The Wrath of Kon

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, and my medium-term memory is completely gone, but I’ve taken on a second tech writing client. It’s a sort of whirlwind project, writing a manual in the next two weeks. I’m still getting started with the software and everything, but the framework of the thing is zipping along. The reason I mention this is that with two clients, I have virtually no time to think about other stuff. It’s good that Summer Rain is currently resting, as I will be very busy for the next few weeks.

I’m at a state where everything I touch breaks. This happens here and there, but it has been fairly constant since I arrived here. I’m still waiting for this to go away so I can… so I can something. so I can complete my sentences. This journal project is useless at this point. I can’t compose my thoughts when I have to pre-guess what I’m typing over a delay that ranges from five seconds to five minutes per character. I can’t compose my thoughts, period. My paper journal has gone completely south – I’m lucky to update it weekly, and then it is a maze of confusion, wondering if I’ve added some certain daily activities event in the story. And my writing on the trip piece of shit has been mostly “I was x” “I did y” “I drove more” kind of shit.

I honestly need to stop writing, period, until the desire to write comes back. I need to do nothing but sleep and play nintendo for weeks, months, years, until my journals and my other work become creative again. But I can’t do that. I have work that needs to be completed, and I know that if I stop writing, I will just beat myself up for not writing until I return. And if I stop, I will feel that I have absolutely no purpose in life, and I will spend the remainder of my savings on some idiotic hobby to give myself purpose. And I can’t do that.

So maybe I need to do some exercises. Write something different. Read some books about writing. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out eventually.

I have completed a draft of the last third of Summer Rain. It took a lot of stalling for me to type that sentence, at least wouthout qualifying it somehow (“mostly completed”,”shitty draft”,etc.) I’m not happy with the writing in the third part of the book – it’s very repetitive, simple, and I don’t think it has as much significance. But the third part of the book has never been written entirely. While the first chapters have been written and rewritten a million times, there were holes in the ending that were left in a skeletal state ever since I started this disaster back in 1995. Maybe with time and further refinements, I will be more comfortable with book 3 and its problems. Maybe I will have to completely rewrite it, or at least add some new plot elements and scale back the stuff that seems to drag on forever.

I should mention that Summer Rain in its entirety is available for review and comment to discriminating readers. I say that because the whole thing is 237,000 words long and I can’t throw it on a public web site and let the world read it if I ever try to publish the thing. But if you want to read it and let me know what you think, drop me a line and I can give you a password to download everything.

Work is beginning to pile up. I have two freelance tech writing clients, and a couple of other leads. Summer Rain can sit and ferment for a bit, but I’ve still got this damned trip travelogue thing. I think it’s 4 or 5 days into the 14 total, but it’s still going slow. At least I got the pictures scanned, thanks to Marie, so I can plug those in once I get the thing on the web. Soon, soon.

I just read an excellent bio on Bukowski – I would tell you the author and title, but I already put it away and I don’t want to get up. It’s the new one that just came out in hardcover – I found it at Tower, so it shouldn’t be that obscure. It’s the best bio of him I’ve seen, considering all of the half-ass attempts made. It’s the first third-party Bukowski book I’ve seen that was longer than a pamphlet, and it’s very well written. The problem with Buk is that his stories and poems were about 90% accurate, and the other 10% has been very elusive. Everyone has speculated on details of his life like finances, and it’s good to see a realistic account of this stuff.

I just started a 12M download and typing is not an option anymore. I guess it’s time to go do some other work.

I still can’t believe the weather here. My new ‘office’ is a folding table set up by one of the windows in our living room. So immediately to the right of my monitor is a western view of Washington Heights. With a good set of binocs or a climb up the fire escape to the roof, you can see over to Jersey. But the sunny sky and the stretch of buildings below my 6th story window beats the gloom of Seattle. And with all of my books in my new bookshelves, all of the CDs in alphabetical order, and my stereo right behind me, I’ve got everything I need to write (except a Coke machine with an infinite supply.)

I’ve been blowing through the travel story lately. It’s up to about 12,000 words, and on the fourth of 14 days. I hope to HTMLize it and add some links to pictures. I’ve also been slaving on Summer Rain. Still stuck on the annoying romance scenes, but I got one of the three worst ones passably finished.

I finished rereading On the Road, by the way. I started it before the trip, to get chaged up and ready. I only got 100 pages into it before I left, and I only had a couple of chances to stop and read during hte trip. But I finished the other day, and it’s as good as ever. I manage to reread it every year or so, usually when I’m on the road myself. It’s always cool to visit some place like LA or New York for the first time, and then turn past the pages you’ve read ten times and realize you’ve been in the same places as Kerouac. While his prose wasn’t what I’m aiming for, that book is a real inspiration for Summer Rain in many ways. Maybe someday I’ll sit down and write a paper about it.

Speaking of writing, I’ve got work to do…

I’ve been working on Summer Rain. I hesitate to say that I’m working on it full time, but I have no other productive items going (except for a pay gig, which is part-time.) I am making progress towards wrapping up the final third, but it’s going slow on a couple of chapters. I try to keep a regular schedule, wordcount-wise, but this one chapter is just killing me. I worked all day on it, and I must’ve written like 1500 words. Sometimes I would write less than 100 words an hour, and I wasn’t off playing Pac-man or whatever – I was seriously sitting at the computer for 60 full minutes, struggling with how to develop this motherfucking chapter. It’s because this deals with sex, and the character doesn’t get any for most of the book, and I am not a romance author or whatever, so it’s all uphill. I’ll get through it, hopefully. But the book is getting better, and I’m excited about it, and I hope I can show it to a few people sometime soon.

