Author Archives: Jerry

An Unlikely Injury

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The plan at Saxkova Palačinkarna (Sax is a dog, by the way) tonight was simple: two cups of tea, two beers, and an evaluation of the effect on the first 150 pages of The Monster Within if I add two telling words in the fourth paragraph. The result: three teas, three beers, a rewrite of chapter three, and a bloody knuckle. The first results can be attributed to bad communication, bad counting, and good ideas. The last is a little more complicated. In fact, when I left Saxarna my knuckle was still intact. Indeed, as I emerged from the convenience store with a loaf of bread (the crumbs of which I am picking out of my keyboard as I compose this), I was still more or less in one piece. As I stepped out of the store and put the earphones in, however, I sowed the seeds of my own destruction.

In retrospect, perhaps it was not the act of putting phone to ear that did me in, it was my skipping over a tune in the shuffle because it was too mellow. Thus it was that “Electro” by Gwen Mars was crashing against my eardrums when I got home. I set aside my backpack, and there in the kitchen I proceeded to Rock Out. It was with a grand leaping air-guitar flourish that I cracked my hand into the ceiling lamp.

It wasn’t until after the number off the new(ish) Dickies album was over that I noticed the blood. Rest assured, by then the house was rocked.

Thanks!

A remarkably unremarkable day

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It was a day remarkable for its unremarkableness. I was invited by a friend (by his mother, really) to a meal. I went, had an enjoyable time, and left before the conversational pauses got too long.

The meal itself was very tasty; an excellent beef noodle soup (“handmade noodles,” Martin’s mother explained, “with my hands!”), followed by a plateful featuring two different kinds of potato dumplings and two different kinds of cabbage (czech variations on sauerkraut), all framing a lovely roasted duck breast. It was an excellent meal. conversation was convivial, I managed a bit of czech, I understood some of the jokes and the rest were explained to me, which gave everyone a chance to laugh at them again.

Martin’s father has a very impressive collection of books. He was able to travel to the west during the communist times, and he would smuggle books back into the country, at considerable risk. We talked about the weather, about how warm things have been so far this year, the warmest in almost 50 years (or was it 80?) and that was fine with them. The entire family agreed that there’s no such thing as a winter that’s too warm. Personally, I waiting for the payback storm. After the last two winters, it seems only a matter of time before the bottom falls out of the thermometer.

Feeling bloated, I declined the offer of a lift the short distance home, and instead walked home through the light rain, and reflected that what not long ago would have seemed a sure opportunity for culture shock was instead just a pleasant meal with a family I didn’t know very well.

On a not-very-related note, this evening the downside of my new favorite place was made abundantly clear. Saxkova Palačinkarna is closed on weekends. Spending the evening there with a chocolate crepe to fill in the gaps that are starting to appear in my stomach would have been perfect. I was halfway there when I realized what day it was and that I would likely be disappointed. I wandered up and down the street for a while, and ultimately ended up at U Kormidla, which is nice enough but doesn’t have readily available electricity. Ah, well, I can always write at home.

Thanks!

Hey! He was in…

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People sometimes ask me what my favorite movies are. It’s not the kind of question I’m good at answering. There are movies I like a lot, there are movies I appreciate for some particular point, and there are movies I enjoy just for the fun of them. I would do much better with a list of movies I really hated.

One movie that is without question one of my all-time favorites is… I’ll tell you later. For now we’ll call the film Get Crazy. It is not an intellectual flick. But once again, a couple of decades later, I’m watching a movie and one of the big stars shows up and my first thought is, “Hey! That guy was in Get Crazy!”

The cast of this forgotten epic includes Daniel Stern, Malcom Macdowell, Lou frickin’ Reed, for crying out loud, Fabian, Bobby Goldsboro, John Densmore (the drummer for the Doors), Howard Calin (the Turtles), and a ton of other actors who went on to make minor names for themselves. The theme of the movie: Rock and roll is supposed to be fun. Yeah, they took some risks, there, but even back then we were wishing Mick Jagger drank whatever was in the water cooler at the Saturn that night. Reggie Wanker did, and rediscovered rock ‘n’ roll. It was the Wanker I saw tonight on TV. Then he played an aging rock star, now he is an evil european bad guy of some sort. He’s doing all right, but it’s nothing like his perrformance in Get Crazy.

