Brokebad Mountain

A True Sketch

So, the original idea for this blog was that it is a sketchbook for me to post my "sketches". It's a way for feedback. I haven't used it the way it was meant to be used since I started blogging. So here goes. This is a rough draft of a story. Email me with any notes you might have. Make it constructive. Don't just tell me you love it, mom.

Sample

Please say something, she said.

I sat there with my feet twisted around the legs of the kitchen chair, legs chewed gnarly by our deaf and blind dog, Mathis. It was two weeks after the accident, two weeks after the funeral. We still had the pictures up. We still had the vases full of flowers, pink and brown, smelling like sweet decay. Mom knelt in front of me with a hand on each shoulder begging me to talk about it, but there wasn't anything to say even though there was so much. My Uncle Ben and Aunt Pat were there too, standing statuesque behind Mom. And behind them, Dad paced. Mathis pinballed his way around the kitchen. The soft clank of his body hitting a cabinet, the swoosh of his furry side sliding along the wood. He moved in circles still, a sheltie who never learned to stop herding. It used to be, maybe a year earlier, he would herd us all morning long as we opened presents on Christmas. Except now, in his blindness, he herded people less. It was closer to “The Yellow Wallpaper”.

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Perfection is a Mutha Fuckin' Rainbow, Mutha Fucka!

I am off today. A whole day away from a coffee shop and really the only thought I had upon waking was, "coffee". I feel like I've eaten peanuts for lunch too many times in the past month. It's actually pretty disgusting. What can I say? I'm a busy guy. 

I had a pretty good talk with my friend, Dan, about rewriting a story you've rewritten a dozen times before. It's nice to know that it's not just me who feels this way. That shit is WORK. My writing sample for grad school is one such example. It's a story that was birthed in a tutoring session while I was in a nonfiction class. It was this small instance about hearing a friend of mine being hit by his dad. Not seeing it, but the sound of it. I don't know how long that version was, but it had to be at least four years ago. I have been writing versions of it since then. Now that I know all the pieces, it's the putting them all together that is kind of           boring.  Even this blog is a form of me putting it off. It gets to the point where it literally just feels like sitting in a chair for hours. Teachers, other writers, all tell you that this is hard work. It truly is. I have snippets of breakthrough though. Still, after years, I realize that this one word needs to be changed. And when I change it, perfection.

I'm putting in the hours. This story will be finished soon. Done. 

Until I decide it isn't. 

I guess, as an artist, you always strive for that perfect thing. That final product. Maybe I'm later at figuring this out than most of the writers, painters, musicians I know. That finality is a rainbow. It will always be over there. I don't know. It just made sense to me now. Slow learner, I guess. 

so true.

For Those About to Blog...

This is my salute to my friends and their blogs. I type this while my cat tries to rest his head on the keyboard. This could take a while.


These are in no real order.

David Peak
I had class with David. It was my first Advanced Fiction Writing class and he slayed. His blog actually inspired me to start one. His writing is tight and his blogging has become more and more sporadic. David Peak is a busy man.

Ghost Factory

Blue Square Press

Sheree L. Greer

Big shocker here: I also had class with Miss Greer. It was earlier in my college career, and I was intimidated to say the least. I was a sophomore and she was a GRAD STUDENT. It was a class on first novels and I hadn't even really finished a short story so I can't have had much to say. Still, she took time to think of constructive things to say about whatever lackluster thoughts I wrote down.

Zack Willhoff
Holy shit, it's my brother! He's a kick ass writer and a kick ass musician. He just kicks ass. That's all you really need to know. OH, and he does music reviews.

Emily Skaja

I don't really know how to judge poetry. I just know that I like some and I don't like some. Needless to say, I really like Emily's stuff. It gets me. 

Geoff Hyatt

Possibly the only person on this list I haven't had an actual conversation with. I knew of him through college, but we never had a class. He had me at hello when he posted this.

Geoff Hyatt

Galactic Hangover

Christian Woodruff

We bonded over Bradbury. He writes and illustrates. Most recently he was at the Sunday Night Sex Show. 

Sorry if I forgot someone.

Is Your Government Running?

That would be the title of my political essay if I ever had the interest in writing a political essay.


I am dog sitting for a few days. A friend is on vacation and I get to watch this amazing dog.


Her name is Cricket and she's pretty much awesome. The other day she murdered a rat. A cold blooded killer, though you couldn't tell from her picture.


