So about this challenge I’m in:
The StickK website has my credit card information. On April 25 they’ll e-mail me a certificate asking me if I’ve honored the resolution I launched a couple weeks ago, i.e., whether I wrote the first draft of a new novel in 100 days. If I report to them no, they’ll deduct $100 from my credit card and donate it to a national anti-gay marriage organization (anonymously, thank God). If I report to them yes, they’ll deduct nothing.
Note that I said “report to them.” In other words, I could fail to complete the novel by April 25 and still report to them that I succeeded, and StickK would leave my credit card alone without their ever knowing I lied to them.
So how do I prove to my family, my friends, and my fans whether or not I’m telling the truth? The truth is, I can’t. All I can tell you is I’d sooner give money to the anti-marriage crowd than lie to you about this. And I’d sooner write a novel draft in 100 days — hell, I’d sooner jump into a vat of boiling oil — than give money to those people.
And this week’s controversy surrounding the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, whose decades-in-the-making reputation appears to be suffering, perhaps fatally, due to a single act of dishonesty, has given me an idea about the $100 dollars the anti-marriage crowd won’t be getting once I complete my draft. I hereby declare that if I finish my first draft by April 25, I’ll donate my $100 to Planned Parenthood. And this is something I think I can prove to you. If I get some sort of written acknowledgment from them regarding the donation, I’ll post it here.
Enjoy your weekend, everybody! Go Pats!
I’m now two weeks into writing my new novel from scratch. I still haven’t come up with names for the characters — they’re still just letters of the alphabet. This is probably a good thing because writing their names out longhand would probably consume too much time.
The book recommends writing the first notes in longhand. I agree with them. But God help me when the time comes for me to go back and try to decipher my own handwriting.
It’s amazing how the thought of donating a hundred dollars to a charity I detest has motivated me. For the past few days I’ve been waking up on my own without the need of the alarm clock. (That doesn’t mean, of course, that I actually get out of bed before the alarm goes off.) In two weeks I have nearly a hundred pages of notes written; several characters drawn; and even a halfway-decent plot structure built. At this rate I might have two or three books written by the time the country finally gets around to legalizing gay marriage. In the meantime, I’ll keep plugging away.
Procrastination remains an enemy. But what can I do? My wrist gets sore and needs a break. I find myself playing computer games, checking the latest presidential polls, and, oh, writing blog posts. Thanks for tuning in.
I’m now a week into the challenge of writing the first draft of a new novel. If I don’t have it written by April 25, I’ve pledged to fork over $100 to an institution devoted to denying gays and lesbians the right to marry. Needless to say, putting money on the line like this has really got me motivated.
To help me, I’m using the daily writing exercises in Alan Watt’s book The 90-Day Novel: Unlocking The Story Within. Right now I’m in the brainstorming phase; apparently, I don’t start writing the real draft until Day 29. By rights I should have made the challenge for 90 days instead of 100, but I figured I might take a day off here and there over the course of the winter.)
It’s been a week since I started. How am I doing? For starters, I’m tired. Instead of getting up at 5:20 a.m. to write—my usual rising hour when working on my first two books—I’m now getting up at 4:45. My right wrist is sore from filling up my pink Goth notebook with page after page of increasingly illegible handwriting. (The book recommends brainstorming in longhand.) And the result? I have the skeleton of a plot and a few major characters, whose names, for now, are called A, B, C, D, E, and F.
Take that, anti-gay marriage crowd. You’ll never get my money!
As many of you know, I’m looking forward to publishing my second novel, “You Are Here,” by this summer. I now find myself itching to tackle a new project. But what to write? What characters, what plot to create? And can I really afford to devote another gigantic chunk of time to writing a third novel? Art is long, but life is short.
So I’ve made a commitment, on a website devoted to help people keep their resolutions, to write the first draft of my third novel in exactly 100 days, or by April 25, 2012. And to ensure I stick to this commitment, I’ve made a dangerous bet: if I don’t have a draft written by April 25, the site is going to charge me $100 and send it to the Institute for Marriage & Public Policy. Yep, that’s right, if I fall down on the commitment, my money is going straight to the bad guys.
Please don’t let this happen! Help me keep my pen moving! You can become an official Supporter on the website or just root for me. I’ll also be posting the details of my commitment as well as progress reports on this blog.
If my new novel gets off the ground, I’ll owe part of the success to the generosity of so many Bay Area writers who have provided me with an open forum in which I can read drafts of my work aloud and edit out what doesn’t work.
