Fast Fiction

You may consider this your three month update on the new car.

Gas prices are going up. And so is my mileage. I’m about to top 2,000 miles on my new 2004 Toyota Prius and I’ve gotta say I’m lovin’ it.

When I first got it, the mileage was anemic. About 42 miles per gallon. Yeah, you say, “I’d be pretty damn happy with 42!” But I know I can do better. And I am. I think the car was getting broken in and I seem to have pushed through a wall and I’m at 48 mpg my current tank of gas. So, as the price of gas goes up, so does my mileage and in a sense they’re balancing out. By summer I’m hoping to get about 55 mpg.

My old Subaru used to get about 28-32 mpg. So, I’ve gone 2,000 miles so far on the new car. The old car would have consumed about 68 gallons of gas - at today’s prices that’s $140. But even with my overall lifetime for the Prius at 43 mpg, that’s only 46.5 gallons and $97 in gas. Whee!

This flower has been bugging me since we moved to this house. It’s this huge bloom and it’s obviously not something native to Los Angeles. The plant has taken over a rather remote corner of the yard, back by the fence, beyond the sprinklers.

But here it is, March and it’s in bloom again. Damn, the thing seems really happy to be here. I counted eight current blooms and about another dozen buds. The flowers are freaky huge - about the size of softball splayed open.

I had no clue what this thing was. So I just started searching the net. I did it by doing a google image search for flower bloom.

Anyway, it is a tropical plant (classified as an invasive species in Hawaii) called Solandra nitida or Cup of Gold Vine. Turns out they’re dangerously poisonous, too.

Wow, now I don’t feel so bad about my book sales. Blair’s book, Burning Down my Master’s House was released with much fanfare, being reviewed (not favorably for the most part) widely. The publisher printed 250,000 copies for the first edition. Read more here.

I, on the other hand, have sold 11 copies in my first month of publication. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disappointed by the sales. There’s been no fanfare about the release of the play, I haven’t been on any talk shows, no reviews in the Times. Yes, two more people bought the play since my last posting about this on February 25th. It seems that people who have not heard of me are more likely to buy my book than people who have heard of Jayson Blair.

In case you’re a fellow Los Angeles blogger and haven’t heard, there’s an informal gathering of LA based bloggers at 3rd and Fairfax (the Farmers Market) on Saturday, March 27th starting at 5:30 PM. Read more about it LA Blogs. I’ll be there hanging out with the other bloggers, trying to match faces to URLs, maybe I’ll shoot a few digipix.

I haven’t much to say. I’ve abandoned work on the novel right now. Not in favor of working on anything else, but just because I haven’t the stomach for it right now. It turns out that I can’t just edit it in the same way that just wrote it. It apparently takes a plan and some notion of what the hell the novel is about and attention to continuity. I like revising plays much better, I have a bunch of actors read it out loud and they tell me what needs to be fixed. I wonder if I could lure an actor to read it outloud for me ... as if it were a very, very long monologue.

No matter. The weather is beautiful and things are growing in the back yard and I’ve got my camera back out and I’m takin’ photos.

So, at least once a week (or until I run out of servers space), I’ll grace you with a photo of something I took in my back yard.

Today it’s the lone calla lily. We have one calla lily growing under the Norfolk Island pine. I’m not sure who planted it or if it was part of a bed of lilies at one time, but it was happy to get some rain this spring and graced us with a bloom.

Has anyone else seen this? Was I asleep for a week and missed this one? The Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act seeks to provide a way for Congress to reverse Supreme Court decisions with a 2/3 vote. It was introduced by Ron Lewis (R - KY). He says “This is especially true when the power to interpret the Constitution rests in the hands of activist judges anxious to find the latest ‘right’ hiding between the lines of our founding document.” [emphasis added by me]

So now we have checks and balances and then another check for good measure? As Bill Maher has said before, sometimes the majority is wrong. The courts may be out of step with the prejudices of more vocal members of our great country, but they seem to be going in the direction of what’s right. It’s all a reactionMassachusettset’s courts upholding same-gender marriage.

This fellow has the whole text of the bugger. And you can tell Mr. Lewis how you feel here (or your own Representative). The bill is also known as H.R. 3920.

Well, it seems that scientists are prepared to announce the discovery of the elusive tenth planet. Many have suspected a tenth planetoid on a large eliptical orbit that takes it well into the Kuiper belt.

