February Ray Update

My Stuart Smalley affirmations seem to have garnered some results, although not necessarily the ones I might have anticipated. For one thing, I'm now working three days a week back at my old job at Bridger Bowl, working at Jimmy B's Bar and Grill. And it's been great — it was like coming home all over again. I had forgotten how much working at a place like that — similar to Murphy's Irish Pub, where I worked in Sonoma — was integral not only as a job, but to my social life. Plus, free skiing!

I was a bit concerned that working at Bridger would distract me from pursuing my writing career, but so far I feel like I'm doing really well with both. The summer may pose a bigger question, when I have to decide if I should work back at Grand Teton. That place is like paradise to me, but I'd end up having to start my writing career pretty much from scratch again when I'd return to Bozeman.

In other news, the rail bike project is moving along like a coal train over Homestake Pass. Slow. It's been really warm lately so I should take advantage of it in our unheated garage, where the workshop is. I think I need old school skateboard wheels, instead of the ones I got for free from World Boards. I may have to go on eBay (scary!). Hopefully I'll be done by the time the snow melts.

And doggone it, people like me!

In regards to this morning's post (see below), I've decided to take the Stuart Smalley approach. Imagine me pulling up a mirror and saying:

"I want to be a professional freelance writer. I want to do this in Bozeman, Montana. I want to cover people and events I myself find interesting. I want to write for magazines and newspapers, based in print or on the Internet, that have an appreciation and respect for my talent, and that challenge me in ways that I find constructive. I want to be paid well for my efforts."

Okay, that was weird. It better work.

Sometimes I'm just not in the mood

Yesterday, and even talking to people at the brunch party today, I felt my freelance career was going fairly well - slowly but steadily I've been making progress. But every now and then I'm hit with this sense that I'm not cut out for this business and I'll never make it because it's just too hard. I feel like if I let go of the struggle for one moment the whole thing will fall apart... and sometimes I'm not in the mood to struggle. Sometimes I just want someone to say, "This is your assignment, go do it and we'll pay you."

I think it was the winter issue of Outside Bozeman that set me off. I have an article on Nima Sherpa scheduled for the spring issue, but nothing in this one. I had contacted them about writing something for the winter article a while back, but at the time I really didn't have any ideas of my own, and they had enough queries to not be interested in thinking up something for me, so I ended up with nothing. Now the issue comes out, and its full of writers with good ideas and good articles, as well as interviews with several successful Bozeman-area outdoors writers. And I just felt like all those people are better than me. They're motivated, they work hard, they have good ideas which they pursue.

Of course, I'm like that some of the time. I'm about halfway done with my Everglades article, and I don't even have a place to put it. I kind of think that sometimes we have to come to the breaking point before things start to fall into place. That's how it was for me with the Sonoma Valley Sun, when I first started freelancing for them -- I had been working at Murphy's, just filling in, and there was barely any work at all in the winter. I went to the Sun more or less out of desperation, and that ended up working out so well. I could only wonder why I waited so long.

There is an element of lonliness to this life that's probably the hardest part for anyone... but it may part of why I'm drawn to it. And I don't think I'm that different from other writers in this regard. Human interaction is foreign and exciting and fraught with danger. I'm only comfortable with people I'm most comfortable with -- but even that could be a total stranger. God, it's like I'm from another planet or something. Despite the fear, I crave it. People. I must have met tens of thousands of people, waiting tables in so many restaurants, going up cold to total strangers... And interviewing them's no different. I call them, out of the blue, and go into their homes and ask them questions sometimes their closest friends won't even ask.

And yet, here I am, alone in the basement, convincing myself that it's my calling. Trying to embrace my contradictions, as if within them lies some kind of salvation, or at least a paycheck.

Write a novel in a month? No problem!

Damn Good Padding


At last, it's finished. "Tinker Visits the Woods," that is, or," Thoreau, I Like a Girl." All 506 chapters of it, and it only took me 30 days to write.

Yes, it's my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) novel, started on November 2nd (so actually 29 days) after I saw a mention of the competition in the Montana State University Exponent. It's not really a competition, in that there aren't really any prizes... I like to think of it as the equivalent of running a marathon for writers.

Me and 80,000 others from around were involved in this marathon, including about 130 or so from Montana. There was plenty of camaraderie in our little bunch, which included NaDruWriNi and a cut-throat battle for wordcount with Saskatchewan, in which we kicked their Canuck butts.

See, the trick to writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days is to concentrate on quantity, not quality. None of this editing nonsense, just crank out the words. Don't even look back, there'll be plenty of time for that in December. As for me, I didn't even have an outline going into this thing. All I had was the character Tinker, who made his first appearance in a story in my book "Driftwood Dan and Other Adventures." I just wanted to take Tinker and roll with him, and roll we did.

Undertaking the writing of a novel while having no idea of what the plot will be is admittedly a little strange. With Tinker, I handled this issue by making him a writer (which he was in the original story) who's writing a novel and searching for a plot. Clever, huh? That enabled me to essentially free associate the first 10,000 or so words, i.e. "I need a plot, Tinker thought"; "This sucks, not having a plot"; "I wonder how I can find a plot"; "Every other writer must have a plot by now"; etc.

The problem revealed itself when I was eventually forced to find a real plot, which ended up being something in which the character Tinker created became his antagonist, and for some reason Tinker felt compelled to have sex with a bunch of different women, some of whom only existed in his imagination. I should note that on the NaNoWriMo website they included interviews with authors who had successfully written NaNoWriMo novels in the past, who offered helpful advice on padding: when in doubt, bring in a new character, plot twist, sex scene, or have all the characters sit down to a gourmet meal. I repeatedly did all but the last one, and that's only because if I think about food when I'm writing I get hungry and the whole thing goes to hell.

So, basically, I ended up with 47,000 or so words worth of padding. And I think there's something to be said for that. It's damn good padding. Sometimes I thought the whole thing sucked and should be drop-kicked into the landfill, but when I actually got around to re-reading some of it (I separated it into 506 micro-chapters, and since finishing have made plans to name each one -- I'm up to Chapter 94 so far), I sensed that it wasn't that bad. Not good, mind you, but not bad.

I've only shown it to one person so far... but that's mainly because I'm embarrassed by all the raunchy sex scenes that ended up in there. It's amazing the things writer's block will make you do.

Does anybody want to see it? Let me know!