Christening.

Now, gentle readers, starts my nervous hand-wringings and contemptable snappishness.... if that is a word.  I have one short story that was mailed this morning, and another waiting breathlessly to be sent out, both harboring that inextinguishable desire of wanting to show a glow so formidable that when the readers at the respective lit mags lay their furtive glance upon its pages that they cannot help but run to the nearest blackboard and write, in large, swooping hand, "A+++++++++". 

I think that they are good stories.  Probably two of my favorites.  For that reason, I am setting unrealistically high goals for them, namely, getting published.  The chances are slim (I have sent them to highly selective publications) but my hopes for them are anything but.  I should hear back from the one I sent out last month within a month... and the other one about the same time.  Stay tuned for more fumings, rants, ravings, and maybe a particular shade of joy should the story get published.  It will more than likely contain size 72 helvitica at some point during that blog post, should it weasel its way past the editors and into a magazine.

I imagine this post as the glass bottle of milk or champaigne being cracked against the hull of a ship that is departing the harbor for the first time.  So come with me as I begin the slightly painful journey that is "doing this for a living."  The water is treacherous and deep, and the bottom is lined with ships that didn't make it.

-Ken

This may come as a shock to you...

I'm writing some fun stuff right now, and I think I have stumbled across what may be the most providential moment in my writing history.  It is like a precipice that propels friendship down down down and dashes it against rocks.  I think it is so perfect, it may almost be in the realm of cliche.  It's just a simple sentence, but it does several things that I think make it so great, and I wrote it yesterday, so pardon the idiosyncratic nature of this post...

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking _______.

See?  How fucking wonderful that sentence is?  It's like a writer's madlib.  Just put in whatever, wherever when you need a big punch, and it works out great... here's some examples that I just came up with:

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking rubber ducky. (Bert finally letting Ernie have it in their three-room flat on the lower west-side.)

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking revolution. (What Benedict Arnold should have said to George Washington.)

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about your motherfucking last name.  (Admittedly not as poetic, but equally as effective utturance delivered by Romeo Montague to Juliet Capulet outside her bedroom window. The phrase is changed slightly.)

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking e-book pricing structure. (Macmillan to Amazon)

Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking rules on what constitutes "decent fiction". (Micheal Chabon against the literary fiction monsters that love to hate.)

 Maybe it comes as a shock to you, but I don't give two flying fucks about you or your motherfucking fear of what others think about you. (Roarke to Keating in The Fountainhead.  That is essentially the Ken's Notes to the entire friggin' book, in case you were wondering.)

... and really, it all goes on from there.  Pretty heavy stuff, right?  Anyway, this wasn't too serious of an entry... but you know... you get what you get.

I have 3 followers now!  I feel like I'm heading places, Jerry!  I'm headin' all the way to the top!

That is all. 

-Ken

P.S. -- The thoughts and views shown in this blog do NOT portray the views of any other person other than the author of this blog.  Anything said here was a fictional representation and meant only to be funny.  

New Year's Resolutions and the Whats-Its That Coincide Therein

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.  - Heather Armstrong

It is undoubtedly too late to wish everyone a happy New Year.  It is, in fact, about nineteen days too late -- give or take a few hours.  So I won't do that.  You've already doffed the celebratory paper cone from your head, so saying "HAPPY NEW YEAR!" will only make people wonder if I had lost my mind.  I haven't.  In case you were wondering.

Much has happened since I last wrote here.  Almost an entire month has passed, and so far my inability to keep a blog has been a frustrating spur in my side.  It's not as if I don't think about the blog, because I do.  It's just that I am always so busy.  I am writing more.  More than I had last year, thanks to the Inkygirl's 1000 Words A Day Challenge.  Many people don't like the idea of chaining oneself to a chair and forcing a thousand words out where nothing is to be found, but I've found the excersize to yield considerable results thus far.  Let me tell you a little about my experience twenty days in...

