Zapata's Zapateria

I started working on a novella this week. Day by day its coming, but I'm satisifed with the writing so far as a whole. Typically I struggle with my satisfaction for the opening pages throughout the whole enterprise. But, so far, I'm happy with them. I've the tendency to overwrite things, being a Faulkner fan and all, so I'm having to be real honest with myself if everything is necessary. My workshop always tells me, though, so it'll be a challenge to see how much I've learned so far.
    The story itself, called "The Servants of Xibalba", deals with my interests in supernatural horror, sword-play, Truth, suspence, and my views of pre-columbian cultures. Cannibalism and monsters abound, as do the consequences of prejudice, but so does Truth--I hope :) The ending is low-key mellow drama, but I hope that I'll handle it in such a way as to avoid being trite and uninteresting. There's something to be said about understatement, and that's how I want to end. I expanded it from a short-story I was planning to see if I could handle a longer structure--adding sub-plots and stuff like that.
    Because I'm paranoid of a faction of desperate people fool enough to steal my ideas, I'll leave the plot unsaid.  I hope to get a chapter a week done, with estimation of, oh, eight long chapters in the works.

   In other news I hope to attending the Bedford Writer's Conference where Sarah A. Hoyt will be...conferencing. o.O It'd be nice to get feedback  from a pro who has never read my work before, someone who was completely unaware of my existence until that moment. :) Because only 15 people can go, it looks promising. So, here's hoping it doesn't fill up!

I'm so deliciously close to finishing what I hope will be the final draft of this story I'm working on.  I'm iffy about the title since it was a less-liked alternative to the original title which now has nothing to do with the story. Maybe I'll just call it "Publish It, You Jerk!" It has a nice ring to it.

   I went to a Flamenco concert on Friday at a very pretty house art-museum right next to Lovefield Airport. The dancing was awesome, the tapas were good (which surprised me) and of course the music was splendid! I only claim Spanish and Mexican cultures as my heritage since I'm pretty light skinned for someone of Mexican decent. Can't trace the Spanish, other than that I don't look like an indeginous Mexican in MANY respects. All that to say it pleased me to see a flamenco ensemble that allowed me to pretend for the better part of two hours that I was connecting to my roots, and that it goes well with the story I'm writing.

A wonderful opprotunity has arisen that allows to experience life as it was before Shakespeare wrote "Who goes there?": my plumbing is shot. The house I live in, while beautifully maintained, has pipes from the days of Al Capone, and they are broken. My options are to hunt down a toilet with a door, a door to hide my shame from the world, or to give exhibitionism a try and use the one downstairs with no door. The bad thing is that the toilet downstairs, at the right angle, can expose me to the passing world outside. :/  I'll look on this ten years from now as a fond memory over a cup of tea, I'm sure.

So I ended accomplishing none of what I set out to do yesterday and instead spent an hour or so reading Raymond Carver stories from "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." When I first started reading from this book a few months ago, I was turned by the his short-story form, mainly because they were well-written stories without a discernable plot. Last night though, as I was thinking about what thepoint of his craft was, it struck me of how his characters are in terrible situations, and the stories deal with their reactions. Quite beacutifully, I might add.

  In particular was the story of how a son went to go meet his father at the aiport while he was on his way through town. They hadn't seen each other since the son's parents divorced whenhe was a child. The son is pays attention to everything around, but not his father, who is confesssing to his son the affair that he conducted for a year or so. The son kept noticing other things, a woman, coffee, etc., and never really cared about what his father had to say. As the father's relating how the husband caught him in his wife's bed, the son asked, "Did you get away?" To which his father replied, "You don't get, go you? You only know how to sell books!" The he talked about the husband broke down weeping and the wife tried to console him.

   It struck that the son's attention only caught the plot of his father's confession ("Did you get caught) when that father was talking about the consequences, the turmoil that happened ("You don't get it, do you?"). Anyways, I don't have anything profound to say about it, other than that it finally clicked what Carver wrote about, and it rocks :P 
 

Finished the first draft of a new story I'm writing. The prospect of finishing so overtook me that I hurried the last two pages a bit and sprinted to the end. It was mostly impressional/psychological stuff I blew past. Thanks to revision, I've nothing to worry about! :) I thought about not even strating the revision today,opting instead to read the "Blood of Ambrose" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." But the excitement of making things better keeps tugging at me. Argh!

