Stand up comedian Jim Gaffigan has a great line about email: Send me an email so I can ignore it.
I understand the feeling. I've even half-jokingly said it to people. But to be honest, I'm kind of OCD about email. I loathe unopened email. It's not hard to delete and/or read email. It's so easy in this day and age to do so. I despise that little red circle on my phone's email app. I attack it like a video game, deleting what needs deleting and reading what needs reading. I can't fathom people that don't do this. My mother-in-law has thousands of unopened emails. So does one of my uncles. I joke with them that I'm offended. Hell, the first thing I do in the morning when I wake up is clean up my email. I'm borderline obsessed with my emails. But I know how easy it is to ignore.
Today is the second to last day before Christmas break, so everything is a little wonky. We're already losing the battle over the halls and kids are shutting down. Hell, so am I.
I've had my students working on research the last two weeks. It's been a mixed bag of success. When not putting out fires, I've managed to fit in a little writing. I've realized that what I've written of my present WIP needs a good editorial scrubbing. I've started the initial thoughts/ideas about the epic project I wrote about, including the kernel of a plot idea.
The first thing I do when I log on to my work computer is open two browsers: Firefox and Chrome. Firefox is for attendance and grades (the site we use works better in Firefox). Chrome is for email and everything else. When I opened my email page, I was appalled that I had 1300 plus unopened emails. The program we use doesn't make it easy to mass delete them, so I played my favorite video game: email purge. It took the better part of two forty-eight minute class periods to accomplish, but I did it. 1300 unread emails, gone into the ether.
I feel good. I feel accomplished. Let's see how long that lasts.
A few weeks back I wrote a long piece in my notebook about the hankering to write a big, thick, heavy, weighty, old school, doorstopping epic fantasy. Part of it was what I think is a really terrific introduction that captured how and why I was feeling that way, touching on how the weather stoked the always smoldering nostalgia I feel about reading epic fantasy and how I always viewed the fall as the time for reading them. But it doesn't exactly work right now. We had a blizzard. I've written some other things. My Christmas lights are up. The mood is different. (You can read it here if you like.) But I'm still feeling the hankering though and I've been thinking about it a lot, the idea gestating and growing in my mind.
I've always wanted to write an old school, 90s style, epic high fantasy book. We're talking a doorstopper where the word count is expressed in fractions of millions and requires at least two reams of paper to properly print out in double spaced Times New Roman, 12 point font.
I've tried it before and never quite got there. My first completed novel, THE FALLING DARK, was an attempt at this. Interestingly, this time of year always makes me think of that book because about fifteen years ago, my wife's cousin challenged me to complete the book by Christmas Eve or I couldn't eat at our family celebration. I finished it and it was a mess. A glorious 172k word, 575 manuscript paged mess. And I'm damned proud of it. It's the textbook example of a trunk novel. I actually just spent about 20 minutes cycling through several thumb drives I own to confirm word counts and pages. It was on an old 128MB PNY stick.
My next attempt were the SEASONS book. They came in at 135k (WINTER) and 131k (SPRING) with a lost "working draft" of a few dozen thousand words (SUMMER). Interestingly enough, the word counts of those two books are comparable to the word counts of my beloved Dragonlance books. But the SEASONS books were YA books, not traditional epic fantasy. My former agent had even suggested shopping them as adult with crossover YA potential. I don't know if he ever did, hence the reason he's my former agent....but that's a discussion for another time.
THE LOST SCIONS has epic elements though I don't fully think of it as epic fantasy. I always intended it to be more fantasy adventure than epic fantasy, but I definitely blurred lines with it. It's also YA and topped out at about 108k. So as you can see, I never quite reached my loft aspirations. In retrospect, it's probably a good thing. I don't think I could've actually handled it twenty years ago. And I still don't know if I can handle it now.
This really all started a few months back. I was hanging out with my kids, niece and nephew. They wanted to color. My daughter asked me to draw pictures for them. She thinks that I can draw. I can't. I printed out some figure drawing templates, traced over them and added details and embellishments for the kids, creating a slew of knights, princesses, sorceresses and one midriff bearing Aiel knock-off that was Natalie's favorite. I joked that they were characters from the "epic fantasy I'm never going to write." I couldn't leave it alone though. The drawings became the grain of sand that gets stuck in the oyster. A pearl started to form, agitating me to the point of ignoring my WIP (a YA fantasy inspired by THE THIEF by Megan Turner Whalen) and spending energy on a project that doesn't exist.
