This Week in Musical Obsessions

"The Moment" by Atomic Tom.  I don't sleep when I'm in NYC and find myself watching a lot of basic cable, usually culminating with me catching a few precious minutes of zzz's in front of Two and Half Men.

One night, while flipping channels, I came across the Fearless Music showcase, featuring Atomic Tom's "The Moment."  As you've probably noticed, I'm pretty damn cynical about modern music, but this just blew my mind--it reminded me of something I could remember, struck up an emotion I couldn't name. 




I like real love songs--songs like The Replacements "I Will Dare" that capture the awkward desparation of falling in deeply, madly, passionately infatuated in love. "The Moment" is exactly that.  It's about that one moment where you get that absolute rush of love, those great terrifying shivers that cause you to seize up and go silent (or worse, babble) in your beloved's presence.

I'm pretty much done falling in love.  I've met the man of my dreams and we've been together for awhile.  But sometimes I miss that tipping-backwards feeling of a new love.  That's where music comes in.  It's fantasy.  For 4 minutes and 35 seconds, I can remember that rush without having to go through all the trouble of falling in love again.

Record Party!

My friend/Odd Couples stage manager Thor came over last night for an oft-delayed record party.  Holding a record party is simple, you just get some records and play them and maybe have some food and talk about whatever comes to mind. We talked about our high school music teacher Mrs. Sobieski, apartment hunting, tattoos we'll never get but like to joke about, really, just random stuff.

One of the really cool things about record parties is that because the record sleeves are so BIG, you notice the names of the musicians who played on them and can draw neat parallels between the session musicians.  For instance, last night I noticed that Rick Marotta played drums on both Steely Dan's The Royal Scam and Warren Zevon's Excitable Boy.  Neat, huh?  And sure, you can look that up on the internet, but without it right in front of you, would you?

We got through Katy Lied, The Queen is Dead, Rockabilly Classics and the first disc of Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King.  We chatted.  We drank pink lemonade.

And then Thor put on Justin Towne Earle's Midnight at the Movies and the game changed.

When I was finishing the first season Justified, starting the currently in-between-titled novel I'm writing now (not for NaNoWriMo) and planning for my two-week trip to Oklahoma, I became very interested in Kentucky.  I rented Harlan County USA and watched it the instant it came in the mail.  What really struck me about it was all the singing.  They were out on the picketline, singing union songs from the early part of the century.  One woman wrote a song to teach everyone.  Not in a "I'm going to go to Nashville and record an album" kind of song, but a song to say what she was thinking.  Song, in this culture, was a means of communication.  It was raw and unacompanied and sung to get a message across.

And that's what I heard when I heard Justin Towne Earle.  It was music in it's pure, raw form, and it was heartbreaking and sad and lovely and wonderful.  I wanted to cry.  I wanted to put it on a mix CD and mail it to Walton Goggins.  I wanted to listen to that album all night long.  He covered "Can't Hardly Wait," which automatically endears him to me because I love The Replacements.



That's the magic of a record party.  Your friends bring some stuff you don't know, you play some stuff they don't know.  Thor got his first real taste of Warren Zevon.  I discovered Justin Townes Earle.  And at the end of the evening when we said goodnight, I realized how such a quiet little evening had reintroduced me to two friends--not just Thor, but the power and the core of music itself.

F*** You, NaNoWriMo

I had a major breakthrough with NaNoWriMo this week--it can go to hell.

It's not that I'm giving up.  I planned to write 60K in 30 days.  It's a doable goal, and I intend to finish it . . . but if for whatever reason, I don't, my life is not over because some twerp in California decided 30 days makes or doesn't make me a novelist.

NaNoWriMo plays on a culture of selfishness--it encourages people, good, normal people, to abandon their families, their pets, their pleasures in life to indulge in a pathetic attempt to create meaning.  These are not real novelists.  A quick glance at the Published page reveals very, very few legitimate authors (and if you've ever read The Night Circus, you can tell it was written in 30 days--maybe less) at legitimate presses--a lot of POD and micro presses. 

No, these are housewives and teenagers, helping themselves to a chunk of time at the beginning of the ultra-busy holiday season to demand This is MY time!!!  I'm a NOVELIST!



Let's face it, Jesse Pinkman
is just a teenage Shane Vendrell



I had two choices the other night after working 2 of my 5 jobs--write 2K in a book I honestly couldn't care less about, or watch Breaking Bad with my darling boyfriend, who I hadn't seen all day, and snuggle my kitten.  I chose Breaking Bad, and not just because Aaron Paul is the flavor of the week.

So I graded some papers and watched Breaking Bad.  Aaron Paul is a hottie.  And Ian was sweet, and Bosco was cuddly, and when I am on my deathbed, I doubt I'll be saying "I wish I'd spent more time in my office working."

It's admirable that NaNoWriMo people want to write.  I'm glad it's helping me get back in the daily routine.  Maybe it will remind me to update this blog a little more.  But in the end, you have to ask yourself why you're really doing it.  Is it to feel special, to accomplish something, to escape your miserable life?