That film, for all its throwaway one-liner genius, was above all a triumph of casting, and of giving the creative people the chance to create. There’s a constant barrage of little oddities, the kind of things you think of on the spur of the moment, and the folks making this movie listened to one of the characters: “Yeah, why not?” Even in post-production, there came the odd sound effects, and subtitles stating the obvious just for the pleasure of stating the obvious (“The Bad Guys” reads one, as the helicopter for Serpent Industries lands, and later “Boy Meets Girl”).

“Rock ‘n’ Roll is gonna be fun again,” we hear near the end of the film, from a surprise character. (I could tell you, but that would spoil everything.) “Good…?” Toad replies. The idea that Rock ‘n’ Roll might not be fun has never occurred to him. Let me back up and give you the dialog. Reggie Wanker is Malcom McDowell being Mick Jagger. Toad is John Densmore being John Densmore. I have not see this movie in several years, so the dialog might be a little off.

Reggie: Toad, meet our new manager.
Toad: Aaaug! Ugh!
New Manger: ‘ello, Toad.
Toad: Wha?
New Manager: I’ve got us booked into every bleedin’ dive in Liverpool.
Reggie: Rock ‘n’ Roll is gonna be fun again.
Toad: Good…?
Reggie: Go on, give the lad a drink.
Toad (pouring from his bottle): I ain’t gonna touch him.

The reason I bring this up, other than the fact I saw (but didn’t understand) a movie with Malcom McDowell tonight, is that lately I’ve been Reggie, when I really should be Toad. Tonight I am both.

Jerry: Writing is gonna be fun again.
Jerry: Good…?

And the actual name of the movie was… Get Crazy!

Thanks!

Saxkova Palačinkarna

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I’m going to start with a nitpick. Either my chair is just a bit too low or my table is just a little too high. So far, that is my only complaint, and it does force me to sit up straight as I type.

As I intimated in my previous post, I was in search of a place to hang and write tonight. I poked my head into a number of crowded bars, but even ones with a table available just didn’t do it for me. I tromped around the neighborhood, looking for a place with the right atmosphere. (Note: the typical neighborhood bar in the Czech Republic has three things: A tap, tables, and a TV. There is little further attempt to create any sort of atmosphere, as it is assumed the smoke will obscure the far wall anyway.) Tonight every place with any sort of atmosphere had a private party in it, except the place with a big hole in the floor where the restrooms used to be.

I’ve walked past this place many times, usually on the weekends. It is close to Vinarna Jana, which I wrote about recently, and like that place has restrictive hours that mean when I can’t find one of my regular places to go, I can’t come here, either. This place isn’t much to look at on the outside, so it’s never been a high priority for me. That, my friends, is about to change. This is a very comfortable place.

(I’ve noticed in my writings that ‘comfortable’ is a word I use quite a lot, and not just to describe places. I consciously go back and change it when editing, although for me there’s really not much better than ‘comfortable’. It is, for me, a superlative.)

Somewhat larger than the Little Café Near Home, it is still one of the smaller places I’ve partonized in this country. The section I’m in has five tables, a couple of them pretty large, and there are three more through the arched-brick opening to the bar. The light is low; the textured paint gives a terra cotta feel. One wall is dominated by a mural depicting a lovely Old Europe boulevard, impressionistic and executed in earth tones. Dark wood floors, solid wooden furniture, and wood ceiling beams complete the effect.

Palačinkarna is Czech for creperie, which is French for place with lots of yummy crepes on the menu. I can’t wait to be hungry here. I haven’t seen the product, but the prices look quite reasonable. It is quiet in here, and well-ventilated. Of course, the fact that there are more female patrons here than male has nothing at all to do with my judgement, except that the distaff like smoky beer barns even less than I do.

I could go on, but as I type, I’m watching my battery dwindle to nothing. There has to be an outlet around here somewhere.

Edited to add: There is, in fact, an outlet right by my table. The mornings I wake up with something to write but know if I even glance at the Internet it’ll be noon before I get anything done, you can find me right here.

Thanks!

Suddenly the Internet is hard to come by

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Since the flood my Internet connection has been flaky on the good days. Today was not a good day. I’m not sure the problem is flood-releated; there was a bad period a month ago as well. Still, the flood couldn’t have helped. (One confirmed casualty was the splitter to allow the phone and the modem to share the line. Perhaps that is related to the current troubles.) Happily the Little Café Near Home recently added WiFi (pronounced in this neck of the woods as wee-fee). I gathered up my gear and headed out through a light rain.