The pearl has grown, grinding bit by bit. It's mostly little character vignettes or fragments of ideas, some based on the pictures I drew others just ones that have popped in or I've thought about before that could fit into a story that size. I contemplated integrating some of these elements into the world and story of my SEASONS book making it a more traditional epic fantasy, kind of like he who shall not be named suggested, but I decided against that because I still believe in that story. No, this has to be a wholly original concept. And that's scary.
The logistics alone could be alarming. The longest thing I've ever written is 172k and it was garbage. Looking back, I've written as many as 440k in one year. A lot of those words were part of rewrites. Still though, I can write that much. I've talked about this before. Even if I were to go the length of a middle WHEEL OF TIME book, between 226k and 315k, that's less than a thousand words a day. That's about three pages a day. About an hour of writing. I feel like my friend Brian Fay would find that interesting. However, logistics aren't the problem. The story is. It's a problem because I don't have one.And that's a major problem.
You can't write a story without a story. Okay, sorry, I'm mixing up my terms. I don't have a plot. I have some nice elements that could make up an epic fantasy story: characters, settings and even vague notions of a protagonist. But I don't know how they come together. And that has to be the first step if I'm going to write the epic fantasy I wasn't going to write. I have to sate this hunger somehow and it can't just be a mashing together of tropes (and cliches) associated with epic fantasy. I was reminded of this last night watching an old episode of Family Guy:
This year I've been joking around with students that if they wrote for 30 minutes a day they could write a book length piece. It makes sense, honestly. I've seen that advice in a lot of places. Even if they eek out 100 words a day, that's still over 35k for the year, a midsized novella. I'm better writers than them and vastly more passionate about it, I could easily bang out three pages a day. But I've said this before. Many times. But I'll address this in the end of year review. For now, I'm off on a quest to find a plot. I'll come back to process when I find that. I have some ideas of how I'm going to go about this and work on other things as well.
I talk a lotaboutepiconthis blog. It probably gets weary to my readers. This entry rambled a bit and was kind of a pain in the butt to put together from the various fragments of it I wrote over the last few weeks. I wonder if that might be portentous. It went from three pages to six pages to a full nine pages of madness, including little vignettes of characters, vague plot points and setting ideas. For now, I'm on an epic quest of my own to find a plot for this epic fantasy I wasn't going to write.
These seemingly innocuous words have ignited hostilities in the yearly tradition of faux rage concerning the perceived war on Christmas. As usual, I have thoughts.
Let me get this out of the way first. I loath hearing people decry political correctness, wielding that derision like a club, bludgeoning anyone that doesn't share their world view as a snowflake or a social justice warrior. Once I hear or read someone say something like "political correctness run amok" my brain is already judging that you're kind of a dick. Someone is uncomfortable with an offensive joke, the club comes out. Anytime you do something they don't like or feel threatened by, they pull out their PC Run Amok Club and start swinging. Gender swap a character (Dr. Who) or cast a POC in a traditionally white role (pretty much anything Idris Elba does) and the clubs come out. But that's a discussion for another time, if ever. I want to talk a little about this latest nonsensical controversy where both sides think they other is wrong.
Can I let you guys know something?
You're both right. Sort of.
Like any piece of writing or art, there is room for interpretation. You may disagree with me, but you're wrong. I could go into some long semantic diatribe about it, but like the discussion above, this isn't the time for that. I'm writing about the wide assortment of interpretations of the song "Baby It's Cold Outside" (BICO). These interpretations are stoking the flames of this latest flare up and people are getting all kinds of salty.
I've long held the opinion, well before it was "cool," that BICO is kind of rapey. It's hard not to see this when you actually listen to the lyrics of the song. He's not concerned for her safety just that she's kind of leaving him hanging. Without much in the way of interpretation, he has no respect for her boundaries and refuses to accept her rebuffs. It's heavily implied that he's doctored her drink in some way. His advances match the intensity of her refusals. It's all at the very least creepy and borderline rapey.
