wildcat

Mostly just been staring at the emptiness following the paragraph I wrote last night, or avoiding the screen, or bustling about and procrastinating. Squeeze a few words out here and maybe that'll get it all flowing in the story. I don't know. Maybe there's just no dramatic tension, maybe it's my discomfort with first person narrators. It's up to just over a thousand words and I couldn't tell you where it's going. It's supposed to be a small story, one extended scene, and the big goal is finishing it. That and the narrative voice.

I've been having trouble finishing stories lately. A lot of ill-conceived texts that sputter to nothing after a few pages.

I sound too melancholy. There's a picnic tonight on the beach, though I'd kind of like to go out now, actually. But, I need to write a page or so before I do anything.

I started reading Katherine Govier's Fables of Brunswich Avenue last night, apparently published for the first time back in 1985 - she reminds me a bit of Atwood in certain lights, though her prose has less poise. She manages to generate and end a marriage in between two paragraphs on the first page of a story without actually saying anything right away. I am working my way slowly through the first story and it feels a little restrained for my tastes, as though Govier is holding something back - but that might be the narrator holding something back; the emotions seem a little bleached.

Haven't gotten any work on the story done since Sunday night, so I'll be hitting it in a few with some well-placed blows from the word-hammer. Or I'll fire the poetry gun at it. Either way. The God of Laundromats has been appeased. The fridge is full. I ate an apple. I took care of the physical concerns so that I can spend an hour or two in the story. It's a good day, the window's open, the sunlight's bright, air's a little thick with pollen but I'm functioning.

It's difficult working on bits of something that are the nitty-gritty event A followed by event B logic for the story...you have the characters in a setting so they have to interact with the setting rather than drifting out of it completely. I sometimes have problems with that, and I think this is why I haven't gotten anything done on this story in over a day; I'm at one of those bits, and so the dialogue isn't going to scintillate but of course it's dialogue that can be used to reveal character, and I have to remember that.

I think about this stuff too much.

Tonight I'm going to try and juggle two projects - scribble notes for one, and write two pages of prose for the story I've already been working on - with the windows open some music firing. Otherwise, it's reading low-voltage science fiction comics and all of that.

Some weeks brunch comes on Sunday mornings like a nervous twitch, utterly predictable. In other words - really? Lox trim eggs benedict? Again? I don't really like being a creature of habit but all the behaviours point in that direction, even when it seems like they shouldn't. I've decided I want to eat in ridiculous new ways this week. No, this doesn't mean I'm going to shove nigiri up my nose or into my ears, but I'm going to try some new things. I want to go over to the Ethiopian place on Cook Street because I haven't done that in nearly a year and it's been really beautiful out lately - why not grab a combination and go to the park to eat it in the light? There's that Persian place just around the corner from Nautical Nellie's that I've never been to - not since it was that weird Japanese restaurant I went to, once, with Joy. I don't know much about Persian cuisine but it seems worth a go.

No sushi this week. And my trip to the grocery store on Tuesday shall be fraught with novelty.

After brunch, the four of us - Michael, Dan, Lisa, and I - wandered down Fort Street to go clothes shopping for Michael and I. Shorts and summer gear. It was a lamentable tragedy, nothing really amounted to anything, Dan had difficulty with boys wearing makeup as a cultural phenomenon, Michael and I tried on hats. I shouldn't try on hats, they do things to my ears to make them look even larger and more destructive than they actually are. The Government Street Market was an exercize in more futile repetition, though there was a lemonade stand so Michael was happy. I walked home after that.

Transcribing the opening to a story from the notebook into the computer, which means heavy line-by-line edits as they go into the keyboard. Not too shabby.

I am not dead, I just blog less often these days.

It's been a pretty good morning so far-- we got up a bit later than expected, bickered our way through the morning's ablutions, then went in seperate directions on buses. It's been warm and bright since I set foot out the front door. I read on the bus while some strange blonde girl sat beside me, got off downtown, sat in a posh coffee shop for an hour and a half-- drinking hot chocolate, reading, and writing.

The writing's been going fairly well lately, and "The Hotel Detective" is chugging along through its first draft. I'm not overly happy with what the first draft looks like at this point - surprisingly linear, not terribly deep in its details, and the characters rendered only on the surface - but it is a first draft, and it's only half-written, and there will be plenty more drafts to work through once I've mapped out the basic arc of the story. I'm not using my scene breaks and white space efficiently enough. That said, it's thrilling to feel as though I'm producing again, particularly producing something that I'm genuinely interested in. The characters aren't strongly fleshed out yet, but my protagonist is fun to write and the basic circumstances of the story are egging me on.