Before I even got there I knew that I was heading for a disappointment. As I approached up the sidewalk the first thing I noticed was that the security grill was closed over the big window. The next thing I noticed was the sound of a jackhammer coming from inside. Renovations are under way. That’s cool, but not really convenient for me tonight. The bowling alley’s out – they are hosting a private party tonight. Their network has been sporadic lately as well; I think one guy is playing with the security settings but isn’t telling anyone else what he’s up to. On top of all that, I had pizza to go from the bowling alley last night, and as much as I like those guys, there is a limit.

I’m at U Kormidla right now, where I just had a very nice chicken dish that was not at all what I expected. Upstairs there’s a party of some sort going on; things are festive and they just relocated the plasma TV. Looks like there’s going to be a show. The downstairs is packed, and I’m feeling a little of that American guilt over sitting at the table sipping another tea while people are turned away because there’s no space.

On a marginally related note, on Saturday I’ve been invited to join a family for a meal. It’s the mother of one of the regulars at Little Café Near Home (for a while I though he was setting me up with her, but fortunately that doesn’t appear to be the case). The only catch is that I have no way to contact them. I hadn’t worried about it, I knew that even if I didn’t run into Martin that there were plenty of other Little Café regulars who would have his number. That was on my to-do list for today. That leaves the question, where does a Little Café regular go, when there’s no Little Café? That will be my quest for the rest of the night.

Thanks!

Coming Soon to a Paris Runway Near You

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There’s something that’s been percolating through my grey matter for a few days, and it’s finally reached the surface. A while back I read a blurb about a guy who was looking ever-so-stylish in a custom-tailored four-button coat.

Four buttons! Wow! Can you believe it? That guy has some brass!

Four buttons.

One time, many years ago, I went into a suit store (lacking the funds to pay someone thousands of dollars to make a jacket for me with one more button) and asked for the suit that would be the farthest thing from the Standard Male Uniform without offending people who expected to see me in the SMU. (Nobody I knew was in the ‘expecting to see’ category, but there was a funeral or a job interview or a wedding or some tragedy like that that required me to look ‘respectable’.) I ended up with a fairly nice suit in a borderline scandalous dark dark green that utterly failed to bring out my eyes. It looked, to my eye, like just about every other suit I’d ever seen.

If someone from a non-suit-wearing culture were to visit me in a suit-required situation and apologize for mixing up our names by saying ‘you all look the same to me’, I would nod my head in agreement. Women have fashion, men have the SMU. Men are reduced to the necktie to express who they are through clothing. Unfortunately, the necktie has turned into the business equivalent of gang colors. It’s not an expression of individuality; it’s your membership badge for whatever pathetically irrelevant subset of suit wearers you imagine yourself to be. There is the Power Tie (ha!), the School Tie, the Invisible Tie, and (the only one backed by a shred of honesty) the Family tie. I like the Family tie. It changes with the holidays, is sometimes horrible but carried as a badge of honor. “I’m wearing this polyester disaster because it will make my family happy.” There’s a good chance it will deflect bullets as well. The Family tie is cynically wielded by gray-haired salesmen.

Back to the buttons. You read it here first, kids… the TRUE FASHION REBEL will have no buttons at all. Velcro, baby. Imagine the clean lines of your suit jacket that is in every other respect just like what everyone else is wearing. No buttons! The Scandal!

Velcro. It’s the new black.

Thanks!

Monday Night at the Budvar Bar.

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I wasn’t paying attention to the calendar when I happened in here tonight. I’m at the Budvar Bar (actually the name is U Kmotra, not to be confused with some big tourist trap that is actually called Budvar Bar), the bar closest to home and also a place to get a plateful of cheap, if not inspired, food. The tea costs more here than at Little Café Near Home, but the food swayed me.

Incidentally, word on the street is that the Little Café Near Home is going to get larger. What’s cool is that the plan is to grow vertically downward. Beverages are always tastier when consumed subterranealy. This probably means tripling the size of the Little Café — there would be no point in spending so much on construction just to increase the capacity from twenty (when packed to the gills) to forty. If the Little Café has fifteen tables, rather than the current six, will it still be the Little Café?

