Energumene

kelly_yoyo and planetalyx will probably be here within an hour or so. I'm looking forward to Orycon this weekend, but even more to seeing Kelly and meeting Alyx. It's a blue-sky day here in Portland, sunny and very windy and cold. I hope they've had similarly glorious weather for the drive down from their sub-Arctic lair.

Zachary is at work, and Xerxes and I are passing the time until Kelly and Alyx arrive in our usual ways. Which is to say, he's curled up in his little fleece cave, sound asleep, and I am ostensibly working on a Forensics book but really fidgeting and distracting myself.

Next week I will:

--finish that final Forensics book;
--take Xerxes to the veterinarian for his annual teeth-cleaning;
--assess my Nano experience and probably post something about it; and
--redesign my two crapulous websites, with WordPress and the phone support of my WP-savvy pal Magda.

So it looks like a good weekend in store, followed by a good week. Although Xerxes may see it rather differently.

My room is still indigo, but I've changed my username. I microblog as myself on twitter and fb, so I decided to use my name here, too. Posts NSFW (not safe for the world) can still be friends-locked.

And now back to my regularly scheduled NaNoing.

Some months ago a protagonist and a premise presented themselves to me. I noodled around with them, on and off, and even wrote a handful of scenes. Then I stopped, because I had sworn a solemn vow not to write my way through a novel without plot, plan, or road map. I've done that before, and it hasn't worked out well for me.

I had the beginning of my book, and the ending. I knew the two or three Biggest Things that happen in between. Almost all of the second and third acts, though, remained a mystery. I needed structure, causality, escalation.

"One of these days," I told myself, "I will Grapple." I resisted the siren call of scenes that seductively appealed to be written. Did they even belong in the book? "Must . . . finish  . . . plotting . . . ."

Yesterday afternoon  mindseas  shared with me the dining-room table in her family's Portland house, several hours of her time, and, best of all, her insightful questions and excellent ideas. We did a Taos-style plot break on my book, complete with color-coded cards. And while we did not introduce a shadowy cabal of Norwegian secret agents, we did create a three-act structure that hangs together and will bear weight. Afterward, as she prepared for the red-eye flight home, I copied those index cards into Super Note Card, feeling grateful and excited.

NaNoWri Mo? NaNoWhyNot?

As mindseas and I left the theater last night after a showing of "The Mist" (part of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhucon going on this weekend in Portland), I wondered why it is that whenever the military, or scientists, or military scientists punch a window through the fabric of space-time into another dimension, and the window turns into a door through which things pour into our world, those things are always (1) big, (2) mean, and (3) a lot like bugs, deep-sea creatures, reptiles, dinos, or some combination thereof.

Wouldn't you think that just once in a while, by the law of averages, we'd punch our way into a dimension of ponies and buttercups?

That said, "The Mist" is one of the better film adaptations of Stephen King. Not directly Lovecraftian, though the sense of brooding mysterious cosmic horror is Lovecrafty.

The evening's offerings also included "The Haunted Palace," a 1963 film based--loosely--on HPL's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In the hope of cramming the film into the studio's "Poe Cycle," AIP bookended it with quotes from a Poe poem and plopped a transplanted European castle, a la the Hearst palace, into the middle of rustic Arkham. Hence the title.

I had seen bits of it before but this was my first exposure to the complete film. It's really not too bad, and has a lot of wonderful shots and some classic Price mugging. I couldn't help but notice, however, that after Charles Dexter Ward and his wife (anyone who knows HPL is eye-rolling at that!) arrive at their inherited, abandoned palace carrying a total of two small suitcases approximately the size of lightweight portable sewing machines, those reticules disgorge, in the course of the film, a dazzling profusion of full-length brocade dressing gowns and ruffled shirts (him), and lacy peignoirs, satin dressing gowns, and full-crinolined skirts (her).

Now, I love luggage, and I love packing. It has long been my dream to find the perfect piece of luggage, one that violates the laws of physics by being much bigger on the inside than its exterior dimensions would seem to allow. Apparently the prop department at AIP in the 60s had a couple of these treasures.

I just came across this hilarious short article that appeared in slate.com in July. It's about a guy who peddled plot-generators to aspiring screenwriters and novelists in Hollywood back in the DeMille era. The beauty of it is that he was living a fabulous plot line himself--a plot line complete with a serial killer and buried treasure, I add--and never saw it.

www.slate.com/id/2221392/