, but only for a word or two.

We learned that I would have to make an excuse for the character's feet not to be secured, because I was a deadly weapon with the folding chair tied to me.

Late in September Gina challenged me to do National Novel Writing Month. I didn’t say yes right away.  I spent all of October outlining my story and sketching the details of my characters. If I was going to join I wanted a mythology of my own.

While I outlined I hit a lot of gaps in my knowledge, but I didn’t let them stop me.  I’m smart. I can acquire knowledge. Better to start out with ideas.

A few of my characters  do things that involve some pretty intense knowledge of chemistry and physics. In my outline I glossed over the details, but now it’s time to write about them. I can’t always be asking Gina about every little detail, so to get started I bought Chemistry for Dummies.

And, last night I needed to find out how hard a character could swing a folding chair he was flexicuffed to in order to knock out another character, so I had E tie me up and take photographs of it.

Why? Because that’s what an author does.