Saturday, March 14, 2009

Erring on the Side of Caution

About five years ago, when I first started this blog, my intention was to bang out about five hundred pages of quasi-me stuff/ and quasi fiction. I was seriosuly giving thought to writing my second novel.

My first was a graduate school project, and I did sell one short story from it--but that was a long time ago. Actualy the short story came first and inspired me to add on another 200 pages. I never submitted it. I probably tossed it long ago.

Anyway, I was going to try to give it a go again. A novel.

I had read once in a Granta magazine interview that when asked about his process of writing a novel, Philip Roth said that he banged out about five hundred pages without stopping to edit, revise, look back or give much thought to where he was going with plot, setting, characters, all that jazz.

Then after getting his five hundred or so pages, he'd retreat to some quiet place with a yellow highlighter and scrutinize what he'd written for sentences that he thought had a breath of life in them.

He told the interviewer, that if he was lucky to find maybe twenty or thirty pages worth of sentences that would point him in the direction of his next novel.

That was the original inspiration for blogging. Bang out a lot of pages--don't look back.

I now have well over 500 single spaced pages, about 350,000 words, and about 2 million characters with spaces.


Time to grab the yellow highlighter and find a quiet place.

Why now?

Precedent.

About five years ago, give or take, I went to Kuwait to accept a position that had opened up mid-semester because someone had resigned. It was an emergency fill-in position at a place called "The Gulf University of Science and Technology", or "GUST", with the promise that "If you help us out and fly over here to take the job, we'll offer you a ticket, housing and at the end of the term, a two-year contract."

I flew there. While waiting to meet with some people in personnel, I found a free computer in their library, and toodled around with a poem called "Gust". Hammered it out in about fifteen minutes, then posted it. I may still have it somewhere in this blog where I've now batched downloaded every past post and saved them in Word.

I remember a line in the poem about "on a gust of decision and indecision. . ."

A few weeks later, someone at work found the blog, probably someone Googling for dirt, found the poem, and forwarded to management. Management thought I was slamming them and their fine tertiary institute if higher learning. They especially zeroed in on the "decision and indecision" part.

I tried to convince them it was a poem, more about me, about other ex-pat ESL teachers, thisESL teaching business and travelling, all that, but they weren't buying it.


I was not offered a two-year contract based on that poem and and found myself stranded in Kuwait working for the next year or so in a business English institute waiting for a more permanent position elsewhere. That was a rough year.

It has recently come to my attention that co-workers have found the blog, and though the comments about the writing have been complimetary, I ain't taken any chances.

So, this is my first post of a revised Past Imperfect.

Today, I took my car to the service station and had it washed.
Yesterday, I homed four cats.
I'm going to eat an apple now.
Tonight I will have green tea at sunset

I have borrowed from a friend the complete first season of the Simpsons and plan to watch it with commentary.

To celebrate the rebirth of this blog--I'm going with Arial font for a fresher look. I may even redesign the lay-out. The coffee stains are stale.

5 Comments:

Blogger Sling said...

YAY!..I get to be the first to comment on the new incarnation!
You were probably hoping for a better class of stalker..

5:41 AM  
Blogger Mimi's Pa said...

Welcome Mr. Sling to the new "The Past Imperfect"--a blog that will not include references to Zionism either pro or con, any hint that I might be disparaging to falafels, free non-marital intimacy, intimacy arranged through a pecuniary process, intimacy with Sundanese goats (unless tribal elders demand a shotgun wedding between capricorn and capricorn violator), political discourse
(without referring to the US as the Great Satan), religious discourse, racial discourse, hand holding in public (unless it's between Pakistani construction workers, kissing in public (unless it is two men greeting each other with three pecks on the cheeks), history that refers to Greco-European advances in science, medicine and mathematics (all lies), turn-of-the-century Yiddish theater, Woody Allen movies, Miami, long flowing females tresses, sandals, dogs, porcine references of any kind, female breasts, Bangkok nights, Russian connubial surrogates, 9/11 (unless the whole operation was planned top to toe and carried out by the CIA), and any hint of slander or cultural or political hegemony east of the Suez Canal, west of the Himalayas.

By the way, can you find a photo of yourself with a shirt or take a black felt tip pen and censor those naked shoulders lest two men in sunglasses wearing berets come knocking on my door at 3 AM wanting to "just talk" down at the station where I may never be heard from again?

8:23 AM  
Blogger Sling said...

..and here I thought you were gonna get mad at me for smoking in public.

3:10 AM  
Blogger booda baby said...

It's some kind of irony that, finally, there's a mechanism that allows a little loose and uninhibited commentary and the world can't help but do its censoring. And censuring. Without even trying because it's just not nice to stir up any kind of trouble with anything like honesty.

I really like being a propagandist. Is that a word? Is that a title?

I'd like to see some novel excerpts.

6:46 AM  
Blogger Mimi's Pa said...

Booda--score on point for living in a country where I my life is reduced to Wal Mart, Home Depot Outback Steak Houses, and paying taxes--at least you can break silences with whatever words and ideas come to mind, and keep your job. Well, in most cases, anyway. If not Thailand, we're thinking maybe Oregon or Wash State. I COULD live there I suppose.

Novel. I can do sentences. I can do paragraphs. But if I knew how to create suspense and sustain it for three hundred pages, I wouldn't spend so much time on Facebook.

Actually, something you said about Twitter and the like struck a chord--the thing you said about telling one's story before it's even been written, or something to that effect. I don't, praise d lawd, Twitter.

7:33 AM  

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