Penny Hero (dot) Net

So, in the first serious attempt I’ve made to keep myself from playing WoW for a day, I dusted off my guitar and tried to see how much I remember.

My fingers hurt like hell, but it’s a good hurt. :) I stumbled through a few of the Pumpkins songs I know, some Third Eye Blind, and the few original songs I wrote back in High School (still no lyrics for any of those).

Then I remembered I had a folder of songs and tablature somewhere. Dug it out. Unfortunately, it was full of base tabs from when I was in a band (for what, a month? haha). Most of the tabs were for songs I had wanted to play (Like Naveed), but never got brave enough to actually suggest them.

Anyway, in the back of the folder, I’d stuck a 3-ring notebook with half the pages already torn out. What was left was a bunch of poetry, maybe attempts at song lyrics actually–I barely remember writing any of it.

I found this little snippet though, and I think it’s brilliant. I have a sneaky suspicion that I stole it from someone:

Jazz me up,
I’m like a bad mood soda
Feel your fizz carress my sky.
Do I?

It’s sitting all by itself above some really crappy verse in a different colored pen as if I’d thrown it in there really rushed and then didn’t know what to do with it.

Anyway, I like it. I’m not sure if it’s mine. At the edge of my brain, I think I remember trying to come up with music for it. But of course failing miserably. I’ve been told that my “original” music sounds like Christian pop-rock (no offense… but happy bouncy “rock” music is not my cup of jasmine tea.)

More quotes may follow. Wish me luck with taking a break from WoW. The rest of my life is calling. :)

I’d been telling people I worked with in the Writing Center that in a business environment, emails should be short, easy to reply to, and direct.

I thought I knew what that meant… I’m a good writer, confident in my ability to be professional and clear… direct and concise… I asked a client a question 7 days ago about something related to their company… something I needed to know in order to finish something for them, and never got a reply. At all.

I basically wrote:

Can you give us more information about your [type of service] services? For example, which products on your site apply to these offers? How big can orders be? Do you have any electronic or print materials describing these services we can reference?

And then I said “my goal is to do x, y, and z with this information” in about 2 sentences…

I really thought that this was concise enough. It really only asks one question “can you give us more information” and then clarifies what types of information we need. If I saw an email like that in the Writing Center, I would have said “good job with being clear, clarifying, etc” and thought it fit the business environment.

However, like I said, I never got a reply, and today we were about to finish the project for this client and we still had these unresolved questions.

The bosses from Portland came down today and our President shot an email to this client to get the issue resolved because for one thing, time is running out. His email was literally 2 lines long and just asked

“Hey [name], do you do [x] or do you do [y] for your customers with your [type of service] services? Thanks, [Name].”

…

We got a reply in 5 minutes. He saw my email and suggested that it might have APPEARED that I was asking a complicated question simply by having so many words in my query.

So really folks, short is better. It’s better to shoot off a few emails several times a day with specific questions than to put them all into one email and send it out hoping for a long complete reply.

Moral of the story is: ask one question per email. Make it something that the person can answer sitting down in about 30 seconds. DON’T suggest options or alternative ways of seeing the question. “Either/or” emails work well. Essayistic thoughtful ones do not.

DON’T BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR.

I’m really really interested in the structure of fiction. Not just something so basic as knowing the difference between a framed and an unframed story. I’m really into tracing where the author chooses to shift in time between “present” time and the time of the narrative itself.

I’m also really into how a story can play with structure in a more physical sense. House of Leaves is a good example of this. The text itself is thought to be a collection of crap found somewhere, but the various narrators paint different, deeper histories of where that collection of stuff came from… and how it wound up published and in your hands. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is another one that plays with this kind of structure… it sets up the story as a story told on a late night orally, but the first narrator says that the text we are reading was actually given to him after that storyteller died, years later, and that he published it after that.

These kinds of structures displace the idea of “book” and “story” and cause the story or whatever you want to call it at that point to insert itself a little bit into our own world.

When an author does that, it’s awesome. If they can shake up the boundry between “book” and “me”, I practically orgasm.

So, I’m facinated by this. And thinking about these kinds of works has given me new ideas for cool structures that I could maybe someday make into stories. Things like, having two interlinear narratives… two different points of view seeing a story at the same time literally woven together line by line on the page. I know how it would look, and the kinds of effects it would have… but I don’t yet have the content to make it work.

