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.

 Last night I went to see Billy's band, Dona Nicha, and while bobbing my head idly to the surf-rock, I started thinking about my book.  What a mess it was.  What extensive scalpel-snips were needed.  After much thought, I decided that the sprawling five-part structure was ridiculous and self-indulgent and purposeless.  Why?  Why?  Why pad the front end of the novel with previously written text of other cities and other times.  There was no trajectory, there was no...dare I say it, PLOT.

An old friend from Portland always said plot was my weak point, and years later after reading Jet Set Desolate he hadn't changed his mind.  This time, though, I had so lost track not only of plot but of the point...what the hell was the point of all of this?  Who the fuck cares what I spent the last 13 years of my life doing?

So, snip snip snip and a cut cut cut and a new plan has been hatched.  That is, to take the Portland material, my Reed thesis of 1998, which is in itself a completed novella, and try shopping it around to see if any publishers are interested in a punk rock novella of the 90s....who knows, it's worth a try??

And then, flash forwards to what was the most compelling material  of the bloated death corpse of a manuscript, the LA/Echo Park material that I was writing about the present, and make that chapter one.  Start at the end.  Go forwards into the future.  Keep it current and exciting. Don't keep recycling old material, but generate anew.

I will keep the San Francisco and San Diego chapters around on the hard drive, of course, in case a flashback is necessary or suggested.  Razorcut flashbacks are a bit of a fun time.  But I feel so much more excited about the text now that I'm trimming it down, it was sort of an embarrassing dead weight of awkward before.

It's Sunday, and we're working on the book together while listening to the Lene Lovich Pandora station.  Katie is editing while I am printing out chapters.  The printer is being ornery and slow. It has taken a good twenty minutes to think about printing chapter nine, which is the last one I have so far.  I wrote a three-page story this morning which may fit into the later LA section, or may just float around flapping it's wings like an orphaned sparrow.

Meanwhile, Giblets got behind the stove twice today when I was on the phone, and I was running around in a T-shirt and panties waving carrots yelling "Giblets get out of there" while Omar giggled on the line and tried to tell me about live-work lofts.

Meanwhile it is Sunday and Broken English is playing now, Marianne Faithful, who is one of my pop idols, more for the life she led then for her tunes, though I like those as well.   Her piano bar version of Boulevard of Broken Dreams (NOT the Green Day travesty) I lost it when my hard drive crashed, but it it jaw-dropping, stunning.  I couldn't find a worthy version on youtube. alas.

This pulp novel sits above my desk, where it taunts me.  When I went on SSDI did I forfeit all hope of such a thing?

A head cold and treating it with a steady diet of vodka, coffee and smoking yields only to be expected....sitting here feeling limp and unwilling to do the things that I must.

Last night we went to a lovely BBQ at Nikki's, sat in the grass while Anthony McCann read poems of alcoholism and horses...good stuff.  It was a surprise party, and surprise the birthday boy it did.

The bunny is hopping hopping hopping without stopping.  I feel like I need to write more poetry after having received the first rejections of my recent submissions sweep.  Working in the novel form it is so hard to excerpt anything, poems are tight, compact, like bullets you can scattershoot them everywhere.   Well, not everywhere.  Some places.  More places then you can put a 14,000 word fifth chapter of a novel that doesn't really cohere and that I haven't worked on in several weeks and fear I am losing faith on.

Whatever.  Does it matter? What am I working towards in the end?  I would really like to finish this novel and have it actually be worth reading.  The rabbit is burrowing his little head onto the VCR, under the TV.  He loves to chew wires.  He will chew these wires.  He is sitting on the yellow armchair licking the upholstery like cream.

We are going for ice cream today.  It should be a fine day.

