Philistine

So, while I’m doing okay with my own blog’s minimalist aesthetic, I’ve been struggling unsuccessfully to set one up for my wife. Installation isn’t a problem, but she’s primarily interested in a photo blog, and that brings its own challenges. I discovered a WordPress theme called “autofocus” that looked promising, but it’s not going great. Stay tuned.

Tonight, I went with some friends to see a sneak preview of Todd Phillips’ latest gross-out comedy, The Hangover. Simply extraordinary. While it had the usual ingredients (and subscribes to the comedy equation: female full-frontal=erotic; male full-frontal=hilarious, apparently. Plenty of the latter in this movie.) there was something really fresh about the (anti?)comedic style of Ed Helms, but most especially Zack Galafianakis, for whom this movie will certainly prove a kingmaker. I’ve noticed comic actors in the last couple years are gravitating toward earnestness as their primary mood; I guess it goes with the new (or re-emerging? no idea–when did awkward comedy start?) schadenfreude school of hilarity. It’s good, old, very unclean fun, and the most I’ve laughed in months.

The trip to the cinema left the dog alone entirely too much today (though he had breaks during the day), and so I took him out for plenty of frisbee time when I got home, around 10pm, and I was able to tire him out. It still feels eerily like outer space on campus, and I wonder if he’d be so singular in his dedication to fetching the frisbee if anyone else were to happen by and tempt him to chase and/or scare the hell out of them. He hasn’t yet mastered friendly approach, and “hey, I’m interested in you, let me run over and sniff/lick you” looks unsettlingly like “hey, I have canine antisocial personality disorder and I’m going to bite the shit out of you.” That–in case you were wondering–is why I keep ham in my pocket.

In the last three days, I’ve managed to completely resurrect our old notebook computers–the ones we’d replaced because they were broken–into working machines. My brother has another that he’s offered me, so I’ll wind up with three not-entirely-awful notebooks that we plan to pass along to some folks we know who can use them.

My brother and one of my friends are coming to visit this weekend, so I likely won’t get much writing done, but I did get a start on a new story; I basically have a title and a general mood. That’s enough of a genesis for now. Baby steps.

I’m also baby-stepping toward a bit more rigorous personal routine, and trying to integrate a little exercise and a lot of writing into my daily schedule. So far, so good.

What’s that? You’re dying to know what I consider a good writing day? Well, okay…

Nearly all my guidelines here are lifted wholesale from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and the rest I’ve stolen from Chris Offutt’s submission routine. A comprehensive view should look like this, seven days a week:

1. pounding out 1,000 words of good, “keepable” new writing or

2. 2-3 hours of focused editing.

3. posting 1 friendly note of encouragement/congratulations/gushing to a writer you’re geeked up about. This person can be more or less famous, more or less likely to actually recieve the note. That’s not important. It’s important that you send it, and that you don’t hope to–not even a little bit–ever hear back from them. And no asking for favors. You’re simply adding to the body of good, collegial writing karma out there. For more, check out her book.

4. once every 3 days (more or less) submitting a short story to a journal. If you happen to get one accepted, it didn’t count. The idea is to get to 100 rejection letters a year. I’ve already told you about this.

If I’m able to do that, 7 days a week (Right, I know, the mail doesn’t pick up every day, etc. Don’t be a pedantic dick, man, just play along.) that would be pretty awesome indeed.

If you take the #3, the friendly note, as a model for everything else, things get interesting. You can kind of see this in Offutt’s 100 rejections deal. It’s not about the response or the results, it’s only about what you–as a writer–can control. The result is a set of ambitious but achievable goals, completely independent of anyone else. Two of my favorite writers have, essentially, provided me with a structure for preserving a writing ethic that is at once reassuringly solitary and industriously engaged. Count me in.

But Philistine,

……………….you say

………………………….you promised a funny post! Where is the comedy?

Well, gentle reader, your uncle Philistine is a damned dirty liar. My b.