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All week I've been thinking about the house we looked at on Sunday. The half-moon shape of the master bedroom window. The high wainscoting in one of the smaller bedrooms. The neutral paint on the walls, well-chosen colors, but not too bland. High ceilings in the front room, skylight in the hall bathroom, backyard full of trees. I think we really do want it. We should make an offer. We have the down payment and we're pre-approved. It's scary, it's glorious, it's exciting, and it's scary. I am still looking for full-time work, but Brian is as stable and steady as ever. It's another very quiet and gray day. I worked on the book this morning, continuing a rewrite I started last night at the coffee shop with pen and paper. I asked myself if I am holding something back in this story, if it could be more compelling in the visceral details. I really don't know. I don't know anything. So I took one of the earliest chapters, written in the third person, and from memory only, rewrote it in the first person. I loved how it turned out, but I don't think it would work throughout the whole book. Or would it? That's what I mean about not knowing anything. Tags: book, homeownership
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Here's a fun writing exercise: create a livejournal or other blog for a fictional character, and write a journal in that person's voice. I decided to do that today and just see where it takes me. I know a lot of people on LJ have "side" journals that are anonymous where they are more free to be big ol exhibitionists/perverts (heh). And that there are also numerous fictional journals too -- people playing a character. I look at it as a writing exercise though. I'm not going to publicize it, but if someone stumbles upon it, hopefully they will also stumble upon the fine print disclaimer. I had vivid dreams this morning. In one, I got out of bed, and was fully aware that I was dreaming. I walked into the kitchen and looked at the back door, which was covered with plywood. Again, totally lucid, which made me realize the control I had, that I could bring whatever I wanted to life. I opened the door and decided there would be horses outside. But then I woke up goddammit. Tags: book, dreams
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Once again, no nanowrimo for me, for you see, I am 140,000 words into my stupid novel already, therefore am overly qualified. But hey, maybe I'll take it as an invitation to use this coming month as a time to get a shitload of my book goals accomplished. I made yummy sloppy joe filling and it's currently sitting in a pot on the stove, flavorizing. Meaning that the more it sits there, the more yummy it becomes. No Halloween for us tonight, aside from our facilitating diabetes and tooth decay in local children. I am just not into Halloween. I will be when we have a kid of our own, I guess, though the thought of pumping 5000 sugary calories into a tiny growing body in one sitting makes me a little sick. It was so deliciously gray and chilly today. Our street is absolutely littered with dead leaves. I got to wear my brown tweed jacket and a cashmere scarf today, and we went downtown for a little while, where I enjoyed my first eggnog latte of the year. Must try to keep self reined in in that department. Tags: book
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I dreamed that I was riding in a car on a twisty, climbing road. There were trees on both sides. I was lost, and my friend and I looked for a road sign. Finally I saw one, it read "FELL". I figured if we went that way, we would eventually get back downtown. We turned and followed Fell, but the road narrowed and suddenly we found ourselves turning the car into a deserted parking garage. The road had ended. I cursed and got out. I walked over some rocks and was surrounded by groups of people, kids and parents, all heading toward the viewing area for a waterfall. I could see the water splashing down over a huge flat rock, high up on a mountain. It was twilight, and very dim. I was searching for Alex. I told my friend I had to find him before it got dark. I couldn't call out to him; he is deaf and wouldn't be able to hear me. I threaded through the crowd, searching for an unrecognizable face. I figured I would know him when I saw him. But I never did, and then I woke up. Tags: book, dreams
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I just packed four more boxes of books. I now have six total. I figured out it's half as cheap to mail them book rate than to put them on the moving truck, so that will be a fun day at the post office. As I went through my bookcase I found my collection of "Murder Can Be Fun" fanzines. This was a great zine from the 1990s, based here in SF, and full of nothing but stories of freak accidents, bizarre murders, and other true crime, all of it written from a comedic angle. Loved that zine. Glad I still have them all. "Death at Disneyland" was a good issue. Anyway, hidden within this stack was a copy of "Hex" #4, yes, my own zine. This one came out in spring of 1996. It was fantastically printed with a full color cover and extremely high-quality black and white pages within. This was the period when I had my Kinko's graveyard shift hookup -- my old friend Lisa. I would drive over the bridge at midnight and stay until dawn working on this thing. This was a good issue, short and sweet. But I am still amazed at how candid I was, almost daring someone to accuse me of talking shit. This was right after I made a trip back to Olympia for a visit, and so there is a whole story within about how much I fuckin hated that place. I never named any names, of course, but I basically said the town was full of hipsters and assholes. Which it was, but still. Ballsy of me, no? This was also a period when I was heavy into Britpop and was about to leave the US for the first time for my first trip to England. I had been fetishizing the place since high school so this was a pretty big deal. But all that is discussed in issue five. Here is some stuff I wrote when I was twenty-three: "I remember walking across the roof of the State Theater some May day ages ago at dusk, drinking hot chocolate and picking up sea shells... Wandering the frosty streets of Olympia in the middle of the night with a paper bag of beer, sitting in a cavernous parking garage, typing on my Royal just to hear the hollow hammer of the keys on paper. And looking across the pavement to see him facing me doing the same thing on the typewriter we found behind the thrift shop. If I don't think about him breaking my heart a few weeks later, things like this stay as sweet as candy." I think reading this old issue has solidified something that has been on my mind this week with regard to the novel I am writing. I can't use a made-up, fictionalized town. That is the coward's way; a lie. I have to be truthful, which ironically is one of the more important things about writing fiction. So, Olympia it is. Damn the torpedoes. Tags: book, olympia, writing
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The winner of the town poll was St. Augustine, and I'm glad because my gut kind of went with that one as well. I knew it was a Band of Horses song, which is fine, I like that song very much and they are from the Northwest. July draws to a close, and San Francisco has been very cold and gray this week. I walked to the train today and the fog was so thick it had turned into a fine spray on my face. Summer! Work sucked today because our replication server died in the middle of the morning, meaning that content I uploaded to be tested was not showing up in our preview site. This went on until about 3pm. What a waste. Luckily it gave me time to work on my novel outline, which I've neglected since January. An outline is really important, especially when working with something that's going to be about 25 or 30 chapters. Dinner tonight was scrambled eggs with green peppers, and a green salad. I want to make something vegetarian for dinner tomorrow. Something crazy. Maybe with beans? Hmm. Legumes! I found out today that my pal Rena is moving back here from NYC. Rena I need your email address and I need to know what the deal is, too! My coworkers have been so sweet about me leaving. They all seem happy for me to be taking this step, and one rad girl gave me a job contact in Seattle and her personal email. I think whenever someone leaves my company, people are a bit envious. It's a very corporate environment. Good money and benefits, but really, not extraordinarily creative or anything. Speaking of moving, there is a house for sale in my neighborhood, very close to our building. It's a grey single family house, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, two stories, garage and back yard. Really a typical family house, right? Our neighborhood is nothing special by any means, cold most of the year, but this place is three blocks from the park and a half block from the N train. The house is on a fairly busy street, close to an auto repair shop, with houses on either side built directly against the side walls. It's the Inner Sunset, not a posh neighborhood like Pacific Heights or the Marina or even Golden Gate Heights way up the hill. There's no view, it's just on a flat street. It's nice on the inside; I'll admit it, it's a pretty nice house. Guess how much this place is asking, given all the criteria I mentioned? $700k? No. Okay, $850k? Not even. $1.3 MILLION And so we moved to Seattle. Tags: book, houses, seattle
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previously 
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