IPOD
RADIO
Long post ahead, fair warning....
I've been in Austin for the holiday, and I delayed my flight home from tomorrow morning to Monday. As soon as I saw the skyline from the plane (and especially after I stepped out into the low 70s temperature) I immediately wondered why I left. Yeah, I got into an MFA program, but that's been pissing me off lately. They just recently took away the option of writing a novel for our final, overall project; it now has to be a short story collection. Apparently, this is because everyone chose the novel option but then hardly anyone finished. Well, to that, I say I've already written one novel, and before the spring semester starts I'm hoping to have a second one completed. To me, that seems like a lowering of the program standards. In all honesty though, I'm not sure how high the standards are to begin with. Some of the student stories I've read lack basic English skills, such as complete sentences and basic grammar (such as paragraph breaks between dialogue and near-incomprehensible sentences). I've been trying to arrange a meeting with the program head to lodge my complaints, but she hasn't been available for a while due to some family issues.
So yeah, I saw my old Barnes & Noble store (SO much better than my current one in Maryland) and I really started to regret leaving. Maybe I should have waited around another year and tried to apply to all the schools again. I was doing all right for money while I was here; I might have been able to handle all the application fees. I let my parents talk me into believing that I wouldn't have any better writing samples a year from then and that the results would all be the same. I know they didn't mean that as an insult, but I should have taken it as one to use as motivation. Now I'm pretty much locked into a program that I really feel misled me when I was visiting.
I've just gotten extremely homesick since being here (and seeing as how I only lived here for a year, that struck me as odd). I drove by my old apartment, and all the sights I remember, and went to the Texas-Texas A&M football game. The whole trip has been bittersweet; I don't want to leave, but I have a shitload of homework I have to do before next Saturday.
I'm not very happy in Baltimore, and my girlfriend feels the same way. "We don't belong here," she told me a few days ago, only half-jokingly after enduring another terrible night of tips at her restaurant. Nobody we've met really gets either of our senses of humor, at least not like the people in Austin did.
It also doesn't help that I've been losing sleep over money issues. I've been dipping into my financial aid money, but I need that to pay for next semester. I'll have to find some way to replenish most of what I've used before the second week of January. Fun fun. I started doing this credit counseling thing, which is a good long term solution for my $9,000 worth of credit card debt (it could be a lot worse, I know), but unfortunately rapes me up the ass in the short term.
It's just been a shitty year all around. The silver lining in all this is that it does motivate me to keep working on my books, even though I have to focus a lot on the shit-ton of work I have to do for the final weeks of my classes. I need to get published, even if only for a little money just to lift the burden. Plus, there's a deeper reason behind that need: people keep telling me not to get my hopes up, that getting published before you're 30 is a real long shot. Maybe this is the athlete in me, but that makes me want to say, "Fuck you," and pull it off even more. I want to show them what I can do, that I'm not just some idealistic dreamer who will never put the work in and will spend his whole life pining for the reward that will never come. I've been terrified of being that person since I was in high school, and that fear only increases as the years go on.
And I got work done here in Austin; I wrote a 500 page book (and that was only part one of a trilogy). I don't know if I made the right decision or not....
I've been in Austin for the holiday, and I delayed my flight home from tomorrow morning to Monday. As soon as I saw the skyline from the plane (and especially after I stepped out into the low 70s temperature) I immediately wondered why I left. Yeah, I got into an MFA program, but that's been pissing me off lately. They just recently took away the option of writing a novel for our final, overall project; it now has to be a short story collection. Apparently, this is because everyone chose the novel option but then hardly anyone finished. Well, to that, I say I've already written one novel, and before the spring semester starts I'm hoping to have a second one completed. To me, that seems like a lowering of the program standards. In all honesty though, I'm not sure how high the standards are to begin with. Some of the student stories I've read lack basic English skills, such as complete sentences and basic grammar (such as paragraph breaks between dialogue and near-incomprehensible sentences). I've been trying to arrange a meeting with the program head to lodge my complaints, but she hasn't been available for a while due to some family issues.
So yeah, I saw my old Barnes & Noble store (SO much better than my current one in Maryland) and I really started to regret leaving. Maybe I should have waited around another year and tried to apply to all the schools again. I was doing all right for money while I was here; I might have been able to handle all the application fees. I let my parents talk me into believing that I wouldn't have any better writing samples a year from then and that the results would all be the same. I know they didn't mean that as an insult, but I should have taken it as one to use as motivation. Now I'm pretty much locked into a program that I really feel misled me when I was visiting.
I've just gotten extremely homesick since being here (and seeing as how I only lived here for a year, that struck me as odd). I drove by my old apartment, and all the sights I remember, and went to the Texas-Texas A&M football game. The whole trip has been bittersweet; I don't want to leave, but I have a shitload of homework I have to do before next Saturday.
