Finished “The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki” last night which makes it my third book this month I read. That’s a nice stat. Sort of balances out the fact that I’ve written about 1200 words in the new year. Maybe. This wasn’t my favorite saga by a long shot but the end really captured my imagination. The best parts of the sagas (besides the constant bloodshed) are the moments where the Christian influence and pagan past appear in stark contrast. The fall of King Hrolf and his champions looks very much like Ragnarock and the author, despite his obvious Christian bias (he says the reason Kraki lost is because he didn’t have knowledge of the Creator–although qualifies this by saying he didn’t have an option because the Truth had not reached Scandinavia), can’t help but paint these warriors in the most glowing of terms. People (incorrectly) think Ragnarock is depressing because everyone meets his/her preordained end; those people completely miss the beauty (if you want to call it that) of going down in a blaze of glory. In other words, you might not be able to control your larger fate but you always have control over your individual actions; if you’re going out, you might as well go out fighting instead of sniveling.

I’m preparing “Twenty Pound Hammers” for another submission. It’s been sitting on the computer for about a year now after receiving a very, very favorable rejection (”we loved this story but we’re oversold, it’s a few hundred words too long, and it wouldn’t appear until 2006″) from the small mag Bibliophilos. It’s gone through a very good critique session with my Clarion buds and has made me rethink the nature of the story. A few people mentioned that it smells awfully like a mystical negro story and, after an objective read-through by yours truly, I have to say they’re right. It does have those elements. Oddly enough, I am trying to say something more about class than race (although the two go hand in hand.) It’s a bit of a pickle; the railroad owner is undoubtedly a racist whereas the railroad manager is not, and the gratuitous use of the ‘N’ word is supposed to relate the disgust and contempt the owner feels for these men and everything they represent–especially the superhuman John Henry who stands at the core of their community. But it seems that race issues naturally push to the forefront of the reader’s (and probably this writer’s) mind and won’t allow itself to be a secondary element of the story. Without the strong racist element I’m not sure the story works, but I’m not sure how I can include it and not have it overpower what I want to say about myths and the human condition as it seems wont to do.

This, I’ve decided, is the real struggle for me as a writer. I need to work on weaving in more subtle details to give my stories more texture (which is a chore in itself) but even with a real purty story it has to have the right balance. It’s like cooking; something can’t taste great without top-notch ingredients but those ingredients need to be combined in the right way, in the correct proportion, and at deployed at the ideal time in order to create something special. My stories are close but, at this point, everything is still on the high end of amateur and not quite to the professional standards. Paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, I need shape the story to the pro standard. And after all that work, I need to accept the fact that it still might not have the right balance to be a compelling story.

So I despaired the other day at lunch when I was going over “Twenty Pound Hammers,” telling myself it sucked and I didn’t know why or how to fix it. After taking a day or so to breathe I realized that there is still good stuff in it but it needs more work to properly lead in and out of those potentially “gong-ringing” moments. And I need to work around the race issue. Is this what it feels like when one stands in the base camp for Mount Everest and looks up at the peak?

And the best part? This story is only 3600 words. Can’t wait until I take the hammer and tongs to stories two and three times as long.

If it was easy I’d be published by now.

I finished Phillip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” last night and immediately jumped online to see what other people thought about the ending. I wasn’t quite sure I understood and, as I read a few online commentaries, I quickly figured out no one else really knew either. But a “book of ideas” it surely is. It’s almost too much to fully undertstand in one reading. It does make me want to look into the I Ching so I can better understand how the coin throwing and stalk folding works. Seems pretty cool.

So many things on my reading list right now. I’ve got to finish “King Hrolf Kraki’s Saga” which only has about thirty or forty pages left and then it’s on to…what? I have Kevin Anderson’s “Pavane,” another alternate history classic, on deck but there’s other stuff I’m eager to dive into as well. “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves” is a popular book on grammar that I got for xmas that I’m interested in, and another gift I got was Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles, Volume I.” What comes first?

I was listening to the Majority Report the other night and the guest was Antonino D’Ambrosio who was talking about his book, “Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer.” Might I be just a little interest in this? Of course I’m interested in the subject matter, but to compound it I agreed with nearly everything D’Ambrosio said even though the fill-in host Eric Alterman kept challenging him on it. D’Ambrosio basically argued that the Clash truly was The Only Band That Mattered because they wanted to elevate punk into a social revolution in addition to smashing windows. And this is the great misunderstanding about punk and why the Clash are underrated by the masses: there’s a massive difference dropping out of society, getting a mohawk, and acting rude simply because you’re bored teenager feeling rebellious (which sums up a lot of punk bands and fans) and doing those same things because you feel the need to fundamentally resist the establishment and think music is one way to overturn the system. One you grow out of; the other seems to gain intensity over time. It’s easy to write angry music; it’s much tougher to write angy songs that make people think.

