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Just … wow.
Not good. Not good at all. I guess when you consider all the Easter candy I binged on it could actually be a lot worse, though. And now I know I need to back off the sweets a bit (okay, a lot) and ramp up the exercise again this week to get myself headed back in the right direction. Current status: The return of Jek Porkins. Alas.
This is horrible.
A Finnish tourist has been arrested for ripping the earlobe off one of Easter Island’s ancient statues. Marko Kulju, 26, allegedly snapped off the giant lobe, which smashed into dozens of pieces. He then pocketed a chunk of the sacred Moai head in front of a horrified local woman. He now faces seven years in a Chilean jail and a £10,000 fine if convicted of stealing part of the 4 metre high head.
But I think this part is even worse.
Patricia Loflund, the consul at the Finnish embassy in Chile, said: “It was a sudden, impulsive crazy idea. He is sorry and surprised that it has caused such a stir. He really regrets his actions.”
He’s surprised it caused such a stir?! I’m just glad he’s not an American.
I’ll say this for my friend RaeJean: I never know what to expect when her name pops up in my inbox. I mean that in a good way. Case in point:
From: RaeJean
To: Josh
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2008 10:29 AM
Subject: Pirate help!Quick:
If you were going to give a kickball team a pirate-themed name, what would it be?
This is very important!!
First of all: Kickball?
Anyway, these were my suggestions:
The Scurvy Dogs
The Booty Shakers
Swashbucklers
Lily Livers
Buccaneers
The Mangy Curs
The Mutinous Sea Dogs
I think I like the last one the best.
Maybe this is where Barrack Obama gets all his info about us typical white people.
It’s not quite 6:00 a.m., and the Red Sox are just minutes away from opening their World Series title defense in Japan. It’s as if they designed this whole trip for those of us with one-year-olds at home. Stay up late for a game? No way. Get up at 5:00 a.m. for the pre-game show? Hell, I’m already up anyway. Play ball!
Sarah sent me this quote, which comes from an essay on writing by John Dufresne.
All first drafts are experimental, chaotic, messy, and all take time, energy, patience and persistence. You won’t get it right the first time, and that’s as it should be. The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
That same essay describes my own shortcomings perfectly.
[The inexperienced novelist] can articulate theme, explain how he’ll go about revealing character, lay in symbols, build tension. But he never gets the story written, though he feels an urgency to do so. Often it is this very urgency that aborts the narrative. He wants to dodge the drafting process and write the story immediately. He doesn’t know what every experienced fiction writer knows—that the story does not exist before the act of writing, that it emerges through the flow of images and the rhythm of words. He fails to understand that while life may be spontaneous, art is not.
And so he makes mistakes. He sets unrealistic goals for what he may not acknowledge to be, but is in fact, the first draft. He undermines his effort by holding unrealistic expectations of his own imaginative and organizing powers. And so he becomes discouraged when the people in his head are unrecognizable on the page, when the intense emotion he felt in real life is unrealized in what he writes. The beginning writer who has read a great deal is even more susceptible to this kind of dejection. She knows that the Chekhov story she just read did not founder the way hers seems to. She loses confidence and hope, becomes intimidated by the magnitude of the problem that is the nascent story. What had seemed like an exciting and noble undertaking now seems impossible.
Do not try to write beyond what the first draft is meant to accomplish: Do not demand or expect a finished manuscript in one draft. The worst thing you may do in writing the first draft may be to focus on the form or content of the story. Do not even consider technical problems at this early stage. And do not let your critical self sit at your desk with your creative self. The critic will stifle the writer within.
It’s good advice, and even though I’ve heard it before it’s something I need to keep hearing. Because my “critical self” is fairly well entrenched in front of the keyboard. It’s probably a side effect of being a professional editor. I edit everything—it’s what I do! But (and this bears repeating over and over again if I’m ever to actually write this damn novel), I’ve already tried my way, and it hasn’t worked. So it’s time to once again attempt to embrace the chaos of the sloppy first draft.
But I’m still going to use proper punctuation when I do it. Let’s not get crazy or anything.
Remember how back in January I said this was going to be the year I actually finished one of my writing projects? Well, since then I’ve proceeded to write zip, zero, zilch, nothing, nada. Not a single damn word. Still, there’s no time like the present to get started, right? Check back next week to see if I can get past the blank page that’s been staring back at me for the last two months.
I’ve just upgraded my home WiFi network, SkyNet—yes, I named it SkyNet! I’m a risk taker—from 802.11b to 802.11g, or 11 Mbps to 54 Mbps. Now I can actually stream video. It’s like a whole new world.
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