I’m also still working on the travel thing about the WA->NY trip. It’s getting done, but it’s also going slow. There are only so many ways you can describe driving through the desert. But I got the pictures back – 5 rolls – and they look great. Maybe I will scan a few and post them also.

Today’s weather was beautiful – 70’s, sunny. I went for a walk for about an hour, which got me in the mood for Summer Rain. I’m hoping for many more days like this.

I am going to get back to writing this travel stuff, before I need to crash. Feel free to email me and bug me about it – maybe it will help me finish faster.

Isn’t it weird when the song in your walkman and the stuff around you coincidentally match for a moment? I was listening to Dream Theater’s latest while walking to the drug store in the rain, and on the last song there is this repeated line: “It’s raining, raining, on the streers of New York City.” I guess you’d need to know the song, but the soaked cityscape of 181st and Broadway could’ve made a perfect video for the song.

Today I’ve found my new hobby: recording music. Marie has a Tascam 4-track and a Yamaha keyboard that were gathering dust. So I got out my bass and my cable collection and set up a little studio on the living room floor. I have almost no musical ability, and just spent the afternoon playing bass lines on top of the built-in drum rhythms. It’s a lot of fun, and a decent way to practice. Plus I’m now remembering a tiny bit of my ten year old piano lessons, so maybe I’ll learn more.

Still no writing, aside from some work on the travel thing. Maybe tomorrow. For now, the Daily Show…

It looks like if I type late at night, I can almost see what I type. I don’t know what’s going on with this, and I don’t know if it’s really a fiber cut or very shitty service. But things work fine in getting back to my speakeasy account, so I many need to come up with some new scheme for writing these entries.

I’ve found from updating my paper journal that I’m sick of updating things with entries like “I went to the K-Mart. I went to the grocery” etc. Things are going good here, and I’ve had a ton of errands to do, but it’s too tedious to present a laundry list of these idiotic events. I’m doing okay in setting up shop though, and I’m sort of writing now – trying to write a huge account of everything that happened on the trip. It’s going very slow, and the story hasn’t even finished up the first of 14 days. But I’m waiting for the day when this will all pick up and I’ll blow through 4, 5, or 6 days at a clip.

I’m about underway on a freelance writing gig for an old friend from college. Go check out itList.com. [Long dead, sorry.] It’s an online bookmark manager, a way to post, share, or centrally manage all of your bookmarks. The current interface is pretty basic, but there are cool things afoot, with new programs and a totally new interface. I’ll be writing some help for it, which will be a very fun experience. Plus it’ll bring in a couple of bucks to support my new fulltime-writer lifestyle.

Although my connection is fast, I’m not in the mood to write. The Nintendo 64 is back, so if nothing’s on the tube, I’ll get into some Diddy Kong Racing or something. More later.

It appears I’m still suffering from a slow connection to my server, possibly from a fiber cut yesterday. Maybe it has already been fixed and my connection will always be slow. I’m not sure, but for now it means it’s impossible to do any worthwhile updates.

I’ve spent the whole day running errands, and I didn’t even leave the house until fourish. There’s still a lot of unpacking, setting up, and other miscellaneous work. Plus I had to fill prescriptions, deal with banks, and dig through luggage to find things. I guess I didn’t do as much as I planned, but some stuff is happening.

And I started writing today. Actually, my first test run just showed me that I had a lot of work to do at my writing area. I started writing, got about 3 words in, and then realized that I had to readjust stuff, or find my scrap paper notebook, or look for a pen, or whatever. Eventually, I got enough done that I could write for maybe an hour, which is decent. I’m trying to write all of the trip stories down, but it’s going slow. Maybe next week will provide for some better working conditions.

Speaking of which, I have more to do, so I better split.

I’m here – New York that is. It also appears I have the slowest connection in the world to this server, so it looks like I either need to yell at the new ISP or find a way to do this writing on my home machine and then FTP it in, like the rest of the people out there do.

This connection is completely useless, so I need to cut this short. I’ll be writing a comprehensive report on the trip soon, and hopefully I’ll get this connectivity problem fixed by then. Until then, drop me a line.

04/15/99 21:25

It looks like it isn’t the new ISP’s fault that I can’t type. There was some sort of fiber cut today that affected pair.com, the folks that host my site. Things appear somewhat better, although it’s not a zippy connection.

I now have a computer table – one of those folding tables from Staples. And I am getting more set up here. Soon I will type in an account of my entire trip, I promise. Until then, I have to answer lots of mail and keep unpacking. More later…

This should be my last entry from Seattle. Unfortunately it won’t be a great one, because I am sick, running a fever, having stomach problems, still have a lot of packing to do, and I leave in only 12 hours. If there is any one sure thing in life, it’s that I will get sick right before a trip. It looks like I will be seeing the great southwest in a dayquil haze now.

I got the rental car thismorning. It is an Oldsmobile Intrigue, in old-person white paint. It has auto-everything, and will be a real rest to drive it. It’s quite a bit different than the rabbit, which had manual-everything, except for the things that just didn’t work. I already took it for a test drive up to Lynnwood and back, and it seems great. I don’t know how good of mileage it gets, but the needle barely wavered int the 40-something miles I drove, so hopefully that will be OK.

Almost everything is packed. I am backing up the computer, and then it gets powered down. The apartment looks REALLY vacant now, just my air mattress and a bunch of piles of stuff awaiting the car or the dumpster.

I was going to write some kind of great ending at this point, but I’m trying not to get too sentimental about Seattle. I just want to get this shit in my car and get it behind me and think about it later. The cold isn’t helping me either. So I’m going to cut this short while I can still type. Maybe I’ll type in some entries from the road. If not, you’ll get the whole story when I reach New York on the 16th or so. Keep in touch, and wish me luck.