Here He Comes, The Queen of Chee-ee-eese!

The Bad Poetry Party was a spectacular success. Good food, good wine, good company, appalling verse--a perfect combination. We adorned vgnwtch's husband T with the Cheese Crown for his discovery and performance of a trove of truly abysmal poetry by a kid who wishes, rather desperately, to be Poe. Oh, the misplaced modifiers! I knew, when mischievouspie's wails of horror at the syntax turned to mock threats of vengeance, that T had found something extraordinary. aristeros gave a fine performance of a 19th century ode to a train wreck. newroticgirl dredged up her high school notebooks--brave, brave woman! From jeneralist, we had anagrammatic poetry galore. tracyandrook composed new odes just for the occasion, and jaime_sama was represented in absentia when her husband performed a poem she'd crafted from spam subject lines. One measure of true bad craftsmanship and the true craftsmanship of bad: can the poem make aspenwolf squeak involuntarily? tracyandrook declared that she could not wait to break out "The Eye of Argon" until the crowd had thinned and only the die-hards were left, so we spent a prose interlude with the worst work of short fiction in the entirety of Anglophone literature, and then came back for another round of Enjambments Man Was Not Meant to Know.

T and vgnwtch are well stocked now to make Bad Poetry Day an international phenomenon when they move across the pond--she was the second Queen of Cheese, and may still have the jalapeno cheddar crown. After all, if International Talk Like a Pirate Day can become a massive phenomenon, why not bad poetry, too?

International Bad Poetry Day, by the way, is really January 22nd, my actual birthday. Sometimes we have to settle for celebrating on Bad Poetry Day (observed), but we do aim for the real thing. It's kind of a race now: which will I manage to establish first--a goofy pseudoholiday, or a writing career? What if Bad Poetry Day turns out to be the whole of my literary legacy?

Sunday, Dan and I languished among the party dishes with our likewise tuckered out houseguests, twoeleven, radiotelescope, and gregoradon, who had crossed state lines to be here and were able to stay through most of a second day. Today, we seem to be recovered from the party, and mostly recovered from the dishes, but what on earth are we going to do with this refrigeratorful of cheese? Stilton with candied lemon peel, anyone?

Thanks to all of you who came out for the occasion. And those of you who couldn't be here--well, next year in South River. Have I mentioned recently how grateful I am to the universe for my good friend-karma? Not recently enough? I don't know how I got so lucky. You all make my life sweet.

One Step Back, Many Steps Forward?

The strangest thing has been happening. I seem to have taken a break from writing.

This hasn't happened since...hm...17 May 2003.

For most of the past week, the only writing I've been doing has been extensive annotation in the margins of the book I'm reading to prepare for the next drafting pass on Traitor of Imlen. It's indisputably a writing-related task, and it's absolutely necessary if I want my little prequel not to suck, but it doesn't feel like real work. Odd that it doesn't, since in my other life, research was half of my job.

Anyhow, yesterday I really started to feel like I was losing my mind from not producing pages. My thinking on Traitor of Imlen is simply not at the writing stage right now.

Here's what my self-doubt has to say about today's work:
I did the unthinkable. I spent today working on Big Book, Volume 2. It's not dumb enough that I wrote an unpublishably large book, or that it's the start of a series of unpublishably large books. No, I have to interrupt work on a publishably small book to work, not even on the first excessively large volume, but on its excessively large sequel.

Wow. That must be the post-bookum depression talking. I wondered whether the novella was important enough to me to set it off. Looks like the answer is yes.

Last night, it really bothered me to think that the minor character who was in jail in the last scene I wrote of the Big Book before I split it in half was still in jail. In my very first lj post, I announced to my lj-addicted friends that I had to drop forward progress on the storytelling to try to pull the first volume into publishable condition. At the end of a spoilery catalog of awkward positions in which my characters were now frozen for the duration, I said:

Ateket is still in jail, suffering drug withdrawal. It's Ateket I feel worst for, really, because at this point I've left him in solitary confinement in a windowless cell since July. Yes, I know how it all ends, but you deserve to see it. Actually, you deserve to see it more clearly than I've yet shown it to you. Hang on. It's coming.

He's only supposed to spend about a month in jail, Beltresin time. In writing time, he's been in solitary confinement for 20 months. The overpowering feeling came over me that I was not going to be able to write anything worthwhile until I got that poor boy out of prison. So today, I reread the last few chapters I roughed out for Vol 2. I was surprised at how much I still like them. Tonight, I'm sending Ateket home, dammit.

Then, if I have to spend another year or two on the short Stisele prequel, I won't feel nearly so bad about neglecting the characters in the Big Book.




In entirely unrelated news, sporos has just started up his new blog. Those of you who've been reading mine since the beginning may remember him from this post, in which I describe his habit of titling all his first drafts, "Bite Me: I Rule." Those of you who were at the Bad Poetry Party may remember the stupendously awful poem about he sent for me to read, since he couldn't attend this year. The one called "Ode to Sven, My Pet Glacier, Being a Reminiscence upon the Time before the Great Melting Took My Veray True and Goode Companion, Who Was Named after My Nephew's Newt." It is both the best and the worst poem I have ever read on the subject of defrosting one's freezer. His opening lj post, however, is lovely. So go bite him. He rules.