About Face

November 4, 2009 in Yes I have a life | Tags: , , | 2 comments

Alright, I’m going to level with you: I’m not doing stand-up comedy anymore.

This has been a long time coming and obvious to many of you. I don’t feel comfortable making public displays but it occurred to me that I need to just combine my book’s website with this one. Doing so without discussing it would be a little odd. Posting in two blogs at the same time is just getting ridiculous. If my trading card has a weakness on the back it would read: ” splits attention in too many directions, does bad job with all of them”. In retrospect, building a website for a book probably works best for those who don’t already have one. Or people who have the focus to post regularly throughout the week while interacting with other websites on a level that I don’t. My website is mostly a journal, a method for keeping track and posting things I find interesting, but not a lot of interaction with other websites.

This brings me back to what has happened and why I haven’t posted here in a few months.

After performing at Bridgetown I had a hard setback in my comedy goals: achieving them. My supreme goal was perform at Bridgetown. But as soon as I stepped off that stage the desire to do comedy vanished with it. Some switch flipped off in me. I felt no interest in working new venues, no interest in traveling to Seattle to make more progress in a career. The thrill of audience applause didn’t balance out the feeling I got when I visualized lonely nights in hotels.

When the urge to perform never returned in the weeks that followed I had to ask myself a lot of questions. What happened? My friends told me that I was burnt out after a long year of organizing a monthly show.  Would it ever come back after a break? What if I just do this, switching my focus to a new career path, over and over again but never actually get anywhere? Years of working a day job and then working again at night has already been hell on my mind and body, and I’d made no progress in changing my situation or decreasing my stress. Finally the big one: what do I do now?

Taking my friend’s advice, I spent a lot of time alone, reflecting on where I stood. I started with Favorite Show. My freshest memory is the June show I hosted. When I looked out into the crowd I saw the entire audience was people I already knew, friends of mine or friends of other performers. Something inside me told me this was wrong in some way. I understood that every show is started with the support of your friends, but after a year I really had to ask myself if I had the will to take it to the next level in order to attract people outside my friend circle. I honestly wasn’t. So instead drowning the show in my backyard I handed everything over to Whitney Streed, who I hope gets everything and more out of Favorite Show. I admired her performing skills the first time I saw her work at Legacy Lounge and continue to do so. I’m unendingly grateful for the chance she’s given me to sit, breath, and reflect.

Then I decided on what to do next: Scrap, the book project I started back in 2007 but gave up before doing comedy shows. I dabbled with it on and off after Bridgetown but there came a moment where I thought back to what made me start doing comedy. The talk Duncan Trussel had with me during 2008 Bridgetown that inspired me to go up on stage. Favorite Show started as a space to play in, to write short stories and perform them in front of audiences while also dabbling in stand up. After a time, stand up (and promoting/organizing the show) became my everything and the short stories faded away. Now I wanted to try going back to writing and see where it would lead me. I committed to finishing a complete, full draft of my book. And I achieved it.

When I dug deep into the writing process and started building a book, not just pieces of a draft, I found myself at peace. More focused than I ever did when I performed. Performing was always a sort of slow boil anxiety, capturing my full attention because it took singlehandedly organizing an entire show to take my focus. The buildup kept me occupied, every joke had been labored over, but when I went up I performed like a bullet. My friend’s main complaint about my performances always centered on my speed: you go too fast. With time I became more fluid and loose but then I caught myself not being there in the moment. Sometimes I felt like I had been floating above my head, looking down. Writing is different. Of course I still chew on everything, obsessing on every sentence because I’m at least a half-lunatic, but my anxieties never hit the levels they did before a show. But the anxiety driven adrenaline never fully sets in when I’m writing. I used to think this was boredom or a bad work ethic but now I think that’s a good thing.

One night while completing my latest draft I had been working on a scene involving three characters in the midst of an emotional argument. It took me a while before I realized my breath had gotten heavier and I had been sweating. And when I completed the scene I remember sitting back in my chair and wanting to cry. Not because I was sad or hurt, but because I just felt so overwhelmingly good. I had been there, in the moment, and it felt like nothing else.

