City Records

I love the realism that setting a story in my city allows me.  I write Inventor more or less in real-time; tonight I am putting together a long-anticipated entry for tomorrow morning and looking at the weather report.  I actually go to the farmers market where the scene is set, and the percussionist I will mention in the scene is out there all the time. Here's a YouTube video of him:

Like most people in the city, I'm in somewhat of a hurry and don't tend to notice others all that much. I love the lively ambiance the percussionist gives Saturday mornings at the Ferry Building, but I never stopped to look or listen long enough to notice that he's not actually playing the drums.

It's been awhile.  I have a part-one entry with no part two, a million Inventor entries to catch up on, a ton of research to do, weekend work and a new job to find.

I started this weblog at Melanie's suggestion, to have someplace not to write but to talk about the process of writing, and lately I've been wanting to post about things without spamming my poor Livejournal friends, who have had to put up with a number of posts lately on jobs, diet and the occasional bird.  I'm not particularly keen on anyone I know actually finding this weblog -- I'm much too good at self-censorship, and knowing that I have an audience of friends and acquaintances actually reading The Inventor would probably be enough to make me throw in the towel on the project altogether.  (For the record, I love it.  I love writing it, and losing it would be a personal tragedy.)  For that reason, I'm going to buckle down here and try to avoid posting anything too personal until it's all done and over with, and start using a pseudonym.

Anyway, about a month ago, I started on the paleo diet.  It's basically a diet of nothing but meat, fruits and vegetables, meant to approximate what our "wild" ancestors ate before the advent of agriculture.  It consists of the foods that humans evolved eating.  My doctor actually recommended it to me in 2008 and I sort of half-heartedly tried it, but without any real support, and I quickly fell off the wagon.  Giving up grains and dairy is really, really difficult.  I tried it again in February and it's week four or five or something like that, and now I'm happily eating just meat, fruits and vegetables.  My acne is gone, my digestive problems are gone, I feel a million times better and I'm slowly but steadily dropping fat and building muscle.  I eat vegetables now and I like them.  This diet is fantastic.

I say that not to evangelize but to give you a background on the sort of resources I want to share here.  One of the most difficult things for me has been eating out.  I go to Boston Market when I'm at work sometimes, because it's the only place I can get straight meat; Jamba Juice is even out of the question because its employees don't seem to understand the words "dairy-free".  But you guys, grains are everywhere, from the citric acid in your canned tomatoes (made from corn, not citrus) to the vinegar on your damn salad.  It really sucks because I like Chevy's and I like sushi and there are suddenly a whole bunch of things that are off-limits to me because I can't be sure that what I'm eating is okay, and I can't trust the employees to be able to look at a list of ingredients and know, for example, that corn is a grain.

I took this picture earlier today, with the intent of sharing my success at getting a paleo-friendly meal outside of my home.  It's an absolutely fantastic example of a paleo meal -- most of the calories come from fat and protein, and though you can't really see it, there is a significant amount of vegetable matter in the salad.  My friend made this for me at his restaurant, after I came in today citing new dietary requirements.  It's a hamburger patty with avocado and bacon on top, and a salad of mixed greens with smoked salmon, avocado, raw asparagus, cucumber, tomato and a bunch of other mixed vegetables I've forgotten.  The dressing is lemon juice and olive oil.  I just about died and went to heaven right there at the bar.

And I got it at a restaurant.

The restaurant in question, by the way, is Nona's Kitchen, at 5450 Cabrillo Highway in Pacifica.  It's something of a local hot-spot, and I highly, highly recommend it for those who live in the area..

Well, that was interesting.  I've known for a long time that Russell is going to be, if not another main character, at least the story's biggest supporting character.  I think he's more me than Protagonist is (which, by the way, I still owe that second "Writing what you know" entry; it's coming soon), but he's also his own person, and while I took years, no joke, years to develop Protagonist, Russell is kind of new.  And he's kind of unfamiliar.  And I'm a little out of my depth here.

