Dave Bain's blog

That man!

2008-07-02T22:40:05Z

He doesn't post for awhile!

He is judging 4-H creative writing! He is rejuvenated by a 4-H writing project! So innocent, so full of old soul wisdom!

He had the brakes on his ancient pick-up fail while hauling a piano last night! Luckily it was in his driveway! Luckily nothing (including him!)was damaged!

He is writing two novels at once! Slow going on both! Best stuff he's ever written!

He has beaten the main storyline on GTA: Vice City! The credits have rolled! Though he's barely finished more than 50% of the game! (He is still too unhip to have access to a PS III and GTA IV!)

He is reading every short story Joyce Carol Oates ever wrote! He is swearing, as he has sworn many a time before, that there is nothing that woman can't do with words! Also a Tom Picirrilli book in one sitting! Mostly while waiting for his damned dial-up service to Doooo Something! He is also catching up on all the New Yorker stories he didn't have time to read last year! His wife is complaining about all the New Yorkers littering his bedside!

He is teaching! The substance of the classes is almost over after tomorrow night! Everything after that is either oral or final! (As in reports or exams!) Huzzah!

He is listening almost exclusively to The Hold Steady and Los Campesinos!! (But not tonight!) Which must mean he is longing for Bukowski-esque, Springsteeny drugs-n-drunk-grungy-love crunge or a hyper, bouncy, bratty, sonic, guitars-n-xylophone, twee dada dance party!

Run, Kitty, Run!

2008-06-26T11:45:39Z

I saw the following sign pinned to the corkboard at the local grocery store last night and had to read it three times to be sure:

"LOST: small orange housecat with blue mohawk."

The Past Comes Back to Haunt You (in a Good Way)

2008-06-24T14:08:10Z

Some potentially cheery blast-from-the-past reprint news in the ol' inbox this morning. We'll see if I can post about it or not.

"Tell 'em I'm comin'! And hell's comin' with me!"

2008-06-18T16:38:34Z

I said, Turn your paper in on time!

Just received my teaching schedule for the fall. Couldn't look much better. One class each night, M,T,W and R. (Does anyone know the official story behind Thursday becoming "R"?)

The sweet thing is these classes are all off-campus and close to my home. See, it's an hour-or-so drive for me to the Fort Wayne campus, but these are all within about 20 minutes.

Even sweeter is the fact that Ivy Tech pays more for off-campus, exponentially depending upon distance, as if you're coming from Fort Wayne - so I actually get paid more for teaching close to my house than I do for driving all the way to F.W.

I'm spending much of the summer creating PowerPoint presentations for these classes.

Snake doing his best Wyatt Earp

On a related note, I gave the coolest mid-term ever to last night's class -- we watched Tombstone, and they have to write a short paper (w/ MLA and all that) contrasting the movie to what historically happened at The O.K. Corral.

I introduced the assignment by quoting my favorite of the film's many gems:

"Tell 'em I'm comin'! And hell's comin' with me!"

This fall I'm gonna start each of the first classes with that line.

Date up

2008-06-10T15:39:07Z

I've cut 12,000 words from Gray Lake, am writing not one but two new novels, am mowing two acres of lawn via push-mower, am reading like a madman and have reached 50% on GTA: Vice City, where my criminal status is officially "Goon." Life is good.

DW #1

2008-06-01T01:35:05Z

This is perhaps the way POD should be done. A bunch of pulp enthusiast buddies, producing a club 'zine for the fun of it.

Dark Worlds.

Above's the teaser illo for my story, "Fifteen Minutes." It features backwater-burg journalists, at least one gunshot (maybe more!), and an old school beatbox rap song penned by yours truly.

Reviews!

2008-05-27T01:54:21Z

Hey, check out the positive review of the latest ish of Withersin over at The Fix! My story gets particularly nice kudos. (I get the concluding paragraph.)

In honor of that nice review, I'll review my Memorial Day Weekend. Pretty good, three and a half stars!

Saturday and Sunday I worked. That sucked!

On Sunday afternoon I picnicked with friends on a lake. Memorable!

That night we went to a drive-in with the best double bill I could imagine this summer: Indy 4 and Iron Man. Just a plain old gosh-wow good time at the movies!

Tonight I grilled up a killer blue hake amandine with dill butter. Awesome!

Truth in Advertising!