   As a treat, I stopped by the world's greatest used bookstore and picked up Everyman's Library eidtions of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovch", "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and "Love in the Time of Cholera". It looked like someone abandoned ship on their library and sold their Everymans: there was also "Midnight's Children", "A House for Mr. Biswas," and a triloogy of novels by Samuel Bekett which doesn't officially have a name and "The Rabbit Novels" by John Updike, all of which I'm looking to read at some point in my life. There was also a Trollope book which I happily passed by, and "the Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps," and "American Noir: Crime Novels of the 1940's." A severe case of "Don't-buy-more-books-than-you-can-read-even-though-you-never-abide-by-this-aphorism" struck me and I let those last books pass. I hope they'll be there when I return with more money ^_^;;
 

I've made a new year's resolution to post more often. It gets awfully lonely in the silence out here :)
I found a new author (long-time dead, however) that I was hoping would be awesome. Eric Ambler is his name, and suspence is his game. And it never leaves being a game.....Honestly, I think he got better in his career. I picked up "Journey into Fear", which turned out to be more of a Journey into "start the suspence then stop it for an anything but brief artificial romantic respite that just doesn't seem to end only to pick up the suspence again once your interest has died long long ago". My impression at least. The bad thing is that he IS good at suspense, but he's terrible at keeping my interest going in the interem, almost as if he lifted the in-between matter from a Daniel Defoe novel. Those clever publishers, trying to pick up the sales on Defoe novels!

   And in the action of my genius, I bought two of his books without having read him. He seemed good! I couldn't help it. But, since I'm reading DUNE right now (an AWESOME book, by the way), I think I'll pick up "A Coffin for Dimitrios" later, which sounds like a good book from the opening page I've read, and the critics, the almighty defenders of good taste, hail it as his masterpiece.

SO!

   I've completely abandoned the novel I was writing. Well, not totally. The novel I was writing is called "Mighty Saint." Compared to another novel I've been planning out, "Cold Wind", there were many similarities that I didn't want there to be. "Cold Wind" is dear to me since there is so much emotion tied into it; nothing of my own stock, but mainly the character's emtions and turmoil he will suffer to recieve wisdom. So I dashed "Mighty Saint", kept some key plot-points, re-contextualized them, changed some traits of the character's, and started rewriting. What I'm left with is an abandoned hard-boiled novel, and what I have now is something fresher, hopefully stylistically more original.

   I realized that I can write hard lines, but not all the time. I don't have the voicing or attitude to write prose constantly tinged with bitterness. So I've to reinvent the novel to save it from giving up. As it turns out, I'm enjoying it much more, though enduring twice the labor to flesh scenes out. I think, in the story, I could be dwelling too long, I don't know. I do have to keep heart and be honest with myself when editing and reading.

   It's all fun! And I do it for free :P

I must admit, Obama is starting to warm-up to me, not because he picked Rick Warren to begin his address, but because he's trying to be inclusive of other political opinions than his party's. This doesn't mean that he's going to stay like this for the rest of his presidency, but to me it's a good start to avoid divisive politics. I'm sure the left thinks the world is ending because Obama picked a pastor (whom I really don't care for) who opposes gay rights and abortion. Oh no! Someone with a different opinion!! He opposes my alternative life-way choice! I can't take it!

   The funny thing about this is that, for years and years, you hear about how evil religion, particularly Christianity, is and how so many people died because of religion and we should do away with it just like the vegetables in a steak dinner no one wants. I don't think religion is the issue. If you just step back and take a breif glance, the same thing is happening in politics. Subsitute Democrat and Republican for Catholic and Protestant and you have the same thing over again. I think the problem is us. I think the higher-ups in the political sphere and their political devotees are just like the maniacle religious leaders back in the day....and like the ones today, too.  Both the abortionists and the anti-abortionists, the flamers and the extinguishers, they're all just as oppresive with the opinions as the religious nuts in the dark ages. In fact, the Dark Ages never left. We're still just as ignorant, hurtful, and wrong, we just have a new label on it.

   I saw a button I liked yesterday: Get your theology off my biology. It made want to make a new one: Get your gaudiness off my godliness.

So, I picked up the thread again instead of redying what I had needled out. It's been great so far. The writing's average, but I'm determined to just write it all out first, then go back and make revisions. I redifined the role of a minor character, which enabled me to change the ending to something more "shocking" for lack of a better word, added more twists to the plot (not to the point where you can't tell what's going on), and with the help of some folks I talked to, changed the plot around, too. It's a lot more noir, action-packed, and intense. I LIKE it. I like it before, just not with caps. I still need some things resolved before I can call it a tight plot. But once the story is told, I need to go in and charge the prose with electricity. That should be the hardest part.


