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.
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