I'm not very happy in Baltimore, and my girlfriend feels the same way. "We don't belong here," she told me a few days ago, only half-jokingly after enduring another terrible night of tips at her restaurant. Nobody we've met really gets either of our senses of humor, at least not like the people in Austin did.
It also doesn't help that I've been losing sleep over money issues. I've been dipping into my financial aid money, but I need that to pay for next semester. I'll have to find some way to replenish most of what I've used before the second week of January. Fun fun. I started doing this credit counseling thing, which is a good long term solution for my $9,000 worth of credit card debt (it could be a lot worse, I know), but unfortunately rapes me up the ass in the short term.
It's just been a shitty year all around. The silver lining in all this is that it does motivate me to keep working on my books, even though I have to focus a lot on the shit-ton of work I have to do for the final weeks of my classes. I need to get published, even if only for a little money just to lift the burden. Plus, there's a deeper reason behind that need: people keep telling me not to get my hopes up, that getting published before you're 30 is a real long shot. Maybe this is the athlete in me, but that makes me want to say, "Fuck you," and pull it off even more. I want to show them what I can do, that I'm not just some idealistic dreamer who will never put the work in and will spend his whole life pining for the reward that will never come. I've been terrified of being that person since I was in high school, and that fear only increases as the years go on.
And I got work done here in Austin; I wrote a 500 page book (and that was only part one of a trilogy). I don't know if I made the right decision or not....
Still waiting to hear from the second (well, technicall third, but the second just never responded) agent I submitted my book to. Today I decided I should start on a second one, but not the second book in the trilogy -- if the first one gets picked up, I can start worrying about the second one then. No, for now, I think I should focus on something singular, self-contained. There are several I could do, but as of this moment, really two I could see myself sticking with over the next few months. One is a quasi-fantasy about a world in between Heaven and Hell, filled with both angels, demons, and a bunch of things in between, and another is a story about a high school shooting. I think I'm going to send an e-mail to the agent I met in Austin to gauge her interest in either possible book.
But something needs to happen, soon. I hope. Money is incredibly tight right now. I'm actually going hungry a few days a week simply because I can't afford food. Times are tough all around, and a lot of people have it worse than me, so I really can't complain, but these past couple weeks have been rough. It just feels like I'm so close to breaking through with my writing, but still so far away. Age old problem, huh?
And hey, at least the Texas Longhorns are giving me reason to cheer.
13 days 'til the election... please Lord, let Obama win....
But something needs to happen, soon. I hope. Money is incredibly tight right now. I'm actually going hungry a few days a week simply because I can't afford food. Times are tough all around, and a lot of people have it worse than me, so I really can't complain, but these past couple weeks have been rough. It just feels like I'm so close to breaking through with my writing, but still so far away. Age old problem, huh?
And hey, at least the Texas Longhorns are giving me reason to cheer.
13 days 'til the election... please Lord, let Obama win....
My emotions all day, courtesy of the Chicago Cubs:
--PANIC!
--It's okay, they can still win tonight.
--PANIC PANIC PANIC!
--Wait, even if they lose, they're going to a much warmer climate in L.A. and facing two pitchers who aren't nearly as good as the Dodgers' first two pitchers with two very good pitchers of their own.
--Oh, let's just get to this game already....
Aren't sports fun?
--PANIC!
--It's okay, they can still win tonight.
--PANIC PANIC PANIC!
--Wait, even if they lose, they're going to a much warmer climate in L.A. and facing two pitchers who aren't nearly as good as the Dodgers' first two pitchers with two very good pitchers of their own.
--Oh, let's just get to this game already....
Aren't sports fun?
First of all, thanks to all of you who left messages of support for my (foolhardy?) literary endeavors. The agent I spoke to in Austin finally got back to me today to give me the name of another agent who handles stories like mine. I had more or less expected that, based on our earlier conversations, but still, I'm disappointed. She did say she really liked the manuscript, and the idea for the overall trilogy, she just doesn't represent young adult fantasy-type novels. I'm trying to be cautiously optmistic; she wouldn't have given me a specific person to contact if she didn't think there was something there, right?
Anyway, on another, somewhat related note, I began my MFA classes last week. I've been doing more "serious" fiction (rather, I've been thinking about it, for my future writings in the program), and it's had an interesting side effect. When I do this kind of writing, I tend to become angrier, and drink more. I think it's because I look at the world, the real world, much more closely when I'm trying to write about it (as opposed to working on my fantasy worlds). Doing so just underscores how... I don't know, I guess disappointed I am with the ways of the world. It makes me generally upset, and occasionally depressed.