Right now, I’m playing with a piece of fiction that on the outer-most layer is a fiction story (it has a title, but the title refers to the next “layer” in the structure), but it’s actually a story about a blog entry that recieves no comments, which is telling the story of the girl’s father’s death and how that effects her, which really turns out to be her trying to make connections with people in her life… It’s 4 pages long now, and I don’t know how it will end, or if I could get away with ending it with something bloggy like “but I have to go now, my mom just came in” or something.

I’m not sure that makes sense, because I’m writing this in “rambling blog style” instead of literary analysis-clarity style… but I’m really excited about some of these ideas. And for a long while I had my heart set on working on some of them with Gavin. But, I don’t think that’ll happen. I read a story by a classmate of mine yesterday, and I really admire her work. The only problem is that really working with someone on your writing requires a huge amount of trust and vulnerability and that takes time to build…

I guess I’ve got time though. I should start talking to more of my writing classmates. Some of them are really jozu.

The panels are mostly amazing. The questions are mostly awesome too. I’ve only gone to one panel that was a pretty big dissapointment.

My favorite so far was the first one we went to about the short-short story, prose poetry, or “flash fiction”. Some writers read some of their work and then there was a great discussion on the genre itself, how it resists definition, a little about how to navigate editor’s expectations in order to get the work published. One of the most interesting conclusions one person drew was that prose poetry seems to really explode and blossom in the face of whatever criteria or definitions are sometimes imposed in a classroom because it gives a writer something to push against, to resist, and to subvert. This genre might be my favorite ever.

Another really interesting discussion was about how people seem to see the form differently if they are coming from a poetry background or a fiction background. To poets, the form is very new and very strange. To fiction writers, it is less of a shock, but it is still strange and very difficult to publish in fiction journals.

At one point, when someone mentioned that the internet seemed to be a perfect market for prose poetry, I almost had a mental orgasm, because I’d been thinking the same thing, and thinking about livejournal, thinking about the stuff I’d write and post on my crappy website back in high school that no one read.

I really think I’ve found my favorite form. I had no idea it was so much bigger than just little writing games writers played. I write so much of it all the time on the backs of scraps of paper in the writing center and in my notebooks as brainstorms for bigger stories that I never am able to write.

In Other News: Absinthe is FUN. fun fun fun fun fun. holy cow fun. And it’s fun to get it in a bar, where they light the sugar on fire right in front of you and everyone looks at your three flaming glasses not without a little envy but thinking either “stupid americans” or “stupid rich americans”. (it’s a bit spendy in the bars)

We tried it the other night in a bar, and it was a little fun. I drank much less than Dave and Gavin because the taste was so strong and I’d been drinking martinis and vodka stuff earlier. But they went for it. Both had two. I had about 3/4s of one and then ordered a guiness. Yesterday Dave went out to buy booze because bars were sucking down our funds like nothing (we’re spending about $45 a night on alcohol. It’s nuts), and he found a variety of absinthe for $50 (instead of the usual $150). It was probably much weaker, and also made with a slightly different root, but that shit was potent. We didn’t light anything on fire in the hotel room, but we drank all of it. ALL of it between the five of us. I took a lot of pictures, but now my camera is missing. I hope it’s not lost for good. I think there’s an awesome shot of gavin picking me up just before accidentally whacking my head against the wall (awesome). Not to mention the shot of me, dave, and gav in the bathtub posing with the absinthe bottle.

So last night i felt like my head was filled with helium, and I couldn’t stop laughing. But this morning I was pretty pukey and I missed the early panels. I’m much better now though, and gav bought me veggies. I’ll make it to the 1:30 stuff for sure. Fuck if I’m going to drink again on this trip though. I think I had 4 glasses of the green fairy goodness last night. FOUR. Maybe I’m actually partly dead right now. ha ha.

It’s a rare and satisfying experience when you can simply switch two paragraphs and discover new meaning, new transitions, and a stronger piece of work altogether.

That’s when the piece writes itself. And makes me think I’ve perhaps got a muse.

I’ve decided one of my projects for the summer will be to write a short martial arts story. A good one. One of those Literary Gems, only with a martial arts theme.

My anal retentive, hyper stressed out fiction writing professor constantly bashes martial arts stories in his lectures. He puts them right up there with “Commercial fiction,” and that in itself was motivation enough to begin thinking of writing a martial arts story.

One of today’s stories was centered around a boy who gets picked on a lot at school and his martial-arts-master uncle. (can we say “Karate Kid”?) But the author disappointingly enough, embarrassed himself with his lack of understanding about martial arts. Seeing this, and being forced to critique it, actually inspired me to sit down and start working on my own piece.

I dunno. This is kind of a random announcement. *snort* what am I doing announcing it anyway? Why don’t I just pull out a notebook and start writing?

*exits*