But what I found surprising was this article. It says, “A 10th heavenly body has been spotted orbiting the Earth.” Now last time I checked (and I haven’t been in school for quite a few years), things that orbit the Earth are moons. Things that orbit the Sun are planets (if they’re big enough). Glad they’ve got the basics down there at The Scotsman. (UPDATE: Hah! That article disappeared and was replaced with a different one with completely different text. No mention of a correction. I’m sure someone pointed it out to them.)

Other articles of course got it right and report that it’s being called Sedna. It was spotted by the Spitzer Space Telescope and confirmed by the Hubble. I think this only demonstrates the usefulness of the Hubble and the fact that we should make every effort to upgrade it and continue to use it.

Here’s a cool article written by an academic about how life is not as stressful as some other academics would have you believe. Complain, Complain by David Lester in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He’s very even-keeled when describing the difference between the hard work that workers do and the hard work that academics do. Let’s face it, it can’t compare.

But my favorite part of it was this: I have not attended a faculty meeting since 1972. I found that I liked my colleagues much better if I did not listen to their silly comments in such meetings.

This is something I’ve suspected for a long time. We’re all much happier in the dark. We’re all much happier not looking at a big picture we have no control over. What’s the point of going to meetings where nothing happens except you are informed of everyone else’s dissatisfaction ... which you have no control over.

Yes, I belong to the Ignorance is Bliss Club. It’s a huge club, but don’t bother coming to the meetings. None of us ever show up.

It’s March and I can already see the way this year is going to go. It’s gonna be a great year for me as a writer but a sucky year for my health.

See, my play was published and I’ve had bronchitis since the week before New Year’s. The length of the disease was determined by the momentousness of the event. Then this week I find out that I’m gonna be published in two anthologies and I’VE GOT A COLD! I’m not sure if I can extend this pattern to previous years ... I did have the whole knee thing going on back in October ‘02, right when I started auditions for my production in Hollywood.

I don’t think I’m strong enough for Broadway or a runaway best-seller.

In other news, I’ll soon be blogging for blogging.la. Look for entries there from me on such topics as the greatness of craigslist.org, local cafes that welcome laptop writers, insects I find and photograph in the back yard and walking to work.

Okay, maybe triumph is a little bit big.

I just got an email from my publisher (Playscripts, inc.) and they submitted two of my monologues and one scene from The Redeemer to be included in Best Stage Scenes 2004 and Best Men’s Stage Monlogues published by Smith and Kraus. (Okay, okay, they don’t have the sexiest site.) They only picked one of the monologues, but I’d rather that than both monologues and not the scene because now I’m in TWO books! I’ll keep everyone posted on the release date.

The pay is practically non-existent, but I consider it good exposure for my work. A little billboard out there directing folks back to my plays.

My marketing plan goes something like this: an actor uses one of my monologues or scenes for audition. Maybe he gets the part, maybe not. But he stands up there and says, I’ll be doing Stewart’s monlogue from The Redeemer by Cybele May (hopefully he’ll pronounce my name correctly). The director and casting director talk, maybe a little about the play and the actor’s interpretations or maybe not. But the fact that my name has entered the consciousness of the director is good. Maybe another year goes by and he might see another monologue (I have others up on the web for actors to use) and there’s that name again. One day he’s looking through a catalogue or browsing the web and he comes across my name and he’s heard of me. Suddenly I’m validated. He’s more inclined to read my more, perhaps even like it.

Anyway, that’s what I hope.

The next thing I should do is actually write some more!

I’m not adept enough to create poetry from my spam subject lines. But I had to share this little doozy I got today:

Subject: Dip Your Toes in Lettering!
From: “Roland Husman” .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

I didn’t actually read the text of the email. I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with press-apply toenails with little sayings on them (maybe they look like those little valentine’s candy hearts).

This is just an attempt to get my ping to weblogs.com take effect. I don’t know why I care. I really don’t get much traffic, but it’d be nice if some of them just came by curiousity and perhaps stayed for the quality.

So, this is just a blatant attempt to try to get myself to show up on lablogs.com.

Yes, it’s March and if you haven’t checked the calendar, it’s National Novel Editing Month.

Of course, I can’t do anything normally. I’m not planning on editing, because that implies that I have a “draft” of my novel that’s worthy of polish. I don’t have something rough, I have something that’s raw.

I’m planning a chapter-by-chapter rewrite. I’m just sitting down with print out and retyping it. My laziness will be a guide - if I don’t feel like typing it, it’s probably not good enough to be in the novel. If I can reword it to be more concise, you can be damn sure I will.