 

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/11/18/lkl.beatie.qanda/index.html

  What's normal about a woman changing herslf into a man, getting married to a woman, getting pregnant, then going on LArry King. NOTHING ABOUT THAT IS NORMAL!! The kind of place we live in is one where people say whatever they want and everyone is forced into not questioning them. Because then you're racist. Then you're homophobic. Well, as far as I'm concerened they're Nazis.

 

I had a GREAT day writing today. I started a new novel two days ago, still in my universe, with this character I made up  that I could pour all my sacarsm into and take into the realms of hard-boiled writing. Someone asked not too long ago when I was going to write a hard-boiled since I read them so much. I said I wasn't ever going to do one since I didn't know anything about law, detective work, or police procedures. Although I wanted to write one, actually many, I just wasn't up to the task.

  Then a couple of days ago, I got the idea of using a character I had made up for a hard-boiled fantasy books that would combine samurai/wuxia type action and Hammett-esque plotting and pace and, hopefully, insight. I could use this character through many individual novels yet have an over-arching story throughout each of them since the character has a purpose other than kicking butt and hacking up demons.

   I started working on it in a firt-person point of view. One thing I'm absolutely avoiding is a PI fantasy novel (Private Investigator). The one's I've seen didn't sound good, and the one I tried to read, which got high praise, just seemed blah to me. I hammered out ten or eleven pages today in four hours (I write slow) and have a total of seventeen or eighteen pages in five chapters. I've got 3/4 of it plotted and have improvised the details so far, deatails I like :) I also wrote a treatment of the character before I started, his motivations, what he wants, why he's living the way he does. I got an idea off of Andrew Vachss, whose Burke drifts from haunt to haunt, earning his room by scaming the land-lord with some crime he caught the land-lord doing or some variation thereof. I tweaked it around a bit and went somewhere else with it. Burke is ultimately an outlaw busting kiddie-slave rings, something the author does in real life, and stopping sinister criminals. The only qualification, the way I see it, is you have to be worse than Burke to be a bad guy. I'm having trouble getting into Burke and am not sure I'll continue with the series.

  I liked the living off people idea, though, the drifting from haunt to haunt, but I didn't like he was going around stopping bad guys--that would make it PI. I think I took my character in a different direction and hopefully it's good. My guy gets tangles up in them, sometimes he doesn't want to be in it, sometimes he has to. Either way, things get violent.

So the brilliant mouth of LIterature in Sweden spoke the other day about American Literature thusly:

 
  He goes to say that America is not (or maybe cannot be) the center of Literature and has not replaced Europe as the center of literary life. 

       What he's saying is that American's write about things pertaining to their own culture to an almost exclusive nature. This means that only Americans who live in the Border Towns of Texas can read "No Country for Old Men", and the poor Europeans struggle with reading it because they just can't relate (you know, mass murder, sadism, drugs...American problems only).  Whereas I, a Mexican-American male raised in Houston, should be able to relate to a novel written about Parisian life as long as it's by a European. o_O Yes, I'm taking it to an extreme, but so is he. Not only is his statement just flat-out ignorant, stupid, and Eurocentric, it's also ignorant, stupid, and Eurocentric.  If you want, the big-shot Americans writing right now are McCarthy, Pynchon, Delilo, and Roth, along with side-kicks Easton Ellis, T.C. Boyle and some other folks I can't think of at the moment. I guess I'd be upset if I were Swedish since they only literary thing they've managed to achieve is the Nobel Prize--and even then the prize is heavily tainted in the political trends of the day and not the literary dialogue they speak of. They never once offered it to Tolstoy or Chekhov while they were alive or Joyce or Proust. Just look at the first twenty or so years and you'll think "Who?"

I've heard that you know you love something when you're willing to do it for free. Not getting paid to do it doesn't mean you're not good, it just means you haven't pursued it for long enough. At least I'd like to think that.  Anyways, I'm considering starting an on-line Literary Journal to include book reviews, literary and political essays, and other such things that I can think of. It's for fun, not profit. I'm willing to bet it might be just for me, but I think I'd like to get others involved not so much in the making of it, but in the contributions. This doesn't mean I want junk on there, though. If I go through with it, I know I will put all my efforts into crafting good book reviews and essays.

