gaps and the filling thereof

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I've been participating in the Fill in the Gaps 100 Project, a great little challenge for anyone who loves to read. The idea is simple: put together a list of one hundred books you've been meaning to read but haven't for whatever reason, and give yourself a deadline of five years to finish reading the books on that list. Participants are encouraged to discuss books, organize reading groups for some of the more intimidating reads they have in common, post reviews, etc.

There's some other fine print in there, like an "acceptable gap" exemption for a certain percentage of your reading list, but I'm not interested in half measures--for me, it's all one hundred or bust. You can read my list here (eleven down, eighty-nine to go), and all my posts can be found here, although from now on I will also try to remember to post a quick note here whenever I write a new book review.

And hey, if any of this sounds interesting to you, then head over and join up yourself! This may be the academic OCD talking, but it's deeply satisfying to check things off a reading list.

of siblings and nerdery

Last Friday, a UPS delivery man dropped off a box on our doorstep. We've been receiving plenty of boxes filled with wedding presents lately, most likely because we got married recently, but this one was a bit more puzzling:


Apparently, someone had seen fit to send us a box full of Jones Soda. Sure, it seemed like a strange thing to use to congratulate newlyweds, but if nothing else I figured it was better than receiving something less useful like, say, a second toaster, a package of doilies, or a pipe bomb¹. After inspecting the bottles more closely, however, I noticed there was something decidedly different about them:


That's right, someone didn't just send us a box of soda, they sent us a box of Magic: The Gathering themed soda. But who did it? The box didn't contain any receipts or packing slips and the shipping label on the box was addressed to me, so the packaging was no help in identifying the culprit. More importantly though, why would someone send me these sodas? Was it a message--an edible insult, perhaps? Did I just find out that I had the world's geekiest stalker? The box was heavy on calories, but short on answers².

The mystery persisted until a friend of mine took a closer look at the package and noticed the listed phone number wasn't mine. The number that was there sounded familiar, though, and a quick check of my cell's phone book gave me an answer: the person who sent me a box full of sugar and embarrassment was none other than my own brother. I then sent him the following text:

I just received the soda. You are a dork.

A few minutes later, he replied:

If I'm a dork, why are you the one with a box of Magic themed soda in your house?

I suppose the lesson here is that no matter how many miles separate you or how many adult responsibilities you take on, there's no outgrowing the pleasure of antagonizing a sibling.

Also, as further proof that I have no sense of shame, I served those sodas to guests at a barbecue the next day.

¹Yes, I'm well aware that there are several contexts in which a pipe bomb would be very useful indeed, but I'm trying to write a post here that won't get me red-flagged by the FBI.

² I know this is a terrible, groan-inducing sentence, but I can't bring myself to delete it. Call it perversity, but it fills me with an odd sense of pride³.

³ Before you ask, I have no idea if this endnote thing is going to end up being a regular thing. Chances are it's just a passing phase, much like bed wetting or storing the remains of last week's hitchhiker in the crawlspace. If my wife happens to be reading this, I'm just kidding, dear. There's no need to check the crawlspace. Or, for that matter, the tool chest in the closet, the cooler underneath the old tent in the carport, or the box of polaroids in the back of the filing cabinet. On second thought, it might be best if you just forgot this post ever happened.

festina lente

When I started my novel writing project, I thought it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to figure out. After all, I had plenty of prior experience writing short fiction, poetry, academic papers--hell, I'd even taught writing courses. How much different could a novel possibly be?

As I've come to learn over the last few months, a whole lot different. After all of my early novel starts hit dead end after dead end, I tried consulting some books on novel writing (typical researchaholic thinking, I suppose: when in doubt, hit the books). I'll spare you all a tedious recounting of each and every book I consulted, but the one that had the biggest impact was No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, the guy who started National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it's more commonly known, but I hate cutesy abbreviations so I refuse to call it that). No Plot? No Problem! advocates writing novels in a breakneck, marathon fashion wherein the goal is the completion of a 50,000 word manuscript with a deadline of thirty days. To this end, Baty offers plenty of tips and strategies and makes the whole thing sound fun and interesting, which it is, at least at first.

When I tried Baty's method, I managed to produce plenty of text, but about two weeks in I began to realize that the increased output didn't matter because every last thing I wrote was crap. Not a damn bit of it was usable, and I ended up discarding everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to badmouth the approach--according to the National Novel Writing Month website, in the last ten years over 70,000¹ participants have met the 30 day/50,000 word deadline, so it's clearly effective for some writers. What the experience underscored for me was that other people's writing strategies were just that: strategies that worked for other people. I needed to learn how I write novels, and the only person who could teach me that was me.

I began trying out writing strategies of my own devising, mixing and matching various techniques and schedules, and in the process discovered a great many ways how not to write a novel. But I stuck with it, and a few weeks ago I finally hit on a solution that works for me: notes. I don't mean a few here and there, I mean lots of notes. Tons of notes. Notes piling in snowdrifts around the room and threatening to trap pets and small children in avalanches. Okay, so maybe my note output isn't quite that out of control, but on average I write about three to five pages of notes for every one page of fiction. The reason for that disparity is partly because writing all those notes gets helps me get rid of the squirrely extraneous stuff bouncing around in my head so that it doesn't muck up the fiction, but mostly it's because writing them forces me to justify to myself each and every writing decision I make. If I can't identify a solid reason a scene needs to exist, or a plausible motivation for a character's actions, then the idea in question doesn't get written. I talk myself out of writing a great many things these days, but the things that do get written are more effective, more substantial. And best of all, I rarely have to discard anything.

¹Granted, the National Novel Writing Month website lists only 37 participant-written novels that have gone on to be published, giving the whole endeavor a discouraging .0005% publication rate, but I have a feeling the written to published ratio isn't much better for all the non-marathon written novels written out there.