For the past couple of months, Fred “spitballarmy” O. (whom you may remember from the “Under the Tree” collaboration last winter) has been posting strange three-image combinations at unpredictable intervals on Twitter. Today those poetic triads (via Fred) have launched a Twitter #hashtag and Web site called Cryptich (that’s cryptic mixed with triptych, a word for which I may or may not be responsible).

I love this. Such a fun way to play with words and images—and Fred chose the perfect art for the header of the site to boot. My opening entry:

gerbera daisies / blue glass vase / uncashed check #cryptich

Come play on Twitter.

A live concert review I wrote last month is now available on PopMatters:

Hawkins imagined Red Light Fever as sounding like me having sex with my record collection, but delivered from start to finish with the same thrusts at the same speed with the same pressure, the music only humps the listener into numbness.

Photo credit (that sadly fell off the article): Lara Clifford. More of Lara’s photos can be found on her flickr gallery.

From Cracking the GRE, a test-prep manual by Doug Pierce:

You will also see a fourth, unidentified, experimental section on the GRE. This section will either be Math or Verbal and will look exactly like the real Math or Verbal section . . ., but it won’t count toward your score. ETS [the company that administers the test] uses the experimental section to test GRE questions for use on future exams. This means that part of your test fee pays for the privilege of serving as a research subject for ETS.

On a related note, I’ll be hunkered down for the next few weeks working on grad school-, job-, and writing-related activities. To catch my quotidian bitchings about said activities (and the occasional soup recipe), follow me on Twitter.

Be well, everyone, and happy new year.

Inspired by his holiday #cnftweet on Twitter, @spitballarmy and I are making a list of typical (and atypical) gifts identifiable through their wrapping.

Check out the booty as it grows under the tree over at Fred’s blog. And come add your own!

Have a safe, happy, scary-clownless holiday season, everyone.

Day 3 of NahNoWriMo, and already I’m behind on my official unofficial word count—but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing.

A couple of months ago, the Friday Project offered bloggers the opportunity to pose three questions to Stewart Copeland as part of their Strange Things Happen advertising blitz. Three questions isn’t much, but I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to ask a bit about Copeland’s writerly side, so I did what any self-respecting interviewer would do: I cheated. Luckily Copeland responded anyway.

(Insert drummer-stereotype/inability-to-count joke here.)

Talented story-spinner Annetta Ribken has been so kind as to host the interesting Q & A results on her website, WordWebbing:

Q & A with Stewart Copeland: On writing, his memoir, and why the early days of the Police didn’t make the cut

Netta is spunky, sassy, and irreverent in all the right ways, and I’m honored to be appearing on her site. Be sure to head over there and say hello and check out what Copeland said about his background as a writer and what he says is the real reason he omitted the early days of the Police from his book.

* * * * *

Many thanks to editor Robin Harvie at the Friday Project for the assistance.

Happy first day of NahNoWriMo, everyone.

This morning I took advantage of the extra hour on the clocks to get started on my word count early in the day, but I can see already the disadvantage that certain nonfiction writing has with this kind of writing marathon: the burden of research. Even those details of events that have already been uncovered and organized need to be reread and reconsidered, which adds a chunk of time to the daily word generating. Part of me wants to just spew from memory and worry about accuracy and details later—and for nonessential details, I’m doing just that—but the smarter, more practical, lazier part of me refuses to waste a month doing work that will need to be repeated later simply because I was too careless or rushed or cocky to look up the facts or think things through.

Practicality FTW.

We have a guest coming to visit in a few weeks (plus the Thanksgiving holidays), so I’m aiming for a minimum of 2000 words per day in order to stay on track for the month. I’ve got my work cut out for me (plus a heap of other things to take care of), but I’m determined not to stress too hard about it: my primary goals for participating in NahNoWriMo are to make progress on this draft and to get back into a consistent writing schedule. As long as I stick to those two goals, I don’t care whether or not I “win” or adhere to the rules.

(If you knew how much headache rules had created on that exact project that I’m currently writing about, you’d have a really good laugh right now.)

Fellow NahNoWriMoer (NahNoWriMoid?) Kelpie has been so kind as to create the original NahNoWriMo art that you see above (please don’t smite us, NaNoWriMo), and, of course, no writing marathon would be complete without a handy dandy word count meter:

2198 / 50000 words. 4% done!

I promise not to regale you all with daily word crunch reports: I don’t want to write them any more than you want to read them. But I’ll be sure to check in now and then to let you know how it’s going.

