Getting Serious

Tonight: I have turned down fun with Shelley, M-C and Mel; also turned down a very different kind of fun with Smokin' Hot Mae.

Tomorrow: I am going to do something I have never, ever, done before. Read the first draft of something that I have probably just finished that day. If you've ever seen me cringe when someone's said "I just finished this next piece a couple hours ago, it's maybe kind of bad, but I hope you like it" you'll know that it is out of character and not a little hypocritical to do what I'm about to do.

You might think tonight and tomorrow are unrelated.

I'm taking some work time to blog, which I rarely do, because as soon as I go home, it's business time. I'm sick of reading all the stuff I have to read. I'm at the point where I would rather read potential shite than the decent stuff on tap. Most people who will be there have probably seen me read a bunch and they're probably also sick of what's on tap.

Alors.

There's a tofu burger in the fridge and leftover bibimbap waiting to be hotted up. I'm going home, turning on the computer, and writing, whatever the fuck comes out, until I can't keep my eyes open. And then I'm going to get up early and start again, and I am going to read something new, and I hope it won't be kind of bad.

I Hate Year End

I don't love this time of year. It's about two weeks after the time of year where I'm at work and I pick up the contract with our funder and I say "Oh shit. Oh *shit*. Fuck. Me." And zing off a bazillion emails to my coworkers saying "OH SHIT." Though I don't exhort them to fuck me.

What is two weeks after that time, you ask? What is today? Today is when we're knee deep in the boring work of making the interesting ideas happen.

Which is why, yesterday, all day yesterday, for 11 hours yesterday, starting as soon as I got back from a tasty brunch at Milan's house, I had my laptop and my typewriter out, so I could clickety click away on the computer, moving giant chunks of data around on our painfully slow content management system, and start working on a story in the spurts of time between clicks.

Perhaps not the best way to write, but fuck, using the computer and having scads of continuous time wasn't doing me any good. Switching to the typewriter seems to have broken whatever block I'd put up. I only got about 500 words down, but that's 500 more than I'd had, and more importantly, I could feel those muscles loosening up.

From now until the end of March, the rest of my time is pretty much working and then working, interspersed with episodes of yoga and hanging out with cute girls. One of those episodes, you might be interested to know, is a date. A date date, on a weekend night, with booze, dim lighting, and perhaps a little cleavage.

Having just re-read the last half of the last paragraph, I might have to say that maybe this time of year isn't so bad after all.

Giving Up, Crawling In

Today was a day I meant to get a lot of shit done. Some shit did get crossed off the list, but not the main shit, which was to get a good start on redoing an older piece of writing.

My aim is to put out another chapbook this year, and I know what pieces I want it to contain. Both of them are written, but the second one I don't like so much any more. It started off as She's So Heavy, right here on this here blog. But I'm not happy with it any more. The tone is off for a chapbook, it doesn't say exactly what I want it to say.

Not that it ever did.

It has been a long time since I've written anything that wasn't for this blog. An embarrassingly long time. And although what I was supposed to be working on today is memoir, containing memory in narrative is a fictionalizing process. The shift from long blog to short story is one I am not comfortable making.

I don't know how to do it and I find that frustrating. I feel like I should be good at this. It's words. Me and words, we're friends, I like to think. So I find myself quibbling over this semi-colon and the order of those two words. Because I know when I stop doing that, there's nothing.

First attack was to just edit the old piece. But it's too close to what I want. Starting over seemed a better idea. I wrote four paragraphs at Bridgehead, a good start and a strong finish and some garbage in the middle.

I know this is how it goes. When you've taken a break from something for this long, what comes out first is mostly garbage. And you have to let yourself do it. I've just never been very good at letting myself be bad at things.

Well, not things involving words. Sports, yes. Took boxing lessons for nearly a year, until my shins protested too strongly. I was terrible. I knew I was terrible. The coach knew I was terrible, but could see my stalwart effort, and so was kind and gentle with my spirit, though he didn't spare my arms.

Six months in, at the end of a series in the ring with him - one! two! duckduck! oneonetwo! duck! one! uppercut! uppercut! - catching my breath, he said "You know, when you started here, I never thought you'd manage a real punch. But look at you now, eh? Your feet and hands all together." His tone was admiring. Any time I showed up, I was probably the worst boxer there. I was proud.

In a different way from usual. This was hard won. Those punches, weak though they were, weren't the ones I was born with. They came from months of training twice a week, of concentrating really hard, of spending hours doing something I was terrible at, in the hopes of getting just a little less terrible. In the hopes of landing a good punch on the coach's pad, the solid thud of it telling me I'd succeeded at not giving up.

