Only in Los Alamos

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I saw a truck today, a big ol’ Dodge 4×4, mud-splattered but in good condition. The front vanity plate read “Forget 911… I dial .357!” and had a drawing of a revolver pointed directly at the reader.

On the rear of the cab were stickers. Some proclaimed the owner of the truck to be in favor of various causes favored by the conservative crowd: POW/MIA, the right to bear arms, and so on. There were also five stickers in a row, white ovals modeled after the stickers that in europe indicate country of origin. In this case, the stickers indicated that the driver was from PHP, WWW, MP3, C++, and W3C. Man, what a geek.

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El Parasol

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It is one of the simple pleasures of life, sitting down to a well-constructed cheeseburger, taking a bite, and tasting the green chile, feeling the burn but more than that appreciating the pungent flavor.

There is something going horribly wrong in our nation right now, as restaurants compete to put more and more beef on their burgers. Half pound and three quarter pound burgers are supplanting more rational sizes as the marketing departments of restaurants and fast food chains have decided that More is Better. This is a very American sort of trend, but now we are faced with burgers out of balance. Sure, beef is an important part of the burger, but a carefully crafted hamburger is not only about the beef, it is an ensemble, with each element making a valuable contribution. This is especially true of the green chile cheeseburger.

The pinnacle of humanity’s culinary progress, the properly-constructed green chile cheeseburger is a delicate — and subjective — art form, an organic sculpture that bursts in your mouth with the first bite and lingers long after the final swallow. The chile must be hot and flavorful, and abundant, yet the meat, cheese, and other fixings must not be overpowered. Each ingredient has a role to play, from the crunch of the onions to the smoothness of the cheese.

I just polished off a darn fine green chile cheeseburger here at El Parasol. For those who know the town, it is located where Los Alamos Building and Loan was when I opened my first bank account there a bazillion years ago.

One side effect of not going overboard with the beef: the burgers are cheaper as well. The guy in line in front of me ordered a GCCB, as did the woman behind me. Looking around I see some people with burritos and other New Mexican fare, but the GCCB’s are all around me. And no wonder. Mine was damn yummy.

Perhaps I am being less critical, as it is the first green chile cheeseburger that I’ve had in a long time, but boy did it hit the spot. I wonder what it would take to get them to open one of these in Prague…

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You know you have the right sorts of friends when…

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Beer consumption:

Negra Modelo: 38
Fat Tire: 33
Red Stripe: 31
Bud Lite: 0

Not one Bud Lite for the entire three hours of the ho-down. Sweet.

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Making the leap, one baby step at a time.

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I’m tidying up a couple of stories, wrapping them with a neat little christmas bows, and sending them out to publications that… pay for writing. Yes, indeed, it is time to face rejection. To date, nothing I’ve submitted anywhere has been rejected. (At least since Junior High – those ninth graders so totally should have used my column in their underground rag. Probably it was just too sophisticated for them. Not that it bothered me.) While Piker Press has been berry berry good to me, I need to take a few baby steps out of my comfort zone and find more competitive markets.

There are several factors that make a market competitive. One of the biggest factors is the pay rate. Not surprisingly, the more a periodical pays, the more quality submissions they receive, and the more writing they reject. Although there have been some very promising new writers over at the Piker Press lately, it is a weekly, and therefore has a voracious appetite for content. The editorial quality over there is steadily improving and they have some promising new writers, but there’s no denying that they have a long way to go to compete with some of the other magazines out there. Ironically, one of the ways I can help them out the most is to become known in other venues.

So, what the hell, it’s time to get rejected, and I intend to start out by getting rejected by some of the top magazines in the country. Heck, why not?

Well, there’s one reason. Most of these publications still want submissions in the dead-tree format, and with double-spacing and huge margins even a modest short story can consume a lot of pages. Between my short stories and my submissions of novel manuscripts to agents, an acceleration of the deforestation of Canada and the Pacific Northwest is inevitable. (I’m told they can plant new trees, so future generations can chop them down once more, in a process known as ‘agriculture’. I find this encouraging.)

