Get out and have an experience, friends. Seriously.

Writer-friends, I had an experience last night. It wasn’t an out-of-body experience or anything like that. It wasn’t even inappropriate, as shocking as that might seem to some. But it was awesome.

See, I was on a brief, out-of-town trip for work, to the Washington, DC area, and my younger brother just happens to live in DC. So, naturally, I made plans to hang out and have dinner with him. As one does. And he made reservations at this Thai place that he and his roommates swear by. I had no idea how cool it was going to be.

I’ll break it down for you.

The restaurant’s located on the ground floor of a three-story row-home in a rapidly-gentrifying former near-ghetto in the NW area of DC. You walk down a few steps, under a wrought-iron stairway and porch, and in a nondescript door. The neon OPEN sign isn’t lit. The menu board has no menu in it.

Okay, yeah. The neon sign wasn’t lit when *I* was there.

Once inside, there’s a hostess’ desk and a curtain separating the dining room from the kitchen directly ahead of you. To your left—and I mean DIRECTLY to your left—are a couple of tables with low stools. Take one pace to left, and you can look back around toward the front of the building to see perhaps three more tables with stools. Dark drapes and hangings line the walls. The dining room is miniscule. It looks like a man-cave, with seating for 15.

The thought runs through your mind: This is supposed to be a restaurant?

My brother told the hostess about our reservation. Every downstairs table was full, but in broken English, the hostess told us to follow her. She walked back out the basement door, up the steps the sidewalk, pulled a sharp u-turn, climbed the wrought-iron steps to the front door, and led us inside. Immediately inside the door, a blond-wood staircase led upward. We kicked off our shoes in the foyer and went upstairs.

On the second floor, a larger dining room is laid out, with three tables and a bit more space than in the basement. Prints of engraved tigers hang on the walls. A darkened bathroom and kitchen are off to the rear of the building. It looks as though someone cleared out their living room and threw some tables in for people to eat at.

There is no menu.

Instead, the chef just gives you whatever he’s cooked that day. $30 a head gets you a five or six course meal, and everything is flat-out excellent. Seriously.

It was on of my most unique dining experiences in recent memory.

I live for this, writer-friends.* It’s just that kind of hole-in-the-wall, experiential-dining restaurant that makes me happy to live near big cities. When you walk into that tiny place, you’re smacked in the face with the fact that you don’t need cavernous ceilings and crystal chandeliers and Michelin stars to create great food. All you need is a space, and a clientele willing to eat a little outside the ordinary, and you can make magic.**

My point is this: every now and then, we need, need, NEED to step outside of our everyday lives and try something new and perhaps a little intimidating. It’s how we grow as writers, as human  beings.

If  we want to create an experience for the reader in our fiction, I can think of few things more crucial than to pursue experiences of our own. Not dip-your-toe-in-the-water-to-see-how-cold-it-is experiences, but full-on-backflips-into-the-freezing-river experiences. Once in a while, it’s okay to go all out. To feel. To live.

Your manuscript will be there when you get back.

 

*Okay, if pressed, I’d say I live to provide for my wife and kids, and to write as often as I can, and to be a reasonably decent human being, but for the purposes of this post, couldja just shut up and humor me?

**If you’re in the DC area, and want to see what I enjoyed so much? Here. You’re welcome. http://www.yelp.com/biz/thai-x-ing-washington

Mais oui! C’est le Blogfest de Bernard Pivot!

Yes, indeed, folks. Nothing brings me out of blog-hiding like an easy blogfest hosted by someone I like. And it just so happens that today is the Bernard Pivot Blogfest hosted by Nicole Ducleroir.  James Lipton of The Actor’s Studio asks his guests these questions at the end of every interview, but the questionnaire was originally created by French journalist Bernard Pivot, “for the cultural series he hosted on French television from 1991-2001, called Bouillon de Culture.”*

So here goes with the questions. And once you’re done reading my answers, do surf on over and bounce around the blog links in the Mr. Linky widget on Nicole’s announcement post. I promise it’ll be more fun than a barrel of overcaffeinated marmosets!**

