Status, Reading, Grillmaster 2012, Writing

Status

Returned from Dallas this evening.

I like the UT Southwestern Med Center campus.  As with so much in Dallas, its very Logan's Run.  Its also crawling with young soon-to-be-doctors in scrubs and white coats all looking very stressed.

Reading

A long, long time ago AmyD suggested I read Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs, and I am now listening to the audiobook.

I am, obviously, not a father (at least not to anyone I'm telling Jamie about), but I'd recommend friends who have taken the bold step to bring human life onto this miserable rock (either male or female) to give it a whirl.  Mr. Chabon's essays and observations are not all exactly something I agree with, but they're interesting, and I think they do an excellent job of exploring the headspace of us products of a generation raised on TV but who did not have the interets, play-dates and Pixar movies its now common practice for middle-class folk to foist upon their children.

Chabon's geek-media-fueled POV is of particular interest to me, even if many of his choices don't reflect my own.  But anyone who writes a paean to Big Barda gets my respect.

I am also finally reading The Jugger by Richard Stark (aka: Donald Westlake).  Its more Parker.  And its very, very Parker.  Nice to get back to Stark's punchy, brisk style.

Grillmaster 2012

For my birthday/ in order to engage in better living, I have finally moved from the charcoal grill to propane, something the me of 7 years ago would have found horrifying.  But the me of both Sunday and Wednesday evenings found absolutely fantastic.

Cooking meat inside your home is for chumps.  As is doing anything to vegetables but grilling them.  Especially when Matt T. Mangum pushes you aside on the maiden voyage of said grill and insists this is his show, and on Wednesday when Jamie wants to do this herself, so maybe you don't get to use that grill you bought, but you do get to just sit in a porch chair, watch the sun lower in the west and then enjoy a lovely dinner.

Writing

I'm at a very strange point in working on the thing I'm working on.

1)  To some extent, I'm now playing connect-the-dots with plot points I've always known were there, so I feel like I'm straying from character development, world-building, development of themes, etc... in favor of "let's get this told", which is a huge departure from where I spent several chapters/ years hacking away.

2)  Some items that popped up in the news were scheduled to happen within three chapters of where I'm at. Its both disarming and useful to see what actually happens in real life so I can see how close I was, and what the parties involved actually do.

3)  Writers, can you be kind to your protagonists?  It seems counter productive to raising the stakes or maintaining a certain goal or theme.

4)  Tween Vampire Fiction is fun to write.