I love the movie ELF and found out tonight that one of the reasons it's not in heavy rotation is because of the song. And the setting of the song. It's kind of creepy. Elves have genders. Buddy knew better and went into the women's room. He didn't respect a woman's boundaries. Not cool Buddy. It just reinforces the consent theme, in a very indirect way.
The popular counterclaim (shout out to the ELA!) is that the song was written in a more "innocent" time and that applying to an older song like BICO is unfair. It's not an awful point, though I'm not a huge fan of the "product of the time" excuse. According to Wikipedia, BICO was written in 1944. But were the late 40s and 50s all that innocent? If you study history a little bit, a lot of problems we're still paying for as a society can be traced back to this time period of American history. I think the better word is that the song came from a more naive time. We've been taught to view that time period as some "great" time for the country (I think we all know what "great" has become code for),so many people want to go back to that "innocent" version of America that they crave, even though, in the words of Stephen King, "the world has moved on" and they haven't moved with it.
I've also noticed the "Fifty Shades" argument. Y'know, a book that explicitly makes consent a major part of the plot. It's a terrible argument, but I thought I'd mention it.
The lines of consent are thankfully becoming less gray than they were, especially during that "innocent" time. Because of this, BICO is something of a relic of that time where the lyrics mean something entirely different. The same could be said about dozens and dozens and dozens of things. To be honest, BICO is no less rapey/creepy than any 80s romcom (go watch the movie OVERBOARD and tell me how offensive this song is) and far less offensive on any level than almost anything that my students listen to when they should be watching my modeling of writing techniques. Someone pointed out the absurdity of the offense over this song from people taking their kids to a concert featuring Cardi B talking about her private parts. (TBH, though, they are HER parts and she's allowed to talk about them.)
I like the song, but that varies from version to version. I still think it's creepy, but I don't think it deserves to be banned. That's just an overreaction, which is the right move. Two of my favorite versions are the Lady Gaga/Joseph Gordon Levitt (a gender swapped version that embraces the creepiness of the song in a comical way) and the Indina Menzel/Michael Buble (perfectly playful and there's no doubt that Indina's not putting up with his bullshit).
Despite all this, I am firmly in the playful camp when it comes to this song. But I get that it bothers you, that's fine. I'm not here to be a goalie to your happiness. Maybe the rest of you should think about that too. You don't like the song? It offends you? Okay, let me change the station or hit the next button. Not being a dick is that easy. If you're offended that others are offended and want to make a point of it...you're being a dick. Don't be a dick.
Merry Christmas. (I have thoughts on this too that I'll share later.)
I've been home today with Cooper as he recovers from some pretty major dental work. Earlier, as he was watching some inane YouTube videos, I started watching ERIC CLAPTON: A LIFE IN 12 BARS. We've since switched over to old Tom and Jerry cartoons, which I don't object to in the least, but my thoughts keep lingering back to the movie.
If you know anything about me, you know that Eric Clapton is one of my top five favorite musicians. The biography is riveting and informative (though an ailing 5 year old takes precedent over what I want to watch) even if you aren't a Clapton fan like me. The film relies on photos, grainy home movies and concert footage of varying quality with a heavy dose of voice overs to piece together the narrative. I really like documentaries like this. There's a visual element while still relying heavily on words to tell the story. (Someday I will write about ESPN's 30 FOR 30: JUNE 17th, 1994 and THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE!) There was one thing that really struck me while watching the movie. Eric Clapton NEVER smiles. Not in photos. Not during concerts. Not while he's playing. Not even in home movies with friends and family.
Okay, NEVER is a hyperbolic absolute. Footage of Clapton smiling is so rare that it's jarring when there is evidence of him smiling. One sequence where he smiles a lot in the film is used to punctuate his complete surrender to addiction. Was that the only time he smiled? Why? Here is one of the greatest musicians of all time, an icon...no, a god of rock and roll...and he never seemed happy. Ever. My other musical idols smile. Dave Grohl smiles. Dave Matthews smiles. Both have made a career out of being known as kind of happy go lucky, good guys. But Eric doesn't.