2008-05-16T13:48:41Z

I noticed today that my daughter's shampoo "costs less than more expensive brands!"

Dillinger's, babe!

2008-05-09T12:34:17Z

A group of my students took me out to Dillinger's last night after our final class. This is a Hudson, Indiana restaurant/bar in what was once a bank robbed by John Dillinger. (Many bios say Dillinger robbed Auburn, Indiana, the nearest "big city," but it was teeny-weeny Hudson.)

The centerpiece of the place is the safe from which Dillinger and his gang stole about $1,700. Actual newspaper accounts (not copies) line the walls, as do Dillinger's death mask (replica), all above the bank's original floor. Awesome.

The owner was awesome too. He gave us all a round of free drinks (plus coupons for free drinks on future visits), plus he had his girlfriend give us a tour -- he himself was too busy playing some acoustic guitar for his open mic night by then. (His uncle played congas for Rare Earth. Luckily, no one played congas at the open mic.)

He'd recently met Johnny Depp, who was here in Indiana a month or two ago filming a biopic about the original gangsta. He said Depp was cool, despite wearing a bright pink scarf.

I had the white chili and a catfish sammich. My moll, unfortunately, wadn't wit' me.

The Writing Process: Gene Wolfe

2008-05-09T12:10:12Z

Again, from Patti Perret's FACES OF FANTASY (1996, Tor).

Gene Wolfe this time.

"The universe is extensive, and time wider than the sea; it is our good fortune, Horatio, to live at a time and in a place vastly richer than most in things that are not to be found in your philosophy....

"Not so long ago I saw a magnificent German shepherd lunge from between two parked cars, held in check by a blonde who could have played first base in the National League. And it struck me that a fantastic adventure could have been filmed on the spot simply by hanging a skull about that woman's neck and equipping her with a broadsword -- but the woman and her dog are everything, while the skull and the sword are nothing."

Good CD!

2008-05-07T17:53:09Z

Pat, your mix CD was too intense. I had to peel and scrape the remains of my soul out of my PT Cruiser yesterday afternoon and patch it together again in time for class last night. All the way home I had to listen to Fort Wayne's hottest hip-hop and R&B station just to be sure I could sleep last night and breathe today. Now I'm listening to some relaxing Arcade Fire and '80s speed metal to calm my nerves. I'm not being facetious. Seriously, you don't live in the world of those songs every day, do you?

The 100-word fling

2008-05-06T14:06:47Z

This is finals week at Ivy Tech. Final projects are flooding in and the college requires I turn in my grades within 24 hours of the last class meeting.

My initial feeling was ... well, there goes the week as far as writing.

But then I reminded myself of something I’ve told my students a dozen times. "If you're feeling swamped with the rest of your life, sit down and write 100 words. That's ten words a minute for ten minutes, five words a minute for twenty. You can do that, almost no matter what. And usually you wind up writing more."

Works, too.

And it makes you feel better. At least *something* got done. Gives the work a good spin through your brain, then you can go back to thinking about it while you grade papers or clean out the garage or whatever.

(This post is 150 words long.)

The Writing Process - Elizabeth Moon

2008-05-01T12:47:05Z

As promised, a second quote this week. This one is by Elizabeth Moon and is culled from The Faces of Fantasy edited by Patti Perret (1996, Tor Books).

"Growing up marginal in the 1950s -- socially, as a child of divorce, an only child, a girl with unsuitable interests; geographically, at the southern tip of Texas, 250 miles south of San Antonio -- had advantages for a future SF/F writer. Those who've grown up marginal find the edges of things -- from forests to cultures -- ideal habitat. Writing science fiction and fantasy lets me use what I am."

Evaluation

2008-04-30T13:34:18Z

Well, my first observation/evaluation at Ivy Tech went swimmingly. The department head offered me a summer class the day after he observed me, so I knew I must have done something right. But my stomach was still a dark pit filled with strange, foreboding noises as I walked into his office yesterday.

I shouldn't have worried. He offered some glowing praise at our eval conference -- not blinding, mind you, but glowing. My observation checklist had mostly threes and fours on a five scale -- "If you get a five, you're God," he said. So I take it he doesn't give fives?

The Writing Process - Joyce Carol Oates

2008-04-28T17:40:15Z

Only three weeks in and I missed a post. That's because I think this is going to go in a different direction soon. Anyway, maybe there'll be two this week.

