Published on
August 25, 2007 in
writing.
My kids are off at the State Fair with my parents, so it’s fitting that I’m working on the outline for September’s story, which starts there:
On a visit to the Minnesota State Fair, ten-year-old Al runs off from her parents. Lost, she wanders into the Coliseum, where she discovers a twenty-foot-tall ram about to be slaughtered before a roaring crowd. She frees the ram and the two of them make a run for it– following the Burlington Northern tracks west-northwest toward the mountains, pursued by the furious Butcher and his thirsty knife.
Near Frazee, she escapes by climbing up the ram’s horn until she reaches the moon, where she finds that the Man in the Moon and his dairy herd are being menaced by a deadly shadow.
Near Surrey, she climbs down the ram’s fleece until she reaches the center of the Earth, and she will be forced to remain there forever unless she can fetch the Devil a glass of ice water.
Near Bainville, she flees by running around the ram until she reaches the kingdom of Srivijaya*. There she catches a glimpse of the Butcher, who is there himself on a dark errand.
On the bank of the Two Medicine River just outside Browning, she and the Butcher will fight a final battle for ram’s life– and her own.
*I took a globe, stuck my finger on Bainville, spun the globe 180 degrees, ran down into the southern hemisphere, and found that I hit Palembang, Sumatra. A quick Googling showed that Palembang was once the capital of the Tantric Buddhist maritime empire of Srivijaya… and that sounded like good fairy-tale fodder to me, so I grabbed it.
Comment on this post.
Published on
August 21, 2007 in
writing.
I spent most of the day blocking out a sequence in which our contestants try to track a gang of rogue librarians from Belarus who are trying to sell a shipment of library materials on the black market in contravention of international bibliographic-proliferation agreements.
When the caffeine wore off, I became convinced that I don’t have the draft of a book; I have a bunch of disconnected scenes in a sack. Rachel and I then spent an hour sitting outside Broders’ Southside Pasta Bar brainstorming how best to bond the scenes together.
Presumably this was just my regularly-scheduled second-act crisis. I am now standing up to go schedule next month’s panic attack on our family calendar.
Comment on this post.
As seems to be happening to an increasing number of people, I have been evangelized by James Peters and company over at Pavedwave into building a longboard optimized for pumping (where you use a surfing motion to propel the board, rather than pushing off with your back foot.) As a father and an old fart, I can’t get much joy out of aggressive hill-bombing or sharing the road with cars, so surfing bike trails sounded just about perfect.
My RoeRacing Mermaid LDP deck arrived the other day in a giant flat cardboard envelope, and I bolted on some Carver CX trucks and some giant sticky 3dm Avila wheels and went out to give it a try.
I spent the whole session howling with laughter (which was probably creepy to watch, given that I was all alone,) but I’ve got the thing self-propelling (slowly) up and down small hills, and I can surf parking lots without ever putting a foot down. It will be a long time before I’m logging respectable mile times, but who cares!
Comment on this post.
Published on
August 7, 2007 in
events.
Ed Vogel (author of the awesome Cigar Box Guitar article in Make among other accomplishments (and whom I met in a longboarding context not writing or strumming or making, but that’s another story)) invited me to attend last Sunday’s Lit6 Story Stage at the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis. I’m still lit up from the exposure to so many talented writers.
Lessons (re)learned:
- Reading out loud is a critical discipline that I ignore at my peril.
- Being too old for stage fright does not prevent stage fright.
- I do not know how to speak properly into a microphone.
Comment on this post.
Published on
August 2, 2007 in
writing.
After a death-strap cage match among Microsoft Word, Dragon Naturally Speaking, my Roadwarrior headset and me, I finally got a clean typescript of the troll story off to the Carleton student who has kindly offered to give it a first read. I asked her to read first of all for vertigo: If she finds that she is overcome by disorientation and vertigo, then she should stop reading and we should talk.
I also overcame my coming-back-from-a-month-of-not-writing inertia and wrote the first sequence of the CIA/Reality Show story. It felt good to get back to work, although rust…in…joints…
Comment on this post.