1. What is your favorite word? Right now it’s a tie between righteous (as in, “Dude, did you see the righteous smackdown John Cena laid on The Edge last night? Whoa.”***), and languid (which is just a lovely word, let’s face it).
2. What is your least favorite word?  “I’m sorry, but we’re all out of vodka.”****
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?  Deathless prose, symphonic metal, and other beautiful but slightly incongruous things.
4. What turns you off? Intolerance and arrogance. Also, skunk-breath.
5. What is your favorite curse word?  I like to concatenate cuss words when I’m steamed, but more often than not there’s f-bombs liberally sprinkled in there.
6. What sound or noise do you love? A symphony orchestra at full crescendo, or a choir at full voice.
7. What sound or noise do you hate?  The sound of someone chewing with their mouth open why would you do that where the hell are your manners YOU MAKE ME ILL WITH THAT SMACKING DON’T MAKE ME CHOKE YOU!!!!11!!1
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?  Since writing’s currently an avocation, and not a profession, I’d like to be a writer. Ha! You thought I was going to say Vodka Taster, didn’t you? Well, you were WRONG! Suckers.*****
9. What profession would you not like to do?  I have a friend who once had a job catching racehorse urine so they could test the animals for banned substances. Racehorse-piss Catcher is just one of the many jobs I’d prefer not to have.
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?  I’m actually planning a long-ish stint in Purgatory. Doesn’t the road out of Purgatory go in the back door to Heaven? I’m not sure I’d even be seeing the Pearly Gates….******

And there we go, folks: everything you ever wanted to know about me, and a few things you probably wish you didn’t know. Now go say hello to the other 100+ (!) participants, eh?

*The quote’s from Nicole’s announcement post. And Bouillon de culture is French for small, dry, savory, cube-shaped, individually-wrapped nuggets of culture.

**I’m working under the assumption that a barrel of overcaffeinated marmosets would be fun, though I’m open to the possibility that it’d actually be rather horrifying.

***I apologize for the gratuitious WWE reference. That was totally unnecessary.

****Yes, I consider that all one word.  Wanna make something of it?

*****Though, now I think of it, Vodka Taster would be an AWESOME job….

******Using asterisks as footnote markers starts to look silly when you get up around 4 or 5 footnotes, doesn’t it?

Things I Believe, No. 1: Who Needs Them Grammar Rules?

You don’t need to know all the rules of grammar.

I’ll say that again, writer-friends. You don’t need to know all the rules of grammar.

Right, I know Stephen King said, in On Writing, that you must know your tools before you can write effectively—meaning, you should know your parts of speech, the proper uses of punctuation, etc. But with all due respect, Steve…bollocks.

See, the rules are broken all the time in fiction. Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner severely abused punctuation. James Joyce cracked the fictional form wide open with Ulyssses, and then the nigh-unreadable Finnegan’s Wake. Chuck Pahlaniuk and Cormac McCarthy seem to have lost the quotation mark key from their keyboards. And who cares? Those writers crafted some seriously awesome books. Bestsellers, even.

Unless I miss my guess, writing is an instinctual affair for most people. I know it is for me. When I sit down to write I’m not thinking about correct conjugation or whether em-dashes or parentheses are the proper way to offset that thought, I just do it. Sure, when editing, I might pay attention to things more closely, but during the act of creation? All instinct, baby.

Don’t get me wrong, I kind of know when I’m breaking the rules. I have the notion, somewhere in my head, that I’m doing something that’s not technically correct. But I don’t care. If what I write communicates what I want it to, I’m not going to worry whether it’s following the rules of grammar 100%.

So far it seems to have been working.

And how did I develop those instincts? Did I slave through a creative writing degree? An MFA? Ph.D in English? Did I do the workshop circuit? The Writer’s Digest courses?

Nope. I took one, three-month fiction writing class two years ago, and all that did was light the fire under me again.

No, I developed my writing instincts by reading. Good, bad, indifferent…I’ve read whatever I can get my hands on. I was the kid turning the cereal boxes around to read the back, the marketing materials that came in my box of new shoes, magazines, catalogs, my mother’s collection of books from her childhood, the fantasy novels in the bookstore. Reading made me the writer I am today.

Will it work that way for you? I can’t say. I only know how I came to this craft. But I do know that before you get all hung up on THE RULES –ULES –ULES –ules –ules –ules –ules…, you might want to consider sitting back, relaxing, and following your instincts for a while.

Who knows where they’ll take you?

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby….

Right, well, see, y’know, I had, like, the, um, best of, um, intentions for this, uh, blogfest, and stuff. But then life got all up in my shizz and here I am at 5 till 11 on a Friday night, realizing I should’ve scheduled a post for Christine’s blogfest tomorrow. Um…yes.

I really did intend to go out in the garage to my box-o’-memories, and pull out my binder of high-school fiction efforts, so I could post one here and laugh at my own naivete. But it’s cold, and the garage is, like, 10 steps from my back door, and so I didn’t.

But y’know what? I dug up a very early exercise from the fiction writing class that got me started back on this writing journey. It was one of those prompt-type assignments, something along the lines of: use a first line of the form, “the first time X heard X, he/she was X doing X.”