This quote by Joyce Carol Oates has always fascinated me. Remember this is Joyce Carol Oates talking, the same JCO who is oft criticized as "too prolific." (The italics: mine.)

"I don't have any formal writing habits. Most of the time I do nothing, and the fact of time passing so relentlessly is a source of anguish to me. There are not enough hours in the day. Yet I waste most of my time, in daydreaming, in drawing faces on pieces of paper....

"When I'm with people I often fall into a kind of waking sleep, a daydreaming about the people, the strangers, who are to be the 'characters' in a story or a novel I will be writing.... At times my head seems crowded; there is a kind of pressure inside it, almost a frightening physical sense of confusion, fullness, dizziness. Strange people appear in my thoughts and define themselves slowly to me: first their faces, then their personalities and quirks and personal histories, then their relationships to other people, who very slowly appear.... I try to put this all together, working very slowly, never hurrying the process. I can't hurry it any more than I can prevent it."

Facebook!

2008-04-28T16:41:54Z

First off, one of my students convinced me the other day that I'm totally unhip, backwards, dull and to be shunned as a worthless expenditure of my parents' and other ancestors' DNA.

Without a Facebook, that is.

So I'm now on Facebook.

Second off. Well, not much. How 'bout last week I went to a Fort Wayne Wizards game. I had my souvenirs signed by Dinger the Dragon -- bonus! I used to actually follow minor league stats, etc., but now it seems I barely have time to keep up with my favorite perennial failures (though obviously not this year -- yet! Just wait!)

Third off, man, you're really stretching it, thinking I have three things in my life to write about.

Don't Copy Your Neighbor's Work, Kiddos

2008-04-22T14:52:26Z

At the beginning of the semester I linked to a Newsweek article about a romance author plagiarizing info on black-footed ferrets.

Now:

It's over: publisher breaks with romance writer Cassie Edwards

The Writing Process: Bernard Malamud

2008-04-17T14:47:13Z

I believe I'll post these during the middle of the week, Tuesday through Thursday sometime, as that suits my schedule better than Fridays.

I like to use this one, from Bernard Malamud (author of The Natural, etc.), in my classes toward the very beginning of the semester, for obvious reasons:

"You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place -- you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he's disciplined, doesn't matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time -- not steal it -- and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you."

Krementz, Jill. The Writer's Desk. New York: Random House, 1996.

John Kessel's new collection

2008-04-17T14:09:21Z

I used to be Mr. Free E-Book, kept the net's biggest database of them at my site (which is still geocities 'cause, quoth The Sex Pistols, I'm a lazy sod).

I don't do that anymore because I no longer give a damn about Billth & Tedley's Awkward Adventures in PDF Land.

But every now and then there's still something I consider an event -- John Kessel's new collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, is available free here via Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. You can buy it too, if ya want -- I probably will.

davidbain @ 2008-04-16T00:48:00

2008-04-16T04:55:56Z

There are times, my dear, when I happen to drink a tad too much (cheap beer, yes, but who cares), and my breath smells like the loamy dirt around the roots of fine roses, a few petals having fallen, and my hair tends to get a shade more frizzy and out of control than usual. It is then, my naughty badger, that I begin to tell lies, but sweetly. This is the age of morning. Not mourning. The hours stretch into horses. The horses stretch into strides until they are one with the wind. You smell each blade of grass as you pass. The edges of everything fade, at last, into formality, and, alas, in the end it's all nothing but a fading taste on your tongue.

The Writing Process: James A. Michener

2008-04-11T13:47:56Z

Most weeks I start my writing classes with a quote on the writing process from an author -- usually from a book I own with (surprisingly diverse) photos of authors at work:

Krementz, Jill. The Writer's Desk. New York: Random House, 1996.

Anyway, this week's quote, from James A. Michener, really affected me. How many of us are ever this deeply into our writing? (The italics are mine.)

"When I am about to start a major project, I am much like a zen master in Japan who is about to serve a ritual tea. I wash my face, cleanse my mind, eat sparingly, exercise every evening by taking long walks, go to bed early and rise at seven to go to my typewriter. I do this seven days a week for the two years during which I am doing the actual writing, and I am loath to permit interruptions. In the morning I do not welcome either visitors or phone calls because writing is hard, exhausting work, and at twelve-thirty when I stop, I am usually sweaty.