Self-Congratulatorialism

My reading has been thwwwwppppting out recently.  It's like all the air is releasing itself from my writerly sails and im just coasting through life.  I sit down to write and BAM! nothing -- whereas before, I'd sit down and it would feel like I couldn't write fast enough.  Damn this mid-story lag!  I know this is something that will haunt me throughout my career -- making people do things for logical reasons.  I want them to run around, explore, go through trials and tribulations that build to this exciting climax... but it has to make logical sense, and these equations are what is killing me at the moment. 

I wrote a page yesterday.  After I wrote it, I looked back at what I wrote and realized I sounded angry at the reader.  It sounded liek "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, OKAY?  GET OVER IT BECAUSE IM NOT CHANGING IT."  Today I'm going to go back and change it.  I can be such a bitch.

What's with the title, you ask?  I don't know.  I guess I want to be able to pat myself on the back and say "Great job Ken, you really perserveired and wrote something worth while today..." but I can't.  Nothing is working right now, the train is off the tracks and I am getting nowhere.  It'll be okay though.  I'm still not bereft of optimism.

The Very Short Prologue.

I have a theory on prologues: they shouldn't be too long.  They should, in fact, be short.  A prologue should be succinct and to the point.  In this vein, I have constructed one for my novel -- Southern Hospitality. So what we have here is the prologue to my WIP (Work In Progress).  I believe it accomplishes what any good prolouge is supposed to, which is to entice without giving much away.  It is a taste and a nice little bite-sized chunk of my novel.

Without further adeu, Southern Hospitality:

Old Tawnee Road was never very well known. It seemed like from the moment that it was laid (from anyone’s best guess it was around the time of the Van Buren administration) it was forgotten. The old road linked two major highways and could save travelers upwards of thirty minutes if they had spotted the street sign that hung slightly askew on a metal pole when it bisected with their path. It was unfortunate then, that the entrance to either side came at a particularly difficult intersection to navigate and so, for the most part, the road remained unchecked for the better part of a century. Traveling southeast along the byway, a traveler would have seen a distinct dichotomy between the two sides: on the driver’s side was untamed and unbridled forest – Georgia Pines, smothered with kudzu and a few bushes skirted along the underbrush; to the right, there were the scant signs that civilization had once prospered in the area – old and rotted clapboard plantations, white and periwinkle paint peeling from the shudders and tiles missing from the roofs. Old Tawnee Road stood as a barrier between the virulent wilderness and the long-forgotten memories of what was.


These skeletons of the past harkened back to a time when slavery was the norm and a house without a bustling team of Negros would be deemed inefficient and quaint. But with the Emancipation Proclamation came an unsustainable business model. The southern rural aristocratic society was born, raised, and died among the shackles of the slave ships that hailed from the shores of East Africa. The great families had long disappeared from the plantations and taken the crops with them. The fields that once bore black-eyed peas, corn, wheat, peaches, and cotton were now fallow, and surrounded the houses that were now mere husks of their former selves – the corpses of the extinct southern gentry

Despite the gentle beauty and glimpses into the past that one could have found on Old Tawnee Road, its ability to keep the forest from encroaching upon the plantation side of the road and the small amount of decay that had come to the structures lining it had created stories about that twenty-five mile stretch of largely uninhabited roadway. The locals spoke of ancient evils that lurked beneath the ground, and ghosts of slaves that lingered in the fields, waiting with scythe in-hand to lop off the heads of any white person dumb enough to walk into their domain. Other stories spoke of specific houses and the histories of their residents, and of murders and infidelities of those residents that branched out to other families and created a web of intrigue and malice that terrified its listeners to the point of taboo.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of those stories wasn’t the variation, but rather the constant. Despite the innumerable ghost sightings and ethereal experiences, there existed one unimpeachable and absolute fact that pervaded every story told: On some nights, at two o’clock in the morning, at 455 Old Tawnee Road in the upper left-hand window, there is a flicker of light where the silhouette of an old woman is seen in a rocking chair – slowly going back and forth, to and fro. After exactly four minutes the wavering, dancing light would extinguish with unnatural abruptness. If one had been unfortunate enough to see that rippling, fiery light through the window, they would not hear, but feel the grating sepulchral lament of that woman as she screamed and moaned in great convulsions of pain that mutilated their senses and coursed through their very being. It would be followed by a feeling that was so brief yet so intense one wondered if they had actually felt it: the cold edge of a steel knife piercing their breast and rending their still-beating heart.