So this is what I came up with. You probably won’t be surprised to find it’s a tad bit dark. What? A tiger can’t change his stripes or his favorite breakfast cereal, can he? *shifty*

*

The first time she heard Grieg’s piano concerto, Sandra was face down on a concrete sidewalk trying to breathe through a punctured lung. As the surging strings of the second movement spilled into the damp air from the open car door, she fought mutely against the sickening, suffocating feeling in her chest and incipient unconsciousness. It had happened too fast for thought, too fast for any reaction other than a paroxysm of fear and a sharp intake of breath.

Through jagged agony she sensed footsteps approach. Black shoes, wingtips with a swirled pattern punched into the leather, halted in front of her face. The man knelt, bending toward her, and a maroon-slashed tie fell into view. “Miss...” The word arrived on bourbon vapors, edged with panic.

He stood, and the black wingtips took several uncertain steps. In the background, the chime of the car’s open door clashed with the piano’s plaintive chords. Sandra’s mouth was filled with the taste of blood and exhaust. Against her will, her eyes were closing.

Footsteps receded, and the car door slammed. Renewed shock forced her awake. The brightness of the taillights pierced her brain, bolts of red stabbing at eyes blurred with tears, then the tires shrieked and she was left gasping in the wake of a rapidly-receding Mercedes.

A light rain was falling, cool on her skin. Shards of glass from the ruined bus shelter lay scattered around and beneath her, glinting beneath the streetlights. The distant sounds of evening in the city drifted over her like a breeze: a car’s horn, the faint rumble of a passenger jet above the clouds, the ubiquitous hum of traffic. With a monumental effort, Sandra turned her head, searching desperately for help. The street was empty.

She was too tired to weep, now; the pain was dragging her down. As her eyes slipped shut, the last thing she saw was headlights slicing across her vision as a car turned toward her at the end of the block.

*

Overwrought? Perhaps. It’s an early effort.

I could get extra points in Christine’s drawing if I rewrote this in my current style, but I don’t think I’d do much to it other than a few line edits. I’ll just chalk that up to a lack of creativity late on a Friday evening, shall I? Yes, I shall.

Now go visit the other lovely people participating in the blogfest, won’t you? The linky’s here.

Happy writing, friends!

…stumbles into Blogland, blinking blearily….

Dude. Seriously. I’ve been ankles-deep in writing for the past couple of weeks, y’all. And when I say ankles-deep, I mean I dove in headfirst, so it’s been pretty deep.

I haven’t forgotten about you all, though. I still lurk and occasionally comment and have flashes of inspiration for blog posts that then get filed away in the drafts folder for later, but what with work being epically busy, and the children mainlining espresso* in the evenings, it’s been difficult to spare any brain for anything other than the WIP-that-is-currently-eating-my-frontal-lobe.

I’m sure you know how that goes.

Anyway, I’m resurfacing to make a couple brief announcements. They’ll be short, I promise.

Announcement #1!

Christine Hardy, who blogs over at The Writer’s Hole, and whom I’ve had the distinct pleasure of meeting a couple of times in actual, real life, and stuff, is hosting the You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby Blogfest this coming Saturday (2/5). To participate, just post a sample of your early writing on your blog, and if you like, rewrite it with all that hard-won skill you’ve worked so desperately to attain. Yes? Yes. Sign up using the Mr. Linky on Christine’s blog.

Announcement #2!

Nicole Ducleroir, my go-to gal for verisimilitude in all things French (I’m not sure that even made sense, but I’m leaving it that way ‘cause I like the sound of it), is also hosting a blogfest, on the 16th. It’s pretty easy: all you have to do is answer a few questions about yourself. And really, we writers are all narcissists at heart, aren’t we? (Wait…you’re not? Never mind, then. *cough*) Sign up at Nicole’s blog here!

Announcement #3!

This is less of an announcement and more of a thank you. In fact, it’s two thank yous, since I recently won two blog contests. Random number generators love me, after all! W00T! *weeps*

So! A big thank you link to Sarah at Falen Formulates Fiction, and Denise at L’Aussie Writing for their generosity and general loveliness!

Announcement #4!

I owe a recap of the awesomesauce that was Philly Lit Night a week and a half ago. Really, I should get on that, before I drink away all memory of the event. But in the meantime, here’s a few pictures to incur jealousy in you poor, geographically-challenged people that live in other regions of the world. Yeah. I’m merciless like that.

Frankie Mallis, Christine Danek, Kelly Lyman, and some random dude.

Christine Danek, Kelly Lyman, Shveta Thakrar, Jessica Tudor, some random dude, Kate Walton, Debbie Cassell, and Krista Magrowski

Announcement #5!

I’m tired now.

Zzzzzz….

 

*Kidding. We don’t let the children mainline espresso. They drink it from sippie cups like civilized people.