Like so many artists before him, Clapton was haunted by demons and seemed set on destroying himself bit by bit. (Why is it always the great ones?) Drugs, alcohol and infidelity plagued Clapton. Did this rob Clapton of the sheer joy that comes from creating? You never get the impression that he felt burdened or frustrated by his greatness when you hear him talk. There is no doubt he loves the music and is passionate about it. But there's never a sense of fun that should come with rock music. Maybe that's not it.
Is it the content of what he's singing about? I thought about what he sings about. Forbidden and unattainable love. Loss. The dangers of addiction. Grief. Unrequited love. Both Daves write and sing about those. You can't compete with Pink Floyd when it comes to heavy subject matter in their material, can you? (They wrote a whole album about one of the founding members literally going insane.) But there are smiles. Maybe not during the performances, but after there's a sense of pride, happiness and even relief that they played a song that addressed that serious issue. I don't expect my rock stars to be Buddy the Elf, but there's a limit. I don't think that's it. But that video may contain the answer.
The manager tells the overly cheerful Buddy to make work his favorite. Maybe that it. Maybe the happiness comes from the work itself. Clapton worked at his craft. He loved his craft when people didn't view the craft with the same love he did. They viewed it as a job, not work. The documentary shows his frustration at the way the recording process became stagnant, lacking innovation to achieve the right sound. He was never interested in being popular, just creating great music. Perhaps Eric Clapton was just so focused on making great music there wasn't room for smiling.
I wonder, do I smile while I'm writing? I enjoy it. I love it. I don't think I'm great at it yet. But I'm pretty sure I don't smile...not until I'm done. Then I smile. A lot. Because I like smiling. Smiling's my favorite.
For now, I'll leave you with this video. While LAYLA will get the lions share of praise for being Clapton's opus for it's mastery and epicness, my favorite will always be WONDERFUL TONIGHT. Perfect in its simplicity, this version, recorded live at Prince Albert Hall, is a haunting masterpiece. Maybe it'll make you smile a bit.
Today, November 1st, is my favorite part of Halloween.
It's over.
I don't like Halloween.
Easy. I know there are many of you that absolutely LIVE for Halloween. Good for you. I'm not a goalie. I'm not going to stand in the way of you enjoying it. I just don't . I'm not sure when that happened, because what kid doesn't like Halloween? Somewhere along the way, I soured on it.
Maybe it's that I don't like pranks. Never have. I don't think that's it. I've never been a fan of the horror genre. What about the candy, you ask. Growing up with a peanut allergy in the pre-safe room 70s and 80s meant that easily half my candy was inedible to me. It sucked.
Really, it's none of those things. The truth is that they don't exactly make costumes for fat kids. I mean you can only dress as a ghost or newspaper stuffed scarecrow so many times. Even today, I find costumes, masks and wigs hot and confining. I was fortunate that my mother was pretty handy with the sewing machine. This meant that every so often I could be creative and come up with a fat kid costume, though I'll never top the year I dressed as TJ Big Boy and people literally thought I was the official mascot.
I don't completely hate Halloween. I love seeing kids in costume, especially really clever ones that they obviously put time in or are really passionate about. Being a parent also changes your perspective a bit. Costumes are more inclusive and accessible. And my kids love costumes. My son runs around in his fireman or police or army uniform all the time. He had a ninja costume for a while too.
My kids know my disdain for Halloween. It's not a secret. The night before Halloween, my daughter expressed her excitement over and over. I listened, smiling dutifully but clearly artificially. She's too smart to fool. She looked over to me and said, "Daddy, I know you hate Halloween, but just for tomorrow, could you love it?"
Ugh. Talk about crushing devastation. My kid knows me. She knows how to play me.
When I was in junior high, I created and ran my own football league. Seriously. Games, box scores, stats, poorly drawn logos, team colors and uniforms, everything. This was the pre-Internet days where I chose my teams by using an atlas I got for Christmas (I'm going to write about my map fetish someday, seriously, what kid asks for an atlas for Christmas?) My library register in the mid to late 80s would be little more than an endless list of Dungeons and Dragons guides, The Lord of the Rings books, a professional football register (think of it as a print version of Pro Football Reference) and The Sporting News Guide and Registers for the NFL and USFL. The USFL was the most frequently checked out. I was obsessed with it. I was new to football and became obsessed with it.
