Archive for December, 2008
Queries And Monies
Hmm…
After a couple of days of shopping and hanging out with friends and family, I suppose it’s time to figure out the query letter, a process that will likely take a long, long time. Especially since it’s my first.
I have a vague idea of what I need to do, but the fact is that until you seriously consider it, a synopsis or summary of your book seems like the child’s play. And when you finally do consider it, it seems to fling you into a state of huh?. It feels as if I have no idea how to describe The River in three or four sentences in an engaging manner. It certainly appears to be the most difficult part of this (for now).
Speaking of which, I might soon be talking more about The River over here.
In the meantime, there has been a complete lack of inspiration and my original intent to do a couple of short pieces (or so) will probably take longer than expected. Not that there’s any hurry, since those are really just a kind of cool-down sequence that I hope will keep me writing and writing something else for a change.
Spending
I bought… an Arctic Monkeys DVD, The Dark Knight on Bluray, a Rilakkuma, and Travel by Yuichi Yokoyama yesterday. I suppose this almost puts my holiday spending at an end, save for a couple of presents and maybe one or two small indulgences along the way. It’s been a good shopping holiday, to be honest, although it has also left me with about 20 books waiting in line.
Doctor Who Merch
Hey, they’re making the journal of the Doctor from the Family of Blood two-parter in Season 3! [via Adventures Through Time And Space] I wonder if I can get it here, or if I’ll have to place some sort of order… It even comes with a Sonic Screwdriver!
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Children Of The Dusk
Third Draft
Yesterday, I finished work on the third draft and I’ve since decided that it’s probably as close to the final draft as I’ll ever get it, and therefore I might as well start treating this as my manuscript for submission. In other words, this will presumably be it for The River, with some proofing and minor corrections ahead. (Oh, and as I am in the habit of naming my drafts, this one is called “Children Of The Dusk”.)
Look Out Below
Wait, so what does this mean? I’ll have to figure out how this thing works, I guess. I’ve been able to find quite a bit of information about the industry worldwide, but that information probably isn’t going to help me too much with the local market. I have a feeling that things work a bit differently here given the size of the industry and the state of literature in general in these parts. So that first thing is research.
I’m not sure quite where to start. I have a couple of leads, a couple of ideas, but they’re not of the optimistic sort. I probably need to look for a bit of help.
I’ll also be working on my query letter, since that will certainly have to figure in sooner or later.
I also see myself doing a short piece or two just to take my mind off of this for the time being.
And that will probably be it. It sounds so simple. What could possibly go wrong?
…Sigh.
Also Finished
I finished Half-Life 2 yesterday, and the ending isn’t as bad as I remembered it. I don’t know why I had this negative impression of it. Now it seems pretty okay.
In any case, really enjoyed myself with it. It reminded me of how much crap I’ve been putting up with some of the recent (and much lauded) games. I think the only game that hasn’t thrown me that kind of nonsense in recent times is MGS4, which I really love too.
Gargh, stop feeding me useless, un-fun games, game companies! I don’t want to date all my friends to go bowling to raise their percentage admiration or drive around on barren moon surfaces.
Loot
I went to the bookstore on Saturday and got myself:
- Boxwood, by Camilo José Cela
- José Saramago’s Blindness
- Basho: The Complete Haiku, by Matsuo Bashō (duh)
- Anne Higonnet’s Lewis Carroll
- The Alcoholic, Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel
Because I could choose my Christmas present, I also got myself Sebastião Salgado’s beautiful Africa.
Some notes:
The Bashō book is very, very pretty, and I’m very happy that I bought it. The Lewis Carroll book is a photography book featuring photos that he took. It’s a very elegant book by Phaidon and I’m glad to add it to my library. And I had never before heard of The Alcoholic, but on the morning before I went, I read Charles D’Ambrosio recommending it and couldn’t resist.
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Hazards Of Love
News of the new Decemberists album. [via The Decemberists]
We Decemberists are pleased to announce that our forthcoming LP, The Hazards of Love, is, in the parlance of the industry, “in the can[2]“. Four tumultuous months passed in the creation of the record, during which a new president was selected[3], 3 people associated with the band were married[4], birthdays too numerous to recount were celebrated and many tasty asada tacos from two of the vast array of taco trucks in the greater Portland east-side were consumed. And what do we have to show for it? Or at least that we can now reveal to you? A release date and a tracklist! As follows:
Release Date: March 24th[5] in the U.S. and March 23th[6] in the UK.[7]
Tracklist:
1. Prelude
2. The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won’t Wrestle the Thistles Undone)
3. A Bower Scene
4. Won’t Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)
5. The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)
6. The Queen’s Approach
7. Isn’t it a Lovely Night?
8. The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid
9. An Interlude
10. The Rake’s Song
11. The Abduction of Margaret
12. The Queen’s Rebuke / The Crossing
13. Annan Water
14. Margaret in Captivity
15. The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)
16. The Wanting Comes in Waves (Reprise)
17. The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned)
Can’t wait.
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Working Methods
Almost There
I’m pretty sure I’ll be up to my third draft soon, and then I’ll have to figure out how things work around here (meaning the local publishing industry). I say that because this draft appears to be good enough to see the light of day. I probably won’t be worrying about getting a big deal or anything, especially since this is a book about Singapore and I suppose we’ll start here.