Tonight I’m at the Budvar Bar, however, and I”m feeling bloated and slow-witted after a filling meal. It is crowded tonight. I am at the table directly under the television, as there is a game on and I don’t want to take up a seat that someone interested in the game might want. The place began to fill up quickly soon after I arrived, the tables filling first on the sides facing the television. Tonight’s match is Prague Sparta (rhymes with New York Yankees) vs. Kladno (rhyme pending) in a grass-kick-hockey (rhymes with soccer or football, depending where you live) match. This game has had relatively few cases of grown men lying on the grass pretending to be hurt (apparently an integral part of this sport), so it hasn’t been too painful to have it flashing in my peripheral vision, demanding my attention.

Directly behind me is the table where the guys play cards. The man with no nose is among them, and after this much time I must assume that he is not getting a new nose, and that he is content to wear a rectangle of gauze affixed to his face with a big X of tape forever. The guy with no larynx was here earlier, sitting at the table I prefer when things aren’t crowded. Also departed are the men who like to do shots with the matronly waitress, who may or may not be related to the owner.

(One of the Spartans just had made contact with a defender, and had the sense to make a crisp pass upfield before the agony of the violence done to him was too much and he collapsed to the turf in agony.)

All these things are going on around me, and that’s just the normal vibe for this place. No distraction at all. What is distracting me is the tattoo of the leaping tiger that the waitress who recently came on is sporting. Could it be that she’s a fan of the Liberec Bily Tigri, my favorite ice hockey (rhymes with real sport) team? She’s very pretty, so the idea is enticing.

There’s also the matter of where the tattoo is. It is a large piece, right between her shoulder blades and extending down her slender back. At times it is partially concealed by her long, blonde hair. Her nose crinkles when she smiles; I think she is secretly laughing at my resolute determination to look at her eyes rather than her breasts. She has very pretty eyes.

Thanks!

Breaking the Curse

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I’m heading out in a few minutes to watch the Charger game. This week, I just feel like the curse will be broken. I’m not sure why after three years that this will be the week, but there you go.

Edited to add: Just for the record, I ended up not watching the game after all. I did listen to it, however.

Thanks!

A Hundred Little Things

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I was supposed to go down to Moravia this weekend for a birthday party, but as the time approached to leave I was getting progressively more stressed out. The big pile of things I had put off in November was looming over me, and the flood added a new list of its own. Even just taking a shower was a hassle; there were sodden floor mats piled in the shower, and I had no towels even remotely clean.

I had no dry shoes that didn’t tear up my feet, rent was due, I had no telephone or Internet access, the list goes on and on. On top of everything else I had been eagerly awaiting the chance come December to get back to work on my “real” writing projects. Thanks to the flood that hadn’t happened yet.

MaK really wanted me to come, and I fell into the trap of listing some of the reasons I was bailing. Any individual reason sounds pretty weak, it’s only when you can see the avalanche that you stop saying, “those are just snowflakes.”

It did not promise to be a relaxing trip, either. It was for a birthday celebration, and there were events planned that stretched from the moment we arrived until we left, and I knew that more things would be added. And, like MaK trying to convince me I should go, there would be no saying “no”. If I boarded that train, there would be no getting off, and there would be no getting any work done. (I suspect my in-laws don’t consider what I do to be work. I have heard them say (in czech, assuming I don’t understand) that my language skills are weak because I go to cafés but I don’t talk to anyone, I just sit and write. Well, that’s my job. It’s a good job, but it’s not one that involves talking.) It became a lot easier to say no when MaK said they were ready to go and they she thought they should pick me up. I was so laughably far from being ready to walk out the door (see shower and shoes above, add clean clothes and painfully stiff legs from bailing out the kitchen), that at that point I wouldn’t have been able to join them even if I wanted to. So I just said, “I have to work. I can’t work right now and I’ll be crazy until I can.”

I could go on talking about all the things I need to do, but I think I’d better get back to doing them.

Thanks!

Tý Voda!

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I learned this morning that my new neighbors are pretty cool. When the Polish family downstairs moved out, I idly hoped that a bunch of single women would move in. Alas, my wish fell one ‘wo’ short. I had seen a couple of the guys coming and going, in the last few days, but I had not had a chance to say more than ‘hello’.