Another day, another morning, and again I'm drinking coffee and typing while Nevada sits on top of my computer and looks at me with those green cat-eyes.  What has happened?  We flyered for two days for featherless #1, after much tromping of pavement and an inadvertent detour into Boyle Heights (oopsies).  Lessons learned along the way: 

• libraries will only allow flyers for free events,
• it is difficult to go into all of those bookstores without buying things (case in point, this pulp novel)
• waiting until afternoon to leave results in hot hot heat and is ill-advised

Other news.  Skylight Books accepted the valeveil duo, so it is in the LA poets section.   This I am very pleased about.

I went through a storm of sending out submissions to journals, online and print, and am now scanning my inbox, hawklike, waiting for responses.  This was perhaps a distraction from what I really need to be doing, which is finishing...or, even, working on the middle of...that book which I began in such a fury.  I feel terrible about this, I have slacked off, yes, it's true.  I got distracted by other projects, I get distracted by the internet, by housework, by pet care, by cooking, by putting on my face, by just about anything, really.

I need to refocus on this, and so semi-public flagellation seems like the way to do it.

In brighter, happier news, it is springtime, hop-time, and time for projects to blossom.

featherless, a reading series, is having its first event on June 20th at 7:30 pm at Wordspace.  The curators, Katie and I, are very excited.  The three readers will be announced shortly.  Omar Routher is designing our logo, and, judging by the preliminary versions, it should be smashing.

The bits and pieces are coming together.

I'm working on the novel obsessively, still.  I have a rough draft manuscript of nine chapters, with four more in sketchy sketchy hopeful fill-in land.   The problem I'm running into (well, one of many), is that with such an epic scope, that of thirteen years and five cities, it seems that there should be some sort of epic quality to the narrative beyond plink plonk ping pong here's my little life.  I feel that in the last section, the Los Angeles section, I will have to veer far far from the truth of placid domesticity and concoct some sort of explosive climactic whatnot to finish it off with.

Oh dear.

Passed the 100 page mark yesterday.  Now lurking on page 106. The rewriting is a little bit slower here, as chapter five deals with Nikki's impregnation and abortion.  Not exactly pleasant reading, or writing, or reliving.

 I'm almost done with the Portland section, one more chapter to go.  Katie suggested going to Portland at the end of August.  That would really be fun, but I don't know if I could afford it with current finances being what they are.  But to revisit these places with her, to see my sister and cousins and old friends, would be amazing.

In other news, Katie got a new tattoo. Lookin' hot, yes'm.

 I have fallen into a strict rhythm of waking at seven, taking the Wellbutrin and half an Ativan, drinking coffee, and working on the book for the next 5-8 hours.    Then Katie wakes up, we might socialize or plot and scheme.

In the evenings I am more relaxed, we go to readings or spend time with friends.

Here is Stephen eating ham. 

There is a new project on the horizon, a reading series called featherless.  There are exciting developments that I won't speak of yet. 

Spring is in the air, and new projects abound.

The book I've begun has five parts, each set in a different city I've lived in: Portland, San Francisco, Valencia, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Each part begins with a poem, to give context and mood, then moves to narrative text.

Part 1: Cigarette Butts in a Chipped Teacup, is set in 1997-8, Portland.  It relates how Nicole/Nikki, a 19 year-old living in a messy punk house called the Dustbin, navigates her subculture as it crosses with her own rising attraction to women, namely her roommate Lana, and the beginnings of her own psychological problems.

As of this morning I have 17 pages of this, retyped and revised from an earlier, 120 page document.

Part 2 is set in 2003, San Francisco, and will take substantial revision of a three-story set in terms of point of view and tenses.  I wrote the stories originally in a very post-modern way, and I'm changing them back to a more traditional first person straighforward narrative.  Revision is key.

Part 3 is set in 2005, San Diego.  It discusses Nikki's isolation after the manic excitement of San Francisco, and her friendship with Micah, an HIV+ neighbor who becomes her only ally while she waits to go to graduate school.  I have a rough draft of this, but it needs some work.