So ask your stockbroker for tips on paper companies, and maybe put a little into the toner cartridge market as well. Maybe you can find a paper-and-ink mutual fund. If there isn’t one, there ought to be.

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Gambler’s Alert!

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Sure they’ve won a bunch of games, and they’re playing at home and they’re big favorites — but don’t bet on the San Diego Chargers today. Why? Because I’m in North America, that’s why. It’s possible that I’m still far enough away that they will win the game, but by two touchdowns? I think not.

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A (Chemically) Balanced Breakfast

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I’m in a mall right now, at the food court, surrounded by neon and bright decorations in a vaguely southwest style. Rattlesnake sculptures with glowing red tongues and rattles, gila monsters with neon haloes, and the like adorn the pillars in this boomy place, and all around me are the classics: Wendys, Dairy Queen, Orange Julius.

Of course I sat with a view of the Hot Dog On A Stick franchise. I don’t think they ever sell any food, rather I think the chain is funded by a sadistic old man performing a long-term social experiment to discover the lower limit of human pride by paying pretty girls to wear the ugliest clothes imaginable in public.

I chose none of the above delights to break my fast; I was drawn to a blue neon sign hollering “Ichiban” into the void. They were just bringing the first trays of chow from the back, and I looked over the vaguely asian fare as it lay glistening under the lamps. The red peppers I call “hot little mothers” were abundant in a couple of the dishes, and I knew I had found my chow.

I am woefully out of shape; the hot little mothers are really hot this morning. Still, after eating a few of them, I can feel the endorphins start to work. Add the fat, salt, and sugar from the food, top it off with a refill of Coke, and I’m processing a chemical cocktail that is working very well with the jet-lag, thank you very much. Synergy at its finest.

Now I’m off to Bigass Bookstore to look for a book about pet therapy that is technical, at least 150 pages long, and hasn’t been translated into czech yet. (It’s for a friend! Really!) Wish me luck.

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Who are you?

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In Czech, “to teach” is učit “to learn” is učit se which, although it doesn’t seem like the czechs think of it this way, translates as “to teach myself”. Likewise, půjčit means “to lend” while půjčit si means “to borrow”. There is a very appealing symmetry there. Apparently “lend”, “borrow”, and “return” in English forms an inscrutable quagmire for the native czech.

When the verb is accompanied by se, it is an indication that the action of the verb is being reflected back onto the speaker. Si, on the other hand, indicates that the action is being applied to another object.

When you get to washing, this becomes interesting. You can say, míju – “I wash” – but that applies strictly to the general act of self-cleaning. When you are washing your hands, Míješ si ruce you are washing some external object. Your hands are not you. Built into the language is a separation of the parts and the whole. You could name any part: heart, brain, foot, and that part is not you. It’s not even part of you. It is something separate, an object you interact with the same way you would with a stone.

And there you have, built into the Czech language, a distinction between the whole and the parts.

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Meat Parade

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I was a fuego’s, watering the plants, when the call came from Soup Boy. “You wanna come downtown?”

“I just came from there.”

“I know. But I have an idea.”

I was pretty sure I knew what his idea was. There’s a place down there in Slovansky Dům called Ambiente. The restaurant is based on a simple idea, modeled, I think on similar restaurants in Brazil. You sit, order drinks, and they hand you a menu. Only it’s not a menu, really, it’s more of a guide, explaining what all the different items are.

The subject of this restaurant had come up some time before when I was reminiscing about sushi. There are a couple of pretty dang good sushi places in San Diego, and it has been a long time since I’ve been to one. Ambiente has sushi.

Ordering is simple there; you have two choices. Meat or no meat. No meat means you must be content with the rather lavish “salad bar”, which includes lots of tasty things, including meat and sushi. If you order meat, not only do you have salad bar privileges, but you also get to partake of the meat parade. As it was my first time, naturally I had to get the whole experience. I ordered Meat.

