Friday night our basement flooded. I still can't use my computer because until the dehumidifier quits pulling gallons of air out in the time it takes me to visit my brother in the nursing home. This nursing home, it's closer than my office.
And I'm not as old as that makes me sound, neither is my brother. He rolled a car and broke everything you can break without dying.
Anyway, I've used the library to access the forums I post to, and my blogs. The library has new, cheap computers, and for no good reason, the keys are stiff as hell. They come that way. I don't know why, I can buy a $9 keyboard that types just fine. I can buy a $30 keyboard that types just fine and has more bells and whistles. Maybe at $50 I can get a fully ergonomic keyboard with digital camera dock and a web cam or something. But it will type fine.
The laptop I've hijacked from my wife, the keys on it are easily depressed. Watch this:
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
And this:
asdjfpaweuroqwejf['w4309t-xczvnadfioeoB
Those two lines of nonsense were accomplished quickly, and with NO effort.
I don't know where the assholes at Dell get the keyboards for libraries, but all of them, every damned one, is an athletic event. I know it's not a side effect of patron abuse, because I've been there when the damned things were brand new. Hell, when we moved to Gardner, there was a little brick building that was the library, about the size of my living room and kitchen, with a couple of computers the behind the counter for the employees to use. They still had a paper card catalog as a backup.
Then the taxpayers (meaning me, and other people like me who sell the days of our lives to feed families and get robbed by the state in the process) built a shiny new building that takes half a city block. It's rivaled only by the Taj MaHigh School and the Grand Lodge of City Halls, built apparently by the same team of architects, construction fetishists, and fiscally reckless public servants.
Which is a long way of saying I want my computer back. It's not a grand computer, it's an AMD 3200, 2GB of DDR RAM, a beefy AGP video card, 40 GB hard drive and external 20 GB. It has drives for everyting from burning CDs and DVDs to reading digital camera media. Mainly it has a regular keyboard. And it's in close proximity to my stereo. Behind a door I can lock to avoid things like teenagers who need to include their physical neighbors in their virtual conversations.
My computer also has Adobe CS, which I paid almost as much as the computer costs for. It has EditPlus, the hand-coding software I used for the first version of Lobster Land. It also has a 30 day trial of GoLive CS2, which I was allowed to download on account of being a registered CS Standard user. The days are ticking away, but I don't get to find out if GoLive is a waste of money or not.
And you Dreamweaver folks, I'm sure it's wonderful, but I need Adobe's stuff for my print oriented stuff, so I can't see shelling out big time for Macromedia software to boot.
So far, with Go Live, I end up spending so much time at the 'source' area, it's like hand-coding anyway. I'd really like the full 30 days to figure out if it's a worthy WYSIWYG editor. It writes clean style sheets, but in the process of figuring out how to take advantage of that, I learned enough CSS to do the same thing in EditPlus. And Illustrator, Photoshop/ImageReady and even InDesign have image mapping, SVG interactivity, etc., that exceeds my needs.
Oh, visiting Todd I got a pleasant surprise. A speech therapist came through. He has 'yes' and 'no' signs now, though he so far hasn't been persuaded to use them.
I read the first four segments of 'Wealth Effects' to him, stopping to mark it up where I found obvious clunkers. The fourth segment is the first comic book segement, and it's problematic. Chabon did it with 'Kavalier & Clay,' which I read after I'd written a couple of drafts of 'Wealth Effects.' Ditto, to an extent, for Lethem's 'Fortress of Solitude.' The trick is to translate comic book frames into compelling prose. It's fairly central to being able to do what I want to do with 'Wealth Effects,' so I just have to figure it out.
Maybe once I get MY computer back (and with it certain passwords I didn't seem to save to floppy), I'll workshop the first comic strip chapter at the Cult or in Write Club, get some feedback. Write Club is supposed to be geared towards longer works, but I haven't done enough critiques to post more of my stuff there in good conscience. At the Cult, I've got plenty of review Karma, but a lot of the members shy away from reviewing novel excerpts.
Since I don't have access (locally) to Gordon Lish, Tom Spanbauer, Stephen Graham Jones or any of the other creative writing gurus I'd seek out, the 'net has to suffice. I tend to learn more from giving feedback than getting it. I'll be telling someone 'don't do _____' and realize I do it all the time myself.
Oh, my heading about addiction. I'm not addicted to the internet. I could quit any time I want. It's just that I need some time on my wife's machine. And easier keyboards at the library, and maybe machines without time limits like the library imposes. It's not dependency, I just have to have it, and more of it...
