The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • Hello from Mexico

    IMG_1643I’m writing from a hotel room in Ixtapa, Mexico, where I’ve been hanging out for almost a week.  We flew down last Saturday, and fly back on Sunday.  This has been our first real vacation since our honeymoon in the Bahamas in 2007, except for long weekends, trips back to the Midwest for holidays, and the week I took off to move into our new place, and it’s been long overdue.

    Mexico’s a strange place.  First, it’s strange that my didn’t-pay-attention-twenty-years-ago Spanish is somewhat functional here, and fragments of it have been coming back to me as we stumble through menus and tours.  Yes, most of the people here, especially those in the tourism-related industries (which is pretty much all of Ixtapa and Zihuantanejo) speak English.  But they also like it when you try to use Spanish, and they all seem to love trying to teach you a few words here and there en Espanol.

    We’re in one of the poorest states in the country, and once you leave our hotel, you can see it.  Ixtapa’s not much more than a marina, a row of resorts, and a couple of golf courses, but Zihua is a pretty beat city.  Walking the rows of open markets and ramshackle properties, pretty much the only high tech things you will see are Coke or Corona signs.  Any feeling you may have about being the Ugly American here is quickly dissipated by the thought that at least the pesos you’re throwing out there are going to someone who needs them.

    A dollar is worth 12 or almost 13 pesos.  Prices in pesos still use the dollar sign though, which first freaked me out when I picked up a room service menu and saw a can of Coke for $35.  I can’t really tell how much we’re spending or how good or bad of a deal it is, because we’re charging a lot of stuff back to the room, and there’s the whole ‘monopoly money’ factor.  Anything less than 20 pesos you get back in change will be in coins, and the paper money is very colorful with pictures of Indians and pyramids.  Also, the Banco De Mexico on the 100 peso bill is in a font that looks like the Iron Maiden logo, which is very metal.

    Most days, we have been doing nothing but sitting on the beach, reading or writing.  I have crossed the 50,000 mark on this book, which means it is officially done as far as NaNoWriMo is concerned, but it’s really like 30% done, and that’s just a first draft, so don’t look for a pre-order any time soon.  We also took a long tour where we got to see a tilemaking operation in the countryside and wander through a town that had a big open market.  It was all centered around this one Catholic church that had a Jesus that looked tragic in a Faces of Death sort of way, bewildered and on his knees dragging a cross, bloodied and beaten.  Not exactly the airbrushed and toned Jesus I was used to seeing as a kid in Indiana.

    We also went on a long tour yesterday on ATVs, which was a lot of fun.  It was mostly through woods and farmland, and most of the farms here grow coconuts, or raise cattle.  We also got to cruise at top speed across a wavy oceanfront.  ATVs are fun as hell, and it makes me want to buy a couple and tear up my land in Colorado to put in some kind of dirt obstacle course.

    And the bad news.  First, there was an earthquake here last Sunday.  There were actually three, a 3.7, a 4.6, and a 4.2; I think we only felt the middle one.  It wasn’t much, a very quick shake that we thought was just someone next door or maybe below us, and we didn’t hear confirmation of it until the next day.

    Second, we got sick.  We were both careful about what we ate and drank, and they purify everything here at the hotel, but something got us.  It was a horrible, flu-like thing where I was feverish and totally weak for about 24 hours, and then it went away.  So, Montezuma had his revenge, but a day later, I was for the most part better.

    And also, on last Sunday, I was eating a piece of cake, and one of my crowns fell out.  It was my lower rear one, and it and the tooth appeared to have no damage, but there was some sensitivity, and immediately went ballistic.  “Mexican” and “Dentist” go together like “Turkish” and “Prison”.  I got an appointment the next morning with a dentist in Zihua who had an office about as clean and friendly as my last dentist in Astoria (which isn’t saying much, but it wasn’t like the dental scene in that Tom Hanks castaway movie.)  He shot me up with novacaine, cleaned everything, glued the crown back on, told me in broken English that I needed to get it redone as soon as possible (going back next week, in the US…) and then charged me roughly  $40.  No paperwork, no insurance hassles, no waivers to sign, nothing.  It was truly a “you are not in the US anymore” moment.

