I suppose it is my fault––I have always been a hard one to figure out. I have  it firmly in mind that I am as intelligent & nuanced as a $600/hr lawyer (moreso--the innate ambition of the novelist).  Heard the one about the author and the brain surgeon?

Despite this high opinion of my skills (it is not ego, as I prick my own self worth through the editing process on a daily basis)  I am left constantly worrying about how to scrape by rent and pay  credit card bills each month. Like many a worthy writer, I face the perception that the art I engage in is as simple as flipping a burger, deserves to go unpaid. Naturally, not having enough money to take a friend on a date fails to faze me. I am not entirely without adaptive skills - each setback causes a new pathway to arise (welcome improvisatory tribal flute). 

Silver lining––I gain an  innate understanding of how systems work, in various locales. I have picked and grazed, learning much - not only in the U.S., but in supremely nuanced Japan, blissfully chaotic Philippines, yoga chilled Tulum, jerk rough Negril artsy deco Miami Beach, train whistle Raleigh, wanderweg Schweiz, smoky,  sticky Koh Tao . Refraining from asserting myself in the way people expect, I  observe. This is the tension that informs Cowachunga and the far reaching trilogy(Cohuanga-EVEN) that may emerge. Having experienced life in a variety of  settings,  I am ready to create literary works with flare and independent expression..

Oh, and the joke? A brain surgeon says to his author friend, "I was thinking of taking the summer off and writing a book." To which the author replies, "I was thinking of taking the summer off and becoming a brain surgeon." 

#endurancewriter

A couple days I wrote a post "Good Writing Is Not Automatic" and presented a Cowachunga passage I had been working on for a couple hours. I was hoping to illustrate my particular technique of writing-–typically beginning with straightforward prose, of a sort that could plausibly inhabit a blog entry.

Two days later, the same two paragraphs have, like sea monkeys, expanded and taken life of their own. Here it is, the beginning of Cowachunga  2.8 in its current iteration: 

"Kyle and Dylan scanned the darkness with quiet intensity as the Mustang slowed to inch-by-inch progression. The high beam petered out a few feet off the road, engulfed in night, the hint of moonlight over the ridge only accentuating a lack of artificial exuberance. There was a good chance they had already passed the turn-off…. Kyle squinted at a hint of car tracks veering off the road. “Shit, I think that was––” the car shot into reverse across center-ridged divider, Kyle’s hands flailing for something to hold onto. He lurched forward as brakes screeched in resounding assertion of control over an engine seeking alpha. Holding sides of the seat with rigid grip, he readied for lift off––Dylan was clearly going to reassert himself in the most reckless way possible. Instead, there was an awkward clearing of the throat. “Sorry, I’m not used to putting this thing into reverse."

Dylan eased the Mustang onto the unmarked track with painful slowness, clearly expecting the sort of disintegration that had occurred after Beatty. Instead, the car’s grip on the road held as they skirted the edges of the ridge. After a quarter mile a gentle rise, larger bumps and pockets of erosion providing a constant jitter. Dylan gradually accelerated, trusting that the road was well enough maintained to allow coherent progress. A sense of anticipation building with each successive bend. It was not simply imminent reconnection with mystic herb under a star-brushed sky. There was also the prospect of friendship unearthed at its primal foundation––the reestablishing of connections submerged over time in an staccato of jobs, girlfriends, self-inflicted deadlines.

.

"It’s as if each country looks for a form of antidote in the author it chooses." Jorge Luis Borges.

There were some interesting patterns in people's answers to a thread in the BGS Readers' Group to the question: "Is there a book or an author you like to re-read regularly?" My thoughts:

Interesting to see the way the fav books shake out. There was a single novel by Stephen King I enjoyed. It was a fantasy, not a horror... from the 1980s. LOTR I read under the covers for three days straight in junior high. Have to get the bad (CG) taste of the movies out of my mouth to conceive of ever reading them again. Never got into the Harry Potter thing - first movie was good, as I recall... LeCarre's The Honorable Schoolboy, well above any other spy novel I have attempted. Melville's Typee above the ponderous philosophical meanderings of Moby Dick (similarly Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 above Gravity's Rainbow). And Steinbeck's Cannery Row above all the others I can think of, except maybe Hemingway's short stories (A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, etc.). Hammiett's Maltese Falcon for good measure - SF noir before it got taken up by everyone from Garrison Keiller to Calvin & Hobbes, codified.