So now I’m committed to finishing my book, sending it out to publishers, and working on this career. The one I had originally started with. My year in stand-up comedy is something I’m proud of. I’ve met very talented people in Portland, completed a lot of work, and learned so many things. Perhaps next year I will be eating these words, crawling back to stand-up, trying to re-friend it on Facebook. But I doubt it. Right now the experiment feels over. Comedy is an important part of my life and is a major part of my book. But it’s not my entire life, and not what I want to build a career on.

Expect this blog to change a little bit. I’m going to move my posts from the Scrap website over to here, rename some of my tags, and be a bit more honest with everyone, especially myself.

Junk to Funk

October 21, 2009 in Green | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

2009_J2F_CALL_SHOW_FLIER_low_res

Junk to Funk has announced the date of their next show: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14TH

I know I’m going to be there.

As quoted from their website:

“PERFORMANCE BY JUNQUESTRA WITH A STAGE FULL OF JUNK INSTRUMENTS

THIS YEAR’S JUNK JURY
Local Designer Adam Arnold, Kelley Carmichael-Casey from SCRAP, Kristen Calhoun from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Prasenjit Tito Chowdhury from Portland Fashion Week nd Ronda Chapman-Duer from the Oregon Association of Recyclers.

Don’t forget audience costumes are encouraged! But don’t worry, if you don’t get to it before hand, SCRAP will be on site with a DIY SCRAPPY ACCESSORY TABLE – bubble wrap bow tie anyone??


We recommend that you come early to interview with local show Sustainable Today Television on the “Green Carpet”, watch intriguing film shorts and hang out with our trash monsters!!”

First Read Through – Complete

October 14, 2009 in Editing | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

It’s occurred to me that it’s taken the act of writing the book and completing it in order for me to figure out what it really was about. Are a lot of books written this way? I spent last week house sitting for a friend, pouring through all 62k words of my current draft, making notes and charts all the way. This much has occurred to me:

  1. I need to write more chapters, including the perspectives of the other two prominent characters in the story.
  2. I have a long way to go.

Now that I have a more complete idea of what this story is about I can take steps to tell the story the best way it can be told. I’ve gotten a very clear glimpse of the humor, the tragedy, and the completely absurd things that happen in it. The first five chapters, the ones I had started the story with so long ago, now ring a little flat. I commented on the word use in a previous entry but this is not what I am referring to here.

My reading time has been spent juggling various books: Chabon’s Maps and Legends, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jonathan Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Each of these novels have given me different infusions of something I’ve nearly flogged dry from my work: description. Although focused on entirely different topics, the authors above use their description guns in their own way. Foer’s description is emotive and relentlessly mental, Stoker’s more stark and Victorian, while Chabon’s writes with a very vivid, imaginative, steady rhythm. They play their strengths to their own effects, never giving me the sensation that they don’t know what is driving them along. It makes me contemplate how I’m using description in my own work.

My whole story is drowning in objects and I’ve come to find laziest way to display anything to a reader is to list them. Needless to say I’ve spotted a lot of lists in this draft. It bleeds into even my descriptions of Scrap’s past:

Chet and Hali took great delight in telling him he used to cry all the time as a baby. His first words were, “It smells bad here.” These days he only complained of the same things his parents did: all kinds of cleaning liquids, flavored drain cleaner, little tubes of “underarm destructorodorants”, strawberry shampoos, coconut conditioners, anything overly minty, watermelon head and hand soaps, red pepper foot soaps, or disinfectant nail polish. Anything lemon-scented found a burial place far, far away from their home. He could smell none of these things coming from the pungent, wavy heat that drifted up from the opening, and none of the more deadly smells: the cold chill that ran along his throat when he smelled spilled chemicals or the mouth drying scent of rusted metal.

This technique is useful, but gets tedious. I like the description I use but the format that it’s given to the reader makes it a little hard to swallow. I’m not setting a proper rhythm for the reader to get through the scenery, instead dumping it all on their lap at once and making them to figure it out. This is not what I want to do. So I’ve made myself a goal of coming up with not only more interesting items of trash but also more creative ways to display the scenery to the reader without forcing it.