I recently moved to a new apartment. The apartment itself is worth a post of its own. I love the space. I love the light. The landlord also deserves a post of her own but I won't give her the glory. She is       interesting. She is an Eastern European woman with a wonderfully thick accent, and she's the kind of person that needs a lot of pushing to get things done. My brother hasn't had a door on his room since we moved in Aug. 2nd. For instance.


"Don't Vorry Andrea. The door vill definitely be put in on Monday or Tuesday."


Definitely Monday. Or Tuesday. OK. So there's the landlord. Also, today outside the building that's behind mine, sort of across the alley, were actual gang members. While I was dropping Zack off, I saw one lift up his shirt at a passing car to show off the handle of a gun. Cool!


This novel I'm working on is taking excellent shape. My characters are driving to Alaska. They have met an astrologist who they thought was an astronomer. They have murdered. They have known very little about what they are doing. One of them is Jackson Jackson, a hoarder who even seems to hoard his own first name. One of them is a blind woman named Justice. She thinks she can see the future. The third and final is Ben. He is the least hoarderly, least blind of them. He is the driver. He is the catalyst.


The birth of this novel is an interesting one. It is both my first and my second novel idea. I started writing these characters in an Advanced Fiction Writing class at Columbia College. It was my first Advanced class and I was sure that what I was writing was a novel. It wasn't. It was a random string of instances that were mostly sexual and drug induced and mostly ripping off Craig Clevenger's character in Dermaphoria. The main story line was: Jackson Jackson takes a drug and has sex with Justice. Justice chokes Jackson. Jackson feels alive. In this class I met a friend named Ingrid Rojas. One of the first things she said to me outside of class was, "The choking is interesting."


"..."


The next Advanced I had, I threw out that story and those characters. I started working on my "real first novel". It will still get written. I have no doubts about that. But fast forward to 2009. It was October and Jackie Astorga asked if I was going to participate in NaNoWriMo. I said sure. She wanted someone to do it with her. To push her. One of the rules was that it had to be new material. I didn't feel that it was cheating to use old characters so I mined Jackson and Justice and Ben from that old pile of garbage and got them into a car. I wrote 50,000 words and a lot of them were trash, but some of it was very fun and beautiful. I put it all aside for a while after NaNoWriMo was over. I tried writing a story that I could put in my Grad school application. The story sucked. I didn't get accepted. I returned to "Old News" as I was calling it then.


I've now put my "real first novel" on hold and am focusing solely on the story of Jackson, Justice, and Ben. I think I will be finished by October 5th, 2011. I will be 26 years old. I will be a "novelist" and no longer just a "bloggist".


Wish me luck.

Esther Kim is tha Shit, Yo.

Here she is. 

On Tobias Funke

I wonder if part of the reason Arrested Development was cancelled was because of characters like Tobias. He was pretty much asexual. People didn't know how to classify him. Or Buster for that matter. Or George Michael, maybe. Tobias' sexuality and Buster's intelligence were both made fun of but never made clear. Was Tobias gay? He certainly didn't seem sexually interested in his wife (Portia De Rossi for those not in the know). He did have a lot of man crushes. I think he had the possibility of being gay but he was too much like a child to know it yet. He was pre-sexual in a way. I wonder if audiences didn't like that. I wonder if audiences didn't like not knowing whether Buster was retarded or just extremely sheltered. Does the ability to classify a character increase a show's or a book's or a film's chances of success? Most definitely. That means more people can "connect" even if it is a more shallow connection than an extremely complex character that only the author truly understands. Does that necessarily mean that classless character results in an unsuccessful show, book, or film?


I guess I need to quantify "success". Let's say, for the sake of simplicity: 10 seasons for a show. 100,000 copies for a book. $200,000,000 for a movie's theatrical run. 


Thinking about characters that defy categorization: who are some other characters that fit this? Do they fit into the realm of "successful"? In the end, it doesn't really matter but I am interested in the possible conversations that could be had.


Judge Holden from Blood Meridian is pretty much pure violence. At first he is a little harder to put into a category. He is this smart, hairless member of a group of Apache hunters. Still he is intriguing. Though, by the end of the book, he pretty much fits snugly into a classification, so maybe he isn't a good example. I would say the book is successful, but maybe not at first. I read somewhere that it only sold about 2,500 copies in it's original run. This could be falsehood, though because I don't know where I read that. Since then the book has been listed as one of the best books in the American Language. The Judge has also been named the 43rd greatest character in fiction since 1900, so I think it is a success.  


I'm blanking on possible ambiguous characters other than Tobias Funke and Buster Bluth, so I will now pass the topic on to the next person.