FOOLISH CONSISTENCY: HOBGOBLIN OF GOOD NOVELS?

My memory struggles as I write my best selling, futuristic PI novel that Hollywood and I make a big pile of money from when it becomes a movie. Cross fingers, spin twice in a circle and lay on the charm to potential agents.

Yesterday, I caught a memory slip while I was rewriting a passage, but it led to a happy outcome. Chapters apart, two people come to Manning's apartment on Everett Street in Portland. The first has to stand downstairs and ring up to Manning's apartment on the 5th floor so that Manning can release the downstairs door. The next visitor magically appears at Charley's door on the 5th floor and rings his doorbell there. INCONSISTENT! Then, I decided the live in landlady sees the second visitor and lets him in because she knows that the visitor and Manning are friends. It would be a nice touch of apartment dwelling interplay.

While concocting that little piece of business, I suddenly recalled that Manning is set 250 years in the future. Already autos are being started with equipment that reads thumb prints so, certainly, most locks 250 years hence will be opened by thumbprint or whole body scanners. Something! I put a note in my rewrite file to make this consistent when the final rewrite begins sometime within the next hundred years or so. Cross fingers.

The great fact about the tale above is that, after all, I did remember the two different visitors when I needed to recall them. My memory actually worked.

ROAD WORK AHEAD: SILENT BOOMER OPENS SEGMENT 23

According to my every other day blog entry schedule, I need to be saying something just about now, but I'm always a mite off kilter and a trifle out of synch. I've been more or less stuck for a week, dithering and dallying around with an impaction in my writer's colon. However, day afore yesterday, while walking my hour—this time inside of Freddy Meyer's place—I came up with the next to last scene in the Manning novel. Fits very nicely with the opening I've set in Vietnam where fisherman Qwan Bak Ti is sliced up by a band of wild humans in the jungle darkness. With my finish at last congealed into something interesting, my interest flared up again and set my pants on fire.

Found ant here

So, this morning, I put in my minimal hour and commenced a start into Segment 23. I felt pretty good about that. It's as if an ant atop a leaf on the forehead of George Washington on Mount Rushmore could, for a moment, see all the way into Colorado, his ultimate destination. Things will soon be emerging out of the darkness and events lining up toward the finish of Manning, my future best selling novel and movie. Many miles of sentences, however, wait to be fashioned.

ANXIETY'S A BEAT NAMED THE SILENT BOOMER

Find picture source here:

I'm learning constantly the intricacies of writing a detective novel, specially one set 250 years in the future. Today, I added another piece of complexity to Manning, details about Beaunita and her knowledge (or lack of it) and how that affects her interactions with Charley Manning and how his knowledge of the case will eventually be connected to the new details in Beaunita's own knowledge (or lack of it) about the case. Obviously, the more complex the novel the more risk of inconsistency and implausibility. The anxiety I feel about the difficulty of complex plotting at my age sometimes nearly causes me, like Ken Kesey did, to quit writing. I'll feel all those details out there in space and the impossibility of me remembering them all. Whew!

The failure to recall minute details at my age certainly increases the risk of writing a major inconsistency into the tale. For one example, I forgot that a sinister character, during an encounter, removed one of Manning's molars while Manning was drugged into unconsciousness. It was a warning about future dental work without anesthesia. I recalled the meeting as several things did happen in it, but I forgot the tooth removal detail as part of that meeting. Not central to the plot, it's a detail not to be forgotten since Manning's physical status means the hole in his gum won't ever heal. He'll require a Wayland Patch.

Sadly, the Ooligan Press query about my novel ANGIE'S CHOICE fell through. They decided that "your work does not fit our present needs". However two other smaller pieces having been published already this year brightens me considerably.

BEATNICK SILENT GETS HEAD BLOWN OFF TWO TIMES

Oh, good heavens, Minerva! I'm at Black Rock. Planned to work on my best selling novel, Manning and discovered my brain farted again, left me with soiled frontal lobes. I carry my novel back and forth between laptop work at coffee shops and desktop work at home on a thumb drive. Sometimes, I forget to load the most current Manning file onto the thumb drive for transport. Today, I'm stuck here, drinking my soy Chai latte, with yesterday's Black Rock file on the thumb drive. This morning's home work remains there. 

My forgetfulness is a minor inconvenience today. Worse when I spend a couple of hours reworking Manning and discover, I've been working on an older version of the novel. Then I've got new work in an older version of Manning and a previous rewrite in a separate file. The two versions are irreconcilable, beyond mere copying. They cry to be rejoined. Sayeth, yon Romeo:

Chris and Toni

See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. 
O, that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek!  

On a happier note, my piece of creative non-fiction, "The Kiggins and I Were Meant For Each Other", appears in Feb's Vancouver Vector, and a poem appears in Ghost Town Poetry Anthology, II, eds: Toni Partington and Chris Luna. Coincidental is the fact their photo appears near a mention of  "Romeo and Juliet". Fortunately no family feud  intervenes. 

Speaking of family. No more nasty family could be found as Siyar's murderous bunch in last night's PIFF film, "Before Snowfall". The last scene, a wedding, blew the top of my head off. Still stunned, recalling it.

SILENT BOOMER BEATS HIS WAY THROUGH A NERVE JUNGLE

dendrites

I have tinnitus. Recently Conductor Spritz von Tinnitus added a second movement to the symphony in my right ear, a crescendo. The first night it happened was months ago, and I couldn't sleep that night. I imagined the rest of my life, sleepless, but, already, I've become conditioned to ignore it. Thankfully (or not), the human brain can be conditioned to accept anything.