    So here I am, the temperature outside double what it is back home, no rain or gloom.  No turkey yesterday, and the only football on the tube was the no-hands variety with the round ball.  Lots of pictures to upload when I get back on a real internet connection, so stay tuned.

  • A final coda to the season

    Oh yeah, I have not updated since the end of baseball season.  People keep commenting about the Yankees buying the World Series, because it’s great to hate the Yankees.  My general opinion on that is, “eh.”  It’s no secret teams with high payrolls have more success, except the Mets have the second-highest payroll and 2009 didn’t work out so well for them (24th place in win/loss); the Cubs threw down about $135 big, third in payroll size, and finished like 7th in a 5-team division.  (OK, it was 16th of 30) The Marlins were dead last in payroll and almost won a wildcard; the Mariners shed almost $20 million, but they still spent more money than the Phillies did to win the World Series in 2008.  Houston is in the top ten money served, but finished 24th.  And my beloved Rockies just barely made the top twenty in the salary department, but were sixth place overall. So more payroll means more success, except when it doesn’t.

    I’m pretty neutral about the whole Yankees hate thing, except for the fact that I’m a fan of whoever is playing the Red Sox, and that makes me somewhat happy they were able to win.  But I only passively watched the games.  It seems like it was months ago that the Rockies lost, and I’m starting to get the itch, wishing I was back at Coors Field with AM radio in ear, and a bag of Cracker Jacks in my lap.  I think this will be a tough year, hot stove-wise, since a lot of my favorites from the 2007 series may be going elsewhere.  (Hawpe, Atkins, Torrealba) and some of the big weapons of this year will also wander elsewhere (Beimel, Giambi, Betancourt).  Hopefully, the owners will lock down some good names for 2010.  And hopefully, I’ll get at least one weekend at altitude to see a few games.

    Until then – winter ball?  I don’t think the iPhone has an app for that…

  • Marathon

    It’s been a while.  I’ve been busy working on this NaNoWriMo book writing marathon.  It’s day 15, and I should be at 25,000 words, and I’m just shy of 32,000 words, which is good news.  The bad news is I took yesterday off, I barely picked at things today after sleeping in, and I go on vacation next week.  I am also slowly running out of steam, and I’m not terribly excited about the project anymore.  Part of this is due to two artificial constraints I have added.  One is that I have been limiting myself to only the first third of the book, because this is the weakest third, and normally, I’d jump straight into the final third, and totally screw everything up.  I need the base writing done in the first third, so that’s where I’m focusing.  The other problem is that I’ve been avoiding going back to re-edit or revise the old stuff I’ve already written, but I know it needs lots of work.  It’s all filled with passive verbs, simple telling versus showing, and not a lot of good storytelling.  I’ll get to that eventually – right now the only goal is 50,000 by the end of the month.

    In less than a week, I will be in sunny Mexico.  I have done zero preparation for the trip, aside from getting a Frommer’s book (or maybe it’s Lonely Planet, I forget.)  It will be a nice change from the weather here, which has been dipping into the 40s some mornings.  The cats have taken to sleeping on top of our cable box/DVR, so I’m also expecting a near future of no TV unless I can find a way to block that off.

    I’ve wasted the morning googling old crap about malls.  One of the main problems with this book is it’s much harder to research late 80s stuff from Elkhart on the internet.  I thought researching Summer Rain was bad, but try finding anything about Scottsdale Mall on the web.  There’s one page on deadmalls, and there’s what I posted, and that’s about it.  I don’t want to have to start pulling crap from the Elkhart library to research this, because it’s not a research project – it’s a friggin’ novel.  The same goes for music, although I can actually find Indestroy’s album on iTunes.