Starting work by Chabon has been a dowsing rod to me: his writing making me spot the staleness of my own writing. And it just gets more lifeless as it goes on. Near the end everything becomes very drab, the words themselves being about as direct as possible:

Scrap picked up his pace: Bottles, jars, containers, anything that could hold water. While picking up some thing plastic bottles Scrap saw the Prince and Ex spot something and shout at each other in excitement. Together they overturned a giant concave plastic shape. “Krazy Kool Kiddy Pool”, read the lettering inside it.

Another list, utterly dead. It’s a combination of the list problem from the paragraph presented earlier without the imaginative description: easier to read, more dull. I’ve given you the most basic account of the event with only a glimmer of humor at the end of the paragraph. This is not how I want this story to be told.

Discoveries like this make it hard for me to put a specific date on when this draft will be done and ready to go. When the subject comes up in conversation I’ve told others to expect a readable copy of it in two to three months. I’m hungry for a deadline, almost ready to pay a person to give one to me. But with how new this entire process is to me I don’t have the experience to really say.

The Story of Stuff

October 7, 2009 in Green | Tags: , | Leave a comment

I feel like it’s about time for something a little less texty for a change, so have a video.

This is the first in a series of YouTube videos titled “The Story of Stuff”, a segmentation of the original, full video that you can find on their website. I had never heard of this video before until a friend pointed me to it. If you feel the video is a little heavy handed, you can get the other heavy hand by watching “How the World Works“. Apparently it’s controversial enough to warrant Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck weighing in on the issue in their usual ways.

Enjoy.

First/Last

October 1, 2009 in Editing | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

I took another stab at editing last night after a brief hiatus. This time around I worked with the manuscript directly instead of reading a grammar book that tells me what to do. It went very well.

My current approach is to read the first and last chapters then move toward the center of the story. The first chapter is very, very old and reflects an entirely different style. To illustrate, let’s just compare two sentences. Here’s a line from the second and third paragraphs of the first chapter. I believe I wrote this somewhere around the 25th of May, 2009:

Catching a glimpse of himself, he looked away and kicked the mirror over with his foot.
I hope that’s not true, he thought.

Now here’s a sentence from the final chapter, written the 10th of September, 2009:

Vogue walked up and closed his mouth. She didn’t meet his eyes, head cast down. She scratched the back of her neck, speeding up her descent.

These two sentences are just a few months apart but miles away in quality. The groundwork for that first chapter came from September of 2008, but the internal dialogue part was added in May when I started experimenting with internal conversations. As I traveled through the story, I rarely ever felt that people’s thoughts were worth bringing up with the reader. Not on this scale. If I do decide to keep this technique I’m going to have to use it a lot more frequently and efficiently than this. Looking back at the first sentence, I feel it just overstates the point when I keep it this simple and short.

You may also notice that I included a reference to a mirror, a sketchy attempt at defining the character right away. Sometimes I think the hardest parts of writing are doing the most simple things, in this case describing your main character to the reader. I’ve never wanted to just plop a paragraph in the middle of the chapter but I wasn’t sure how to do it otherwise. Describing Scrap may turn out to be the most difficult and I may do away with it altogether.

The second sentence, on the other hand, relies more on the character’s actions than words or thoughts. As the story progresses Scrap becomes more adept at reading people’s body language and figuring things out about them, a theme that I like to explore versus overloading the reader about everyone’s internal processing. It also helps cement the third person limited perspective that I think suits the story best: you’re following Scrap’s exploration of this landscape and his decisions that come from this exploration. This includes people’s actions and reactions. To be the sort of person I’d want to follow around in this setting he needed to outgrow the stale everyman archtype. So Scrap started noticing people’s behaviors and smaller things, become more detail oriented, and therefore become a bit more snappy and kee, an extension of his ability to hunt for food in the garbage.

What’s really exciting to me is noticing the similarities in the first and last chapters. I can see the real Scrap in the first chapter, buried under everything I thought he was. He’s fully formed and still the same person, just more fuzzy than he is in the last chapter. The last chapter is far from perfect: I can spot some grammar problems and improvements that need to be made even on the sentence I posted above. The last chapter is not better than the first to me on a purely technical level, it’s better to me because it is more true to the story.