   But why would I want to this? I haven't found a web-site where people upt their serious views out on books. There's Shelfari, and I've seen some decent reviews of books on there. Then there's the New York review of books that reads more like "Oh, so you decided to pick up our superior magazine. Dally dally, chum!" and completly saps any life out of the book you're reading about with an overly political interpretation of it. It just doesn't satisfy what I want. You can find plenty of web-sites dedicated to reviewing movies, some of them even actually having a nice calibre of writing to them. But when you look for a literary review web-site, it's usually, "Oh this book was amazing, lol!" and that's the depth of it. Not only that, but sitting down to review a book for a web-zine that no one will read will spurn me to pay better attention to what I'm reading, hopefully making me a better writer. 
 
  Now I've thought about what my review would consist of. Style, plot, and execution. Under style would be poetics, syntax, and cadence. Under plot would be....what the stories about, whether it's any good, whether there's any meaning. And execution would be how well the writer did it. I think plenty of writers have great plots, but pulling it off well seemed to be, well, the struggle.

   I also want critical essays to be on there, too. I don't buy literary journals because they're usually about how gay Shakespeare was and how we can discover it in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". Woot woot! Like I care! When I read something, I get involved in the broader, hopefully more noble, aspects of the writing. I want to read about that. I want to write about that and discuss it.I want to read and write about the greater meanings in "The Sea of Fertility" tetralogy, the "Border Trilogy" and other books I'm reading. And just for fun do I want to do this. Because I like it.

     I'm just gonna dig in and do what I want. I don't think Homer composed " The Iliad" or "The Odyssey" for money.

    Now how to get people to read it is another thing. I'm not doing to good of a job with this journal :P

 

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/19/palin-nixed-from-iran-rally-2/#more-19323
 
 Reading this article and seeing the comments made remind of why I hate politics, why I choose NOT to vote, and why voting doesn't fix anything. It's not just reading these things alone, though. If you just take two steps outside your door and mention your political views, you will either have a BFF (*smooch*) or a worst enemy. Who's running the country isn't the problem, it's the country itself. That people can get so worked up over their political views and make a decision to HATE someone with such heat, passion, fervor, just because they are the opposite party  is sad. It's disgusting. And then they only surround themselves around people with likewise views. "It's wrong to hate someone because they're black," we say, "because they're girls, hispanic, etc." but it seems to be perfectly acceptable to hate someone for being a democrat or republican. Probably because the people who are preaching against sexism and racism have hatred themselves that THEY can't get over. Then they go out and infect other people with it.

  I hate, hate, hate politics. Not really. I just really really really don't like it. 

http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/news/2645/religious-texts-taken-down-after-complaints 

  So how many of us believe in freedom of speech? That's a question that everyone raises their hands to. Now how many think that a religious document calling for the slaughter of Jews should be allowed on a student web-site? How many think a university should take it down? The hands fall all of a sudden.

  So yesterday some friends and I were making jokes about everything there is and we came up with some nice political ones. 1. It seems Obama is attracting all the panhandlers with all this change he's promising to give if he's elected. 2. Knock knock. Who's there? Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin who? Exactly.
 
   The media's really annoying with their preferential treatment. Instead of striving for objectivity on all their talk shows, their picking apart the lives of anything conservative and to manipulate the minds of their viewers. I hope now McCain gets elected just to spite them. I don't mind that people in the media have left-wing political views (I have some too, you know) but it's wrong when they use their shows to get their viewers to vote just like them. That's called manipulation. Enter into a dialogue. Discuss things. Don't grill someone into the ground when they can't properly defend themselves because of the situation they're in. That's called bullying. I'm talking about the Roach Hotel known as the View. If they did it to both candiates, that would fine since it's fair. But when Obama walks on stage, everyone kneels before him and pledges life-long servitude to cleaning his boxers. This is really annoying.

Just finished submitting "Incident at River Bend Pass" to a Weird Tales, and today I will mail it out to Realms of Fantasy. I was waiting on Black Gate and Flashing Swords to open up for submissions, but I realized that there are two other potential markets for fantasy short stories, so I decided just today to send to them. I reread the story today after a month or so and can see the flaws in the writing, but that's OK. I don't feel like rewriting it, just want to get it out and see what happens. I'm expecting rejections, I hope to get an acceptance. What would be most valuable to me is feedback from the editors, or even a word of encouragement like, "No thanks, but keep us in mind" or something of that stripe. So we'll see what happens.