My dad isn't a sports guy. I'm convinced part of my teenage rebellion was my obsession with sports. My connections to sports came geographically not passed down from generation to generation. I was born in Queens, which meant I was a Mets fan. My mom says she's a Mets fan, so I guess maybe that's the generational fandom. Being raised on Long Island in the early 80s meant that I was all about the Islanders. Football wasn't on my radar. (And forget basketball!) When I moved to Syracuse, football became my thing. And why wouldn't it? I was a 6'1" and 220 pound 6th grader. Unfortunately most of that 220 pounds came in the shape of a bag of pizza dough shaped like a person. I was (still am mostly) slow, clumsy and weak. And lazy. But I loved box scores.
I was a baseball guy and box scores told a story. I've opined in other places, maybe even this blog. One thing I sorely miss about daily newpapers is the box scores, whether the full page of baseball scores during the summer, the tiny, incomplete college football boxes on Sunday mornings, the rigidly structured NFL scores or complex NHL boxes with their plus/minus and penalty minutes, I would absorb them all. Don't ask me the quadratic formula, but dammit I could break down a box score. It was this obsession that led to me creating my own football league. But it was also my obsession with alternative football leagues. It was such an obsession that I created my own league based on box scores.
I would spend hours working on my fictional league, named the North American Football League, crafting it into something, though I couldn't say what. These were hours I should've been writing or doing school work. Instead I was creating accounts of fictional games with fictional players. My friends knew about it. Mocked me for it. But they did that with most of my creative endeavors. (Lesson of my blog lately: teenagers are shitheads.) I was recently reminded of all of this reading Jeff Pearlman's outstanding Football for a Buck.
From the moment I first heard about the book, I was excited. I was a fan of the USFL from the moment I heard about it. A spring football league meant as an alternative to the stodgy NFL. I only vaguely knew about football then, but this alternative league was exciting to me. I love alternative football to the NFL and will always watch when I can. I loved the ESPN 30 for 30 about the USFL and couldn't wait to read this book. And it doesn't disappoint.
Born of a high school English project (thanks Jeff for inspiring me as a teacher with this since now my students are going to do a similar project as Mr, Height, maybe in 20 years they'll be an anecdote about Mr. Zeleznik in someone's book) and a genuine obsession with the USFL, Pearlman's passion was pretty parallel to my own. The uniforms, the nicknames, the stories, the personalities...these were the things pro sports should be about. Pearlman's book perfectly and fairly accounts for the rise and fall of the spring football league from it's earliest gestation to birth, stumbling start, early successes and, ultimately, its hastened failure at the hands of a egomaniacal huckster desperate to get his own NFL team. Honestly, if you want to know what the anthem controversy is all about, this is it.
Pearlman's book is terrifically written, light, entertaining and incredibly informative. It feels like you're just shooting the shit and sharing stories about this crazy league. A lazy writer would've really ratcheted up the parallels between what happened in the USFL to what is happening in our country at present, but Pearlman deftly integrates it. It's an important part of the story and you can see the skill in the presentation of facts in the book about a good idea that went bad mostly because of a snake oil salesman.
It's the stories about the USFL, the owners, players and fans, that really makes the book so fun. It was insane. The 80s were insane and a "rebel" football league looking to buck tradition was even more insane. Never mind that this book is a harbinger of what we are experiencing now, it's a fun, amazing read. Jeff Pearlman's otherbookshavemovedupmyqueue and maybe they'll inspire me to write something thought I don't exactly know what it will be. I know that I'm inspired to do something with my old league. The North American Football league lives again and I'll talk about that in my next blog post.
Football for a Buck is the clubhouse leader for best book of the year for me. I loved it that much.
In the meantime, go buy Football for a Buck, check out Jeff''s terrific podcast Two Writers Slinging Yang and keep your eyes on this space for more on whatever the North American Football League is going to be. I don't know if I can create a character as vivid and incredible as Paper Fields for my league. But let's see what happens.
I don't write about school often. I don't want to gripe, complain or harangue about my job. I've worked enough shitty jobs to know that as shitty a job that teaching can be sometimes, I've got a pretty good gig. This week I had something happen in Study Hall of all places that got me thinking about who we are in the stories of the people around us.