As mentioned in the previous post, we watched KB,Vol.I on the plane ride back and it as I watched, I couldn’t help but think of the critique of the movie I’d heard (attributed I believe to one of my Clarion buds): “I felt like I’ve seen this movie before.”

KB is clearly a break from most modern movies with one notable exception: any film made by Quentin Tarantino. So while the ultraviolence, quirky characters, and snappy dialogue by all accounts should be fresh and original, they just seem like another rehashed Tarantino bit. Tarantino trashed movie conventions with “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” with his knack for everyday dialogue and his characters’ idiosyncratic behaviors but with KB I was expecting these things and Tarantino delivered. So while KB is quite different than the majority of mainstream movies out there, it’s not so different than say “Pulp Fiction.” Can you knock a guy for using a tried and true formula? I guess…not? The only thing that I really felt was original was the break to anime to tell the story of Lucy Liu’s character.

The big question mark hanging over the film is whether it needed to be two volumes and over four hours total. Many of the scenes–most notably the anime flashback, the “I’m Buck” scene, and the travel to Okinawa–could have been cut back dramatically. Yes, this might diminish the “revenge” motif Tarantino wanted but that’s part of the problem–I can’t help think that Tarantino so badly wanted this to be a two volume epic, he made it so whether the story took him there or not.

As for the critics who complained about the over the top violence and spurting blood, they clearly don’t understand that Tarantino is imitating the Japanese revenge flick and that’s part and parcel of the genre. This was my major complaints with the idiots who said “The Passion of the Christ” was too violent; when goriness is deliberately used it needs to be considered in the context of the work itself. Tarantino has never casually used violence, or if he has it’s to say something about how we as a culture view violence. For my money, movies like the “Shaft” remake with Samuel L. Jackson are ten times more culpable for needlessly glorifying senseless violence.

In the end, I’m still eager to see KB, Vol. II. I just hope it pushes the envelope a little more. And while I’m no means a photography expert, tinkering around with my camera and trying to become a better photographer has made me appreciate how directors frame shots in movies and how they use contrasts and textures to help create a visual story. KB was full of nifty things (especially the dual in the snowy garden) and you could tell that Tarantino was obsessed with getting it perfect. And he just about did.

I was going to make a point about how “The Matrix” sequels suffered from a similar problem, i.e. it’s the same thing only more of it, but then I realized that does KB a disservice. “Matrix Reloaded” has to be one of the all-time shittiest movies I’ve ever seen, mostly because of the drivel about fate and free will they clumsily try to integrate into the plot and fail miserably. I found “Reloaded” insulting in so many ways I will refrain from listing them. At least at this time.

Back home safe and sound–well, safe and sick is probably more accurate. First day back at work and it seems like I’ve been here forever but it’s only been two hours. Six more to go. Ugh.

Got very little reading and no writing done while on vacation, which is fine. Now that the holidays are behind us and Amy’s back in school I will be able to get down to business. I want to get out a handful of stories by the end of the month–probably “From the Mouths of Babes” with a rework, “Twenty Pound Hammers” with little reworked, and probably “Change of Seasons” as it is. Still waiting to hear back from Cicada on the last one; they’ve had it for a near eternity and perhaps I have a rejection letter in last week’s mail.

I was tossing and turning last night, due in large part to my sore throat and the fact that my sleep schedule is out of whack. I used a good deal of the time to think about the structure and plot elements of a partially written story, “Sea of Traquility, Sea of Tears” and I think I’ve got a better handle on what needs to happen. I need to put aside time to crank this one out and “The Wendigo Killers” as well. Too much laborious thinking and hand-wringing and not enough writing with these two; the problems will not fully be clear (and the solutions as well) until they’re finished. Mulling these things over is [b]not[/b] a good way to lull yourself to sleep, however. But I know this.

As mentioned earlier, I finished Jeff Ford’s “The Physiognomy” over my break and devoured about 1/4 of Phillip Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” on the trip back yesterday. I found it hard to get into at first but once I figured out who people are and what’s going on it was impossible to put down–dedicated reading time is the best part of air travel. I almost made it a full 50 pages before I had to find a pen, go back to the start and begin underlining passages. One of the reviews on the book’s cover calls it “a novel of ideas” and that’s about right. I usually don’t underline when I’m reading for pure entertainment value but this book is different; lots of interesting and often competing philosophies floating around. Underlining helps me pin them down in my brain.

My reading time was cut into severely by watching a couple movies on the laptop, namely “Kill Bill” and “School of Rock.” I was pleasantly surprised by the latter. I was never a Jack Black fan until I heard Tenacious D and loved it; for PG-13 humor, “School of Rock” was really quite good. The foul language is part of what makes Tenacious D so funny and I feared that without that crutch the movie would be lame, like one that’s been edited for network broadcast and left bereft of humor. But JB is still good, even if his schtick will probably wear thin sooner than later.

I have a lot more to say about “Kill Bill Vol. I” primarily because I wanted to like it more than I did. I liked it, but…yeah, more on that later. Not enough time to fully go into it now.