I had a Eureka moment the other day. I figured out how to end my sci-fi novel (one that I completely happy with), I discovered (picked, whatever) a theme for my sword-play and the possible framework to devise the plot in, and I figure out  %90 of the short story I'm writing. Yet time has added more hours to the day , so getting these things done will be tricky.

  The reads of the Sci-Fi novel have been good. People really like it, the writing, and the hints I'm dropping about the character Arturo Pena. One fellow said he could see everything happening from teh way I described. This made me blush. Unfortunately, my dark fantasy stories (the ones I REALLY care about and want to put my name to) haven't taken off so well. But to me, that only means I'm gonna have to work harder to make it good.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/22/sign.vandals.ap/index.html

 I think I still might go for it as a second or third career...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/08/22/lw.forgiveness/index.html

   So I read through this article and realized just what a crap-hole the word is without the love of God, and the world is pretty much much trying to function without the love of God. I thought about the biggest miracle that God has done so far in my life: he gave me the grace to love and forgive my father for the things he did against me as I grew up, things he was ignorant of. I want to be clear about something. I hated and despised my father my whole life up until a few years ago, about a year or so after God saved me. What did he do? Well, to be honest, I'm not gonna sit here and recount the dad's deeds and publicly shame him. I'd rather expose the blackness that was in my own heart.

   These are the things that make men evil. Yes, sin pretty much does it, but there is hatred which spits and sizzles its way into our hearts, and no amount of psychotropic drugs, Oprah books or Joel Olsteen books is going to help us forgive and love another. It takes an authentic experience with God, because God is love. He is THE judge. He judged me and confronted me one day about what I did to ruin my relationship with my dad. And, as I repented, He forgave me and healed me. The next two years I struggled with relating to my dad. I wanted to honour and obey him as the Scriptures say to do, but I was still, as I later found out in prayer, holding on to judgements that I made about my dad, perceptions that I had to let go. I didn't figure them out, God showed them to me while I prayed. He gave me the grace to tell Him about it and the grace to reject my own judgements and move on. It's amazing. And I didn't take a single pill to do it.

     Now, I'm not trashing people who have to take medicine to get through the day. I'm more so troubled that doctors who love to pump people full of them and make people dependent on them come up with crap like this article to try and convince people you CAN live without God. The fact is, is that no one can. Sure, you'll go on living, have a job, drive a car, have kids, cheat on your spouse at least once, maybe divorce, get remarried and then die of heart disease. But you certainly probably won't have a whole lot of joy. Depression is there to suffocate you, hatred is there, insecurity, and every other ill we know of, and probably new one's in the future.
   
    This doesn't mean the people of God don't suffer these things. Jonah HATED the Nenivites, the people to whom God told Jonah to preach repentance. Jonah rebels, knowing that God, out of His grace, would probably forgive the Nenivites. And He did, once a fish swallowed Jonah, threw him up after it took Jonah three days to say "Fine, I'll do it", and he preached repenteance to the Nenivites.
    There are prohpets who cursed the day they were born because of what they went through; I think Elijah, in a fit of woe, lamented that he was the only one faithful to God. God rebuked him, gently if I remeber correctly, and told him that He had set apart 5,000 who were faithful in their hearts towards Him.

   I say all this to show that the people of God go through these things, too. But the difference is that followers of Christ have been forgiven of the sins, after admitting that they lived a wrong life and finally got right with God, and have the grace of God to strengthen them in their struggles, woes, and depressions. The scriptures say that Christ was acquainted with sorrow and knew greif all too well. But He overcame and lived for others, died for the forgiveness of mankind, shed His blood that our sins might be ashed away, descended into Hell and rose again on the third day, whereupon he ascended into Heaven. All this, and I was given the grace to forgive my dad. WOOT!

   There's a reason it's not easy for the world to forgive from the heart, a forgiveness that completely wipes away every shred of bitterness and replaces it with love. It doesn't have the love of God to do it. Praise God!

So, I've conceived my first sword-play fantasy not done in the hard-boiled vein. By hard-boiled I mean in a tough, intricate plot with brutal action and all sorts of good things like that; I don't mean detectives. But now I have a novel in my head based off of chinese sword-play. I have a larger work I'm planning that tries to incorporate that genre in an epic-fatnasy setting. This is one is a one-off book, and I'm starting to like it.

  For your  enjoyment, I've linked one awesome fight scene from New Dragon Gate Inn. Fast forward to about 4:23 wait for the dull horse-back fight to end, then watch the majesty of Ching Siu-Tung, the one choreographer who pwns Yuen Woo-Ping. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBsK6w3WrOM