Writing can be enjoyable.  It doesn't have to be a coffee-swilling, hair-pulling, cat-ignoring frenzy.  But a story needs more than 30 days to unfold.  I have an outline and I'm still discovering new things about my characters (like that the mother in this book is the same Virginia Davenport that protagonist Oren Barry fantasizes about in the other novel).  The "No Plot, No Problem!" slogan is a recipe for frustration and disaster.

Why only be a novelist in November?  Instead of chaining yourself to the desk while you could be eating cranberry sauce with your kids, why not write 1K a day over two months?  Or give yourself Sundays off and take a walk.  Don't give Chris Baty another moment of your precious time. 

Happy Birthday!

Happy 40th to Walton Goggins . . . and here is a present for all of you.  I already took the liberty of unwrapping it:

NanoWriMo Week 1

I'm three days in and at 4K . . . I'm doing 2000 words a night in about an hour and a half, and I haven't done Day 3 yet.  The novel is breezing along, thanks to the outline I meticulously constructed the week before.  That's the secret to NaNoWriMo.  Outlines.  Plan it down to the bone marrow and you'll never lack for something to write.

I'm almost enjoying it, actually.  Seeing my word count on the little graph each night, type-typing away, finally feeling good about writing again.  (Finally writing again, frankly.)  2K isn't an unattainable amount by any stretch of the imagination, it just requires some patience and the ability to say no to TV, no to kitten, no to friends dropping by for a few hours each day. It's only for a month, after all, and only for a few hours.  And besides, TV is mostly wasting time anyways.  Even if it's The Shield.

Happy Halloween!

Rounding out our Spooky Cartoons feature, Disney's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in three parts.  Far superior to the Tim Burton mess and a Halloween tradition in my family dating back to my very early childhood.  My dad has a photograph of my sister Hilary and I in our footie pajamas, acting out the dance scene.  It makes me happy just thinking about it.

Happy Halloween!

NaNoWriMo: The Nathan Rabin of Book Writing

The last time I did National Novel Writing Month was my senior year of college--and after about a week, I got bored and moved on to something more interesting.  I "won" (completed 50K) in 2003 and 2002 (yipee) but decided that I was finally past the realm of part-time writer and onto bigger and better things.

Well, the other night I had a cool dream, and I plotted that dream out to novel-length--YA novel length, to be exact.  And with a million other things going on, I realized that NaNoWriMo might be a good way to partition out some time to focus solely on finishing this book.  YA novels generally clock in around 60K, which is only 2K a day, 500 over the usual NaNoWriMo haul.  I'm a workaholic, so the only way I can allow myself to do anything I'm interested in is if I lable it work.  I need goals and limitations, otherwise I use what little idle time I have watching MST3K.  By structuring myself into to 30-day limitations, I have to go hard or go home.  But while persusing around the website, I noticed two things:

1) Like most people who post on forums, the NaNoWriMo forum goons take themselves WAY too seriously.  Heaven forbid you write down a note that you might use later (and possibly word for word!  oh my!) in your novel.  I get it, we're supposed to write a whole novel just in that one month, but that brings me to my next point

2) NaNoWriMo hates working writers.  Camp NaNoWriMo boasts as one of their objectives, "To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work."


Fuck you, NaNoWriMo.
 
I apologize on behalf of all those asshole "writers" out there who dare labor over their work, polishing it to perfection and submitting it, often times to multiple rejections and, if they're lucky, to rewrites by editors and agents towards publication, because you're better than them.  You wrote a novel.  You jacked off 50K of bad spelling, plot holes, over-wrought prose, cliches and tripe over a 30 day period and that makes you special.  I apologize to all the "auto mechanics, out-of-work-actors and middle school English teachers"  who are so offended by the works between hard and paper covers in their libraries and bookstores.  I apologize on behalf of Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Dorothy Allison, Jane Austin, Mary Shelley, Alexander Dumas, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum. Roald Dahl, George Orwell, Flannery O'Conner, Michael J. Nelson, Jim Kelly, Mike Kimball, and all those other jerks who dared to waste time on their craft.
 
When did sub-par become admirable?  I get it, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to practice writing without tearing down, but sneering at and spitting upon working writers who struggled to get recognition is a dick move.  It manifests that continued theory among artists that if you have to work for something, you're not a genius, as though some magical fairy exists solely to dig through people's desk drawers and pull out manuscripts deemed worthy of admiration.  It's Rabin-esq, and it's wrong on all fronts.
 
I'm kind of sorry I signed up for it, honestly.  As one of those criminal professional writers who takes herself and her career seriously, I don't know if I want to be lumped in with a bunch of bitter housewives and teen girls in Twilight tee-shirts.  I don't want to comiserate about what a hardship it is because I live that hardship every day.  Writers block blows, but I don't get the luxury of logging onto a forum and bitching--I have until 3pm on Tuesday to get a story done, and if I don't, there's a big gaping hole in the Hometown Oneonta where it would go.  I labor over essays short stories that get rejected time and time again.  But I love it, and that's why I keep doing it.  And I will keep doing it long past November.  I was doing it long before November. 
 
Writers stock our bookshelves.  They make our TV shows interesting.  They fill our newspapers and our magazines with more than just ads.  How about giving them a little credit, NaNoWriMo, instead of ripping them to shreds?

YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, NANOWRIMO!