    All of this reading about malls has me thinking about going to a mall, but I don’t even know where one is around here.  I know where the closest strip of Best Buy/Baby Gap/Home Depot is, and we have this big outdoor mall, but I want to walk the corridors of a half-dead, remodeled last in 1978, dried-out water feature covered in fake cotton snow mall.  Meanwhile, I get distracted by posts like this great time capsule of my past: a post about Factoria Mall, outside of where I used to work in Seattle.  That place was a dump, but my first year of work was in an office right next to that place, and it became one of those default places I’d always end up, especially when I needed something from Target.  Scary stuff.

    Must go write…

  • NaNoWriMo, day one

    So there’s this thing called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.  It’s a contest of sorts, where writers have one month to write a 50,000 word novel.  There are no prizes or judges, and there’s no real anything except motivation to throw together a book as fast as possible.  This isn’t anything new; I tried to do this back in 2002, but between a trip to Vegas at the start, a horrible case of the flu, and a story line that was largely unsustainable, I dropped out pretty fast.  This time, I will be in Mexico for a week of the time, and I’ve got a more involved job, plus I’m also married now, so I don’t have as much time as when I was single with no friends in New York, and coasting in a job where I could spend long periods of time chipping away at an outline.

    I have been outlining a book for a few weeks ago; it’s actually an idea I’ve knocked around for years, and I have parts of a rough draft that weighs in at about 60,000 words.  The book, structurally, threatens to weigh in at close to the word count of Summer Rain, or about 180,000-200,000 words.  The book is somewhat biographical, and takes place in high school.  I have often said I don’t want to dip back into this style of writing, and there are some obvious issues with doing this.  But I feel like I need to get this out of my system and behind me, and the only way to do that is to actually write and finish the damn book and put it behind me.  Maybe nobody will ever read it, but I need to get it done and on the shelf.

    My biggest problem is that twenty years is a long time ago, and my memory isn’t what it used to be.  When I was writing Summer Rain, that period was only a few years behind me.  I also had a decent paper trail, including old emails, diaries, checkbooks, bank statements, letters, and even a copy of my bursar’s record, with the prices of every thin dime the university shook out of me back in 1992.  I have moved eight times since I started Summer Rain.  Since I graduated high school, I have moved fifteen times.  Each time, a little bit more falls off the truck or into the recycler, and I have almost no record of anything anymore.  I need to be a lot more loose with dates and details this time around.

    There’s also the issue with writing about other people.  I always run into the problem that I write some story about someone from 1988, and the story is about love lost or lessons learned, and I get an email that says “WHAT THE FUCK DUDE MY CAR DIDNT HAVE 14 INCH RIMS IT HAD 15 INCH RIMS”.  Writing about space aliens from mars doesn’t generate this kind of thing, and it’s a real crapshoot, because I can obsess over these tiny details, or I can just omit so-and-so from the story entirely, or make up some new character, or whatever else.  But knowing that someone will read the story eventually and get on your case because maybe you painted them in a bad light is always unnerving.  And the work of combining and amalgamating and fictionalizing characters is always that – work.

    So I’ve been re-reading John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk (the original version, not the Reader’s Digest version) and that’s got me geared up.  I’ve also been doing a lot of outlining using OmniOutliner on the Mac, which is a pretty useful program for this sort of thing.  I usually have really terse outlines, and then I write for 30 or 40,000 words, and then I start forgetting what the outline is or what I covered, and I have to stop and re-read and re-outline everything, which is a huge waste of time.  I hope that I can stick to this outline and keep things rolling.

    Today was day one, and my wordcount was just over 3000.  I think you need something like 1667 words a day to hit the magic 50K, so I’m slightly ahead.  I hope I can work out some more slack and keep going.  I’m also somewhat forcing myself to write very linear, starting at chapter 1 and going forward, instead of hopping around.

    Anyway, that’s what’s keeping me busy – if I vanish for a bit, you know why.