Part 4 is set in 2006-8, Valencia.  This part will be the most difficult for me to write, as I vowed while at CalArts, not to write about my experiences there.  Therefore I have no base texts to bounce off of, and must write cold.  that's fine, I hope that by this point in the process i will be more able to tell where the story needs to go, and thus what this section needs to do for it.

Part 5 is set in 2009-10 Los Angeles.  I have a few fragmentary stories to work with here, but at this point a lot of the focus is going to be on tying the previous threads together into plot threads that cohere and coincide with the present state.  That is to say, I'll write this part when I get to it, hopefully.

So, that's my plan, I've decided that to keep myself going I must write not only for pleasure or for the self-indulgence of the thinly veiled memoir (pa-ha, I know it's obvious).  But this time I must write from fear, write from the nipping at my heels of the dogs of supported employment, the drool and leaden hands at the factory floor.  I must discipline myself this time.  I will try.

So we just got back from the urgent care, where the wuzh got her ear looked at.  For some reason it took three hours, so here we are back at home with the rain pouring down, about to make linguine carbonara.  All I can say is YUM.

All there is in my stomach is coffee, fudgy grahams, and a lot of rain. 

One of the techniques I've been thinking about was in The Other Hollywood: The uncensored oral history of the porn film industry, and involved using different oral testimonies to tell increasingly interlocking and compelling stories.  I stayed up till 6 am one night reading it, simply fascinated by the fact that it was all true, and primary source material.  Paragraphs from different voices, layering together to tell the stories.

Katie and I experimented a little bit with taking a story she had written about the two of us, and me adding in my viewpoint in alternating paragraphs.  It was a fun exercise, and I should really finish my portion.

I think the Ocho Y Media project, for which (other to do list) I have to fill out an interview, is projected to form a similar oral history formatted narrative.

To do lists, aie.  I saw Stephen Van Dyck perform at Sea and Space the other day, and he read from his worry list.  I'm fascinated by lists, making them, reading them, the different types of lists, etc...

What would my worry list be:

• getting mugged walking around echo park
• never leaving the house as I have no car now
• slipping on wet steps and losing my front teeth
• running out of ativan and not being able to get more
• the car eating the bunny
• the rats dying of depression

Hmmm...that's about it.

So it's thanksgiving once again, and for once I am excited.  More than that - pumped!  (oh dear, eighties slang).  But, really, for the first time in quite awhile I'm having a home thanksgiving with my girlfriend and all my housemates and their boyfriends/dates.

I spent yesterday in a fervor of baking, making twice-baked sweet potatoes, a pumpkin pie, battling with turkey brine, etc...  Today I plan to just focus on the turkey and picking up whatever else needs doing.  Between the five of us, everyone is making some sort of tastiness.  Katie made a maple syrup pie last night and bought a bumpit, which I'm pretty excited about.  She has the perfect hair to really make it work.

I have been exceedingly domestic as of late, spending days writing in the morning and doing housework in the afternoon.  Ambitiously, I launched on a project of doing morning pages every day - that's three freewrite pages of gobbldegook every am upon rising.  Coffee helps, and it helps that I wake up every day at around 8, so I've got the quiet time before the wuzh wakes up to get things done.

This state of productivity may or may not last.  I'm experimenting with a new book project, a collection of short stories based around the five cities I've lived in.  As my hard drive broke, I've had to do a lot of retyping and careful revisions of old hard copy drafts.  It's going to be awhile before this sees fruition, but I'm working on it, and hoping.

Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin / 750910-2155 is out now from valeveil press.  Many thanks to J.S. Davis and her excellent work on the project.  I am thrilled to pieces about it.

There is a reading at the REDCAT in the works, where copies will be available for sale, as well as copies of Jet Set Desolate.

The nature of the duo is in a sense subdivided and recontextualized.  Two authors, one Californian and one anonymous Swede, have written two texts each divided into two sections (poems vs lists) (Introduction vs Potentiality in Art).  Each text is translated into English and Swedish, and contextualized by J.S. Davis's foreword, Derailleur.