When Soup Boy had first come to Prague, this location had been a bar called Joshua Tree, and his first job in town was bartending there. The ownership had changed, but the wood paneling on the walls still had U2 lyrics artfully carved into it. The place was well-lit and busy, but not uncomfortably so. They apologized; without a reservation there was only room in the non-smoking section. A bonus not to be take for granted here. After we ordered I was awarded a giant Meat Plate and a small set of tongs as a symbol of my quest. Soup Boy, recovering from illness as he was, chose to go small-scale.

He explained the tongs. “Sometimes when they are serving you meat, you will use these to help.”

Then began the Meat Parade. Between the tables passed servers carrying skewers of various dead animals, everything from chicken hearts to beef filet with Parmesan. Sausage, pork, various beef, veal, chicken (when the chicken wrapped with bacon came by, Soup Boy said, “Any time you take one animal, and wrap it around another animal, it’s going to be good.”), and fish. On and on it went, more than a dozen different dishes altogether, including roasted pineapple, which I discovered made all the other things on my plate less filling. The Meat Parade continued, and some of the servers were quite insistent that I take more of whatever it was they were flogging at the moment. Between that and two loads from the salad bar I ate a lot — I mean a lot, of good food. (Although, the sushi, truth be told, was limited in variety and not the best. Not the worst, either – I had quite a lot of it.)

By the time I got home, I was approaching comatose. My belly was a ponderous mountain as I lay on my back. I had joined the Meat Parade, and I had done my share. I am honestly amazed at how much I was able to eat.

It has been about eighteen hours since I got the call, and now, as I write this, I’m starting to feel just a wee bit hungry again.

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The Mysterious Secret Message

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I got a text message from fuego, leaping wide oceans in a single bound. “Pirates script due Jan. 8.”

I assume he is not referring to the script we have already written, as, well, a deadline in the future would not be very noteworthy. Unless it’s a Pirates script that includes the ad-libs and other changes made during the shooting, that are not reflected in the master document. That might be it, but what would the point of such a script be?

No, I’m guessing that for some reason we need a new Pirates script, of unknown length (probably significantly longer), for an unknown audience, for an unknown purpose, and for some reason the window of opportunity closes on January 8th.

A good guess is that we need something for a feature-length movie or a television pilot. I hadn’t considered how different those two things can be until tonight as I sat down and started thinking through an outline of the plot. For a TV pilot you need to establish the style that the series will adopt, which limits you to styles that work in smaller chunks and won’t confuse first-time viewers. That means you can’t get too carried away with nonlinear structures and other devices that take time to build. Also, a pilot defines the main issues the characters will face, whereas a movie resolves them.

Getting a polished work of that size done in a month will be a big, big, challenge. We’re with Unlikely on Impossible’s front porch, and we’re ringing the doorbell.

Hopefully by the time I can get this posted I will already have the answers, but right now I’m anxious to start working. If only I knew what to work on.

Post Script: It’s all cool now. I’m a little rusty with english, apparently – I didn’t recognize “jan” as an abbreviation for “June”

5

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Strč prst skrz krk

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No, that’s not gibberish in the title of this episode, it’s Czech. It is a sentence just about anyone over here will quote when you mention vowels. It translates, more or less, to “Put your finger through your neck.” It doesn’t seem that useful in daily conversation, but it is notable for having no vowels at all. The Czechs are a frugal people, saving up their vowels, but they are also binge spellers, writing whole words with no vowels at all only to write others with strings of vowels, each of which is voiced.

I do not know enough czech to come up with my own vowel-free sentences yet, but it sounds like a fun game.

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You Wrote a Bad Song

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There’s a pop song in the heavy rotation over here, called “Bad Day”. I suspect it is popular over on the other side of the pond as well. It is an inoffensive little tune, a bit on the catchy side, and were it not played so often I would have never even noticed it. There’s nothing wrong with catchy little tunes; that describes much of the Beatles’ output, and now they are considered one of the greatest pop bands ever.