#endurancewriter

Thing - Thought. A little pen and ink thing I did, to pass the time before pear and blackberry hunting in the relic orchards of Moraga. 

Passage 
Endurance is more than a phase, 
everyone does it each day.
It is called living––

The light into darkness,
lifting a curse, 
making my choices,
inevitable, unblemished 
​last to first.

​I've seen this making the rounds. It demeans the work we writers put in. $500,000 is the correct number. #amwriting 

An interesting article on Pub Crawl by E.C. Myers, I Have Not Read Your Book (Yet), sparked some soul searching and this response:

​"I read very few books––used to devour all kinds of prose. I do write for hours each day and read a few pages of one book or another on a semi-regular basis. 

I have this theory that at some point many serious writers, who used to be subsumed in others' words, have internalized  the modes of expression and must grapple with a much more complex and unwieldy beast - the depths of their own perception. Just getting one's own experiences on paper can become a life's work.

Interesting to think back on books that I have completed this year:

Louis de Bernières' The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a wry, bawdy, faintly British accent. Found this at Focus Gallery on Grant Street in North Beach (plug: the well-read proprietor of this shop has an extensive selection of art by Ferlinghetti, Miller, Hirschman). Read in the Yucatan while completing a tribal flute residency at Hostal 3B in Playa del Carmen and camping on the beach in Tulum.  An eye-opening mapping of Latin American banana republic terrains of the past century, with magic thrown in for good measure.  I finished the book for its bravado and wealth of societal description more than anything. Many interpersonal threads between characters were left completely hanging in this saga of attrition, cruelty, black humor.

Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon

This I swear was a revelation. I picked it up at the Tradewinds Hostel in San Fran. Wasn't expecting much from a book that birthed multitudes of outworn tropes. Not only a vivid depiction of an area of the city (Tenderloin) that exists architecturally intact, with much the same spare, fog-flecked flavor to this day. Maltese Falcon presents a truly unreliable narrator, whom you at first believe is as dumb as he acts. The femme fatale angle came as a complete surprise and that is saying a lot. You can see why this book launched a thousand genre writers, but––having been conceived before the detective genre was static––there is a "paint fresh on the wall" feel. And yes, there is some controversy as to whether it was Hemingway who influenced Hammett or visa versa (Maltese Falcon came out slightly before Sun Also Rises). 

Books I did not finish:

​Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum

I was interested in this on many levels at the start. The way in which the codes contained in ancient texts (and the computer mapping of such) presaged issues paramount in our own algorithmically driven era. The sense of dissipated revolution and muted longing in the bars of late 1960s northern Italy. The problem is, Eco does not know when to stop. Like Pynchon, I begin tuning him out when he says a similar thing from too many angles (see: Inherent Vice).

​Andy Weir's The Martian 

This is a timely one, so I'll quote at length from a post I made on EnduranceWriter:

"This is a book that started strong. An unlikely premise, made realistic. Andy Weir's style was not obtrusive, which is a compliment in a way––I groaned through the author's puns and dated pop culture  references. The survival aspect of the story was simply so well detailed. I felt like I was there, learning what it would take to continue operating day-to-day in an extraterrestrial environment. 

Unfortunately, the author glossed too quickly over the aspects of the narrative I found most interesting. Namely, how one would grow things sustainably on Mars while maintaining habitable atmosphere and staying sane. Instead of bringing me from the macro to the micro aspects of existence (what is one day of single-minded work, utter monotony, on Mars really like?) Weir gave me series upon series of math, chemistry, and physics problems that needed solving. Yesterday. Or the hab was going to blow up.

