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Archives for November 2010
How Eric Smith rocked my world.
Story time.
A few weeks ago Britt Miller, my partner in all things FAME, posted a link to the first segment of Eric Smith‘s “podiobook” – a podcasted audiobook version of his forthcoming novel Textual Healing with Britt contributing a special voice-acting appearance.
Eric Smith was one of those people that everyone I know knew, but I did not. Still, I occasionally followed his adventures on Twitter, which is what one does these days when you don’t know someone everyone else knows and you want to know why they all knew him already.
It turns out they mostly know him from running Geekadelphia, editing uwishunu, and working for Quirk Books (of Pride and Predjudice and Zombies fame). Eric’s also a professor and a music photographer who spent time touring with a number of bands.
I knew about a lot of those things separately, but didn’t know Eric connected them. I was intrigued – by Eric, by the idea of the advance podiobook, by Britt’s appearance in it, and by hearing Eric’s voice read his work – so I listened. And in the span of about an hour of my on-and-off listening to the podcast, a song popped out…
(watch the video on Facebook, where I sometimes demo sneak peeks of new tunes before releasing them anywhere else)
…so, doing what any DIY songwriter would do after midnight having just moments ago written a new song for a book by someone he knew only through his extended circle of friends, I recorded my first run-through, posted it to my Facebook page at two in the morning, and tagged Eric in it – off-handedly suggesting it was the first of a number of songs I’d write for his novel.
That resulted in Eric commenting “♥!” about eight hours later, which in turn lead to an email exchanges with the extremely genial Mr. Smith, who now I suppose I finally know directly instead of just knowing of via the knowledge of other people I know. Eric sent me an advance copy of Textual Healing and I am now committed (personally, not by contract or gentleman’s agreement or anything) to write at least four songs for the soundtrack of his book.
I just finished my second tune a few minutes ago, but this time there’ll be no insta-video. The phrases are so darn long that I’ll need to do voice exercise for a few days before I can get from breath mark to breath mark on the verses.
I’m happy to finally know who Eric is, and to have his passion project inspire some passion mirrored in me. Head to his blog, Eric Smith Rocks, to catch up on the first few episodes of the podiobook, and keep your eyes and ears open here for more tunes.
PS: About ten minutes after I posted this I wrote another song. Three down! One to go!
bondage is progress
Oh, the things I'll do for my art.
Last night E tied me to a chair in the middle of our freshly painted dining room so I could research my novel.
You see, last night I was blasting out words at an amazing pace on the El when it came time for my protagonist to be cuffed to a chair.
Despite many contortions on the El, I couldn’t figure out how far he could stretch, or if he could stand up and walk. The lack of detail was killing me. My nonstop flow of words dried to a trickle.
I hurried down our street, rereading what I had written on my laptop, only twice stumbling off of the sidewalk and into hedges. I unlocked our front door, flung it open, and announced to E:
Honey, I need to you to tie me to a folding chair and take pictures of it!
**
I’ve always been afraid that I don’t know enough to be an author.
I’m obsessive about details. I always have been. As a kid I would compare stacks GI Joe file cards to make sure their stories were consistent.
Oh the irony: Gina the chemist is writing a book and a blog, and Peter the communicator is learning chemistry.
I love getting lost in the fictional histories other authors have created, but I never thought I could create one of my own. I mean, have you watched the special features on the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition DVD? Tolkien wrote entire history books about his fictional world. He wrote a frickin’ language!
Me? I’m not well-traveled. I don’t know much about history. I haven’t taken science class since the 90s. I don’t know how anything works or how to take it apart or how to turn it into a bomb. I don’t even know the right way to describe a lot of things, like architecture or clothes.
That’s why I like writing songs. Songs have their own internal logic. Sure, they might reference something in the real world, but only for a word or two.
We learned that I would have to make an excuse for the character's feet not to be secured, because I was a deadly weapon with the folding chair tied to me.
Late in September Gina challenged me to do National Novel Writing Month. I didn’t say yes right away. I spent all of October outlining my story and sketching the details of my characters. If I was going to join I wanted a mythology of my own.
While I outlined I hit a lot of gaps in my knowledge, but I didn’t let them stop me. I’m smart. I can acquire knowledge. Better to start out with ideas.
A few of my characters do things that involve some pretty intense knowledge of chemistry and physics. In my outline I glossed over the details, but now it’s time to write about them. I can’t always be asking Gina about every little detail, so to get started I bought Chemistry for Dummies.
And, last night I needed to find out how hard a character could swing a folding chair he was flexicuffed to in order to knock out another character, so I had E tie me up and take photographs of it.
Why? Because that’s what an author does.
But I Regress, pt. 7
60s X-Men
Last time I decided to catch up on X-Men comic books only to discover that nowhere on the entire internet existed a definitive guide to collecting X-Men as trade paperbacks.
I decided to write it myself.
I am not exaggerating when I say the undertaking was harder than my Senior Project in college. No reference books, just sparse ISBN numbers and internet hearsay.
Finding a starting point was like grabbing a toe-hold in quicksand – there have been dozens of X-Men titles accounting for thousands of issues, and my intimate knowledge of them ended almost fifteen years ago.
