Procrastination Incorporated

The inlay designs for my brother's guitar, the novel, the short stories, the workshop critiques I'm supposed to be doing, I just haven't been getting traction on this shit.

'Maybe if you didn't spend so much time on your fucking blog,' my inner-Scold says.

Fair enough.

'Maybe if I didn't have a flood or a family medical emergency or whatever come up on a weekly basis,' I say back to my Scold.

For sure, my family is a million times more important than my novel. Even if I could get my novel where it made more sense than a bunch of random paragraphs scribbled on the insides of empty cigarette cartons, scattered throughout a house for the reader to find at random.

I used to write love letters on the insides of empty cigarette cartons. It's a pretty convenient size when you flatten it out, and good heavy stock. Not sure where it stands relative to the old 'foolscap' sizes.

Not smoking or working in a gas station, I tend to favor the more conventional stationary, the copier paper some people have taken to calling foolscap even though it's not even close to the same size. Is it the revulsion of the term 'letter size,' or that writer-types just hate to drop a word as charming as 'foolscap?'

And what size is 'foolscap' proper, anyway? 13 x 16 according to some accounts. This shows how an 'A0' sheet subdivides into those obscure variations that your HP printer seems willing to print on but that you don't really see. Actually the 8-1/2 x 11 U.S. letter size is often referred to as 'A4' but I think where the metric system rules, that A4 is actually something like 8-1/4 x 11. And they have foolscap down as a 17 x 13 with a question mark.

Why do I care? I don't know. I remember a visit to Emporia, to Grandma's, when we went to the drug store that actually had a soda fountain, I'd wander over to the office supply aisle and browse. My kid brother teased me unmerciful for being so fascinated with stationary and writing implements. I'm picky about the pens I use to the point of fetish, and when I find 'reporter's notebooks,' 4 x 8, bound at the top steno-style, the largest notebook that fits in a back pocket easily, I hoard them.

This, even though the only handwriting I can do legibly is with a keyboard.

I'm even picky about keyboards. I'll use a laptop in a pinch, but the feel just isn't right. They scrunched up the keys when miniaturization was the be-all of the industry, and now everyone wants bigger and bigger screens, and no matter how big the notebook pc is on account of it's ever larger screen, they put that same scrunchy keyboard on the damned thing.

And a big part of me is still nostalgic for the IBM Selectric. I took typing in 8th grade, and those were the best damned typewriters. My first 'word processor' was a Brother that had a 3-1/2" floppy drive, wrote a format no other machine could read, and used a conventional typewriter unit to punch out the finished result. You could do really awesome footnoting, fully justify your text if you wanted to, and spell check before you printed, but it was a glorified typewriter.

And spell-check has made me such an invalid when it comes to spelling. Max Barry's latest blog has Max griping about having to make his manuscript look like it was typed on a Selectric. It's a funny read both because of the power of STET and because it highlights the inertia of large companies. Penguin/Putnam is ostensibly a 'for profit' concern, yet they pretend the paper manuscript is the real thing the way it was once. I could see this as an accommodation to the aging Tom Wolfe, but as a requirement on a young lion? Word, PDF, OpenOffice, all these programs offer tools for editing and flagging and so on. A physical manuscript is a total anachronism.

Yet I print out a hard copy of my shit. I have it double spaced, 12 point courier, use underlining for my italics, all that. The header is upper right: 'McBride / Wealth Effects / ##' and so on.

Basically, except for the fact that I'm always scooting stuff around and doing little spot-edits, I do everything I can to pretend it's a physical manuscript.

Right now, I'm kind of trying to decide a course of action. I gained a lot my first year int he Cult workshops, so much so I paid the $60 to stay on when it went pay at the first of the year. I joined Write Club, which started as (I think) ten people with novels in progress, the idea being that we'd be able to focus on the attention longer works need. In a workshop that mainly draws short stories, it's hard to even get a novel excerpt critiqued. Really, a novel is a bunch of smaller stories that add up to a big story. And if you don't have tension in every segment, every paragraph really, why is the reader going to keep going? They aren't.

I was invited into Write Club in part because I wrote around 100 critiques in slightly under a year between the two Cult workshops. Writing those critiques grew me as a writer more than the feedback I got from submitting my work. Which isn't to say the feedback I got wasn't worthwhile, it almost invariably was.

Write Club is down to six writers, and I've done doodly squat in the way of critiques. I've read and critiqued a total of, I think, seven chapters by two authors there. And I've only submitted three chapters of my own book, which are a different three than were the 'beginning' when I started workshopping at the Cult. And probably a different three than I'll end up making the beginning of the next draft.

Jason Heim, author of 'Don't Forget to Blink' and organizer of Write Club has been bugging me for the fourth chapter, but I can't figure out which chapter is the fourth since I'm second guessing which are the first three.

And the comic book spreads that I've been trying to include, I'm starting to think it's better not to even describe them to the reader, just let Nelson's efforts to get it published and the reactions of the people who read it carry the weight. I'm not even a comic book reader for the most part. I buy Josh Kotter's books, and Evan Dorkin rocks (I even have a Milk & Cheese t-shirt), but I visited a comic book store for the first time a couple of years ago, as research for the book. I can enjoy 'Schizo' and 'I Feel Sick' and 'Eightball' but I still don't feel like a comic book fan.

I'll be getting my first taste of live NASCAR this weekend. For volunteering with the United Way to sell raffle tickets, I'll get to see the ARCA race (same cars as NASCAR, different circuit as I understand), the NASCAR pickups (which I wouldn't believe exist except I've seen them on TV), and on Sunday, they're racing Indy cars. This bears on the novel, as another of my protagonists is a big-time NASCAR head. I watched it on TV once, but it was like watching a video game I didn't have a joystick for.

Anyway, these things I do to get insight into my characters, just like the nonfiction research I do trying to figure out what's possible and how someone might go about it, they take up a lot of time and energy. But I tend to come back to my manuscript with new conviction after a binge of research. So hopefully the NASCAR weekend will fuel progress.

Still not sure if I've outgrown the online workshops or not. It's not that I think I'm such a great writer, it's more that I've started to feel like I need to beat up on my manuscript alone for a while. Craig Clevenger (I'm paraphrasing) says that if you're finding more faults in your work than your fellow workshoppers, consider yourself graduated.

He doesn't mean your manuscript is ready, more that you already know how to find its faults and figure out fixes for them. Of course, once you do that, agents and editors will have plenty to say about what still sucks. And eventually, I guess you have to invoke STET.

And then on to the next book. For likely no commercial rewards, why do I continue writing fiction? It's about as answerable as why I'd care what size 'foolscap' should be. Or why I think it's awesome that I now live in a town that has a pharmacy with a real soda fountain. Or why I still love the office supply section. And the office supply store.

Same reason I don't consider myself a comic book reader, even though I am in some ways. I relate to comic book readers, Batman, Superman, Spawn, these are the modern American versions of Greek gods and goddesses. Human ideals, weaknesses, etc., personified or deified.

And if I don't update this for a while, blame my inner-Scold. That is, if you feel the need for blame...