Early, early this morning, before the sky had even begun to turn light, I slowly emerged from deep slumber, gradually becoming aware that someone was banging on my door. It did not occur to me right away that there might be a good reason someone was knocking. “Oh, great,” I thought. “The new guys are getting home from a bar and they’re drunk and they want to share the joy.” That thought didn’t last long. Other sounds were starting to register, but I was still a bit surprised when someone opened my front door. I stood up and — splash.

I thought of several different titles for this episode over the course of the morning, from “The great flood of ’06” to “Bad day for dust bunnies.” The title I chose is a cross between the most common phrase I heard this morning, tý vole, which is a not-very-polite word, and voda, czech for “water”. (Tý vole translates literally as “you ox”, but over the last few decades has for whatever reason become the default curse.)

Water. Lots of water. I stood in the kitchen, water covering the tops of my feet. It was dark; the only light came from the hall. The main breaker for my flat had popped. I was annoyed at that moment, not considering that my feet were in water than also had power strips floating in it. Yes, overall it’s a good thing that circuit breakers break circuits now and then. (There was little danger of me being electrocuted; the wiring would have caught on fire before I got up.)

Voda, Voda, everywhere, but not a drop of čaj. I really wanted a cup of tea at that moment.

I live on the top floor, and water, being composed mostly of matter, responds readily to the call of gravity. It is crafty in the number of paths it can find to make its way downhill. The water was flowing out my front door in waves, cascading down the stairs and pouring in delicate little waterfalls from one flight to the next. I could see paint lying on the treads of lower flights; as the water sought the center of the earth it paused to work its polar molecule magic on whatever substances it encountered, and paint and plaster were the biggest victims. Water doesn’t necessarily have to go over things to get where it wants to go; it can go through as well. By the time my landlord woke up this morning, water was dripping from his ceiling. That can’t be good.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m a big fan of water; everybody should have some. But when you just let it run loose, nothing good can come of it.

As I stood in shock, awe, and tea deprivation, the new neighbors had already sprung into action; and before long we discovered that shutting off the main to the water heater stopped the flow. About then I looked at the clock. 5:45 am. The downstairs neighbors had been getting ready to go to work when they noticed that something was amiss. I set to trying to get as much of the water down a drain, as opposed to letting it soak through the floor and into my landlord’s apartment. As I used a dustpan as a surprisingly effective water scooper, I began to appreciate the acre-foot. (For those still mired in the metric system, an acre-foot is a unit of volume — the amount of water it would take to cover an acre of land to the depth of one foot.) I was dealing with an apartment-inch. I scooped and scooped, then the neighbors hauled in towels and buckets and eventually (after emptying the large buckets several times), we got the situation under control. The bucket team headed downstairs, where the basement was getting deep. I stayed upstairs and commenced mopping-up operations.

Incidentally, when you’re dealing with a major flood, it’s a good idea to keep one towel dry through the first phase of operations. It was purely accidental in my case, but having a towel that wasn’t saturated made a big difference at the end.) By 7:30 the worst was over and a nice lady arrived to help me clean up. She chased puddles in the corners while I tipped up the furniture to see how things were underneath. The plumbers arrived at 8:00, and by 8:30 they were gone, the electricity was back on, and I had my tea.

I have yet to try any device whose power adapter was on the floor (luckily I have a spare for the laptop), and my WiFi thingie was on the floor as well. Tomorrow, perhaps, we will learn the fate of those electronics. The insurance guy comes on Tuesday.

Thanks!

Whew! It’s over.

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It was with a deep sigh of relief that I submitted my draft for the final word count and read the congratulatory message from the folks at NaNoWriMo central. This was the first time the outcome was in doubt since the first year I did National Novel Writing Month, a lifetime ago. (Literally — I was an Engineer homeowner in Southern California then. Proof that there is such a thing as reincarnation.)

My plan was to publish it as a blog, and let people stumble across it and interact with it, allowing it to grow. The first thing I realized was that 50,000 words in a month is way, way, too much for a blog, and trying to develop all the themes simultaneously so they could reach conclusions in a month was just plain crazy. So I kept writing at the same pace, but posting at a more human-digestable rate. Then, I ran out of story at around 40K. I had tried to scope the project so it could be told in 50,000 words, but at 80% of the target I was just fiddling with pieces, starting to get repetitious, (not that this or almost any other blog isn’t, but this blog has no pretense of being literature), and I had said all that I had set out to say. I had a couple of thousand words to go to wrap things up, which I just couldn’t keep from being maudlin no matter how hard I tried.