"I customarily wear loose Bermuda shorts, very loose T-shirt or loose sport shirt, loose socks and floppy sandals, and I have grown to feel wonderfully at ease in that uniform; it restricts me at no point and leaves my arms and hands free to move easily. I also wear reading glasses with thick lenses, and I work with such intensity that sometimes when I pause to look out the window the world is a blur because my focus has been at such close range for so long."

I might start posting more of these quotes, if anyone out there's interested.

General Update

2008-04-10T15:35:33Z

Reading - The Invention of Hugo Cabret (out loud, to youngsters, which rocks). Awesome, awesome book, a 500+ page novel in which pictures are as important as words -- it won this year's Caldecott (which is usually given to picture books not including novel elements).

Second novel - going well, though a lot of it's pre-writing. (I'm big into that.) Major departure from first novel, I'll say that. The kitchen sink shall be included.

First novel - I'm doing, yup, another rewrite from a read-through (mostly typos and a few relatively minor continuity things, plus one final, absolutely necessary new scene) before a red-inked version arrives from a first reader (you'd recognize his name if I said it here).

Teaching - all caught up grading, four or five weeks to go, depending on the class. Students working on final major research project, which means more teaching and less grading for me - adding up to more writing time!

Dinner last night - Dude, the chicken I grilled absolutely *ruled!* Maybe someday I'll be nice and share my marinade secrets with you.

Drinking - lots of green tea today.

Music - Dylan. Rediscovering. I might write a longer post about this sometime. Basically, I *thought* I was a Dylan fan once upon a time. I have a fair number of Dylan cassettes, but cassettes are problematic in these newfangled times. I'm slowly buying CDS, with various Internet sources guiding me through my decisions. Totally different experience than the college days hearsay, cloudy-sounding tape dubbing and random picking from what the store had in stock. And my ears have totally changed since then it seems. I'm *craving* music like this. (One of my college professors once started a story with a line akin to: "I only listen to the good stuff. You know -- Dylan.")

Forthcoming Flash Fiction

2008-04-03T13:26:07Z

Well, it seems that Withersin was requiring a short-short to close out the table of contents for their forthcoming Issue 2.1 (awesomely subtitled "Flesh"), and my piece, "How to Make Love Last Beyond the Grave" fit the bill! (It's about Zum-bees.)

(All the following info is in a post only one or two down from this one, but shameless self-promotion and all: My story "Finding Tim" is already slated for Issue 2.2 ("Bone" to 2.1's "Flesh") Plus, now availabe, you can read some of my creative nonfic ("The Mongo U.F.O. Investigation") in Issue 1.2 ("Life") and my urban (you could even call it "corporate") horror story ("The Little Guy") in Issue 1.3 ("Death").)

(Enough parenthesis for ya?)

secret

2008-04-01T15:55:25Z

Hey! I've got something coming out in a secret project I can't talk about just right now! It's not necessarily as big of a deal as most people's secret projects they can't talk about right now, but at last, at last, at long last, I've got a secret project I can't talk about right now! Woot!

Various Realities

2008-03-31T19:08:19Z

Today is apparently the day of the year the first green blades appear in the yard.

I've started a second novel. There will be no word count, no daily updates. Maybe a "work continues." This one's mine.

And, sorry folks, it's "the literary one" - but would it really be mine if there were no "genre" elements? See Mr. Castle's words for explanation.(Especially the answers to the first two questions, but the whole interview's inspiring.)

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City continues to be my one foray into video game indulgence. I could see how people might spend an entire lifetime vegatating away at this stuff, feeling like they're getting something done. It's rather scary. I mean, this is a getting-antiquated PlayStation 2 game, bought used for 3.99. So far I've probably spent a literal day, 24 hours or more, at this thing, and I've finished maybe 1/4 of the story line (if you include the endless side missions). Tommy Vercetti's rise to power on the streets of Vice City really is my alternate weekend existence right now, quite literally.

I'm finding I want this total immersion experience, but I'm not buying another video game after this - people are recommending Halo, etc., but no. This is it. The time-waste factor is amazing. Not that it hasn't been explored ad infinitum (that would be called cyberpunk, right? Or no, wait, science fiction) but the ramifications of even this limited virtual reality experience is taking up quite a bit of my thinking and internet exploring right now.

"Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"