"Sleepless in Seattle" (1993) is on TCM right at this minute. Back in 1992, I had reached a stage in my psychological development during which time I decided that women who liked that cream puff movie represented everything that was wrong with American women. They were featherweights who would never be satisfied with a real man who had warts on his brain. Then I met my wife who likes the movie, and I found out, yet once again, how wrong headed I can be. She enjoys the warts on my brain. She expresses this love when she asks me, "How did you ever get to be so weird" and laughs delightedly and delightfully. A long time ago another wife asked me, "How did you learn all these positions?" Also laughing. As I climbed down from the monkey bars I told her, "In kindergarten."

What does this have to do with writing you ask? Nothing. I'm marking time, waiting for the next plot development in my Manning novel to appear out of the sleepless deeps of my brain and slip between my brain warts into my fingertips. 

SILENT & WIFE RECOGNIZED FOR ZINE AND DIDN'T KNOW IT

Had a pleasant surprise last night. To further our aim of getting someone other than myself to publish the best selling novel, Manning, I'm currently writing, I decided to get myself on the "Directory of Poets" listed by the prestigious Poets & Writers Magazine. To qualify for the list, a poet (or writer) must have earned twelve points. Poets earn 1 point for every recognized anthology or journal their work has appeared in.

The key word is "recognized". I have enough publications (caution—still in process), but the application took hours of entering data and scanning the table of contents of publications not on the web when my work went in. In the process, I had to go to Poets & Writers list of authorized publications each time, and there was our pleasant surprise. Out of curiosity, I looked up the monthly microzine that Mertie and I published and I edited for 6 years from 1995 thru 2000. George & Mertie's Place: rooms with a view was on their list of authorized publications. 

"Of course it is," I happily told myself. It was a fine production with little resources. I created funny cartoons and wrote a comedic "Horroscope" [sic] for it, and we laid out the microzine carefully. Eventually, we were getting work from new, now established, writers and established names too. At first, we paid our writers a pittance. The checks we wrote were little more than symbolic gestures. Eventually we offered a $50 prize (instead of little sums to each) which we named the "Diver Award" (after F. Scott's Dick Diver in Tender Is The Night). 

Finding our microzine on Poets & Writers Magazine was a happy moment. Being pleased as punch, as the archaic saying goes, we want to thank those among you who submitted the microzine to the list and to Poets & Writers for recognizing our work in the list.

WEATHER BEATING TOWARD SNOW WHILE SILENT WRITES

Staring out the window of Black Rock Coffee where I'm writing today, rising out of the distant treeline, I can see the cap of snow on Mt. Hood. In this region, just about anywhere you go, you can spot the snow capped peak of Mt. Hood. It's as iconic to Portland and surrounding Oregon sites as Japan's Mt. Fuji is to the Japanese. This photo I've just taken with my laptop's PhotoBooth camera doesn't clearly show Mt. Hood which I can see in the distance between Al's Bowling and another building to Al's right. It's peak is directly entwined in the barren branches of the first tree back from the foreground tree.

The writing is going well today. Inserted a new segment after segment #6, renumbered the following segments and got well into a date between Manning and weather woman Misty Frampton which will be segment #21. The relationship between my two ghouls is going in its own direction. I keep wanting to make it one thing, but it keeps wanting to be another thing altogether. I like that, but will I pay attention to its real presence in my subconscious?

Sometimes futuristic language can be funny. Would you, as a reader, accept the term "ghoulanity" as having replaced "humanity" in our species' future? Or is it just too humorous for words? Those are the decisions in futuristic writing. Writing is fun when it  goes as it has today. Now over to Fred Meyer to put in my hour walk, during this 32 degree frigidly sunny afternoon.

MINIVIEW OF GHOST TOWN POETRY ANTHOLOGY 2004 - 2014

Just finished my copy of Ghost Town Poetry Anthology, Volume Two, edited by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington, published by their Printed Matter in Vancouver, WA. What a wonderful job they've done. A solid production all the way through between kaleidoscopic covers. 

Read the anthology over a three day period, reading slowly and joyfully an hour or so each time, drawn in by poet after poet and disappointed that there were not more poems by each poet for my enjoyment, but that's the nature of an anthology—to give the reader a taste so that the reader wants more. A problem for this mini-viewer is that I can't begin to name one poet's work without feeling I've left out too many others. As I read, at first I jotted down names of poems and poets that most captured my attention, planning on mentioning them, but the list grew so long it might as well include all the poems in Ghost Town and this is only a mini-view. 

If I were a name dropper and began there, you'd be surprised, perhaps, by the number of notable poets who have been featured readers at the Ghost Town Open Mic in Vancouver and whose poems are included in the anthology. Then again, if you know Toni Partington and Christopher Luna, you won't be surprised by their contacts among the poets of this region and beyond. My reading of their publication was one long celebration between my ears and down to my dancing slippers so I backed off that plan and, instead, invite you to read for yourself the diverse, intelligent and emotionally engaging poetry put together by Chris and Toni in this anthology. 

Get hold of a copy of Ghost Town Poetry, Volume Two and read it. The anthology can be found at Cover To Cover Books and, of course, can be ordered at your favorite independent bookseller. Cover To Cover Books is the home of the Ghost Town Open Mic, the second Thursday of each month. A featured reader is always present in the midst of the opening and closing open mic celebrations.