Finally I sat down and spent a day writing an 8000-word subplot in a completely different style, that the world will never see.

I haven’t posted much on the other blog recently; to be honest after pulling my hair out over the thing these last weeks I’m pretty sick of it. This evening I’ll do a bit of recreational writing before getting back to work in December.

Thanks!

I guess Internet Radio counts as well

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For the record, I just stopped listening to the Charger game on Internet radio. I turned it off with about two minutes to go in the third quarter, right after the Raiders intercepted.

The Chargers only score happened during a server timeout.

Follow-up:
Apparently it was at about one minute to go in the third quarter that the interception occurred, at which point the Raiders had the ball deep in San Diego territory. I turned off the game, deciding at that point that sleep would be more fun. I awoke the next morning to discover that soon after I turned off the game, San Diego had intercepted the ball right back. They went on to score two touchdowns (benefitting from a bizarre rules interpretation by the referees) and won the game.

I now attribute the server error that prevented me from hearing their first score to “curse interference” — it was such a slam dunk for them to score that the universe had to stop me from listening for a moment to allow it to happen without inviting untold destruction.

Thanks!

I have a bad feeling about this…

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Today the words aren’t coming very quickly, so I decided to take a short break and do a little career upkeep. WritersMarket.com has a feature called Submission Tracker which allows you to follow the progress of your work, tracking where you have submitted it, where you plan to submit it next, and things like that. With a click you can see a list of all the places you are waiting to hear back from, or all the manuscripts that are sitting around gathering dust rather than out there working.

Make that “could”. It’s been a while since I logged on over at WritersMarket.com, and there have been changes. I had a few beefs with the Submission Tracker, but I wasn’t looking forward to having to figure out a new system. As I poked around, my stomach began to twist up into a little knot. There was a section called My Manuscripts. So far, so good. I clicked and got a list of the works I’ve entered into the system to track. Only — the list seemed shorter than I thought it ought to be. Nevertheless, each entry had a link to “view submissions”. Not as versatile as the old system, but — what the #@$%$!!!. All the submissions have the status “active”! I can’t tell which places have rejected the manuscript, and which were the ones I planned to submit to next! I can’t tell which manuscripts have been published, and where. I can’t tell which agents have see The Monster Within, which are still considering it, and which have rejected it.

It appears that all submissions that were not linked directly to current WritersMarket.com listings are gone. That means, for example, that all my submissions to Piker Press are missing. If that was the only submission for the piece, then the manuscript itself is also gone from the list.

Still there are twenty-four submission entries for Monster. Some of those should show as rejected, but several were there for my next round of submissions. Now I don’t know which is which. And agencies not listed on WritersMarket.com? Information on agents and agencies I’d gathered from all over and consolidated there is now gone, along with any hint that an agent may or may not have seen my work already.

Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe the information is there and I just didn’t know how to find it. Maybe the transition to the new system isn’t complete yet. Maybe. The help system just says “coming soon.” I sent a message to customer support, so maybe in a couple of work days they’ll clear things up.

Right now, I feel ill.

Follow-up:
I just got a nice note from the WritersMarket.com support team saying that my data had been carefully preserved, but would not be available online for two more weeks. They attached a spreadsheet with my info as well. That is a massive relief, as well as an excuse to slack for two weeks. They also asked me if they could contact me for feedback about the new system. I replied that I have opinions on everything, and am happy to share. So, at this time I’m guardedly optimistic that everything will turn out all right.

Thanks!

My Telvision is in My Head

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I got a rejection from the Atlantic Monthly yesterday. My first thought: if I knew how long it would take them to reject me, I never would have sent it in.

There’s no shame in being rejected by that magazine. It’s possible that there are periodicals that accept submissions that are tougher to get into, but none with the sheer whamness of Atlantic Monthly. Sending them a submission was an expression of faith in myself.

I got rejected. I’m OK with that. What I’m not OK with is that right now I hardly have anything out there trying to find a home. The business side of things is languishing, even as I write some words I quite like. I have a pretty sweet story ready to go, and I know where I’m sending it. All I need is a cover letter, and a message to my stateside postal enabler (Hi Dad!) and it’s done. That has been the state of things for three weeks.