We’re spending a low-key week in Vegas on vacation. The weather has been poor for the last few days but it’s supposed to clear up later in the week so we can go hiking, probably at Red Rock Gorge. Instead, we’re laying low. Amy’s got knitting to keep her busy and I’ve been tooling around on the computers, setting up a wireless network, and playing with whatever toys my dad got. I got a new GPS unit for xmas/birthday and some software, so that’s been fun to poke around.

I finished Jeff Ford’s “The Physiognomy” last night, devouring 3/4 of it on the plane in a single sitting. It’s a great book; anything you can read for hours on end without putting it down definitely fits the bill. I was having a hard time getting into it reading over my lunch break; it’s so dense I found it hard to read in small, 30 minute chunks of reading time. The first half alternated between laugh outloud absurdity (Physiognomist Cley is a first-rate dick and he says what most people think) and unsettling brutality. The second half’s tone is completely different, changing along with the character’s perceptions of the world, and ends on a bittersweet note of uncertainty. I’m not sure if I want to charge into books two and three of the Well-Built City trilogy at this point. So many other things on the reading list.

I brought out Phillip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” and “Pavane” by Keith Roberts, books Andy Duncan had on his recommended reading list. I want to polish off one, if not both of them while I’m out here. I forget how quickly I can plow through books when I’m distracted by other things. Once the xmas/birthday dust settles, I think I’m going to spend some dough on books. I read modern works much, much faster than the ancient stuff and I’m finding that the less popular sagas are less popular for a reason. They’re okay, but don’t hold the same artistic weight as the most famous ones. I’m about 7/8 done with “King Hrolf Kraki Saga” and it’s pretty good but not revelatory. It’s a different style than the Snorri Sturleson type of saga, just like Apollonious of Rhodes’ “Argonautica” just doesn’t live up to the other works of Ancient Greece. Again, it’s not bad, it’s just not eye-opening.

I also hope to get some writing done. Writing felt like way too much work since the beginning of November. I wasn’t enjoying myself when I sat down to write and, as a result, I don’t think much of what I wrote was very good. I think I’ve felt a mounting pressure to write something great post-Clarion when, in reality, you can only write what you’ve got. I think the basic stories of “The Wendigo Killers” and “Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Tears” (the two “big” stories I’ve started post-Clarion) are good but they’ll take a lot of cleaning up because they’re both fairly long and fairly complicated in terms of what I’m trying to achieve. I will clean up some of my other stories and get them out this month. With response times as long as they are, I see no reason to keep pretty good stories on my hard drive when all they probably need is a minor touch-up.

Here we are in 2005 and it’s been raining. Raining in Wisconsin in January. Something is very wrong here.

New Year’s came and went and proved to be a long yet pretty fun weekend. Saw people we hadn’t seen in a long time and that’s always good. We’ve also figured out the key to a tolerable New Year’s is to create and maintain low expectations which will likely be met and possible exceeded. We spent little and had an unremarkable but not unpleasant time so, considering past failures, this must be a success. We might host New Year’s next year just to get out of the same ol’ same ol’ Chicago scene.

In great news, Spurs plonked Everton 5-2 on NYD to the great joy of all. That’s a boatload of points for Tottenham in the past few months, a crucial time of year, and if they can keep it up they’ll get a spot in Europe via their league placment–an unheard of feat. The dour Martin Jol is working magic and I hope he keeps it up. And for once, the no-names Spurs always buy at a cut-rate and are guaranteed to be the “next big thing” all looked great–Ziegler has impressed me each time I’ve seen him and Dean Marney looks to be the real deal after his spectacular game against Everton. It almost makes me forget that half the squad is rumored to be going to Chelsea when the transfer window opens.

In good news, the Packers finished up 10-6, splitting with the Bears and sweeping the Viqueens. That makes it eleven in a row at Chicago, a gleeful stat. The ‘Queens also have to play next Saturday in G.B. which is worrisome but it’ll be sweet if the Pack can take them down three times in one year. Besides, a closer look reveals that none of the Packers’ ten wins came against a team with a winning record. The best teams the Pack beat were the Lambs and ‘Queens who each finished at .500. Nicht gut. The same rule applies for the Packers as for New Year’s…keep expectations low. That was my mantra this season and it was fulfilled, yet it’s shocking that a team that’s not that great can finish 10-6 and third in the NFC.

In bad news, I happened to watch the Outback Bowl and good Lord, that’s why you don’t roll up a 9-2 if you’re not that good. I’m talking about the Wisconsin Badgers who flattered themselves in the regular season with their record and managed to end the Outback Bowl with a respectable score when the game really shouldn’t have been that close. Georgia owned them most of the game and their own foolish play calling nearly opened the door for Wisconsin but it was too little too late. In fairness, it would have been a grave injustice if the Badgers had somehow contrived to win in the dying moments of the game. Why is it that Wisconsin still fails to recruit a decent quarterback? It was a fun season while it lasted, at least until reality set in.