Oh Hi

Forgot you were there. Well, not really, I just keep coming up with hideous ideas for blog posts that I should not write in a million years. Seriously, nobody needs to read yet another political rant for the next two months.

But I Just. Can't. Stop!

I've also been kind of busy in meatspace. My house now has functioning hot water pipes, repaired drywall, a pane of glass which is not cracked, two new sets of blinds, a new cubby shelf, and a brand spanking new desk which my wife kindly purchased for our five year anniversary and which I will be putting together as soon as it gets here.

Five is the Wood anniversary, I'm told. Stop sniggering. I got her a jewelry box. It looks lovely.

My current desk is one of those small-but-serviceable metal computer desks that lets you sit at a terminal and not much else. It is falling apart because it was put together shoddily (by moi), or because it was manufactured shoddily in the first place. I can believe either or both. The keyboard tray is currently sitting at a 40 degree angle where my feet ought to go. I am ready for a replacement.

Does the Goodwill take a partially-assembled desk? It still works fine as a desk. Just not, you know, as a desk with a sliding keyboard platform thing.

Oh yeah, I also rebuilt my entire home network after my venerable wireless router (God bless the Linksys WRT54GS!) began dropping connections about every other day. There is only so many times in a week I am willing to pull the plug and count to thirty. I replaced the wizened blue box with an Airport Extreme, which means Apple hardware has finally penetrated my home infrastructure. (iPods don't count.) Setup was a breeze once I remembered to power cycle my modem, and my whole network now runs on a sexy MAC-filtered WPA2-encrypted stream of secured data. (Thank God for firmware updates, or my TiVo would still have me stuck on sad sad WEP.)

All of this, of course, is a distraction from what I'm supposed to be doing, which is Writing The Book. Or more properly, Prewriting The Book.

Everyone says you should outline, except for the people who say you should never outline, and I'm done listening to them because I always come out with something that bent at non-Euclidean angles halfway through. I don't believe a first draft should be perfect, but I do expect it to be coherent enough that I don't have to re-plot the entire book when I'm done drafting it.

Here's an example: I tried pantsing a Victorian-era monster mash that included all the classics: vampire, werewolf, Frankenstein's monster, the works. Then I found out halfway through that the original Wolfman, Larry Talbot, isn't public domain, he's a Universal property. But I was already halfway through the damn book! So rather than go back and fix it from the ground up, I just made another character the werewolf. And then that didn't work, so I made him not the werewolf. Without going back and editing anything.

What I ended up with was a manuscript where one character ceased to exist halfway through, and another character ended up acting like three different people. And the same thing happened to a few other characters - they grew and evolved into completely different people as I wrote, but because I was out to get the first draft done done done, I didn't take the time to go back and fix the cardboard cutouts they were earlier in the story. So when I finally got the draft done, I was stymied trying to figure out where to start revising. "From the beginning..." Yes, well, no. I needed to note down the needed changes, which meant nailing down what the characters were actually going to be like, which of the multiple-choice plots I was going to keep and which I was going to cut...

In short, I would need to outline the damn book as if I was starting from scratch. Better, I think, to just outline the book first, then write the first draft without letting it fly out of control halfway through.

I'm happy to report this has worked for some short fiction pitches, but I'm running aground on the latest book (which is not the monster mash - I'm leaving that on the back burner until I can do the necessary Victorian research). I don't think this is a fault of technique, but just me being too unmotivated to get notes down on paper. And maybe a minor fault of technique - I'm taking plenty of notes and jotting down ideas, but I haven't quite got everything organized in a way that makes sense to me yet.

But! Not giving up. That's what they want you to do. But unless I have a few epiphanies between now and November, I'm probably sitting out NaNoWriMo this year. I still think the challenge is great if you want to prove that you can be productive, or if you feel like testing yourself. But I keep generating 50,000 words of complete gibberish that falls apart on revision. I'd rather take my time, plan ahead, and get an ambulatory first draft I can eventually coax to full health.

Even if it takes a long damn time.

Badass Adventures in Real Estate

Today Sarah and I went hunting for a new house. First of all, let me give a shout out to our agent, Georgia, who was friendly and extremely helpful and made the whole thing a blast, even when we were viewing the lousy houses. And oh, Lord, there were some lousy houses.

House Number One: This house came with a bad first impression, in the form of a shared driveway that was narrow and had little room to park in. I'm still not sure how one house gets two cars parked without causing a turf war. But the rest of the house: gorgeous. A beautiful kitchen, tons of space in the bedrooms, a large living space downstairs, and a big old yard that Lina could run around like a maniac in (once we fenced it in). Sadly, this house was the highlight of our day.

House Number Two: Corgi house! Whoever lived here looked like they were actively stalking Lina: just a ton of Corgi portraits, statues and other furnishings. Unfortunately the actual Corgi wasn't present, just a cat I never saw because it bolted immediately. Also a deck that looked like it was going to fall apart, a driveway that mandates a parking brake, a door that leads to empty air, and half a fence. I admire whoever lives there (excellent taste in dogs and reading material), but I'm not going to.

House Number Three: A horticulturist's dream! I'm not kidding about that: there were plants growing in every room in the house, and the backyard looked like an enchanted fairy forest. Great if you like gardening, but I want a yard where Lina can run around like a psychopath, not something I have to pay someone to keep trimmed. To its credit, the house did have good bathrooms and a spacious (if not modern) kitchen.

House Number Four: This is where we really started running into trouble. And tenants. Someone had called the girl living at this house and told her our walkthrough was cancelled, and she ended up spending five minutes throwing things in one of her bedrooms before she left for her job at the local barbecue hut. The house was decorated in Rue Morgue Red carpeting and featured all the amenities you'd expect to find in a college dorm. The outside included a messy backyard, house-killing trees, and a spider the size of God.

I think he was the landlord.

House Number Five: This one started off well with a covered driveway with ample space. The rest of the exterior was a bit overgrown and crumbly, but that didn't seem like a big deal once we got inside. A beautiful kitchen and living room, with a furnace and a cast-iron stove/fireplace. I also liked seeing ceiling fans that weren't threatening to crack my skull open. Aside from the yard and some slightly undersized bedrooms, it was a fine house, and a nice palate cleanser for House Number Four. Which was good, because next was...

House Number Six: Or as Sarah keeps calling it, the meth lab. Have you ever seen a house where the sidewalk looked decrepit? Because that was our first sign of danger. The second sign was the lack of a For Sale sign. The third was the fact that the door was ajar, and Georgia had to yell inside for the tenant to put his shirt back on. There was a door with what looked like knife scratches in. There was a shattered ping-pong table that didn't come with the house, and a massive hole in the ceiling right above it. And the asking price was the same as what House Number One was asking. Georgia shooed us out of there before we saw the second story.

That was supposed to be our last house for the day, but Georgia had seen a listing for a house that had been on the market for a long time, and she was curious as to why. So we drove out to...

The Bonus Mystery House: Which is called that because we never saw the inside of it. Georgia recognized it as soon as she saw it and advised us not to go inside. We understood why as soon as we saw the fence in the back. Still, morbid curiosity prodded us to carry on; but the driveway was narrow, hilly, and positioned right off a main road, and we didn't have the heart to make Georgia drive down it (and possibly get us all killed in a T-bone accident). She ended up showing us the local Adam's Ribs restaurant instead, which was probably for the best.

So! No real luck today, although House Number One is going to stay on the list for now. But we'll keep looking, and we've got every confidence that Georgia will have us sorted out; if not by Christmas, then shortly after. We're not in any rush, after all. Neither is Lina.

Hell, she'll wait forever if we let her stay in that corner.