So while I don’t hate the song, I woke up with it in my head this morning and soon thereafter some alternate lyrics blossomed in my caffeinated cranium:

You Wrote a Bad Song
(to the tune of Bad Day)

You wrote up a pop song and you knew it was crap,
A helping of saccharine and whole lot of sap,
The artist within you said ‘no way’,
Throw that piece of crap away,
But that’s not how how you earn your paaaaaay…

You wrote a bad song,
You pushed it too far,
But now it’s on the charts
and it’s made you a star

You wrote a bad song
You made some new friends
but now they want to know
when you’ll do it again

Because you’ve known it all along,
You wrote a bad song.

You sit at your keyboard and play with some notes,
But all of the lyrics stick in your throat
Everything that you write that blows
Will be played on the radio,
But that’s now how you want to be knoooooooooown…

You wrote a bad song
You pushed it too far,
But now it’s on the charts
And it’s made you a star.

A million people CAN be wrong,
You wrote a bad song.

Sometimes when you’re thinking late at night,
You wonder what went wrong,
You remember how happy your were the time
The radio first played your song
They played your song…

So where is dispassion when you need it the most?
Why can’t the artist just give up the ghost?
You know if you do it all your way
Play what you really want to play
All your brain-dead fans will saaaaaaaaay…

You wrote a bad song
You pushed it to far
We came to hear candy
And you’re giving us art

Yeah, You wrote a bad song
You pushed it too far
But now it’s on the charts
And it’s made you a star

You wrote a bad song…
You wrote a bad song…
You wrote a bad song…
[Repeat many, many times, fade out]

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NaNoWriMo Kerplop!

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Normally December for me is a time of hectic productivity for me. Each NaNoWriMo leaves me with tremendous momentum and a story in the vault that likely would never have been written otherwise. I am reminded to write without fear, to get the ideas down and worry about the niceties later. I’ve been away from my main projects for a month and there are things I been looking forward to fixing in them, or new ideas on how to give a particular bit of dialog some extra wallop.

Not this year. I’ll make the word count goal again for the fifth straight year, but given my current lifestyle, that’s no big deal at all. I expect there are very few months in which I don’t write 50,000 words.

There are several reasons for this, I suppose. for one thing, this will be the last time I write anything I dare call a novel without planning it carefully first. I can see the germ of a really fun story in what I did this November, with some true Douglas Adams-style blink-blink moments of complete cultural disorientation that power forward what really is a funny story. Or at least it would be funny if there weren’t vast sections of it that just don’t fit together, and lots and lots of filler, and a few spots that just plain suck.

Another, bigger, reason is that with one novel complete, and another approaching completion (um… sort of…), I am forced to recognize that in the long run adding another unpublished work in the hopper isn’t moving me forward professionally. So as a significant annual milestone I have to look back on the year and take stock of my progress. I finished a novel. The whole damn thing. On the way I deleted and rewrote hundreds of pages, honing the language while (hopefully) not eradicating the soul. So that’s a good thing.

It is far less than I had set for myself to accomplish in the last year, however. According to the timetable I set out at the end of last November, I am supposed to be finished with The Test, and well under way with my American Road Novel, tentatively titled The Fish. The Test has some brilliant moments (if I do say so myself), but lacks structure. It’s taken longer than I expected to get it under control, but that’s all right. It’s big, and one of my challenges right now is to split it into two satisfying stories. (I will not put out of these so-called “series” which is really just a single, rambling story. I hate getting to the end of a book only to discover that when I shelled out my money for a story, I only got a fraction of a tale. Or, worse, buying a book and finding myself in the middle of a story with no clue what’s going on and who the hell all these people are. But I digress.) So, okay, writing a novel (at least one that doesn’t suck) takes a long time.

The business part of my chosen profession is a bigger problem, however. It is languishing. I have identified likely agents, identified their requirements and prioritized which ones to approach first. The shotgun method is not appreciated, so this will be a time-consumong process. Well, it would be time-consuming if I was spending any time on it. At the rate I’m going now, the ETA (estimated time of agentedness) is, um… (… carry the four, take the hypotenuse…) infinity.

So this December, rather than pick up my real writing projects, I think I’m going to take that energy and channel it where it needs to go. It is a measure of how much I like my “job” that I can use allowing myself to work as a reward when I make progress in other areas.