This was the only fact in the lore of Old Tawnee Road. It was never questioned by any of the locals because, at one point or another, they had all had their very essence shaken by that old woman’s death rattle.

Probably still not in its final form, but I like what I have so far.  Thanks for reading!

-Ken

Why I Will Never Be 'Artsy'

If there's one thing I have learned from my explorations of the "indie"/"artsy" literary world, it is that the scene is predominantly an intransigent party that exists for the single purpose of inserting one's genitalia into another's mouth. That, and party has also reached capacity.  The sentences I have written thus far are not "edgy" enough, they're not incredibly short or incredibly long, and not every word has some obscure rule of Capitalizing Every Word.  My writing is to tell stories and to show a scene and to show dialogue and allow the reader to be transported to the world of my characters.  It is, first and foremost, to entertain.  When people will read my book, it won't change their perception of the world or themselves.  There may be an epiphany, but I hope it doesn't change who they are.  I'm not nearly conceited enough to think that my writing, nor my worldview, is the correct or most morally valid one.  I'm not writing out of some need to project myself onto others' consciousness.  People who do that are known as evangelicals here in the South, and it isn't something I strive for.  I love all sorts of people in their mannerisms and quirks; in their loves and their hates; in their passions and their lethargies.  The purpose that the majority of the world will pick up a book isn't to be told that they are right or wrong -- it is to be entertained.  I don't want to lose sight of that.

I am constantly told through the enternits that I am not good enough, smart enough, deep enough to be a writer.  Readers are, as the enternits inform me, much like Remora, preoccupied with latching onto the nipple or taint of any "indie" reader who is not white and/or has hellacious sideburns (man or woman) and that it would be much better for the Starbucks latte sippers and beanie-wearing hipsters if I just give up my attempt at "art."  It would in the end provide much less angst for everyone involved -- from myself, to the four or five lamentable sets of eyes that had to flit across my pages.*

To me, there is nothing worse in this world than being part of that "misunderstood" orgy of "indie" writers.  Do I say this because, secretly, I want in?  I don't think so.  I think I have a natural inclination towards fineries such as nice watches, polo shirts, and pressed pairs of khakis.  I like my hair short and clean, and only a sprinkle of facial hair every once and a while.  My room is clean (mostly) and I speak clearly and don't do drugs.  I'm not a practicing Christian, but I'm not an Atheist either.  My ideal situation is in a monogamous relationship with a woman and a dog and two kids and a white picket fence where I would write in the front bay window and leave only to go get food, pick my children up from sports, or to the nearest polling place to vote for my favorite Republican candidate.  I will never be a part of their world because I choose to be different from them.  I choose to live a life of sanitation and of sunlight, and not of dingy holes-in-the-wall, greasy fedoras, and bong resin. 

With that being said, there is something I do appreciate about indie meanderings masquerading as contemplative thought: their writings will, every once and a while produce a diamond.  "The Human Condition" is a favorite topic of theirs, for which a wide variety of definitions has been slapped onto it.  The Human Condition is about as nebulous a term as you can have, but intrinsically it has something to do with our innate need to destroy.  I don't think that we would have this endless well of psuedo-prophetic rambling without the original inquiry of what is human?  The question is immediately vague and worthless, but I love it so much because it helped me get through college.  There, see?  It's not all bad.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some selling out to do.

-Ken

*Maybe a truly unfortunate soul had already lost an eye in a barroom brawl, pepper shaker incident, or warring with pirates.  This would, of course, put the "eye-count" down to a mere 3 1/2 - 4 1/2 sets.  However, there is something inherently "indie" about an eye patch, so it would perhaps raise my overall viewership closer to six -- two of which may even be terry-cloth headbanded teenagers who write angsty poems in their Moleskines while smoking marijuana.

