Blog-a-thon
Topic: Writing Challenges
Thursday 27July06 9:30pm

I heard about this one late in the game so I'm not entering. But it still sounds like enough fun to try at some point during the year.
Blogathon
It starts 6am pacific and basically all you have to do is post a blog entry on your own blog every 30 minutes for 24 hours beginning on July 29... well, this saturday.

It's going to be a beautiful day so I don't want to be strapped down to my computer. It's too bad they don't have one in the winter.
You get pledges for people to donate money to the charity of your choice and blog away.

Sounds like fun to me...

EY

Dead Television Report 4
Mood:  chatty
Topic: R-Dead Television Report
27July06 Thursday 8:48pm

Well it's been more than a week now without the television. Who said that?
I'm loving it like an old soul record. I went to see, I'm not a dinner mint on Saturday at Harbourfront Centre and enjoyed a pint or three on the patio. I marveled during intermission how many people had to check their cell phones to see if they'd received any calls. Wow, how lucky that you are so popular? I guess if I actually gave out my cell phone number... Oh yeah no one calls me at home anyway, why would they call my cell if they had the number?

Anyway, I finished backing up all my music from my laptop (over 200 CD's) and then went off on a whole tangent. I was backing up 2Pac's greatest hits and I decided to see what they had written about him on www.wikipedia.org. For what ever reason the entry sparked my imagination and I was furiously writing notes for a black fable. Then I was sorting through my books for research for said fable. 20 Books in total. I'm pretty excited about that idea. So I've got to get cracking on my current WIP's in order to get to that one.

I sat in the park where all the dog owners bring their dogs to socialize and giggled for hours.

I finished the book: Dreamhealer - his name is Adam. www.dreamhealer.com
A Part of me wonders if some adults wrote the book for him, is he really that smart? Can he really heal? And the other part of me believes that we have capabilities that we haven't tapped. At least I want to believe. Why do we fly in our dreams? How do we meet dead people in our dreams and communicate with them? How does cancer just disappear?
Any how Adam gave me some ideas for a book 10 of my WIP Dreamweaver.

I was saying today to one of my work mates that with a television it can take me a month to read a book, without the television it can take me a week including all the other activities I participate in.

There's been other stuff that I've been doing, I should have kept notes.

But over all I feel less like I'm allowing my life to waste away and less bombarded by advertising. Commercials! The same commercial over and over in the breaks of an hour long show. Commercials that are much louder than the actual show you are watching. Commercials that show people pulling one over on somebody else, embarrassing somebody or some other kind of stupid thing. Commercials that all say the same thing. I thought advertising was a creative field? Who was the first person that said thinking outside the box? Now every one says it. If you're saying it you're not thinking outside the box. If you are thinking outside the box it means you're creating something outside of the norm. If you really thought outside the box, you'd find another way to say it. Okay commercials make me rant, clearly...

Maybe I can make it until the next Olympics before I get another television... Just a thought! Thinking outside the television screen. Whoopee!

Oh yeah and I'm writing... not just blogs.

EY

Dead Television Report 3
Mood:  mischievious
Now Playing: Jill Scott - Living my life like it's GOLDEN!
Topic: R-Dead Television Report
Friday 21July06 9:01pm

I had plans to go see a show tonight. I was originally going to buy tickets because they were cheap, it's in previews. I was convinced that I could get comp tickets instead so I didn't buy the tickets. Turns out I didn't get the comps, the show is sold out and I no longer have plans. *sigh*

Thought I'd rent a couple DVD's since I have no television. Slipped on a few tunes while I decided. The grooves were feeling so good I decided against the DVD's and opted for music instead. Been burning CD's ever since. I raided my best friend and his girlfriend's CD collection when I was in Montreal and I'm finally backing everything up by burning them. Mind you I've been backing them up off and on for weeks. Got a boat load of CD's, it's out of control but it makes me as happy as my cat Quincy staring out the window.

Did a quick load of laundry. That's my new thing, throw in a load here and there through out the week and I'm not stuck with being the laundry maid on the weekends.

