Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

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.

something like life

by

I’ve got this elaborate editorial calendar telling me what to write and when to post, but if I just stick to the calendar that sucks a bit of the me out of the blog, eh?

Life continues to be a non-stop whirlwind of communications and music, which is exactly what I’ve always wanted it to be, so yay for the continued status quo! When not in actual rehearals I’m writing songs (for the soundtrack to Eric Smith’s novel), a novel (for NaNoWriMo), and a blog (just because, and for NaBloPoMo).

As it happens,Gina is also writing songs (at the moment, as a soundtrack to Boardwalk Empire), a novel (she’s the one who convinced me to do NaBloPoMo), and a blog (she is not the only one of us who exerts peer pressure).

I think this is pretty much what I imagined our adulthood would be like as a seventeen year-old, except for I’m married to someone way hotter than I imagined and Gina is engaged to a lawyer.

Speaking of: Elise, who has the same hectic rehearsal schedule as me but less of the writing, has starting painting the house in approved non-vomitorious colors. I think it’s very “nice” that she’s painting, which is to say I think painting (and, in general, decorating) is something people with too much money and spare time do to occupy themselves.

The only photographic evidence of us as Lucas and Corey from Empire Records, courtesy of our friend Tina, who was such a perfect Rachel Berry that it was a little disturbing. Note E's gold star, awarded from Rachel.

(Lest you think I am debuting this sideways insult of my wife here on the blog, she’s been hearing it for years. I’d wager she’d be happy if I just blogged about it and stopped whining about it in the house.)

As someone with neither money nor spare time, the whole process is perplexing to me. She had to use special gray primer on our dining room walls, which took an entire day to paint on and when she was done I was like, “Awesome, it’s gray, can we leave it like that?” and she had to explain that it was just the primer.

I’m all about gray. I think grays are totally exempt from every being vomit-inducing. Now the dining room is cranberry. I hear that’s supposed to aid in digestion, so I stood in it while I was eating raviolis before rehearsal last night. I ate them pretty quickly, but I think that’s just because I hadn’t eaten anything for about 22 hours. I’m not sure about the digestion angle.

The one downside to my constant flurry of words and sounds is it doesn’t leave a lot of time to interact with people I’m not writing or rehearsing with (or for taking things out of the dryer, but that’s another story). I think my next availability for a dinner with friends might be in December.

A snapshot of the last ten days of my life: Saw three concerts (one in New York), rehearsed three times, started three new songs for my soundtrack to Eric Smith’s book, tried to find a way to post three times daily here at CK (still working on that), wrote almost 7,000 words for my NaNoWriMo novel, and dressed as Lucas from Empire Records for a Halloween party.

Oh, and occasionally ate, slept, and watched 30 Rock.

If you did more than that in your last ten days then I want to know what else you could have possibly fit in and kind of vitamins you are taking.

Please note: methamphetamines do not count as “vitamins.”

Shut In

by

The not having a driver’s license is starting to really weigh on me.

I realized this on Friday night in the basement of a bar, transfixed by the noise of  a crowd of friends and the beacon of the Phillies on the television. I heard Jem mention she’d be within a mile of our house the next day, and before I knew it my mouth opened.

“Ohmigod you should totally come over and see the house it’s not far from where you’re going please just stop by we have beer or could order pizza do you think we’ll see you?”

No driver’s license and no $12 cab rides home if I stay out in the city past midnight means even my very occasional social appearances have been greatly curtailed (which is to not even mention open mics, from which I have become extinct). I’m enough of an introvert to think I don’t miss it. But even introverts need people, and the twelvish people that had been to our house before Saturday isn’t quite enough.

As a result, I am expanding my public shame campaign beyond a coworkerly bet with Mel over my cube wall: I am getting my driver’s license. I will report back by next week with news of the physical I need to take in order to get my form filled out in order to take my permit test in order to re-learn how to drive.

If I don’t keep to my promise please unleash an internet’s worth of shame on me.

28 years, 51 weeks: intro

by

It is six thirty-five in the morning, and I am on my way to work to begin raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity for two hours before doing my actual job.

I slept about three hours last night. I have eight-hundred more words due on a freelance assignment before midnight tonight and then rehearsal for the next two nights. I’ll have Thursday night to myself, unless I go out to see the show I’d like to see. Somewhere in there I have to fold some laundry and edit and upload a few gigabytes of videos for three different bands.

All that, and turn 29, on Wednesday.

Sometimes I don’t know how I’m supposed to do it – be this thing that I so desperately want to be. Like some Sisyphean Looney Toons sketch, I feel like I’m constantly plugging leaks in a giant dam only to have a new one spring for each I’ve stopped.

Can I be a successful professional in good shape with a happy marriage, an evening music career, a well-kept home, and writing gigs on the side?

Last week I tried to do it all. I was moderately successful, but it meant I was too busy to blog about it at the time. Does it defeat the purpose of being moderately successful if I don’t have time to blog about it?

Well, I’m making the time now. I’ll be moderately successful, damnit.