In a lot of ways, I'm kind of like McNulty from The Wire (which I finally finished watching the other day -- excellent). McNulty is always angry, and he's an alcoholic because of the bullshit he has to put up with in the Baltimore P.D. In Season 4, he starts up a relationship with a woman and returns to being a beat cop in the Western District, where he's more or less happy. He stops drinking, stops sleeping with random women, and is generall happy. But then he gets bored and goes back to being a detective, where the anger returns. I see a lot of that in myself -- I haven't been like this really since I graduated Purdue and stopped writing this "serious" fiction stuff. Now that I am again, I'm angrier. Fortunately, I haven't slept around like McNulty did, and I can honestly say I won't, either, but still, the other parallels are striking.
Speaking of The Wire, it's really interesting to see a lot of the places where the show was filmed. I drive through a pretty rough spot of East Baltimore on my way to class, and there's one particular block I know I've seen on the show. And then, whenever I go to Oriole Park or M&T Bank Stadium, I drive right by the very docks where they shot Season 2. It's like it's not just a TV show anymore; these are real places, with real addicts sitting on the stumps and real corner boys and hoppers scoping my car and trying to decide whether I'm a cop, a potential customer, or just a dumbass white guy with Texas license plates passing through. It's eerie, really.
Anyway, that's all for now. I'm praying like crazy for this next agent to want to represent me; I can't live this month-to-month life much longer, never knowing if I'll have enough to make rent and all my other bills. I can't just keep going to school without anything to show for it. I need to prove to myself that there's more to me than this.
This video kind of matches my mood right now. It's so beautiful and sad. Fuck Trent Reznor, Cash understands this song better than he ever could. And the look on June's face, the one that shows she wants so desperately to help but knows she can't... God, this video nearly makes me break down every single time I watch it.
(IF THE VIDEO DOESN'T WORK, follow this link
Anyway, on another, somewhat related note, I began my MFA classes last week. I've been doing more "serious" fiction (rather, I've been thinking about it, for my future writings in the program), and it's had an interesting side effect. When I do this kind of writing, I tend to become angrier, and drink more. I think it's because I look at the world, the real world, much more closely when I'm trying to write about it (as opposed to working on my fantasy worlds). Doing so just underscores how... I don't know, I guess disappointed I am with the ways of the world. It makes me generally upset, and occasionally depressed.
In a lot of ways, I'm kind of like McNulty from The Wire (which I finally finished watching the other day -- excellent). McNulty is always angry, and he's an alcoholic because of the bullshit he has to put up with in the Baltimore P.D. In Season 4, he starts up a relationship with a woman and returns to being a beat cop in the Western District, where he's more or less happy. He stops drinking, stops sleeping with random women, and is generall happy. But then he gets bored and goes back to being a detective, where the anger returns. I see a lot of that in myself -- I haven't been like this really since I graduated Purdue and stopped writing this "serious" fiction stuff. Now that I am again, I'm angrier. Fortunately, I haven't slept around like McNulty did, and I can honestly say I won't, either, but still, the other parallels are striking.
Speaking of The Wire, it's really interesting to see a lot of the places where the show was filmed. I drive through a pretty rough spot of East Baltimore on my way to class, and there's one particular block I know I've seen on the show. And then, whenever I go to Oriole Park or M&T Bank Stadium, I drive right by the very docks where they shot Season 2. It's like it's not just a TV show anymore; these are real places, with real addicts sitting on the stumps and real corner boys and hoppers scoping my car and trying to decide whether I'm a cop, a potential customer, or just a dumbass white guy with Texas license plates passing through. It's eerie, really.
Anyway, that's all for now. I'm praying like crazy for this next agent to want to represent me; I can't live this month-to-month life much longer, never knowing if I'll have enough to make rent and all my other bills. I can't just keep going to school without anything to show for it. I need to prove to myself that there's more to me than this.
This video kind of matches my mood right now. It's so beautiful and sad. Fuck Trent Reznor, Cash understands this song better than he ever could. And the look on June's face, the one that shows she wants so desperately to help but knows she can't... God, this video nearly makes me break down every single time I watch it.
(IF THE VIDEO DOESN'T WORK, follow this link
Hey all, sorry I haven't been reading or commenting much lately; I've been rather busy with work (I don't even want to count the number of bills I have piling up on my counter) and editing my book. That was a laborious process, but I'm finally done with it and ready to submit the thing to the agent I met at the Austin Agents and Editors Conference. So yeah, you know, it's only about the biggest moment of my life so far, so no need to be anxious or anything....