It was the first day at work without my work partner. He is on holidays for two weeks. He's the kind of man that looks for the joke in every situation so it's a little less happy at work without him.

Other than that, I've been reading, Dreamhealer His Name is Adam. It's a non fiction book about a teen-aged boy that sees peoples auras and can heal people. It's interesting and coming in handy for research for one of my WIP's. It's also making me interested in reading on Quantum physics. Did I just say that?

Maybe no television will make me smart...

EY

IFOA Notes 4
Mood:  chillin'
Now Playing: Janet Jackson - Damito Jo
Topic: Writing Outings
21July06 Friday 7:02pm

A.S. Byatt
- We need stories because of time.
- Age shapes your sense of time
- "Can't you remember there's a war on?"
- all stories are about time
- suppose you didn't know a character is going to die.

Virginie Despentes
34 years old - occasional prostitute
- the secret is not to hesitate
- porn as a character. What is pornography?
- the word "sex worker" doesn't exist in French
- they don't want to pay for what has happened
- men that want what women don't want to give.

Tama Janowitz
as far as I know no one has ever died of celibacy

Barbara Trapido
- I never promise my characters happiness
- I write like an outsider
- went on holiday and wrote a kaleidoscope of stories
- you are allowed to write about that place because it's over
- mother was the storyteller in her family
- most mild mannered man at work but a tyrant at home
- Her father got out of Holland by luck just before the occupation
- hate the sin not the sinner

Frances Itani
Language was loud and silent

Mary Woronov
- believes that television is our death
- boredom is good
- a love story between two people where it's impossible
- characters are betrayed by people close to them
- you build characters and then you betray them and see how they react
- you have to have something bad happen in order to change or for something to be good
- evil is powerful
- what the world is doing to girls and their bodies
- put humor where things are blackest.

Patricia Duncker
- it's a good idea to publish what you like not all that you write
- writing as a response to reading
- short fiction written to solve a problem in long fiction
- characters who are marginal to society - misanthropic loners
- on the edge of things
- good is unitary, evil has more variety
- fiction is about emotion, passion, change
- horror - the deposit box for our anxieties and concerns
- stalker movies - complicity between stalker and victim. He's at home, he's waiting for you - it's about domestic assault.
- looming men stepping out of the shadows
- how cliches are built up, how they operate and what they actually mean.
- give the pleasures of the genre and a little edge, a shift
- need a driving passion underneath it.
- what is perceived as normal
- Fiction -
1 - exceptional people in ordinary circumstances
2 - ordinary people in exceptional circumstances
3 - exceptional people in exceptional circumstances
- being a critical reader of your own work
- Why write if you're not a reader.
- the triangulation - writer, reader and text

Jennifer Johnston
- father kept files on each child
- started writing at 35
- leave my footprints on the earth
- writing - it's always the first time
- writing about my tribe
- saying what you really want to say
- how you react to people you love
- the secrecy and mystery of men
- you've got to get away from your family to see them properly
- the cost of not being able to be yourself
- advice - make a routine - don't wait for inspiration - sit down and concentrate - read, read, read - don't show it to your friends - it has to be finished.

Khaled Hosseini
- betrayal, redemption, the consequences of betrayal
- stepping out of the shadow that your past casts on your life
- redemption requires some suffering
- you suffer if no one cares in what you have to say
- an entire generation born in war, have lived in war
- eating is a unifying activity
- people who are displaced and leaving every thing behind
- survivor's guilt

Orly Castel-Bloom
- in order to survive you must be a bad enough mother
- no sense of space, just check points
- between books there is emptiness

Sandro Verenesi
- death of a father doesn't mean that a son wins
- when you're understanding of the world collapses
- if pages in my book surprise the reader it's because it surprises me. I don't know where I'm going.
- your senses deny what your mind tells you
- writing is a matter of faith
- playing with the differences of you - characters who have qualities not like you
- I don't write to recover from my suffering. I recover from my suffering so I can write.