I’ve had a hard time telling people that I’m done, and now I know why. Even though I technically finished the book, I still feel there’s so much more to explore.

Insert Editing Procedure

September 25, 2009 in Editing | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

This two week vacation has been good for my mind. I’ve officially stopped picturing my characters doing things when I listen to music. The notes and random thoughts for the book have slowed down to an occasional trickle. Everything has settled enough for me to realize that I’ve never done any large scale editing of this scope before. It’ll be interesting to see how you actually go about this. Will I end up making a chart? Will I buy a whiteboard? At what point will I get so lost I don’t know what works and what doesn’t?

Like most of what I’ve learned so far, all of this is individual to the writer. The lure of advice from professionals is still too great for me. I wish I had read more about what other writers do at this point. Plenty to read about the writing process, didn’t come across so much about the editing. Is it really that unglamorous? I’ve tried all of the writing methods I came across: Artist’s Way, the two sentence rule from Bird by Bird, writing groups, setting a daily word or page count. Those are the ones that didn’t do that much for me. I’ve found that I work really well with reasonible deadlines. Making myself sign a fake contract, setting up specific writing days, and separating each chapter out into individual files are all tactics that helped me get Scrap done on time.

The fight scenes are different. I came close to using game pieces from Risk or Monopoly a few times to chart them out. I’ve been debating this again, as drawing every part of the fight gets me confused and takes up a little too much time. I imagine even thinking of this is a good sign, although I have a hard time imagining Raymond Chandler or Tolkien doing the same. But who knows? Maybe Homer used stones with smiley faces on them and knew the favorite color of every member of Odyseus’ crew.

What will I learn about my editing process this time around? My current plans are to put everything into a single document and edit it whole. That way I can skip between chapters and make rolling edits, so if I give someone an item at one point in the story I will be able to go back and plant it earlier without having to hunt through all the individual files. Once I get into it I’ll try to make a month or month and a half deadline for it. Then I’ll pass one half of it to friends to read (second half by request), get their general impressions, and make another editing run. After these two edits, I’ll work on a submission package for a month before I start sending it out. I figure I’ll be ready to send this out near the end of November or mid December. Considering most editors/agents would probably be swamped with Christmas work I may put it off until January. That’s something I’ll have to research.

Post Story Slowdown

September 16, 2009 in Editing | Tags: , | 2 comments

The story is complete, resting comfortably on multiple hard drives. Now is the time that I give my brain the ability to heal until the 27th, the date I start editing. After-writing books of all different kinds are stacked on my desk: editing books, books on how to write properly, books on how to sell a book, books on agents and publishers. I haven’t touched the editing books yet but I will soon. I know there are few flaws in the way I construct sentences, with an over-reliance on passive voice (a problem I think I picked up from writing standup material), dripping commas all over the place, and possibly jumping from point to point a little too quickly. I can think of one part in particular where the line of believablity may be a little shaky.

The books on selling my book, however, are an entirely different problem. The thought has crossed my mind that every one of these books could be useless now. The industry is undergoing changes while I write this, how can a seemingly bitter editor from a company I’m not familiar with give me insight? In the same turn, who am I to assume that the size or success of the editing firm dictates the worth of the advice? Is the advice itself dated because it’s in printed form? Maybe all books on how to sell your writing are fossils the second a machine splatters ink on their pages. I have no idea.

I’ve avoided thinking too much about the editing and publishing up until this point for a good reason. It’s a mess. Everything I’ve read and heard about is contradictory. The amount of times I’ve heard an agent is useless is equal to those who say they are completely vital (and a lot inbetween). So I try to judge the advice by the date it was written, at what stage in their career it is coming from, and what kind of environment they started in. The result of this line of thought: I have no clue. Even if I have to fight a ghost in the fog, it’s better to take a stab at it than sit back and overthink it.

