Project Update V

Well, November was a crazy month over here. Tremendous highs, debilitating lows, and lots of hopping about hither and thither.

First, I began the month on Cloud Nine, as they say, floating high in the stratosphere because I attained my primary goal of self-publishing a novel.

Then, I faced the really hard part. The follow-up.

Basically, I raced upstairs to my bedroom and dove under the bed, figuratively speaking.

Early November had us spending the wife’s annual bonus on annual house upkeep. In this case, a brand new boiler so we can have the privilege of heat this winter. Then my better half needed to fly out to Montreal for four days leaving me to focus on the children, i.e., herding cats. My true focus, though, turned from the writing and the child care to finding a paying day job. Spent a few days compiling and researching my targets in my market, composing resumes and letters, and sending 77 of them out in staggered waves. (Still have 20 or so more to mail out.) The result to date was two inconclusive interviews last week. Finally, we all enjoyed four luxurious days relaxing at my parents’ place for the long Thanksgiving holiday.

But I did do some work on my book business. Did the whole ISBN registration thing and copyrighted the novel. Selected a web hosting company for my author’s website and started checking out the hundreds of customizable templates I can apply. And towards the end of the month I started editing my second novel for publication and brainstorming an outline for my fourth novel.

Excitement!

As far as my physical health goes, I walked 16.7 miles, kinda so-so for me. But I did take the girls out half-a-dozen times to kick the soccer ball around and lifted the weights a couple of times. During the Thanksgiving break I swam in the indoor pool with the little ones. I did clock in at the heaviest body weight in my life, but now I’m minus-five that, and hopefully that downward trend will continue.

My mindset has been rollercoastering in brutal fashion. Up and down, up and down, out of control. Worry, worry, worry, distraction, stress, stress. However, I’ve been finding much comfort in my faith, and have been spending a lot of time in the cool, dark, peaceful expanse of an empty church before the crucifix – maybe a dozen or fifteen half-hour sessions. Somehow, slowly, answers, inspiration and energy are coming.

Finally got around to reading a pair of books I’ve long wanted to conquer – Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld novel and Mervyn’s Peake’s Titus Groan. Both good reads, but neither lived up to the hype in my opinion. Read a great Heinlein and am currently re-reading The Crystal Cave, a very, very influential book from my youth that I haven’t cracked in thirty years.

So I grade November a B-minus. Would’ve been a C but I was legitimately focused on other things out of necessity. My goal for December is to make it through the holidays, make substantial progress on the Book Self-Publishing Project, and keep on an even keel physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Can be done, no?

Angry Birds

So here’s my dilemma. I’m not a sports guy, never really was growing up. Yes, I ran when I was young and lifted during my teen years, but I wasn’t big on organized sports. Nowadays, however, I watch football and baseball as a means of escape.

Being a New York Giants fan, the whole Eli Manning-Tom Coughlin era has been one of increasing stress. Never a dominant team (unlike, say, the 14-2 Phil Simms-Bill Parcells 1986 Super Bowl winners), the Giants like to play to the level of their opponents, start playing serious late in the game, keep it close until the final 30 seconds, and squeak in to the playoffs – when they make them, which hasn’t been lately – on the thinnest of margins, and usually not in control of their destiny.

Result: Stress, not escape, for Hopper.

Three years ago I decided to start watching baseball. Now, we’ve been taking in a game at Yankee stadium once a year for over a decade now as a sort of family outing with my wife’s side. But I grew up a Mets fan, and it felt more natural to root for them. And since they were not a good team, hovering slightly below .500, and I knew they weren’t a good team, I found myself enjoying watching the games after a busy day at work. Couple this emotional uninvolvement with the fact that a loss in baseball is one-tenth the loss of a football game, baseball became my preferred form of escape.

Then the Mets got good all of a sudden and made it to the World Series.

And stress, emotional involvement, and every-loss-mattering came back in spades.

Last week, after the Giants brutal, heartbreaking, completely demoralizing loss to the Patriots with six seconds left in the game, I threw my hands up in disgust and said the first thing that came to my mind:

“I’m giving up football and baseball and taking up bird watching!”

Problem is, I’ll start watching the birds in my backyard and this’ll happen: I’ll spot a group of warblers muscling in on a bush that a group of wrens call home and I’ll start routing for the wrens and those bastard warblers’ll bring it full force and before you know it, my team, the Wrens, will lose on the last play of the game!

Argh.

Maybe it’s time to break out the telescope again … surely hunting Messier objects wouldn’t be stressful, would it?

Book Review: Titus Groan

© 1946 by Mervyn Peake

What a strange book! Hopper is truly baffled.

Is it a gothic horror? Maybe – but it’s not really gothic and it’s not really horror. Is it a fantasy alternative to The Lord of the Rings? Again, maybe – but while it might be considered “fantasy” it’s not even in the same genus, let alone species, of Tolkien.

Well, then, just what was this 400-page behemoth I just read?

The best description I can come up with is: a 60-percent-Dickens, 40-percent-Poe character study of the morbid and morose goings-on in a massive centuries-old castle.

If you are a devoted fan of Charles Dickens, or if you enjoy the wordy 19th-century horror of Edgar Allan Poe, or if you find the morbid and morose goings-on in massive centuries-old castles, then this book, the first of the “Gormenghast Trilogy,” is right up your alley.

Gormenghast is the name of the castle in question, and Titus Groan is the newborn heir, the seventy-seventh heir of Gormenghast. The action – if it can be called that – takes place over the princeling’s first two years. Though there are at least fifteen characters of importance in the novel, we mainly follow the Machiavellian ascendency of Steerpike, a discontented, highly intelligent and highly amoral cook’s apprentice who desperately, and in snowballing fashion, seeks greater and greater power within the castle walls. Because of his ruthless quest (as well as the passions of other characters), tragedy comes to Gormenghast.

Now, to say that events in Titus Groan flow by at a snail’s pace only does the metaphor justice if one sits that snail in a pan of Krazy Glue, deep freezes it in a block of liquid hydrogen, and deposits the poor creature within the singularity of a black hole (where time ceases to flow). That’s how it felt to me. A twenty-sentence paragraph detailing a man drawing a knife; an entire page devoted to a manservant walking dark and dank corridors; a block of twenty pages to describe a dinner ritual among the castle elites. Now, this is partly due to a decision on Peake’s part to bring out the stilted, near-eternal character of Gormenghast. It also forces the dissecting scalpel on the characters of the individuals who populate the novel. And so, in and of itself, the glacial movement of the plot may not necessarily be a bad thing.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t move past it.

However, as a Dickensian enthusiast, I relished the names (Mr. Flay, Mr. Rottcodd, Doctor Prunesquallor), the idiosyncrasies (Fuchsia’s secret rooms, Lady Gertrude and her moving carpet of cats), the tragedies (Flay and Swelter psychological warfare, Keda and the two men who fight to the death to have her, Lord Sepulchrave’s descent into madness), the whole black-and-white Charles Addams visuals of these people. In this regard Peake is indeed a master. And for this angle the book is worth reading, and for exactly this I am glad to have read it.

But I’m going to hold off on the remaining two-thirds of the trilogy.

Grade: B (A for characterization, C for pacing).