Sunday, September 26, 2010

Sitting here on a Sunday morning, 9:45 and the caffeine and Ativan are warring in my stomach.  One up, the other down, and I'm still trying to wake up.  I went to Stephen's birthday party last night.  By day we sat by the Los Feliz fountain and watched four weddings and two quincanieras pop and rustle about.  Taking photos, floundering along the slick grass.  Three of the weddings had purple bridesmaids, in one bride was quite lovely, the other two, less so.  I didn't look at the men.

That night we sat on the wide porch of his "frottage cottage" and drank Tecate by the light of Jesus, Mary, and St. Jude who Stephen thought was Judas.  He was so amused that there would be a Judas candle, and we were so sad to tell him, no, it is not Judas.

I woke up early, as I tend to do, fed the cat, fed the rabbit, made coffee, checked email, facebook, tumblr, took pills, now it's almost ten.  At ten I often call Omar.  I have a certain rhythm to my mornings.  Free time management you must install routines or flail about, lost.

The book I am writing has a lot of mornings that begin and then recess into memory.  There is a lot of zig-zagging between memory and the present.  I am drawing formally from Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, one of my favorite books.  We'll see how it turns out.

Monday, September 20, 2010

With that said: commence an actual post

I'm taking a class called Wordlab at Wordspace, and it's really helping me get motivated on the novel...aie, the novel that's been floating about in various forms for about six month now, since first conceptualized last November.  Starting from scratch was the right thing to do.  The punk novella that was supposed to be the first part is cheerily moving on on it's own, a small press (hush hush, won't say who) is interested, I must come up with a revised draft to show the editor.  He thought of a title for it, Scaffolding, which I like very much.

The L.A. Novel that I'm working on now, I'm about...maybe three chapters into it.  It's, as usually, flagrantly autobiographical.  I've gotten so used to spilling my guts by now that it's just like, "typey typey herpes typey typey taking shots of triple sec type bum piss" and etc...It has no title as of yet, and I just changed the main characters name to Ginger. 

But Wordlab, it's been great help so far.  It motivated me to turn out ten more pages for class tonight, which I'm  nervous about presenting, but sort of excited at the same time.

And Featherless.  Right now I am waiting to hear back from three amazing writers, and I am so hoping that all three of them will say yes.  We are trying to get our booking taken care of farther in advance, thus.  Monthly it becomes a rapidly turning wheel, one into another, one stops and the next begins. 

I turn 34 in ten days.  My, I'm getting old.  I still have no job.  I have been floating along this summer on a miasma of SSDI payments, food stamps, careful budgeting and the odd sold book here and there.  I am thinking of trying the ticket to work program once Katie and I are married and the chaos of wedding planning and dual book revisions/writing/Featherless has died down a bit.
Things fall apart and things come back together again.  I have realized that if I neglect this blog too much, it becomes the Featherless reblog with a splash of intermittent angst....or glory.  Rarely.  I have gone round and round with what to do with it, now that I focus most of my blogging on tumblr.  Changing the focus to something other then my dumb plodding life seems to be one option, another is simply ignoring it until I tire of tumblr and return like the prodigal son or a beaten dog.  Another, one I think I prefer, is saving it for more long form pieces.  So I have given it a bit of a makeover....smile purty, there...and now commence, to try again.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Another morning, another day.  Last night we saw a great reading: Eileen Myles and Aimee Bender at Human Resources Gallery, as part of the Rocky Point series.  Bender read a selection from her new book, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and Myles read an electrifying segment from Inferno.


 The tirade of people described, bars, rooms, readings, Warholian celebutants and poetic moments went on and on until it dissolved into applause and the crowd funneled out into the Chinatown night. 




Or, more like, it, the crowd stayed and stayed, so many people, it was like a wedding or a funeral.  They didn't want to leave.  There was a palpable excitement.  I waited by the door peering into copies of Sorry Tree while my friends raided the hors d'oeurves, then we turned to leave.

Saturday, September 04, 2010

Crazy-shocking-amazing news!

On a lark, completely at the last minute, Katie and I entered this $50,000 wedding giveaway contest put on by a company called Pink Cloud.  The contest was thus: we submitted a youtube video describing our modern romance, and exhorted our friends and family to "like" the video on youtube.  That with the most likes would win...and...

WE WON!!!!

This completely shocks the knickers off me, as I don't usually win things, my strokes of luck are few, and never this grand.  The video is as follows:



The Pink Cloud Blog announcement is here.

So, after the dust had settled and we had stopped jumping up and down, we met with the Pink Cloud representatives at Downbeat cafe yesterday.  I was struck by their warmth, professionalism and sincerity.  As wedding planners, they appeared totally on top of what to me had been a baffling process.  Katie and I felt comfortable expressing our more whimsical ideas (Giblets as flower bunny), as well as working through the many many details that they marshaled forth.

So, it looks like the next seven months until May, 2011 are going to be a lot busier than I had thought.  Yippee!