So my plan is as follows:

  1. Edit it until my eyes fall out.
  2. Take a few trusted friends and brutally use them to help me edit until they never speak to me again.
  3. Work on an airtight synopsis/cover letter.
  4. Edit the book one last time.
  5. Submit it to a small list of agents first.
  6. If met with failure, take their advice into consideration.
  7. Wait a little bit, then start submitting directly to publishers.

All the while keeping my ears and eyes open in case I’m missing something.

The End

September 12, 2009 in Writing | Tags: | Leave a comment

The third draft of Scrap is officially completed. I have met my September 13th deadline and beat it by a day. The last sentence was written a few hours ago. I still don’t know exactly what to say. I’m shaking, I’m emotionally exhausted. My ability to form sentences has run away from me.

What comes next is a one or two week hiatus from working on it before I dive back in with my editing gloves on. In between then and now I’ll be digging into my editing/writing books and dabbling in other things. Expect less trembly posts soon. Thank you to everyone who has supported me up until now. I’d list everyone but I’d prefer to thank them in person, which I will now do from here until eternity.

Other Titles for Scrap

September 9, 2009 in Conceptual | Tags: | Leave a comment

The end of my third draft is on the horizon. My deadline will be met. I’m jittery and constantly updating people on my progress, giving them microupdates at the half and three fourths level. I suspect some of them have debated throwing me into a soundproof box until I can talk about something else. Good sense tells me I have a lot of editing ahead of me but I can’t stop myself from gushing. Some major obstacle is being overcome. It will take hindsight in order to understand it clearly.

To prevent myself from going further down this self congradulatory slide I’m going to discuss the title of my book.

Scrap.

It began as a working title. Some meaningless shorthand scratch that I could use to discuss it with my friends. Then it just never went away. Somehow the title has just always felt right. Not only is it the name of the main character but it also is used to define a potentially useful bit of junk. I watched the character I knew grow in a lot of different ways, maturing and figuring out what it wanted in the world I had created. In a previous entry I had labeled him a bit of an everyman character. This is turning out to be less true the more I follow him around. Now the story is more about him and his decisions, his observations and decisions in this setting. It feels more right than ever to name it after him.

There’s also a certain kind of quickness to the title I like. Just like how some bands get abbreviated or not mentioned at all due to the length of their name, I’ve been very picky about keeping my titles to a manageble mouth level.

There has been no honest debate in my head about changing the title. But the world can’t always go my way and I’m well aware there’s a possibility I won’t be able to keep it. Copyright restrictions, just plain confusion, etc. It’s not easy trying to explain to someone that I collage pieces inspired by Scrap using materials from S.C.R.A.P.

So, what else could I call it? My first draft of Scrap was hand written in moleskin books. In one of these books is my list of title alternatives. For your amusement and my embarassment, I’m going to list some of them below:

All I got was this Tshirt
A most unfortunate situation
Walking on Wastes
Never seen dirt
Ugly Earth
Eleven Feet Minimum
Satellite Feet
Underfoot
Warriors of Waste
Used
Please inherit the Earth
Scrap, Scavenger King

And my all time low:
You thought it was bad now…

I don’t think I would seriously consider even half of these names. I started it as a creativity game to test myself, seeing if I could think of some better title than Scrap. I couldn’t. The titles that immediately spring to mind sway the tone of the book a little too much by becoming something of an emotional trap: by making the setting sound tragic you make it sound like a novel length guilt trip. Others are too forward, making better nonfiction/documentary titles than fiction.

So for the time being I am keeping “Scrap”. I’m just staying aware I may not see it printed with that name.

Artist Chris Jordan: Running the Numbers

August 26, 2009 in Green | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

The artist Chris Jordan has a new book up titled “Running the Numbers”, based on his art series on human consumption statistics.

To quote from the website Scienceblogs.com:

Now these images are huge – this one being 8 by 11 feet. But that allows you to look from afar like this:

gyre2.png

And closer…

gyre3.png

And closer…

gyre4.png

Until you can see each and every piece of garbage in tantalizing detail.

gyre5.png

This is utterly appalling. All this crap, representing the number of pounds of plastic dumped into the ocean every hour!

He also has a TED talk up on their website.