The Exchange, for those of you who joined recently, is the story of a teen girl who was raised by her mother and grandmother. When she’s in a car accident, her mother tries to track down her biological father. She’s not able to find him, but seeks help from a postmaster in the man’s tiny rural hometown. The postmaster takes pity on the little girl in the hospital and sends her flowers, signing her father’s name. Of course the girl writes a thank you note when she recovers and they begin corresponding. For years. Finally she comes to town in search of her father and finds this postmast, who is only a few years older than her and they strike up a friendship as the postmaster seeks to thwart her efforts to actually meet her father.

It needs work and what I had originally envisioned was that the bulk of the novel would simply be the exchange of letters between the two people as the girl grew up. She would start at 13 or 14 and eventually come looking for her father about five years later. I think the pretense of letters has got to go. I don’t think there’s any compelling reason that I can draft that they wouldn’t email each other, if not from the beginning, eventually the communication would become more immediate.

So it’s a lot to do. And of course it’s the second of the month and I haven’t started yet. The rules for NaNoEdMo are much more strict (well, for me) since they require 50 hours of work. And I don’t usually take that long to write it.

I read all these things (as you’ve seen) and it gets me to wondering. They always say we’re overdue for this or that.

Take a look at Parkfield. They’re supposed to be on a 22 year cycle for major earthquakes. And here we are, 16 years after the last expected quake and we’re still waiting. Of course a watched pot never boils. The more resources we throw at studying this exceptionally regular event, the less likely it will happen. Maybe that’s the cure ...

Take a look at Gorda and Juan de Fuca subduction zone. They are supposed to get a quake (part Native American lore and part geological evidence) every 300 to 600 years. It’s been more than 600 since it last ripped from the Mendocino coast to Vancouver - a huge quake that caused the coastal wetlands near the bays and inlets to either be pushed up or sink as much as three feet. This of course caused huge deadly tsunamis that were recorded in Japan at that time about 600 years ago. 

Then Russ shows a link to a story about the new rumblings under Yellowstone. We like to think of Yellowstone as geysers and mudpots, but it’s really an ancient and dormant volcano. Turns out that supervolcano is 40,000 years overdue for an eruption. And when it goes Ö that’s gonna be a huge one. We’re talking something that’ll take out most of the park and spew debris and ash into the atmosphere that may cause the equivalent of a nuclear winter for the Eastern US. And some other reports of a worst case scenario say it would destroy every living thing in a 600 mile radius.

My personal favorite story is of Cumbre Vieja in the Canary Islands. It’s a large volcano that has a large portion of its western mount that is particularly unstable and could break away and collapse into the ocean. Why should we care? Well, it’s a mountian, and the displacement of water in such a short period of time would create a super tsunami that would race across the Atlantic Ocean and swamp all coastal cities with a wave as high as 100 feet. A 100 foot wave would swamp the entire state of Florida, which doesn’t have much above sea level. Okay, maybe we’re not overdue for it, because I don’t think this particular thing has ever happened before, but it’s a huge thing anyway. If you’re really interested in sub-oceanic landslides and the accompanying landslides, here’s some good reading for those days when you’re not fatalistic enough.

I’m not sure why I bring these up. I suppose there are plenty of times we’re told that something will happen and it does. I suppose there are lots of other times when we’re told that they’ll happen and they don’t. Of course you can never say never because there’s always more future out there.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it here before or not, but I’ve kind of been obsessed by these wild parrots I’ve been seeing in Los Angeles for the past ten years or so. It got worse when I started working in Hollywood, because there seems to be a large colony of them over in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

The story goes that these were birds imported to the US and they were in quarantine down in Long Beach. Then there was a big storm in 1992 destroyed the aviary and all the birds escaped. The resourceful little conures (parakeets) set up sucessful breeding colonies all over Los Angeles, including Hollywood, Santa Monica, Temple City and Pasadena. They’re entirely unexpected, in a way, when you’re walking down the street and you’ll look up into a palm tree and hear their cackles and see something the same color as the fronds flitting about. I’m not having much luck finding info out on the ‘net about them, except for this lovely but slightly outdated site called Parrot Project.

But this morning, not only did I get to see them much closer up than usual, I also snapped a few photos.

There were two out there today, though I only caught one of them with the camera. As far as I can tell, it’s a blue crowned conure. It’s not a bad picture of the cedar waxwing either ...