4 comments:
The trick is to translate comic book frames into compelling prose. It's fairly central to >being able to do what I want to do with 'Wealth Effects,' so I just have to figure it out.
Yeah, sounds a bit tricky. Personally I find Chabon and Lethem unreadable, so I’m not sure as to what degree they achieved this desire. Eco’s new novel is doing something with comic form, but he’s showing pictures (I haven’t read it yet).
What may be a half-decent tool is looking at some of these…I think they’re calling them “scripts”. Nowadays many of the big names in comic books aren’t the illustrators but the writers, and a few Best Selling/Award Winning and Hollywood/Television darlings are even getting involved, anyway, some of the big names like Brian Michael Bendis are publishing their plots and notes and whatever it is called that they give to the artist. Bendis is up and down, but maybe a Daredevil script might be interesting, as in that comic he isn’t terribly dialogue heavy, so I guess he is moreso telling the artist what to visually portray. Or not. I’m not sure, but it popped in my head while reading your attempt at text-visuals. Keep us informed how you make out.
j
The comic book thing is tricky on many levels. I personally like Chabon and Lethem, I especially thought Chabon did a great job in 'Kavalier & Clay' with using the comics as both a vehicle for conveying the time/setting and covering the romance between Joe and Rosa.
That said, it's the kind of thing that can drag down the action. I can't draw a convincing stick figure, so I won't be illustrating my book. Also, one of the features of Nelson's comics is both satire and no regard for 'decency.' This is important to the plot actually, because the censorship angle on comic books comes up, though not in the way you might expect.
We'll see if I can pull it off.
I personally like Chabon and Lethem, I especially thought Chabon did a great job in 'Kavalier & Clay'
To be fair to Chabon, my solid dislike of him comes from his previous work, read around the times they came out. Short stories and the dreadful _Mysteries in Pittsburgh_ (maybe that’s an “of”) whose character needed a swift kick in arse as hard as the beloved Holdon C. I haven’t tried K&C and it just gets filed under my pretty extreme rule (with some slight exceptions) of “it doesn’t take 700 pages to tell a bloody story” and I’m hardly impressed with a Pulitzer sticker on the cover.
Lethem: I tired, twice, to get into _Fortress of Solitude_ and was bored blind by 50 pages in. Again, a larger work not working.
But I’m funny like that.
Also, one of the features of Nelson's comics is both satire and no regard for 'decency.' This is important to the plot actually
If you _do_ go for some visual aspect, ‘decency’ shouldn’t be _too_ much of an issue these days (unless you’re after the brain-dead Harry Potter crowd) as, probably thanks to HollyWeird, graphic works by Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar can now easily be found in bookshops in prominent displays.
j
Chabon, I think you either dig him or don't. I do. Consistently, and I think I've read most of his stuff. 'Wonder Boys' was weak, suffering largely from having a novelist as the central character. But I liked 'Mysteries of Pittsburgh,' and I'm not sure why I didn't think of it as a Caufield reprise. Might have to revisit that.
Lethem I fell in love with for 'Motherless Brooklyn.' 'Fortress' was not as strong though the good parts (the childhood in Brooklyn, the tagging, Mingus' Dad) were a ton of fun. The 'album note' section was lacking, and I didn't think he sold the invisibility with the ring for the prison scene, though I decided it was Dylan's fantasy and not something that actually happened.
I keep meaning to read 'Amnesia Moon' the only of his non-famous books that I have. But Lethem's 'album note' section in 'Fortress' really brings up what I'm wrestling with in terms of Nelson's 'Shoplifters of the World' comic book. Trying to convey to the reader that it's a combination of parody and social criticism informed by Nelson's experiences and family, without describing the comic frame by frame.
Spoiler material (I know I said I wouldn't), but in every draft, I have the comic get published, and an Oklahoma (or Kentucky, depending on which draft I'm on), comic book store gets busted for selling it...to an adult. This is something that actually happens, there's even a Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The hard-core censorship geeks like to prosecute comic books as obscenity cases, apparently assuming that they are for kids and therefore shouldn't be, for instance, R. Crumb.
The reason I'm hooked on this plot element is I give each of my three bandits reason, after the fact, to either not need the bank robbery money or not want it. In Nelson's case, the publicity generated by his comic book's obscenity trial leads to the sale of movie rights, etc., and the money he makes off that shames the bank loot.
I guess that's not too much of a spoiler, it's not the ending of the book or anything. But one of the conceits of the book is to look at how these characters react to having money after assuming all their problems coud be solved with a few grand.
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