  • Cart racing

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    My work had a team-building event today where they brought us to an indoor go-cart track and set us loose for a while on a twisty course with gas-powered carts.  I raced 40 minutes of an hour-long race on a three-person team, and had a car change about halfway through because my throttle broke. Then I spent the last part of the race in a sliding car with cold tires.  I finished the practice round in second, but finished sixth in the full race.

    Overall, it was a lot of fun, although it left me sore as hell, and made the commute home interesting.  I kept wanting to slam into turns and shave corners.  The whole experience reminded me of snowmobiling in Alaska, down to the annoying helmet.

    If you ever have the chance to do this, here is one big tip: when the track safety guys blue flag you and tell you to let the guy behind you pass, ignore them.  I actually let people pass when I got flagged, and I was the only one who did.

  • Album reviews are here

    So, ProgSlob.com, my attempt at a music site, has pretty much died on the vine.  I stopped blogging there after my car accident in April, and never got back on the horse.  I’m in the process of moving all of the worthwhile writing here; since both are WordPress installs, this is easy-peasy.

    Now you can find all of my album reviews scattered amongst the entries here.  Or just go to reviews and read them all in one clip.

  • End of another season

    God.  Damn.  It.  I am pissed about the way the Rockies lost tonight.  They were winning 4-2 at the top of the 9th, and then a blown save later, the season was over.  I spent most of the game pissed, thinking for sure they blew it, and then in the end of the 8th, a brief turnaround, and now… well, maybe next year.

    I am thankful for a few things though:

    • I got to go to two games in Denver, when I initially thought this would be my first Coors Field-less season.
    • I also got to see a win here in Oakland.
    • I got to listen to a ton of games due to MLB at Bat on the iPhone, and all of them from the Denver-local 850 KOA feed.
    • They made it to the postseason.  After much last-second nail-biting wildcard antics, they managed to make it in.
    • They didn’t get swept in the NLDS.  In fact, they were the only team that wasn’t swept in a division series this year.
    • The switch to Jim Tracy not only got them a club-record number of wins, but they also got a bit of attention in the national media with their winning streaks and race to Rocktober.
    • It was good to see Jason Giambi in the purple pinstripes.
    • At least the Red Sox got eliminated.
    • And more salt to the above wound, at least the Yankees are still alive.

    And in the “maybe next year” department, it will be good to see Jim Tracy coach a full season, with that initial two months’ of piss-poor coaching removed from the record.  And maybe Jeff Francis will be back, and Aaron Cook will stay with it for longer, and who knows what other talent will be added to the club.  I’m almost certain Garrett Atkins will move on, given his high salary and crappy year; I initially felt bad about that, given the sentimental attachment of him and 2007, but I’m now convinced that could be for the better.

    There are still a few more weeks of baseball left, but I’m ready to close the book on 2009.  Way back before the all-star break, I predicted a Yankees-Dodgers WS, and maybe that will still happen.  I wouldn’t mind seeing the Angels make it, but this is the point where I tune out for a few months until the itch starts to develop again, and I start pulling out the baseball books and yearning for the start of April to roll around again…

  • A roundabout appearance in the Times

    My writing pal Michael Stutz out in Ohio had a brief appearance in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago.  What makes it interesting is he’s describing some of our late night phone calls back when I lived in the warzone of Astoria.  Check it out:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/nyregion/14diary.html?_r=1

  • Automatic writing

    I haven’t been writing in a while. I still feel like my last great writing project was Rumored to Exist, which shipped in 2002. Everything since then has been a greatest hits or a remix or a collection or something that I started and then watched die on the vine. I’ve managed to get a few good short stories hashed together in the zine, but it starts and ends there.

