caleb walker

coming attractions

Lots happening lately, but no mental energy left at the end of the day for writing.

1. I'm sporting eyeglasses now. I've worn reading glasses for a few years, but this is my first pair of real-world, honest-to-god spectacles. More later, maybe with a photo.
2. The car saga is not quite over. The old thing is parked at the house now, but the left-front tire doesn't hold air. Have to take it back to the Monro for a repair. More later.
3. The end of my job is looming like a... well, like the end of a job. I have a lot to do before leaving, and have been preparing for unemployment. More later.
4. KR spends this weekend in Philly. There were animal guts on our front steps this morning. I watched the final episode of Boston Legal last night. I have a massage scheduled for tonight. I got my first rejection note on my story yesterday. Intrepid Media is publishing a set of their best columns, and many of the included authors are buddies of mine (download it for free or buy the book like I did - at Lulu). More later.

I hope.

next story

Got only a few minutes to get this posted and I'm not sure what I'm gonna write.

Tomorrow I'm due to send something to my writing group. Last time I sent a bunch of scenes all glommed together. The result was a shabby story of two brothers on a road trip who pick up a hitchhiker. So far in this revision I've ditched the whole road trip and, of course, the hitchhiker. Now it's the story of a fairly devout married couple and the husband's brother, who shows up at their door after being released from a night in jail.

I think it has potential. Maybe they'll end up on that road trip after all. Lots of work to do before tomorrow.

100 words: broken

He yelled from his writing desk, "Sharon, I need a metaphor." Minutes later she was in his office doorway. Hugely pregnant, pink paint speckling her face and clothes, paint roller in one hand.

"What?"

"I need a metaphor. For my story."

Her eyes darkened. She took in a raspy breath then flung the roller at him. Its looping contrail settled into a meandering pink line across the hardwood floor. It struck his upheld hand in a Pepto Bismol explosion.

He clutched his hand to his chest. "What the hell? I think you broke my finger."

"There’s your goddamned metaphor," she said.

close call

Geez, I almost forgot to post today. Here's some nice stuff I came across recently:

• The End, a set of photos of final movie shots. (Here's my favorite.)
• Splitter, a well-executed, unusual game.
• Some hard-to-parse sentences.

the process

I don't know what makes me think you want to hear about what I do at lunch time, but it's the only idea I have for this day just shy of midway through NaBloPoMo. Yeah, I'm out of (good) ideas already.

I take a notebook with me to Kiva Han nearly every day. My current notebook is one I picked up at the CHI conference last year. It has "Highmark" embossed on its front cover and some other words printed toward the bottom, which I covered up with a fat black permanent marker.

The first order of business is to order lunch and a Darjeeling tea in a paper cup. They serve an organic tea in bags. It's not great tea, but the Darjeeling doesn't go bitter if you leave it in the water too long. Though the staff turns around fairly regularly, there's usually an attractive young woman behind the counter who's learned my name. If I have a choice, I'll pick a table with a good view of what's going on in the room and out the windows. I sit, arrange my stuff on the table, and put on my reading glasses.

In a recent article in Poets & Writers, Bret Anthony Johnston mentions his warm-up practice of listing all the words he can think of in a few minutes that start with a particular letter. That kick-starts your brain into literary mode. Today I was on "e." I started with "egg" and ended with "eczema" (though I didn't spell it right).

Then I write. Or I try to. Sometimes I have a purpose. Today I was trying to come up with a 100-word piece on the topic "zany." I wrote about a guy in a hospital bed. It came out too much like "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" so I stopped. I stared out the window. I sipped my tea. I went to the counter to see if my food was ready. I had a nurse give the guy a spinal tap. He shouted zany but wrong answers to Jeopardy questions on the tv. And sometimes I don't have a purpose, so I watch people cross the street outside for an hour.

100 words: toes

Because it's 11:00, and Typepad takes upwards of five minutes to load a page, and because I haven't thought much about what to write today, because of all that and because I still have to clean up the kitchen and haul the trash down the steps to the curb before going to bed (sorry, Georgia, you're not getting a walk tonight), although we did see a really good movie tonight called The Speed of Life (written by my writing instructor) and I could maybe write about that, I decided to just post a 100-word exercise I did for my writing group. For every session we write one of these on a topic given the session before.

Toes (June 10, 2008)

He tipped the host to get a quiet table. Like a gentleman, he held her chair for her. They made polite conversation over their plates. Then she said, "Tell me something true." Her smile was a puzzle, like her request. He pondered. Finally he said, "You have to stay on your toes to make it in this world. You have to be prepared. You have to be ready for anything and everything. You have to stay on your toes or--" He sipped his wine for emphasis. "--or someone will step on them." Her smile was gone. She said, "No you don't."

(101 words)

the second story

My writing group met this week. It was my turn to submit something for review. I'd had some trouble getting a new story started. (When I took my first one to Iowa this summer the general response to it was that it was ready to be sent out after I made a couple changes to it. So a month ago I sent it to three journals and began fishing around for a new one.)

I was spending my lunch hours with my notebook, writing short character sketches but nothing seemed to be worthy of a story. Finally I revisited a prior story that I'd abandoned, changing things here and there and a day before I was due to send something to my group I realized maybe I just didn't like that story. So I set it aside again and picked up my notebook.

I combined all those sketches and made the names all the same and wrote some transitions so now I have the beginning of a story. It involves two brothers on a roadtrip and picking up a hitchhiker. It's full of cliches. My biggest task will be to un-cliche the cliches.

So anyway, I sent it to my group and people pointed out the gaps I knew were there. They also pointed out the parts that resonated with them. So I have a direction to push it in for my next draft. I'm so glad I've got this group.

on the radio, part two

Back in May I recorded a bit on the NPR radio show A Way with Words.

It didn't make it onto the radio, but it was released via their podcast today. Listen to it here. (I don't think I really sound like that.)

murphry's law

Muphry's Law
"Muphry's Law dictates [among other things] that if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."

(via)

word of the day: amanuensis

amanuensis (ə-man-yoo-EN-sis), n. ( pl. -ses |-sēz|) a literary or artistic assistant, in particular one who takes dictation or copies manuscripts.

For my birthday last week my mother-in-law gave me a book of stories by Cynthia Ozick, an author I've never read before, called Dictation. The title story features the amanuenses of Henry James and Joseph Conrad. I didn't know what that word meant, or how to pronounce it, so I made a mental note to look it up at home.

At home, I forgot. Then I started leafing through last week's New Yorker and came across a column about John F Kennedy's amanuensis. That's not a word you run across twice in one day, so it is today's word of the day.