November 8th, 2008 keef Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
From : Nate Unique
Sent: 10:27 AM
Happy birthday!!!!!!!!!!! Go have a champagne day!
They don’t have champagne up here.
[Picture]
OMG that is lovely!! I am so jealous
November 1st, 2008 keef Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
From here: Golden Age Comic Book Stories
October 24th, 2008 keef Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Tonight, Barb and I ordered a pizza from an unnamed not-very-good pizza place that we order from sometimes because it reminds us of ordering crummy cheap pizza from similar places in Iowa City (like Gumby’s, or Papa John’s, or Home Team) when we were younger people. It’s just something we do sometimes. You’ve not had my life. Don’t judge me.
But so anyway I drove down to the restaurant in my pajama pants (as it is finally, finally, finally getting cold) to pick up the aforementioned pizza. I walked in the door and all the people behind the counter were on the phone: a middle-aged hispanic guy, a middle-aged white lady, and a rebellious teenager, who was the one standing at the counter. So I grabbed a two-liter of diet soda and walked up to the counter, where the teenager was like “hold on a second” and kept taking the order of the person at the other end.
From the way she was speaking, I could tell that she was the one I had spoken with on the phone. She was very sort of mushmouthed– very hard to understand when she was repeating my order back to me, starting the phone with a very long-winded offer for a kind of pizza that I did not in fact want, and generally very clearly going through the motions without really caring. Which is what you do if you have a lower-tier food service job. No problem there.
But I suddenly felt a wave of affection for this girl. She looked so awkward and uncomfortable there in her outfit and little cap. She had a bunch of zits and thick glasses and looked like the uniform they gave her was at least one size too small. She had a lip ring (at least a 10 gauge) right through the center of her lower lip (which I believe the kids these days call a labret piercing) and the captive bead was sitting right in the middle of her bottom lip. As she babbled into the phone I could see saliva building up at the corner of her mouth and the braces on her teeth. She kept making awkward and tentative eye contact.
At last she was done taking the order and turned to me and apologized for the delay. I gave her my name and she went to get my pizza. As she turned round, I could see that her hair had been dyed black from red, and I could see the roots were coming out because she had her hair tucked up in a ponytail through the back of the cap. She brought back the pizza and handed it to me and swiped my credit card. She asked me how I was and we made polite smalltalk while my credit card was being approved, and in the middle of a sentence as she was talking an enormous spit bubble grew and then burst forth from her open mouth.
I watched as it grew, and at the moment that it popped and she had to sort of slurp the spit back into her mouth, her eyes flashed with this extreme embarrassment and burning teenage shame and I felt this tremendous outpouring of “embarrassment-on-her-behalf” and “remembrances-of-painful-teenage-awkwardness” and other forms of empathy. So to relieve the awkwardness I signed and bolted as fast as I could.
Man, it was amazing. For me, she just embodied all that was awful about being a teenager, just that feeling that you’re loathed and awkward and don’t belong and that feeling of being utterly uncomfortable in your own skin. The fact of being unable to control even the simplest of bodily functions, which betray you and make you look ridiculous at every available opportunity.
I’m sure a lot of this is me projecting as I remember my own awkward and awful teenagerhood.
But really. Totally awesome. I’m definitely going to have to reshape one of the characters in my book after running into that.
October 17th, 2008 keef Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
I hit a pretty major milestone today. I passed fifty thousand words of my new novel.
For some reason– maybe I should blame NaNoWriMo– I’ve always thought of 50k as the threshold at which a piece of writing becomes a novel, becomes something serious and self-contained and suddenly part of a realm of fiction that has to be regarded with a more critical eye than anything shorter than that length. It’s totally BS, of course. But for some reason it’s always existed as a sort of mental stumbling block for me. The previous novels I’ve tried to write, I always sputtered out before this point. The one before this one, I got really close– 47 or 48k, something like that, and then I sputtered out and just couldn’t go any further with it.
And now here I am, maybe two-thirds of the way through a first draft, and I honestly think I can get through the whole shebang, and then, heck, who knows, I might re-draft it or revise it somehow. And then, by gosh and bagorrah, maybe I’ll print up a copy to go on my shelf. Or holy jeez, maybe I’ll even send it to someone to consider for publication.
The future is wide open.
And I’m almost thirty, so the time is ripe.
I’m aiming to finish the first draft of this sucker by the end of the year. Who knows how realistic that is. Just tryin’ here. Working title: Maxwell’s Identities.