NaNoWriMo. Bless it, curse it, dance in the meadow, bludgeon myself with a sharp rock. I need NaNoWriMo. I feel my productivity fall off as summer wanes, and November rekindles the fire. This year is the toughest since the first, and when I’m not too busy whining about it I’m having a blast. Add hundreds of new Jer’s Novel Writer users, though, and there’s no time for anything else. Say, writing, for instance.

I think December may be busier than November.

To veer suddenly to the side, yesterday I was at the Little Café Near Home, and I was thinking about a Chapter One I posted in this blog a while back and dang if the idea didn’t grow. I looked over the previous episode tonight and it didn’t have the punch I remembered, but Natasha has developed in my head since then. I spent a few hours spinning the tale through various scenarios, and it was fun. I came up with a nice twist I’ll be able to use somewhere eventually.

I feel oddly guilty about spending all that time with Natasha, though. Guilty because I have so many things going right now. Oddly because most Americans spend more time watching television each day than I spent developing a frighteningly compelling character. A great new character who stands on her own is the pay dirt of my profession, her birth a moment to celebrate, and I missed the party, frustrated by my lack of productivity. My blue-sky time was pure self-indulgence. Sitting around imagining ridiculous things is my television. I could do it all day, but I’d never get anything done.

Thanks!

The New Bond movie – 10 seconds too short

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Those of you who have seen the new James Bond movie, “Casino Royale”, probably already know what I’m talking about. There is a sequence where 007 pops over to Miami, follows a Bad Guy into an exhibit called BodyWorld, violence ensues, and then our hero is off again to the airport to drive a tanker truck remarkable for it’s spryness while loaded with aviation fuel and which is also a convenient exception from “Bond’s Law”: anything that can explode will, if a bullet comes within ten meters.

Whew! As most of the critics have pointed out, that sequence was just too much for too long. What they needed was a little break in there. One critic (I forget which) went so far as to say, “what that scene really needs is a shot of a couple of guys looking at the plasticized dead people.”

But there is no such shot. It’s quite possible that I’m in that scene somewhere, but my featured “guy looking at things” foreground role now lies on the cutting-room floor. While I’m disappointed, I imagine that the actors with speaking roles in that scene are far more disappointed. I think the original intent was to really take advantage of the plasticized dead people for atmosphere, and so they filmed a lot of stuff to give a good feel for the weirdness of the exhibition. Actors portraying a local news team were interviewing the creator of the plastic people as he walked through the exhibit, and things like that. (You can still hear a bit of Gunter’s voice in the background.)

In the end, in an already long Bond movie, there just wasn’t time for all that. In the middle of a long Point A -> Point B -> Point C -> ad infinitum sequence, there just wasn’t time to stop and smell the latex.

As a side note, in the airport scene there is gunplay and terrorism going on on the runways — police cars with flashing lights, etc, and apparently the tower controllers didn’t notice, as planes were still taking off and landing. The last time airport personnel were so incredibly stupid was in one of those Die Hard movies, but at least here it was just to pull off a moment of cheap drama. The Die Hard flick’s plot depended on hundreds of people in responsible positions being mind-bogglingly stupid. No, thousands. In fact, every pilot on the east coast, every person in the FAA both past and present, and every member of every security agency must have had the IQ of a rutabaga. That movie sucked.

Breathe, Jerry. Think happy thoughts. The bad movie is gone, now.

I enjoyed “Casino Royale” quite a bit, actually, once I got over the ridiculous opening title animation. It is grittier than previous Bonds, more modern, and cinematographically more adventurous. There were a couple of long sparring conversations between Bond and Vesper that could have been shorter; eventually they wore that subject pretty thin. Bravo for putting meaningful dialog in a Bond movie, but it was undermined by the urge to beat it over our heads (“Hey! Look! We put meaningful dialog in a Bond flick!”). Giving Bond a scrap of emotion is good, but trying to make a tuxedo out of a scrap doesn’t benefit anyone. (This was not helped by the British pronunciation of “Vesper”, which made me think of an Italian scooter, and then Princess Vespa in “Spaceballs”.)

If only they could have trimmed those cat-fights a little bit more, so they could have put in that ten seconds where it was really needed.

Thanks!