They will be available for sale on the www.valeveil.se site shortly.

While I can't say how many people have died from excessive reading of Harry Potter, here is a list of people who have died from Lorazepam (Ativan).

• Michael Jackson
• Anna Nicole Smith
• DJ AM

Strangely I only know about famous peeps, as they don't release the lurid details of normal ODs to randoms like me.  But, of these three they each had a veritable pharmicopia of other things in their systems, not just this delicious white pill.

This revelation has led me to try and quit drinking, which is working out reasonably well.  Thanks, lamictal, for making my attempts at social drinking end up with me still sober and headachy, and everyone else loopy loos.

  However, today is my birthday - I'm 33, whee!  Jesus died at 33.  I certainly will not.  I'm feeling pretty good for a no-longer spring chicken.  I remember freaking out when I left my teens.  My thirtieth birthday was such fun, glossed over by calartiness, that I wasn't too upset.  However, today I'm facing adulthood full square in the face.  Yipes.

It's cool, though, really.  I'm enjoying where I'm at right now, if only I could kick the writer's block that steps in front of me, like a fierce Tyra Banks, and says, "what, you're thinking about writing?  how could you, you have nothing good to say!"  So then I blog about my personal life, and everything's ok until the next time I get the urge to write another novel, which I really want/need to do.

But the question, as ever, is what to write it about?  I could just do short pieces until something jells, I suppose?  I recently lost all the data in my external hard drive, I dropped the damn thing....urrrgh.  So unless I retype a bunch of shit, the old fragments I might have cannibalized are gone gone gone.  This makes it seem even weirder.  I looked back on the folder of stuff I'd printed out the last time I got all charged up, and so much of it was shite.

But in other news, I'm going to be reading in "A Day in LA: Washington Blvd Art Concert", on October 11th.  Katie and Omar and I just went driving through Culver City in search of the perfect spot(s) for our readings.  I found a great big blue-poles and glass building called, "Imperial & Wholesale Electric Supply."  It's right next to the river and the intersection of Washington Blvd and La Cienega.  I'll be there from 4:30 - 5:00 pm, with the reading starting at 4:45 pm.

I'm really excited about this.  I haven't read out in public since the Next Words reading when I graduated from CalArts, and that was at least a year ago.  Possibly two.  Time gets weird for me, y'know.

But Katie found an amazing spot, it's an old broken down church.  This spot is so cool that Katie has people asking to share it with her...I think the answer is no.  Katie Katie Katie my lovely girlfriend, yay for her, she's also started a blog, finally seduced by the blogger application.  It's called Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, which means the struggle to come to terms with the past.  That's also the name of her zine, which she will be handing out at this here church around 3:30 pm.

I'm sitting here waiting for darling K to come home from school, defrosting the birthday steaks, drinking coffee that is probably a bad idea.  Oh well, It's my birthday, dammit.

This card is one I am considering for a tattoo.
There are so many to choose from, though, and I am so broke, that the likelihood of this happening is slim.

There is a bunny rabbit hopping around my feet, Katie is rousing in the other room, the ants are amassing on last night's dinner dishes, and all seems well for the morning.

I finished the riot grrl essay and am planning to send it out soon.  I must reread it.

The bunny is football-sized.

Bitterness aside, I am quite interested in other reconstitutions of the San Francisco experience. Jason Madary seems to be working on one, check Prim and Unproper for details.

At the moment I am working on an essay about Riot Grrl, and trying to get ideas together for a new book. Last night, dreaming under the mosquito netting beside my ladylove, I awoke from a dream about how this new book could shape together. It began with short pieces, molded into longer. Plot comes later, impressions and anecdotes come first. I am trying to cast myself back into the previous situations in which I began from scratch - began from turmoil, really, from messy personal situations. But there was always a short story or two that became the keys to the larger piece.