A little backstory. I have a spinal condition called Scheurmann's kyphosis. In short, I'm hunchbacked. It's not aesthetically pleasing to look at, especially if I'm tired and/or wearing something that is a little more form fitting than I normally would. Such was the case in junior high when the head cheerleader, who sat across from me in art class, loudly asked about the hump in my sweater. That afternoon I asked my mother to take me to the doctor because of it and was given a name while showing me the sheer power of being the head cheerleader. In the pre-Internet days of the late-80s, I was left with a cheery description from the doctor: a rounding of the spine, a wedging of the vertebrae and a larger lung capacity (not that it helped when I had to run the mile), so take that head cheerleader. (If you happen to read this since we are friends on Facebook, there is honestly no hard feelings for this despite the tone that it may have.) Over the years, the back has caused many levels of pain, from slight discomfort to Crooks from OF MICE AND MEN level body repositioning including the fracturing of several vertebrae while taking a jump I had no business jumping while skiing to impress a girl when I was seventeen.
I'm self deprecating about it for the most part, dressing as the "Hunchback of Notre Dame" one year by wearing a Notre Dame sweatshirt. The degree of my "hump" depends on my weight, if I'm lifting, what I'm wearing and how tired I am. It oscillates from full on Quasimodo to slightly slumped.
For the last few weeks I've been finishing a tough rewrite (it's done and delivered), so I've been working after the kids go to bed, staying up past midnight while still waking up at 6-6:30. So, by the time I get to study hall 9th period (out of 10), I'm gassed.
I must have been sitting more slumped than usual (the sweater I wore didn't help) and one of the precocious ninth graders noticed my severely slumped posture, loudly pointing it out to his boys, who then spent the rest of study hall mocking me with banal attempts at cruelty without actually saying it to my face. (They're ALWAYS cowards.) One (at least) took a picture, posting it or sending it out to their friends. That bothered me. I don't want to be a meme or go viral. It was the reason I didn't engage when I had every right to. If I were to engage them (with no physical proof), then I'm the crazy white teacher that goes viral. As I so often do, I absorbed the hits. Luckily, the next period two of my seniors both told me they liked the way the sweater looked on me. So, obviously we are dealing with some real a-holes.
This rolled around in my head for the rest of the afternoon and for a while after. Why were the opinions of some highly immature 9th graders affecting me like this? As I often do, I tried to frame it beyond simple cruelty and I couldn't. It also made me think of Richard Vernon.
Yes, THAT Richard Vernon. The quintessential dickhead 80s principal ( Ed Rooney is an acceptable equivalent) played by quintessential dickhead 80s actor Paul Gleeson. To be fair, I have no idea if he was actually a dickhead, but he made a career out of playing them. (There's a later post about my dream 80s movie called The Dickheads.) Richard Vernon was one of our generations great villains. Darth Vader, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Steff, Doug Neidermeyer, Johnny Lawrence (though there's a perfectly valid argument to be made that Daniel LaRusso is actually the villain in THE KARATE KID) then Vernon. When Gleeson played the irascible Vernon, he was forty-five. I am presently the same age. It dawned on me in that moment, to these kids, I'm the Richard Vernon to their John Bender in the story of their lives. Suddenly, it put everything into perspective.
To this day, Vernon is still one of the great villains to many. but in the proper context, especially considering my age compared to his, he's a vastly more interesting and sympathetic character than he was when I was younger. Could you imagine having to come into school on a Saturday morning to oversee detention? I'd be salty too. There's also a great but brief scene in THE BREAKFAST CLUB that sheds new light on Vernon and his Barry Manilow wardrobe. He's alone in the hall and there's a close up on his face. Instead of the smarmy, cruel Vernon we get a weary, lonely middle aged man. We learn nothing else about his character beyond what we need to know about him as the protagonist to our intrepid band of heroes. At this stage of my life, I find him a far more sympathetic character that I have more in common with and maybe I always did. And maybe that's the way these kids saw me and reacted in the limited way they could. (Barry Manilow wardrobe would be far above their pay grade.)
While I don't think I'm Vernon-level of cruel despite the reactions of a few fallow freshman, I see where I might fit in their stories, though I like to think that I'm more of a benignly, blundering Mr. Belding instead.