Tonight at 12:40 AM, I completed the main draft of my first novel. A lot of it still needs to be edited, and of course it's only book one of two (or possibly of three; I've been thinking a lot about that lately), but I can say that I've completed a novel. It's 141,807 words long, and just over 468 Word Processor pages. Hells yeah.
And by the way, thanks to those of you who read through my ranting and raving a few days ago. Sometimes just seeing that people are reading and paying attention to my ventings really helps.
And by the way, thanks to those of you who read through my ranting and raving a few days ago. Sometimes just seeing that people are reading and paying attention to my ventings really helps.
Every fucking time I think she's starting to get better she regresses. Either she stops taking her meds because she doesn't like being "fake" happy on them or something else. (For most of you who haven't been keeping up, check two blogs back to see what I'm talking about, because I'm too drained to go over it any more).
And I can't tell her that even her being "fake" happy while on the meds is so much nicer; that only then does she finally resemble herself again; that only then can I actually enjoy myself at all in this new place; that only then do I not want to drink every night; that only then do I not want to just yell; that only then does the frustration not make me grit my teeth and hold my tongue when I'm around her; I can't tell her that because that would only make her worse, you see. So I have to grit my teeth and hold my tongue even more and just hopes she finds out just what the fuck it is that's causing her to be like this.
And seeing as how neither one of us has insurance yet, another trip to the emergency room isn't in our budget (oh yeah, we went there for her stomach, which, thankfully, is a little better now due to the medication they prescribed which she is still taking). And of course I sure as hell can't tell her any of what I'm feeling, because that will definitely just makes things worse. This is the only online site of mine I know she doesn't read, so it's the only one where I can vent what I'm really thinking.
Fuck it, I'm tired of it. I'm going to bed. Though before I do, a special thanks to wsoxfan for the support; and at this moment, I'm more optimistic about a possible Cubs-White Sox World Series than I was a week ago. Now, instead of the Brewers or Mets, I think the main obstacle to that is actually the Angels. The Texiera trade just makes them scary good.
And I can't tell her that even her being "fake" happy while on the meds is so much nicer; that only then does she finally resemble herself again; that only then can I actually enjoy myself at all in this new place; that only then do I not want to drink every night; that only then do I not want to just yell; that only then does the frustration not make me grit my teeth and hold my tongue when I'm around her; I can't tell her that because that would only make her worse, you see. So I have to grit my teeth and hold my tongue even more and just hopes she finds out just what the fuck it is that's causing her to be like this.
And seeing as how neither one of us has insurance yet, another trip to the emergency room isn't in our budget (oh yeah, we went there for her stomach, which, thankfully, is a little better now due to the medication they prescribed which she is still taking). And of course I sure as hell can't tell her any of what I'm feeling, because that will definitely just makes things worse. This is the only online site of mine I know she doesn't read, so it's the only one where I can vent what I'm really thinking.
Fuck it, I'm tired of it. I'm going to bed. Though before I do, a special thanks to wsoxfan for the support; and at this moment, I'm more optimistic about a possible Cubs-White Sox World Series than I was a week ago. Now, instead of the Brewers or Mets, I think the main obstacle to that is actually the Angels. The Texiera trade just makes them scary good.
So everyone should just read my last blog and know that things were getting better, but now they're right back in the same place. FaaaaaanTAStic....
On a positive note, I've seen The Dark Knight twice now (first at a midnight showing) and I'm still having a hard time fathoming how good it was. I was thinking Heath Ledger definitely deserved a Best Actor nomintation, but now that I've seen the movie twice I also think it should get some serious Best Picture consideration.
And I'm getting close to being done with my book. I have maybe 75 pages left. So close, yet so far away. I'm sorely tempted to just end it at a spot I just reached, which COULD be an ending but isn't quite as good a one as what I have in mind (this is book one of two, so the decision is really where to cut it off). I think mainly I just want to be done with this and that would be a psychological thing.
And I'm really tired and rambly (that's a new word I just invented, deal with it), and the Joker is running through my head right now, so I need to stop typing.
On a positive note, I've seen The Dark Knight twice now (first at a midnight showing) and I'm still having a hard time fathoming how good it was. I was thinking Heath Ledger definitely deserved a Best Actor nomintation, but now that I've seen the movie twice I also think it should get some serious Best Picture consideration.
And I'm getting close to being done with my book. I have maybe 75 pages left. So close, yet so far away. I'm sorely tempted to just end it at a spot I just reached, which COULD be an ending but isn't quite as good a one as what I have in mind (this is book one of two, so the decision is really where to cut it off). I think mainly I just want to be done with this and that would be a psychological thing.
And I'm really tired and rambly (that's a new word I just invented, deal with it), and the Joker is running through my head right now, so I need to stop typing.
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