One of these writers is one of my Oakland neighbors, the poet and teacher Clive Matson, who invites writers of all stripes to his home on the second Friday of every month to read a piece they’re working on, or simply to read a favorite poem. Last night I had the privilege of hearing not only original poems and novels-in-progress, but also Richard Brautigan and Elizabeth Bishop. As someone aptly put it at last night’s reading: “You can do anything with a poem.
So I’d like to offer this post in tribute to Clive, whose poems and whose writing instruction book, Let The Crazy Child Write, is available on Amazon. He also offers writing retreats to the California mountains and to Costa Rica, which you can check out on his website. (He reports he has a few open slots for next month’s trip to Costa Rica.) Thanks to him, a lot of Bay Area writers, including myself, a writing at least a little bit better. Thanks, Clive!
Since I’ve started adding posts to this blog I’m now getting inundated with spam — over 200 just yesterday. It feels like such a waste to throw it all out. Luckily, my friend Dan Cohen, a.k.a. The Sixty-Second Gourmet, has published a helpful, 90-second video on how to convert spam from your e-mail to spam you can eat. I’m not sure if I want to feed it to guests, though.
Sixty-Second Gourmet – How To Make Spam
Readers of “The Love Thing” can probably guess that one of my passions is food. I had originally planned to make all the recipes Greg attempts in the book, but as Greg’s ambition began to grow, he left me behind. So for the food I’ll occasionally be writing about on this blog, I’ll be sticking to what I know.
Anyway, I’ve recently been making my all-time favorite sweet potato recipe—a dish called “fiery sweet potatoes” from the New York Times Dining section from a couple of years ago. You can view the recipe here:
Fiery Sweet Potatoes
The substitutions are small but critical: instead of cream you use coconut milk, and instead of black pepper you use red curry paste. The taste is like a good plot twist—completely unexpected, yet absolutely right.
The last two times I made it, I used less brown sugar than recommended and still found it too sweet. (I’d have been better off tasting the potatoes without sugar and then adding it little by little.) I also ignore the last step where you finish off the dish in the oven. Who’s got time for that? I just mash the potatoes with the other ingredients and I’m done.
I’ve never made these potatoes for Thanksgiving—too many family members don’t like curry—but whenever I make it for friends, I get nothing but raves.
Does anybody out there have a favorite sweet potato recipe? If you do, drop me a line.
While editing the new book I’ve been doing something I wish I’d done more of when I was editing “The Love Thing” — reading the work aloud. Luckily for me, the Bay Area, where I live, is home to at least three places (or at least three places that I know of) that host an open forum for poets and authors to read their work. By reading aloud into a microphone in front of strangers (and rehearsing it aloud beforehand), I think I’ve managed to “hear” what works and what doesn’t.
I’m now practicing reading into my iPhone and hearing my voice come back to me. As I get closer to publication I’ll start posting snippets from the new work. In the meantime I hope you enjoy me reading from the very first paragraph of “The Love Thing.”
The Love Thing – First Paragraph
I currently read in three locations: Clive Matson’s Drunk on Poetry, Smack Dab in the Castro, and Queer Open Mic in the Mission. I’ll be writing about all three of these places in future posts. Meanwhile, if anyone out there knows of any other free open mics, please drop me a line.
I call myself a writer, but whenever I see a blank page, or blank screen, I find myself wanting to do anything but write. I suppose that’s why I’ve resisted starting a blog for over two years.
How to introduce myself? How to say anything that hasn’t already been said a million times over by people more eloquent than myself? And aren’t there far too many bloggers already, and far too few readers to follow them? And yet the blank screen stares at me, as if daring me to fill it with words.
So let me offer this inaugural post as a message of simple gratitude: to my family and friends, for encouraging me to write; to my fellow authors, for their expert advice; and last by no means least, to my generous readers, many of whom don’t know me personally, yet took a chance on an first-time indie author.
And so for this inaugural post, let me offer the one thing I can give that no one else on the Internet can — a limited-time discount on the Kindle version of “The Love Thing,” from its usual price of $6.99 to $4.99. Offer’s good through this Friday, Jan. 6. The link is here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Love-Thing-ebook/dp/B002JCT26A/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1325357903&sr=8-2
And I sincerely hope you come back to this blog, where I’ll likely be writing about whatever I happen to be thinking about, be it history, astronomy, gay marriage, the movies, Lady Gaga vs. Madonna — whatever. Also, stay tuned for posts with respect to my second novel, “You Are Here,” which I plan to share with the world sometime in 2012. In the meantime, if you have anything you’d like me to write about, please just let me know.
Happy New Year’s, everyone! Play nice, and be safe!
Chris
