When It's Good, It's GOOD

Chapter 4 is done!

It's absolute shit. But I know where I want it to go, and sometimes just the catharsis of getting it down on paper is enough.

I'm getting a slow start into chapter 5. I'm doing a lot of figuring out who Mother is. Roger Gans, detective for the FBI. I don't know a whole lot about him, just that he's a skeptic and I'm going to be inhabiting his head. Sounds good. He could be fun, and his introduction is a great and jarring switch from Jack running off into the woods. We'll see where that goes.

Like I said: Chapter 4 is shit shit shit. I don't like what Jack's found, it's maybe a little too obvious. I mean it needs to be obvious (the map and key) enough to get the ball rolling, but my selection of objects may be a little too obvious. The action really started picking up, and as he is cleaning out the cabin of the Giant of useful supplies I really liked the movement and pacing in that. I also need to get out how the giant seems to fluctuate in size, and swell bigger with anger, so that when Jack opens the door and steps outside BAM! he is shocked to look up and up and up and into the eyes of Cormoran, mighty Cormoran. And then I've got to get Silvanus, the green man out there a little sooner.

Anywhoo that is all inside shit that probably won't mean much of anything to anyone.

I've got a stack of American Folklore books I'm going to read and commit to memory over spring break, because I feel like a greater base knowledge of American Folklore will do nothing but inform the story to details it should be noticing and will hopefully get on the page when I make the transfer over from a finished long-hand copy to a typed copy.

Those books include:

Shingling the Fog and Other Plains Lies by Roger Welsch
Donegal Fairy Stories by Seumas MacManus
A Treasury of American Folklore by Terri Hardin
Grandfather Tales by Richard Chase

and anything else along the way that I discover as I'm trying not to spend money on books

Family, and the Fourth

I've been without internet for the past few days. That's my current excuse for not updating this thing sooner. I finally paid the bill in full and now I am connected to the internet again.

Monday was nothing special. Work and tutoring. I kept playing with my funny character who was on a crashed plane and has now established his own contested country. The series of short stories I originally had planned to do with this character is quickly becoming a novel or novella. I'm trying to figure out a way to make a satisfying conclusion, or what exactly the story arc is... As of now I think I am just going to keep writing the little scenes.

Tuesday was the third. My mom and my roommate's parent's came in to town to celebrate the Fourth of July with us. We met them at the train station around noon and went to lunch at the Eleven City Diner, which we fondly refer to as Elevenses. The best part about this diner, other than the food, is the awesome wait staff. They're a feisty bunch. My mom ordered a reuben which comes with either just corned beef, or corned beef and pastrami. Mom was debating between the two and decided to go with the straight corned beef. The waitress responded with a curt "why?" and then badgered my mom until she ordered it with pastrami (a homemade recipe). It was all in good fun, but I think only the wait staff at elevenses could get away with such a blunt manner.

After that, stuffed to the gills, we took them to the Taste of Chicago. It was about the same as the last entry. Wall to wall people, and expensive food. Then we went and toured Shedd's Aquarium (my second time this month). It was about the same as the previous time, except for the majorly depressed Sea Lion, which had been replaced with a more peppy and athletic one. For dinner we went to the Berghoff, a local brewery and restaurant, where we tried the beers, and their awesome food.

This was followed by joining what seemed like millions of people along the lake front and Grant Park for the fireworks. Chicago does their major fireworks display on the third. I learned that this was because of the police department. If they were to do it on the fourth it would cost them time and a half for each of the police officers on duty (which is a really big number), and would drive up the costs to the point where it would be almost undoable. The weather held until the very end of the fireworks, and we managed to make it from Grant Park to the car while getting only marginally wet. Watching that mass of people move across Grant Park was like seeing a large riot scene from the movies. There was an innumerable crowd flocking over the hills surrounding the baseball diamonds and across the bridges over the Metra Rails.

The Fourth was spent in and out of grocery stores, filling Matt's and my larder for the first time ever. It was nice actually being able to see a cupboard full of food. And with all the fixin's I'll probably be throwing a spaghetti dinner sometime in the next week to start to break into the load of food.

Afterword we came back and I picked my Mom's brain about the history of our cottage at Houghton Lake for a 10 page paper I had to write. And that was what today was, between work and class. Writing a 10 page paper in two hours. A new accomplishment for me.

Tomorrow I head back to Haslett for the annual bike ride from Haslett Community Church to Northwoods Boy Scout Reservation. I'll have an update with photos that sunday night if I'm not too tired.

I found this great article which has spawned some ideas for a story I started in class. It's about Kumaris, or living goddesses. A practice from Nepal.

The semester ends in a week. And I'm not counting at all...
cheers

Sent an email today to Mort Castle, my Historical Fiction Research/Writing teacher, and also Story In Graphic Form teacher, to get the contact information of a grad student who was in one of his classes last semester. This student had done a lot of research on hobos and hobo towns in preperation for a novel he was doing as his grad-student project.

One of the parts of the Jack story follows his exploit with the (currently) named hobo King, Cole (an obvious reference to Old King Cole from the mother goose rhyme). Chances are that his name is going to change before the end of this due to some plot reworkings that I am thinking about right now.

I decided that the scope that I was shooting for with looking at world mythology is a little too grand, and just downright overwhelming. So in light of my skills, and this being my first novel that I plan on writing rewriting and submitting I've decided to limit myself to American folk lore, and legends, including native american, and the colonial american on down. I have found a wealth of information with which to touch on. Everything from Pecos Bill to the Roswell Aliens can easily be fit in this grand Jack tale. And so the research begins.

Firstly I found this great journal, "The Journal of American Folklore," which has over a century's worth of publications, essays and critical analyses that I can draw on, so for the next few weeks I am going to bury myself in that and any other information and try to carve out a bit more of this world view, which in turn I think will help to better define the story that I want to tell.

I need to look up whatever I can find on Hobo's, on the Route 66 Roadtrips, and any other American odysseys that I can find. I need to look up information on Folk Heroes, maybe some child protective service laws (but that seems a little less important in light of the fact that this is supposed to have a gritty fairy tale like feel). I want to sit down and read Stephen King's "On Writing, which I think is sitting on my shelf at home, so I'll be able to pick it up in a week or so, when I go home to visit my dad.

I'm going to keep a pretty rigid bibliography of what I've done, for future writing, or for any other writers who want this. So on Sunday of each week I'll post a new blog with links, or sources, or whatever, laced with comments about what I've found.