    And in the last year, forget about it. I haven’t been able to spend more than ten seconds in front of my home computer, given my work schedule. I thought about a lot of different book projects, and would chip away a few words here and there, but I think in the last year, I’ve managed to write maybe a few thousand words. I did finish one short story, and I sort of dicked around with a few ideas for books, but never committed. And like waking up one day a decade after college and finding oneself fifty pounds overweight, I simply do not write anymore. It might be like riding a bike to some people, but I think it’s a perishable skill, and if you don’t sit down and work on something every day, it goes away. I now flip back to some of my old writing, the books or even stuff on here, and I’m amazed at how much better it is than anything I’ve tried to do in the last few months. And it’s because I used to write every god damned day, and now I write about as much as I go to the gym, which is basically never.

    I’ve been talking to my friend Michael about this, and finally came to the conclusion that I just need to man up, wake up earlier every day, and pound out some writing every day, even if it is not for a project. That was the original intention of this journal, to give me some practice every day before I got to the actual writing. But there are a lot of political reasons I can’t just dump anything in here. I’m always afraid of who will read it, and I want things to have a start and a finish, and I want to match a certain theme, and blah blah blah and then I end up paralyzed by fear and unable to write anything. But I need to write SOMETHING.

    That’s when I decided I needed to dump more into automatic writing. I’m not talking about the spirit world trance writing bullshit; I mean sitting down at the keyboard, starting with a thought, and just typing, dumping thoughts straight into the buffer with no concern about plot or structure or underlying anything, just brain to hard disk, trying to capture a scene or a feeling. I don’t know the history of this method; I guess Kerouac was pretty hip to it. But my goal was to sit down at 5:30 AM, eat my bowl of cereal, and speed-type down a thousand words a day of something.

    I dropped this into my .emacs file:

    (defvar write-directory "~/writing/automatic-writing")
(defun writing ()
  (interactive)
  (find-file
   (expand-file-name (format-time-string "%Y%m%d.txt" (current-time))
                     write-directory))
  (goto-char (point-max))
  (newline)
)

(global-set-key "\C-c\C-w" 'writing)

    Now I can hit Control-C Control-W in emacs and open up a text file with today’s date, and type away.

    I’ve been doing this for the last two weeks, and it has been amazing. I’m just writing stupid stuff, memories of old computers and cars and places I’ve lived, bits I’ve vaguely forgotten and have never put into stories, or things that don’t even make stories but have some good potential for description. I think of an idea in the shower, then without thinking too much, start hacking away. I’ve really been able to knock the rust loose, and I feel like my ability to write is coming back. I am not assembling together the next War and Peace or anything, but it’s something I’m thoroughly enjoying, and I look forward to doing it every day.

    My next goal is to (maybe) try to get up a hair earlier, and see how I can work on actually getting the next book going. Or maybe I need to actually focus on a list of vague topics, and see if I can eventually knit together a hundred days of this stuff into something more substantial. But for now, a thousand a day, until I can do it in my sleep. (I sort of am doing that already…)

  • More kicking of tires

    I’m still trying to get used to this new infrastructure, and my actual writing is sapping away any momentum I might have to do this, but I keep thinking of neato ideas I might eventually do on here.

    Case in point: I am attempting to write this entire post on the iPhone. WordPress has an app for that; it lets me enter text, take pictures, and do minor administrative tasks like approve comments, all from my little touchsceen. Yes, I have to type from a glass keyboard, but once you get going, it is not too bad.

    It’s weird to think that when I started this journal in early 1997, my cell phone was this analog Sony model with a pull-out antenna that incurred massive roaming charges when I was not in western Washington and could barely store my favorite five speed dial numbers, let alone text message or run apps or browse the web. The most portable computer I had was a Mac Classic, which was luggable, but still required AC power.

    The idea of typing away on a machine like this phone and then jetting it across the ether to my web page was completely unfathomable. Cell phones were not even that old then; I think nobody had one five years before. Now in some countries in Europe, there are more cell phones than people.  And I can carry a little Mac in my pocket that’s probably ten times faster than that old luggable mac.

    I saved this as a draft, came home, and now it’s the next day and I’m editing it at home in a web browser.  But it’s still exciting that I’ll be able to use this to jot down the occasional note or two, all from a thing smaller than a deck of cards.