After my morning of scribbles, I wandered over to the comic shop - being Wednesday, new comic book day - and picked up a couple of things to read over while I ate sushi for lunch. Went to Shiki. Miso soup was thicker than usual, the Negitoro roll was good (the nori seemed especially crispy), too much tobiko on the tempura roll, a decent triple roll - quite refreshing in the end.

What the hell have I been reading lately?

I chugged through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows over the weekend and was mostly pleased with it in spite of some fairly glaring problems. Rowling managed to demonstrate some of the weird politics and psychoses underlying the wizard world, Hermione proved to be a fairly dangerous commodity, there were pointless deaths and significant characters were mostly absent until right near the end. The first chapter suffered from sounding like a city council meeting of super-villains.

I'm in the midst of reading Dustin Long's first novel, Icelander. I'm really enjoying it. The protagonist is Our Heroine, daughter of famed Iceland-based detectives Emily Bean and Jon Ymirson. A mystery surrounding a family friend's apparent murder leads to old villains and allies coming out of the woodwork-- including a pair of "metaphysical detectives," Wible and Pacheco, who narrate their sections as one but still manage to act seperately sometimes. There' s an underground kingdom, an obsession with Hamlet, ripened footnotes bursting at the bottom of pages, a sense of detective dynasty and references to cruel nemeses. There is one character who may or may not be a thinly veiled parody of Ethan Hawke. The prose crackles, there are funny names, and I'm urged on to through it.

(Cover art by Bryan Lee O'Malley)

A sweet little set of graphic novels out in the digest-sized format from Oni Press. They're slick little numbers about painfully self-involved twentysomething Scott Pilgrim, they're utterly fun and frenetic. Constant romantic entanglements and Scott's horrible ego -- he's courting a girl by the name of Ramona Flowers and consequently finds himself targetted by Ramona's Seven Evil Ex-Boyfriends, each one arriving in due process to fight Scott to the death. Weird video game fight sequences, spontaneous dance numbers, the ever unfolding of Scott's rather dubious romantic history. It's sharp, amusing, and involving. I've read the first two books so far.

(Cover art by Tom Scioli)

I've picked up the first two trades for Gødland, one of Image's latest stable of oddly high quality comics that seem carefully poised to distract us all from the company's dubious publishing ventures of the Nineties (these are the people that brought us such "modern classics" as Rob Liefield's Youngblood [shudder] and perennial wank-comic Witchblade [shiver]!). Gødland is a postmodern nostalgia trip based on those old Jack Kirby comics from the heydays of the Silver Age - his old Thor stuff, the New Gods, the early Fantastic Four comics - but given a brightly twenty-first century vibe. Adam Archer is an astronaut who lands on Mars, has a close encounter, and is transformed into an energy-dipped super-dolt by the "Cosmic Fetus Collective." Then he's dumped back on Earth and has to make a go of it as a government-watched super-hero, attended to by his three brilliant sisters - none of them gifted with powers, but all of them fully-drawn characters. Sibling rivalry, alien invasions by space fairies... not to mention the villains! A skull in a tank who's very existence is to find drugs to consume. the metal-plated Nickelhead. Sometimes, Scioli's art is a bit too loose and sketchy, but it's very funny and bright.

I finished Icelander this morning. It's a fun book, twisting around on itself, enjoying its postmodern mud romps. The idea isn't particularly new - the novel is a mystery novel written by an unknown author and then landed in the hands of the mysterious editor, who footnotes everything and then writes an afterword about the book, suggesting certain solutions to the mysteries carried within, pointing out the notable absences in the text. It's smart, it's crisply written, the footnotes and metatextual stuff plays well into the story. The author, Dustin Long, does a good job of playing with old archetypes like the mastermind criminal (this time, called Surt) and the idea of an underground civilization beneath Iceland is enticing - underground kingdoms, hidden cities, are good fodder. He occasionally loses it with the character names, because even though I absolutely love strange character names and got a lot out of most of his cast, Constance Lingus stood out as pushing the boundary a little too much (A reporter named Connie Lingus....sigh).

The plan for the afternoon is working on the hotel detective story, though I'm going to duck out and buy some dinner groceries first. I've up to about sixteen pages of the first draft, getting closer to the mystery's solution, and I'm certainly looking at how I can make the story a lot more coherent. It's going well, though.

Dinner at the Superior Cafe was exquisite-- beet root tapas followed by a pastry with goat cheese and crab; after that, Christian and I shared a dark chocolate rum torte topped with whipped mascapone flavoured with espresso. The wine was a light, apricot-hinted white called Damasco. As we were finishing up, Lisa showed up with a friend of hers and I filled them in with the menu.

After that, we wandered up Superior Street and eventually hit a liquor store, picked up a bottle of white to have a glass from while we wrote back at Christian's place, and a bottle of Riesling for supper tomorrow.

After that, I turned out about a thousands words for the story and he worked on the introduction to his thesis. We were both really quite productive.