80s X-Men
I started chipping away every night. First I plotted out Uncanny X-Men from issue #1 to present, puzzling together the different means of buying it in book form. Black and white Essentials, premium color Masterworks, dozens of crossover collections, and more regular volumes of the post-2000 books (but, mostly out of print!)
Then I moved to adjectiveless X-Men. Excalibur. X-Factor. X-Force. Oh god, was I really going to try to summarize Wolverine?
As I made progress on my guide I started to get excited about stories I had missed out on. How did Wolverine get his adamantium back? How did Emma Frost wind up as Cyclop’s lover? Where had Rogue been all this time, and how come she can touch people now? Who were X-23 and Daken?
90s X-Men
I had resolved to E that I would get something delivered to the new house every day for the first few weeks we lived there – even if it was something small. I just wanted to relish living somewhere where I could get packages delivered for the first time in my life.
So I hatched a plan. A schedule. Through assembling my guide I had my own library of links to all of the TPBs ever printed with the word X-Men on them. Not only that, but now I knew where on the internet they were the cheapest. I could get through entire runs in book form for under $1.65 an issue … sometimes way under.
Two hundred dollar would buy me into years of missed comics continuity. A few months hiatus from going out to lunch and buying new CDs could catch me up on over a decade of X-Men.
00s X-Men
Well, as we learned from my dalliance with City of Heroes, restraint has never been my strong suit. Three months after my first trio of books were delivered to my new doorstep I have every X-TPB – both in and out of print, from 1996 forward, with barely an exception.
Four months into our new house and I’ve gone from responsible adult all the way back to my teenage levels of geeky obsession. MikeyIl even convinced me to buy Starcraft II, but it was boring – I hate spending time in someone else’s sandbox.
The comics are different than both City of Heroes and Starcraft. I’m not writing fan-fic or putting time into someone else’s universe. I got something I love – the world of comic book continuity – and I found an outlet for it I can own – my best-on-the-net guide to collecting X-Men comic books as trade paperbacks.
How do I know it’s the best on the net? Because I used it to buy every damn book there is, will be, or was before, and no one else’s guide helped me do that.
That’s the difference between high school geek me and present day regression to geekdom: with my own house and CK, now I have my own set of sandboxes to play in.
I like it this way.
something like life
I’ve got this elaborate editorial calendar telling me what to write and when to post, but if I just stick to the calendar that sucks a bit of the me out of the blog, eh?
Life continues to be a non-stop whirlwind of communications and music, which is exactly what I’ve always wanted it to be, so yay for the continued status quo! When not in actual rehearals I’m writing songs (for the soundtrack to Eric Smith’s novel), a novel (for NaNoWriMo), and a blog (just because, and for NaBloPoMo).
As it happens,Gina is also writing songs (at the moment, as a soundtrack to Boardwalk Empire), a novel (she’s the one who convinced me to do NaBloPoMo), and a blog (she is not the only one of us who exerts peer pressure).
I think this is pretty much what I imagined our adulthood would be like as a seventeen year-old, except for I’m married to someone way hotter than I imagined and Gina is engaged to a lawyer.
Speaking of: Elise, who has the same hectic rehearsal schedule as me but less of the writing, has starting painting the house in approved non-vomitorious colors. I think it’s very “nice” that she’s painting, which is to say I think painting (and, in general, decorating) is something people with too much money and spare time do to occupy themselves.
The only photographic evidence of us as Lucas and Corey from Empire Records, courtesy of our friend Tina, who was such a perfect Rachel Berry that it was a little disturbing. Note E's gold star, awarded from Rachel.
(Lest you think I am debuting this sideways insult of my wife here on the blog, she’s been hearing it for years. I’d wager she’d be happy if I just blogged about it and stopped whining about it in the house.)
As someone with neither money nor spare time, the whole process is perplexing to me. She had to use special gray primer on our dining room walls, which took an entire day to paint on and when she was done I was like, “Awesome, it’s gray, can we leave it like that?” and she had to explain that it was just the primer.
I’m all about gray. I think grays are totally exempt from every being vomit-inducing. Now the dining room is cranberry. I hear that’s supposed to aid in digestion, so I stood in it while I was eating raviolis before rehearsal last night. I ate them pretty quickly, but I think that’s just because I hadn’t eaten anything for about 22 hours. I’m not sure about the digestion angle.
The one downside to my constant flurry of words and sounds is it doesn’t leave a lot of time to interact with people I’m not writing or rehearsing with (or for taking things out of the dryer, but that’s another story). I think my next availability for a dinner with friends might be in December.
A snapshot of the last ten days of my life: Saw three concerts (one in New York), rehearsed three times, started three new songs for my soundtrack to Eric Smith’s book, tried to find a way to post three times daily here at CK (still working on that), wrote almost 7,000 words for my NaNoWriMo novel, and dressed as Lucas from Empire Records for a Halloween party.
Oh, and occasionally ate, slept, and watched 30 Rock.
If you did more than that in your last ten days then I want to know what else you could have possibly fit in and kind of vitamins you are taking.
Please note: methamphetamines do not count as “vitamins.”