Today though, I give up on being terrible for today. I crawled into bed an hour ago. I'm going to read some Mavis Gallant, try to get inspired. I'm going to try to remember the feeling of winning something hard, the kind of pride you earn.

My Smut

Every once in a while, I take on a new project with vim and vigour. Sometimes I have the drive and discipline and time to follow through, sometimes I don't.

That occasional lack of follow through is why I haven't told you about my new smut site yet. I mean, not like I've been hiding it - it's right over there, and I mean right, in the right hand column there, with a link called "Start Your Week With Smut."

Every Sunday, usually last thing at night, I write something dirty so you can turn on your computers Monday morning and get a little thrill that Monday mornings usually don't hold.

So far, a few intrepid readers have found it on their own. And my stats tell me that someone from Maryland loves it, which makes me happy.

I've managed to keep it up (har har) for five or six weeks now. I'm trying to write new stuff, but I have about 65 of these blurbs already written, so it's likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Enjoy, my dears!

Five Minute Experiment, Evaluation

Well, that was a fun little thing to do. I must say, I kind of missed not doing it this morning. But then again, I am a creature of habit, so it may just have been the habit talking, since I found the results interesting, but not in a writerly way. More in a where-did-that-come-from way. All of them felt sad and either slightly or very ominous.

No fucking wonder I don't wake up rested.

Also, I must admit that the first thing I wrote on the first day was not what I posted, but about 5 sentences about how much I hated getting up, how much I hated dark mornings, how much I hated blah blah blah. It had been a night of very restless sleep, waiting for the morning and worrying about what I was going to write.

While the blurbs capture the bones of what I saw in my dream-addled state, when I go back and read them they sometimes say something other than what I meant.

I think what I'll do from here is try to turn each one into something longer. And then, if it suits, to join them together somehow.

Five Minute Experiment, Day 3

Five Minute Experiment, Day 2

Five Minute Experiment, Day One

Sea Floor

I thought you all might be interested in a little bit of the creative process. For my last reading, I took a few poems that had been sitting around and reworked them.

Sea Floor is one of them.

Here's the first draft. Sorry it's so small. It's bigger if you click on it.



And here is the reworked version, which I think is much more poetical-like.

Sea Floor
- you look good on my back like a shark fin (kat bjelland)

Daybreak: you sidle
up to me, red claws clacking
mysterious code. I slough
my shell, you leave me
beached.

Sunset: my breasts pressed flat
against the wall, your weight
my decoration. My warning.

Moonrise: the weak light won’t filter down
to our blue twilight, here where we perch
at the edge
of a deep-sea canyon, scary
monsters waiting to bite.

Flurry

Yesterday was what I envisioned when I decided to take Mondays off. I'm not entirely sure what was different - impending reading? tired of the stuff i have read one hundred times before? impending friend visit?

I do not know, but I kicked it into high gear and wrote a new poem, rewrote drafts of a couple others, got a bunch of new dirty blurbs done and a wee start on the story.

At first, I was kind of meh because I was really hoping to get a story done. But if I procrastinate on the story by writing poems and blurbs, then I am probably in pretty good shape.

Tonight has been a pretty good roll too, redoing a couple of older poems enough so that they're nearly new.

I haven't been this productive in a long fucking time, and it feels glorious. Days like the past couple are what keep me going back to words.

So if you want to hear the fruits of my labour, and pardon the mixed metaphor, you should really definitely come to the reading tomorrow night at Venus Envy. Even if I spelled launches wrong in the sidebar and have been too damn lazy to correct it.

Scattershot

1. Passport!

If you have left getting your passport until pretty close to the last minute, I would highly suggest going to the office around 3 pm on a freezing cold day. Because if you have the right-sized head, you will be in and out of there, receipt in hand, in 20 mintues.

There was only one person ahead of me in the screening line. When I got to the front, the woman behind the counter recognized me. "Back again, eh?" She raised her eyebrows at me.

I do believe I made an impression.


2. The Cottage

Prince Edward County is a beautiful part of the province. The cottage was sweet and cozy, though it did have a lot of mouse poop in it. All the people there, with one exception, were charming and sweet and funny. Sadly, I was the one exception. I was completely stuffed up and miserable. Saturday night, everyone else had a fun game of cards while I sat in the corner with my nose either in a book or a tissue.

But I took a pill before I went to bed and got a gloriously bat-free sleep.