It's August, now, and I've spent the last month moving to a compound in Silverlake. We call it Waco. Intermittent internet access and many glorious changes: a slip n'slide in the grass, grass overrun into orange flowers and a lemon tree. I am very happy.

The problem of writing, the problem of writing again. I am going to try to use this blog to get myself to write again. Right before I moved...and it was a very sudden sort of "text message in the middle of the night about amazing property available" sort of thing. Right before this process began I was formulating an outline and thinking about a new project...another book, based on my paranoid delusions.

This might work, then again, it might be abandoned like so many other projects. Now that the major work of settling in is over, it might be worth a try.

Now that all of the Christmas fooferaw (kerfuffle?) is over, I am working on new projects.




Cherry Ames Army Nurse is preparing for our first show...a drag party at a friend's apartment. We must put noses to the grindstone, as Cherry would say.

In addition, Katie and I are working on a collaborative, polyvocal novel in shifting forms that illustrates the shifting nature from fan to stalker to friend...as well as a lady-love story. I am very excited to be working with her, her poetic and rhetorical abilities are entrancing.

The list form plays a major part in this work, this is the backbone to the relationship building, like a fishscale, like feather-shreds of supposition.

I would include a list here, but the latest ones are a bit obscene.

Good news, today. I just heard from Jacquelyn, that Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin is going to be released in Stockholm and the US this winter. I am terribly excited. It will be under a different cover I think, but here is the old one.

The chapbook was put together out of my zinemakers urge, for some sort of post-school expression, and I'm thrilled that it was found interesting by others. Their new website is here.

My roommate and I were manically bouncing around the room this morning, she's writing new material for her thesis. I am trying to get back into that state, of production, of will. The internet can become such a time-suck...I'm trying to spend less time on it and more working, but the Jet Set Desolate manuscript is at a difficult point right now. It is the problem of perspective...when Brady is present, and Lena is not. Some of these moments can be easily fixed by putting Lena in the room in a passive state, but other situations are more difficult.

Hooray for Tod! My boyfriend rescued Liza from under the bookcase last night, we are glad to have her back.

It's noon and I'm making coffee. Must wake up. School is starting for him and for my roommate this week. It feels strange that I am not going back, I miss it, in a way. But it's acceptable, I am amenable to a housewife role at the moment.

Now if my diploma could just arrive...it feels, in a sense, not final, not the closure I would like, until that damned piece of paper is in my grabby little hands.

I never got the Mistress of Fire Ants tattoo. Someday, perhaps.



That and the other... I am working on a new book. It's just in the notecard stage at the moment, the strands and scenes and phrases in little bits on the coffee table.

It's about LA, this time, scrambled from fragments of friends and past encounters and supposition of the what-if. It's eluding me right now...scattered, distractions...I should get back to it.

I'm sitting down to edit the Jet Set Desolate manuscript. So relieved that it's fall, the cool of evening after a deathly hot summer.

It's the relief after a fever has broken.

So, I just put up some new links, some writing done for a now-defunct (and sadly mourned website called www.limetea.net. Edited by the delightful and vivacious Marty Smith: www.martysmith.com

I would've put up the erotica just for pure humor value - yes, we all need to make money, too, I was unemployed in San Francisco, I took a job writing for www.warhookers.com (don't bother, it's down) for $.20 a word, and that paid my rent for a bit. It was a facinating experience, really, getting inside the human psyche in terms of what excites people and how to play upon that while maintaining a forthright post-feminist stance. Seriously, the site was based upon the concept of a sexier Rosie the Riveter, of "the space between slink and hostility, lovely and a slap."

The last one is a club review from ages ago, back in 2000 when I had first moved to San Francisco and was bumbling my way around doing club reviews when I had actually spent very little time in clubs at all. It was an exciting introduction to the city, and I met all sort of disturbing characters and showed up to my temp jobs smelling of vodka, and all that. Much later the job would've been a snap.