Today is a Good Day.

It is a good day today. Writers are publishing, striving, and thriving. I am reading and writing at a break-neck clip (more on the Novel Blog to come shortly) and I had an entire weekend of a contemplative respite from the busy city and feel refreshed and focused on my craft... even when I'm at my soul-sucking day job. Today, three names are circling my brain: Therese Walsh, Stuart Neville, and Michael Chabon.

One of the first writing blogs I read was Writer Unboxed that is run by a gamut of people, but one of the founders of the site is Therese Walsh who's debut novel is out today. The Last Will of Moira Leahy is primarily for women and has been getting awesome reviews. I'm very happy for this new author and everything that she has gone through to get to where she is now. It's a big moment for any author, and one that is getting these kinds of reviews, well, good things are in store for sure! I think why so many people are actively rooting for Ms. Walsh is because yes, she is an author, but she is more than that. Through her site, she has become a friend to so many authors and readers alike. People will go to the book store today to pick up The Last Will because they like her. I don't know too much about the book (and what little I do know, I won't try to explain here) but I have this inkling that after work (around 4:30) I'm going to head to the Barnes and Noble across one of the busiest intersections in Atlanta, march my butt up to the counter and ask for a book who's genre is "Women's Fiction." I don't think that I would have ever picked this book up, no matter HOW much someone tried to goad me into it, because of that outlier of being "Women's Fiction," but for Ms. Walsh, (I'm going to call you Therese) I'll make an exception.

Stuart Neville's breakout novel - The Ghosts of Belfast - landed on U.S. soil a few weeks ago. I'm always interested in books with the connotation of being in the genre of 'horror'. It always seemed to me that I couldn't become scared by a book, but then I started reading some Stephen King and all of a sudden... I understood. I always thought terror to be something more visceral (if not low-brow) with slasher flicks like Saw and The Exorcist, I thought that to be scared by something, you had to see it, but these authors have taught me otherwise. James Ellroy, another very prominent (and very scary) author has already swathed Neville's first foray to the point of hyperbole, saying that it is the best first novel by an author he has ever read. (not verbatim) Really, really excited about this book, and I don't think it could get here fast enough.

Finally, I'm going through a really fun romp through the ever-growing life work of Michael Chabon. I picked up Gentlemen of the Road on my Kindle a few weeks back, and read through it rather quickly. Then I picked up his semi-auto-biography Manhood For Amatuers and I absolutely loved the glimpses into the mind of one of the best writers of prose alive today. Now I'm working my way through The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Note: the link isn't to a current edition... I bought this one, it's the limited edition. I think I was lucky to find it.) which is another delightful display of prose from anything else I have read by him. I'm only about halfway through the relatively short book, but it is definitely dense enough to warrant a second reading. I found it interesting that he wrote this book so young, and it puts me in one of those "why-not-me?" mentalities. I enjoy these fires clear and unextinguishable passion for the craft that I practice that have been burning for a while now and don't seem to be going away. Michael Chabon has, better than any other author I have read, made me feel like I can do this too. I think it's his utter brilliance that he can make his writing come off with such ease (or, at least, it seems that way on the page) and can make the whole idea of writing so attainable because it almost seems like he is goading the reader, saying "See? Look how easy this is." I know that it's not easy. Even for him, but damn, those long, prophetic, sexy sentences and metaphores seem to flow almost too easily.

So what is it that these three have to do with eachother? They are all inspirations to me in their own ways. Therese makes me want to write blogs and get my name out there, Stuart makes me want to fight hard and expand my writing horizons and gives me hope, and Chabon is the master of letters that is capable of transporting me to the Pittsburgh of Art Bechenstein. These three have given me joy and prodded at the fires (however futile) of my own writing aspirations. Everyday I write harder and better because of people like this who have, at least to a certain extent "made it." I hope one day someone will mention me in their blog in this same way.