3. Boy Toys

I'm pretty happy with the latest article I wrote for the Xpress. But with only 500 words, there was so much about the skeezy marketing of sex toys for men that I couldn't get into. And I'm pretty fascinated by the sexual relationship that straight men have with their bodies. In general, it seems so different than what I take for granted. Maybe some day I'll expand this article.

That idea has now been added to the list of Very Good Ideas I Will Never Get Around To Finishing.

Don't forget to read the comment, wherein I am accused of missing my deadline and being filler. I have been quite tempted to comment back, since I most certainly did not miss my deadline. Communications Voir did not check to see whether I thought the beginning of March was a good time for a Tease and Please Special.

And what information would Dan Savage rip apart? The loose definition of sex toy? The description of cockrings? The fact that pumps are limited in use? That men like the fleshlight and the aneros? That maybe, just maybe, men should experiment with their bodies? Shocking, all of it.

Suck my cock, Ronny Pangia.

Oh wait, you probably wouldn't do that, would you. Toys being filler and all.

4. Crusader

In 1963, The Canadian Medical Association urged doctors "to stop smoking, at least during professional duties."

This came up in a Backgrounder I was editing at work.

"At least during professional duties"?

Good christ. I am glad that I was not going to the doctor in 1963.

5. Tattoos

Eric came over on Sunday night and took some photos. We weren't sure if they turned out or not, because my apartment isn't great for lighting. We took some in the kitchen, which is the brightest room, but also has the harshest lighting. We were going to take some in another room, when I allowed as how I would really rather make out with him than have photos taken.

Turns out the lighting wasn't great in most of the kitchen shots, so we'll try again soon, and then I will post them and you can see my beautiful painful sea creatures.

Coming Up

I've been a bit down this weekend. Haven't felt much like blogging.

However, I am having the back-skull tingle of a new story. It's a bit of a problem because I don't really know how to go about writing stories any more. It's been over a decade since the last time I wrote fiction. And I was bad at it. My stories made no sense. So I stopped.

Anyway, this latest thing started with a guy who teaches at a school near here, got rolling with an email that one of my mom's friends sent her, and every once in a while, someone will say something that sets that tingle a-tingling. It's weird, a very physical sensation. As soon as I can, I pull out my little moleskin notebook (one of the three notebooks I have on me at nearly all times) and jot it down. We'll see if the jots ever turn into anything.

Went for dinner with Adam and Jennifer on Saturday night and had a great time. Then met up with Liz and Matt for drinks at the Aloha. Liz is working at a museum in Kingston, and just finished cataloguing this crazy cabinet full of glass disks used to generate, well, I forget. It has to do with x-rays, I think. But it's not actually x-rays. You'll have to forgive me: the first time she told me about it, I was drunk so I forget the details; the second time, it was loud so I didn't hear all the details. I must pin her down in a quiet place with no alcohol and get the details again.

Also coming up: haircut! birthday dinner for steve! yoga! bellabombs fuckingmachines mufflercrunch! yeah!

And on the 25th, I start my bass lessons. Very exciting. Speaking of which, one of the things I did this weekend, after I discovered that January is a Blessed Three-Pay Month, was go buy a very tiny and pretty cheap practice amp, so I only have to lug the behemoth down Misse's steep and slippery stairs one more time.

I have a propensity for falling down stairs. So much so that my parents actually put grippy tape on the stairs to their basement in their Stouffville house. I kept ending up in a heap at the bottom. It happened all the time in the Ballantrae house, too, but the stairs were already carpeted. With white carpet, which my dad had a bug up his arse about. There's no way he would have put grippy tape on that carpet for anything. We did have plastic runners on the carpet for a while, but they got all yellowed and gross. I kind of missed the plastic runners when they were gone; I always did like to lift them up and press my fingers into the little spikes.

Anyway.

The last spectacular fall was here in Ottawa, on the stairs of the Big House on Preston St. I had nothing in my hands, there was nothing on the stairs but carpet. And out went my feet from under me. No good reason.

Falling down the stairs fucking hurts. And it's not even the falling. If I didn't instinctually grab for the wall and railing, I'd probably just end up in a slightly bruised heap six or seven stairs down from where I started. But instincts are hard to beat, and so I grab for the wall, grab for the railing, and the inertia of my body pulls against the muscle and tendon holding on, and two days later it feels like someone laid me out flat and tried to tenderize me. I always end up walking around for a week like a wizened old man, wincing when anyone touches me anywhere.

The last time I fell down the stairs even a little was when I was living with my ex in the Small House on Preston St.

There may be bats here, but no more falling.