I hear that NahNo rebels JHammons kicked ass for 2100 words of her work-in-progress novel and SpitBall Army organized the hell out of 30 years’ worth of letters to be transcribed. How’d everyone else do today?

In a couple of days, thousands of crackerjack crackpots will start putting fingers to keyboards to spend four weeks spewing out 50,000 spontaneous words in the global November marathon that is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. (Yes, I’m fighting the urge to add a hyphen.)

Every artist needs an excuse/incentive to do their art thing now and then, so now that my surgery is past and I’m returning to the world of the wakeful, NaNoWriMo seems the perfect excuse/incentive to get back into that nonfiction book draft of mine that has been collecting dust. Sure, it’s not a novel, but so what? There’s also a whole life around that draft that needs to be attended to at the same time, but luckily neither NaNoWriMo nor early drafts have to be good: they just have to be. You can fix ‘em in post later.

Want to write but don’t want to start a novel? Need an excuse to get going on a new project or a work in progress? Come join me (and others) in NahNoWriMo, the non-novel writing month that’s like NaNoWriMo, but not quite. Whether you’re itching to write a memoir, screenplay, doctoral thesis, fan fiction, prose poetry, short stories, haiku, or 50k-worth of blog posts, don’t let the NaNo rules (such as they are) stop you: write whatever you want. Get those fingers moving, and just say Nah.

[Original (pre-h) rebel badge courtesy of Pax.]

I’m happy to report (as I should have done sooner) that my surgery a couple of weeks ago went well, with no surprises, dramas, or complications. Discomfort has been more of a problem than pain, but the biggest issue has been an inability to get a decent night’s sleep—which over a couple of nights wouldn’t be so bad, but which over a couple of weeks makes it difficult to function in the world.

I’m not dead yet; I’m just too pooped out to party.

In the meantime, while I work on becoming a fully conscious member of society again, please join me in a spoonful of Lucy:

Many thanks for the well wishes.

xoxo

A swollen, unnecessary mass of words has invaded your otherwise healthy body of text.

It’s subtle. It’s small. You might not even feel it. But it’s there, and it has to go.

“But it’s not cancerous,” you say. “It’s benign.”

Cancerous prose is so much easier, isn’t it? Easy to spot, easy to remove, no doubts or rationalizations: just snip, and it’s teatime. Cancerous prose is rowdy; it gets in your face. It incites you to kill it.

Benign prose is quiet. It murmurs. It hides its eyes. A benign writing tumor is harder to recognize, harder to pinpoint, easier to rationalize, easier to defend.

Maybe you can live with it. Maybe no one will notice.

Don’t fool yourself. Benign writing tumors are just as damaging as malignant ones. That growth of clichés is ugly. Those awkward phrasings impede your text’s movement. Those extraneous adjectives press on a nerve. Excess begets excess: the longer you let that word tumor live, the more it will grow, spawning more glut and circumlocution until it paralyzes the rest of your text. You can manipulate it, massage it, or tie it up in pretty ribbons, but without surgery the prognosis is poor.

I know you’re scared. You wish you didn’t have to deal with this: you just want things to be all right. But you don’t have to go it alone. If you cannot identify and remove the offending text yourself, you can rely on a friend or family member to help. You can also hire a writing professional who will examine your text, identify the problem, and perform the extraction for you. He or she will even offer suggestions and alternative strategies on how to stitch your work back together and prevent further infection.

Counseling services may be available.

These decisions are never easy to make, but they cannot be ignored. Your writing must be free to jump and dance and twist without hindrance, to sing without obstruction. You must do whatever it takes to help your writing glide. Once these word tumors have been eradicated and expunged, your text body can return to a happy, healthy, productive life.

Both you and your work will breathe easier for it.

* * * * *

I won’t be around for a few days: I’m having some excess adverbs extracted from my neck.

Everyone have a good week, and be well.

Kellie

(What’s an exquisite corpse?)

Sixty-four raging renegades and I will be pulling together to write a story over the next few weeks to be published in No Colony and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Maybe. Who knows. The whole thing could go down in a blaze of bullets and grey smoke.

No matter: for $10 and 150 words, I get to feel all buoyant and squishy at the thought of collaborating on a story with 64 people I know virtually nothing about, will never meet, and have no association with larger than that we happen to read the same website. This project fits right in with my unnatural love for ludicrous ideas.

To do it as a kind of dare: even better.

I just barely squeezed into the last available spot by one whole minute. The internet can be blamed for all kinds of things, but this project is one of many opportunities that would not be possible without it.

Is it just me? Is this some kind of fetish of mine, or do others out there get turned on by these kinds of projects that defy common sense? Cuz I gotta say: I am very excited.