Dan Rhodes
- takes his cue from songwriters
- nailing a mood in 2 verses and a chorus
- "anthropology" - each story is 101 words long. 101 stories.
- wrote a story a day as a goal
- "don't tell me the truth about love"

Julie Zeh
- wars financed by drugs
- the bad things attract attention

Syl Cheney-Coker
- killing done by kids - the majority of the killing was done by kids
- dealing with duality
- the parliament of writers. cities of asylum were created mostly in Europe and Las Vegas (!)
- exile - carries weight of history
- immigrant - destroys any history - "I don't want to go back there."
- a writer is always an outsider

David Guterson
- questions of the human conditions
- landscape as a thematic force
- do no harm
- feeling that he knows less than he did in the past
- Who I am now
- What do you have to write?
- the cheapening of religious phenomenon
- wherever a crowd gathers people will try to monopolize on that and sell things
- setting as characters
- creating a continuous dream, immerse the reader in a powerful dream of which they cannot awake.
- questions of the spirit.
- when he writes he goes from sleep to work
- doesn't want this world to get into the psyche
- writes in a linear form - never more than 500 new words each day
- writes 6 days a week
- what excites you artistically?
- a feminine component of the divine
- introspection - your own disturbances

Louise Welsh
- in Britain it's okay to be a gay man as long as you're funny.
- literary transvestitism
- a writer's job is to make things up
- we're all flawed personalities

Helen Dunmore
- sense of waiting and asking to be written
- the past is never over
- a child's immediate reaction to a parents violence against his mother

Caryl Phillips
- who has the most insistent voice?
- takes on tribalism
- the things people try to do to cross national borders
- the global wanderer
- people with no children and the impact of having no survivors
- imagining a person who is not you with a degree of sensitivity
- you can't tell a writer what to do, what to write, what they cannot write about...

Douglas Coupland
don't do much but make sure everyone knows you've done it.

EY

Dead Television Report 2
Mood:  sharp
Topic: R-Dead Television Report

9:22pm 19July06 Wednesday

Okay so the only thing that I'm missing from having no television is the Tour de France. Yesterday Floyd Landis wore the yellow jersey and after today's stage he is 8 minutes behind the lead. He's demoralized and saying that he has lost his chance to win the tour. Sucks big time.

It's not like I have anywhere to go to watch it either. No one really cares about the Tour. They say it's boring. But they don't get it. I watched every stage last year (when everyone I knew said they were only going to watch the last stage - anticlimactic) because it was Lance Armstrong's last year and I had just finished reading his book , it's not about the bike. His cancer tale was horrifying. His biking info was darn interesting.

I was inspired watching the Tour because if you really pay attention and you are watching a great, you get it.

In the time trials he pushed his ass as hard as he could. In the team timed whereby your time would be based on the last rider that made it across the line, you had to be a team player. You had to be a leader when needed, tell people or show people how to use their energy for optimum results. How many times do you have an abundance of energy and then blow your load on one thing because you think you are invincible? The Tour teaches you that if you use your energy wisely you can have everything your heart desires. In the general stages where it's about points, Lance would relax and let others win the stages but be very mindful of his points and what he needed to maintain his points and push it if he needed to worry about his points. Patience. It's nice to win a stage but it's not only about one stage it's about the whole race. I compare that to Life. It's not about one incident, It's about living your whole life.

This years race is just as interesting because Lance isn't in it. There has been no clear leader throughout. It really is any man's race. And that man will be known as the first man to win since Lance retired. That will be a trivia question alongside all the Lance Armstrong questions. Everyone knows that it's their race to win or lose and that's damn exciting. When Lance raced his last race the anxiety was over, what if he wipes out, what if the other racers get organized enough to keep him behind. The anxiety was never about whether he could do it. For me, the only disappointment was that I'd never watched the tour before. I would have loved to have seen the race when Lance gave Jan Ullrich the look on the mountains. The look said I'm going are you coming and Jan ate Lance's dust and watched him disappear like a balloon in the sky. Oh I can see it. Oh it's gone behind the clouds.

So yeah, no television is great. Got my laundry done, cooked a nice dinner, bought some shoes... But the Tour? I'm hurtin' for certain...

EY