Long Days
And this is how I’ve been working: I wake up at about 9am, check some news, head to the shower, get breakfast, and maybe play a bit of Half-Life 2. By the time I stop, it’s 11am and I get cracking. I work all the way up to lunch, which is a 15-minute break or so, and then I’m back again at it until a little past 5. Then I have some tea, shower again, and it’ll probably be about 6pm. Depending on my mood, I’ll either get back to work or I’ll play a up to dinner, which is just before 8pm. I start work again at 9pm, and work up to 1am. Then I hit the sheets and it’s the same routine the next day.
It’s actually quite similar to how I work when I’m writing, except maybe my hours are slightly shorter and my breaks slightly longer.
2.7!
Much thanks to the Web Walrus for pushing this up to 2.7.
Interesting
I found this The Year In Reading article on B&N fairly interesting. [via Barnes & Noble]
Photograph Of Jesus
Also, this video tells of the rather silly photograph requests received by the Hulton Archive.
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So the Songbird sings.
City 17
I have reinstalled Half-Life 2 to relive some of my best memories. Nothing quite like feeling like the saviour of the world against a remarkably effective rendition of a dystopian police force while wearing the good old HEV suit.
No More, I Swear!
I got quite frustrated with iTunes yesterday. I’ve basically been putting up with all the tiny faults because it was convenient in a way since it went with my iPod. You might know of course that I’ve been having issues. Well, recently, it’s become a bit more erratic, and after the recent update, I lost complete albums. It appears that they were completely corrupted because I couldn’t play the files in other media players either. (Thankfully they were albums that I had backed up and it was convenient to restore them. I didn’t have to dig out CDs or anything like that.)
There have a few other varieties of splicing corruption, but I’m too lazy to talk about it here.
Yesterday, a random error sprang up and kept springing up and refused to go away. I read a bit about the problem after a Google, but realised that a line had been crossed.
So I decided to give Songbird a spin and quickly went to download it. [via Songbird] So far it seems reasonably functional, with a few problems here and there. It lacks a couple of things I feel like I should see but don’t, although that must surely be attributed to its youth. After spending an hour or two with it, though, I’m reasonably happy. It runs faster (of course), is more well-organised, and hopefully won’t be giving me any of the headaches of iTunes.
A few quibbles, though: I noticed first of all that some songs (that play completely okay in other media players) end up with some awful distortion. I also was unable to navigate within a few tracks; I tried jumping some twenty seconds and the whole song became silence. There were rare occasions of skipping and noise, and it wasn’t as if I was doing anything memory-intensive. And it starts up slow sometimes, but that’ll probably be a memory issue on my computer’s part.
I haven’t done much else but play a few tracks, so I can’t comment much. I’ll be trying to load up my iPod with it soon, and will mess around with the library management too.
In any case, we’ll see where this goes. I’m sure I’ve had enough of iTunes, though, and am lucky that I’m using the non-Touch iPod, which is syncable in Songbird.
Kuwata!
Keisuke Kuwata performing Clapton’s Change The World. [via YouTube]
Lists
2666 has been named as TIME‘s book of the year. [via TIME]
Just so you don’t have to click through the whole fiction list…
- 2666, Roberto Bolaño
- Lush Life, Richard Price
- American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld
- Anathem, Neal Stephenson
- Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
- Personal Days, Ed Park (which has a cute cover that I thought was difficult to read)
- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
- When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson
- The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
- The Widows Of Eastwick, John Updike
I’ll definitely be picking up 2666, and if I can fit it in to my tiny budget, The Graveyard Book.
I was also a bit surprised not to see The Dark Knight on the movies list considering the hype and the fact that the film was actually relatively competent. It was good to see Synecdoche, New York at No. 2 since I intend to watch that as soon as I can get my hands on it.
On another note, 30Rock and The Colbert Report both made the list for TV Episodes (at 8 and 7 respectively). Elsewhere, Vampire Weekend made it to the Top Albums list at 5.
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Nausea
Holiday Headaches
And without any fireworks or party, the holidays have begun. It’s a strange sensation because I really feel like I’m still at work and that there really are no holidays at all. It doesn’t at all feel like I should be relieved the semester is over, which is an odd thing when I stop to think about it. I’ve been writing, mostly, shunning friends away, talking to few people and playing very little. It all feels a little terrible, like I’m doing it wrong.
The rhythm I’ve started to settle into is a sort of 10- or 12-hour day. I begin work at about 11am, after some breakfast and RSS feed checking, and I work all the way up to about 1am. There are interruptions in between, of course, such as lunch, dinner, a shower, tea, checking the mail, feeding of cats, et cetera, but I think it totals about 10 hours a day or more.
The writing is fine, really. I can sort of see light at the end of the tunnel, with a sense that the third draft might be at least something respectable. Nonetheless, I feel a bit nauseous whenever I power on my work computer to see the same old manuscript for the ten billionth time. I’m sure many writing people get that sort of feeling during the monsoon seasons. It’s just another part of recognising that all of this is work, I guess.
I had a headache yesterday, I think mostly because I didn’t have enough sleep. I didn’t follow this routine and instead slept a tiny bit, played some FIFA, read some, watched Blade Runner and loafed around a little. I just couldn’t convince myself that the holidays had arrived and was left feeling as if I had an itch to scratch. I wanted to get back to work.
Work makes me feel sick, but I can’t wait to get back to it… This might prove somewhat tricky.
New Derek Trucks Band Album
Already Free will be available next month. [via Where's Eric!]
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