I thought it would be fun to describe P from somebody else's point of view, but I failed to take into account that Russell wouldn't just be Russell as P knows him, but as he knows himself.  He lives in Daly City.  He's divorced.  He has a cat.  He likes mysteries.  This is really all I know about him, and that does the character a huge disservice, as he's so much more than that, but I don't know what, and until I do, he's doomed to tell his story as it relates to P.  Tough stuff.  I am thinking about taking a hiatus to figure him out, but this is kind of an important part of the story, and it took me so long to get the four big New Year's Eve posts up and written that I'm kind of behind as it is.

So P is back telling her story.  For now.  I keep saying this web serial thing is supposed to be for fun, practice and experimentation, so when I'm more comfortable with Russell, maybe I'll let him tell his story again.

I'd like to introduce Melanie Edmonds, author of Apocalypse Blog, who has just written the first guest post for The Inventor.  I did a post for her back in April or May and now she's graciously shot P off in a new direction for me, though it's not the direction you think.

On December 31st, the "Downtown" portion of the story will come to an end, and I've got a whole new chapter cooked up for the first quarter of 2010.

I've been a fairly prolific writer since childhood, and given my somewhat obsessive personality, I not only wrote, but consumed a vast amount of literature on writing, some good, some suspect, and almost none of which I actually remember.  A good friend recommended me Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird when I was twelve or thirteen, and I can't even remember what it's about; I remember reading Writing Down the Bones in my creative writing class as a senior in high school and sitting in the aisles of bookstores paging through countless books whose titles I have forgotten.  I don't know if it shaped me as a writer; at worst I suppose it inspired me to write.  Say what you will about DIY writing books; inspiration is never a bad thing.

One of the things that managed to stick with me was this bit of advice:  "Write what you know."  I remember parroting that to a fellow writer when I was fourteen.  At the time, I interpreted it as an assault on research as a whole and was rather dubious about the entire concept; it seemed to me that if one wrote only what one knew, libraries would be populated with loosely-disguised autobiographies, and little else.  It seemed like there was some bit of truth in it, though, and whenever I would try to write a character that was unlike me (and inevitably fail), I would come back to it and wonder how real authors did it.

When I grew up and developed some basic analytic skills, I realized that that's not what "Write what you know" meant at all -- and as advice, it was both infinitely valuable and a load of shit.  Right now I'm working on The Inventor, which is about a 15-year-old runaway in my fair city, a story about as far from my own childhood as I can get (although I was tempted sometimes) and one which required (and continues to require) a substantial amount of research, from police procedure to locations in San Francisco to how it feels to be sexually assaulted.  (Not great, I gather.)  None of these are things I have extensive experience with, save, perhaps, all that time I've spent in Protagonist's usual haunts.

That's not important.  That's stuff I can find out by doing my own original research or googling or asking questions online.  "Write what you know," as it turns out, is about the nuances of human expression and emotion (or at least it is for me), not about limiting yourself at all.  All the research in the world can't tell me what it's like to be a 40-year-old man, but if I write what I know -- that is, those worries, hopes and all that other girly feeling shit that makes him what he is, I come away with a story that's infinitely better than I would had I assumed that the character was beyond my scope by virtue of his sex and age.  Rather than an ironclad limitation, it's encouragement to go beyond those comfortable boundaries, in my case mid-twenties and female, and inject personal experience into unfamiliar territory.

(Part two of this post will be up in a few days.)

I never intended this to be a gigantic personal website, although I miss the days when it was me, a journal that no one read and my hopeful (and ultimately ill-advised) entrance into web design.  The idea of putting my entire life into the bento box of a domain name has its charms, but now that I'm no longer an idealistic teenager and possess a sense of, well, privacy, suddenly it seems like a bad idea to have my entire life on the internets.

Mel, of Apocalypse Blog fame, and whom I've known for years online but have never actually met, created an accompanying weblog for her story, and since I seem to be copying her in all ways except setting... well, it seemed like the thing to do.  This may evolve into a personal weblog, but for now I'll be using it for announcements, general complaining and, I hope, eventual reviews of other web serials.

Plus one of these days?  I might actually put my email address up.