The book really lost me as an engaged reader when it switched to Earth. It was not only the surface-level depiction of the astronaut's loved ones and colleagues. The "Robinson Crusoe," "Typee," "Without A Trace," "Castaway" survival-in-the-middle-of-BFE aspect that I enjoyed had been lost. The Martian's existential activities were revealed as a reality show fodder, followed eagerly by millions of earthlings through NASA satellite feeds.  I felt depersonalized as a reader, as if his struggles had been commodified - and I did not come away with any critique of this mass viewing/life in a fishbowl phenomenon. I was no longer alone with the protagonist on a desolate planet, seeking a way home.

Currently:

I am working my way slowly through Philip K. Dick's 1956 novel The World Jones Made, which (like The Martian) I picked up at the Las Vegas Hostel. It is an odd experience to read at a snail's pace a novel that was created and clearly intended to be consumed at high speed. I do see the relative brilliance of Dick's genre work. In direct contrast to Weir, he would have asked the tough questions, rather than allying the protagonist unthinkingly with the establishment. (There would also have been imminent threat from mind-reading, shape morphing aliens, but that is discussion for another day). Dick really had me with his vivid description of mutants as a freak carnival show display well before the advent of  X-men in their uniformed, superhero banality. Also, how can you not love a book with this line? "In the blue spring sky lazily flitted a few robot aerial interception mines."

A couple paragraphs from next week's Cowachunga I have been working and reworking the past 2 hours... grrr. Let's see how they evolve in the next two days. 

Kyle and Dylan scanned the side of the road with quiet intensity as the Mustang slowed to inch-by-inch progression. The high beam was engulfed in a vastness of night, tempered by a hint of moon rising over the ridge. There was a good chance they had already passed the turn off…. “Shit––I think that was it. Can you go back a few meters?” Dylan put the car into reverse and pulled alongside what was distinctly a vehicle track, though unmarked and not quite half the length of the car. He pulled in reverse across both lanes and eased the Mustang along its forward course with incremental slowness, beams still on high––clearly expecting the kind of quick disintegration that had occurred to the track after Beatty. 

The Mustang’s grip on the road held steady as they skirted the foot of the ridge. After a quarter mile a gentle rise began––now climbing steadily, the ride grew turbulent as larger rocks and uneven indentations appeared. This was nothing compared with Beatty––the road was well maintained and Dylan gradually increased the speed to an appropriate level of recklessness. Kyle, having reluctantly gone along with Dylan’s plan, again felt a distinct sense of exhilaration. It was not simply anticipation of a reunion with the mystic herb after a long hiatus, under a primitive ooze of stars. It was the opportunity of reclaiming friendship at its primal foundation. The promise of finding a sense of shared cause––what this trip was really all about. Of reestablishing connections that had been submerged over time, in an inevitable staccato of jobs, girlfriends, self-inflicted injuries, addictions.

‪#‎endurancewriter‬

As some of you may know, I have a completed manuscript Arisugawa Park. I connected with a respected agent about a year ago and we started shopping an extensively revised manuscript about 5 months ago. The rejections were polite, but firm, despite the fact that my agent (and her intern) thought the prose unique and original. One editor's publisher had had poor luck with a Japanese thriller a couple years ago and suspected that they would be gun shy to market another. Another called it an "easy pass," noting that my prose was mechanical, though the concept was ambitious. My agent planted in my ear that the real reason for many rejections was its length.

Rather than reassess the manuscript, I decided to embark upon a new project, as a way of halting a constant stream of doubts. I needed to go direct and improv, demonstrate to myself that I was still able to produce. I'm now on my second month of the serial novel Cowachunga, which I write and publish as I go each week.

I get 500 hits and 75-100 unique visitors each time I publish a section of Cowachunga (and this is relying strictly on organic social media + word of mouth). Should I be aiming higher? Does anyone have a similar project in mind? I think in a way I am traversing a path pioneered by The Martian, but I don't have a community of scientific peers to activate in debate on how long a cubic liter of oxygen will last at an inverse decompression rate. 

‪#‎endurancewriter‬

Slow driving in the desert, some kind, a big decision.

Read the entire Cowachunga up to 2.7 or  check out Cowachunga 2.7 - Very Ape.