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A Dream Within A Dream

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I was talking to Soup Boy this morning, asking him if he knew of a place here in the ‘hood where I could send a fax. Sure, there are places in the next neighborhood over, but it’s a cold, rainy day, the kind where you just want to hole up in your favorite café and write. Public transportation is efficient, so it’s not really a problem to go elsewhere.

“People who live in Prague don’t get out into the real world much,” Soup Boy said, “but you don’t even see Prague.

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Gotta be there

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It’s the little things – the timing that could be a wee bit better, the fill-in radio chatter that needs to be written, the F-117 keychain hanging on my wall that’s needed for a shot. The way they are afraid to push the music forward when atmosphere is more important than realism. Not to mention, Charles the Second needs his Becherovka.

I spent two months on the production of Pirates of the White Sand, and it would be difficult to point to any one thing and say, “Dang! Jerry kicked ass right there.” (Aside from my part of the writing, of course, but that happened long before.) I was (so I tell myself), a general lift to the entire production, leaving very small marks everywhere. There was the general good feeling on the set. I provided pure pie-in-the-sky American Dream. Pirates was not a goal but a vehicle, a stepping stone to something grander. The film was itself theCrusader, a pirate ship ready to storm pop culture. I painted a vision so grand that no one else could be embarrassed for dreaming big. I did that. And honestly, I’m a little bummed that that didn’t show up more in the raw footage. There was sloppiness there that didn’t echo the belief that we were building a new pop-culture franchise.

The last day when, after my incessant whining, we set things up so the pirates could do some serious shouting, it was golden. (Credit must also be given to a crew who gave us a day to go back and do stuff like that.)

Also, I brought an enormous number of breakfast burritos for the crew. And a machine gun.

The part where Moab says “lay a course for the Sierra Madres”? I happened to be paying attention just then, made a comment, and then C-2 used that to change the cut by a fraction of a second, and it was better. So most of the credit goes to Chuck II, because he had the skill and immediately knew what I was talking about. Dude knows his shit. Not to take away from fuego, he was there too, and it was actually a pretty tough cut. They worked together on it for quite a while. I really came to appreciate how many hours of post production go into each second of film you see.

But I made the comment. They probably don’t need me for that so much now that they have time to be picky, but I bet there are places in the flow of things that they are just used to, places where they understand more than the audience, that could be better. I know that’s the way with my writing.

And there are the relationships. I was on the ground for the Duke City Shootout longer than they were, and I just got comfortable with people. It doesn’t sound like they are having any trouble in that regard, but they are dealing with people I would like to see again, whether or not my participation would be helpful. If you’ve been paying attention, you know who I’m talking about.

When it comes right down to it, while intellectually I have surrendered the vision of the story to people with the skills to make it happen, emotionally I am still wrapped up in the thing. I hear reports from far away, encouraging noises, and I know things are in good hands. Skilled hands. Passionate hands.

Just not my hands.

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Girls Night Out at the Bowling Alley

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I may have to start a new category in this here bolg: Observations in a bowling alley. There’s always something new to see here.

Tonight the writing has been especially difficult, for it is, indeed, girl’s night out. There is a large group of them, dominating four of the six lanes, and from my vantage point far above, each bowler provides her own unique distraction. For some, it is simple physical attraction. Others have a unique bowling style. One, a dark-haired cutie wearing 60’s-style striped pants, has the pendulum delivery.

There is another, her long, black hair tinted red, wearing glasses, a t-shirt and stone-washed jeans, who is quite obviously used to being good at things. She approaches bowling with the intensity of a serious athlete. It is interesting watching someone who is accustomed to excelling facing a task at which she does not excel. Her own expectation is still there.

All the women below me suck at bowling. I imagine it might be the first time for some of them. I’m pretty sure it’s the first time for athlete girl.

Here’s why I think so. In their first game, she was horrible. She dropped the ball so it rolled behind her. Gutter, gutter, gutter. She’s on her third game now, and she’s laying the ball down gracefully, almost silently, and she is following through with her hand high in the air. No one taught her this. Much of the time, the ball rolls straight and true, and she’s working on a score I would be satisfied with.

I hate people like that.

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