“Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut
“…a young writer’s quest to research the history of the atomic bomb, which leads to a bizarre political soap opera and apocalyptic showdown on the shores of a seedy banana republic in the Caribbean.” – (Publishers Weekly)
Rating: 8 / 10
“Into the Wild” by John Krakauer
“After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive.” - (Publishers Weekly)
Rating: 7.5 / 10
The Mission:
Complete 101 preset tasks in a period of 1001 days.
The Criteria:
Tasks must be specific (ie. no ambiguity in the wording) with a result that is either measurable or clearly defined. Tasks must also be realistic and stretching (ie. represent some amount of work on my part).
Why 1001 Days?
Many people have created lists in the past – frequently simple goals such as New Year’s resolutions. The key to beating procrastination is to set a deadline that is realistic. 1001 Days (about 2.75 years) is a better period of time than a year, because it allows you several seasons to complete the tasks, which is better for organising and timing some tasks such as overseas trips or outdoor activities.
My 1001 Day project began on December 31, 2009
A lot of the entries on my list are personal, but click ahead to read the public portion of my list. You can check back here any time to see how much (if any) progress I’ve made.
One of the things I plan to do in the upcoming year is to read at least one book every two weeks. That may not seem like a challenge, but for someone who is easily distracted by other things (such as writing her own novel), it can be difficult sometimes to find time to sit down and read.
Some of these books I’ll be reading will be pulled from the ALA’s list of the most banned books of 1990-2001. I’ll also be reading books from the Modern Library’s 100 Best Books collection. Hit the jump for the complete lists…
I just got home a week ago after spending ten amazing days in Copenhagen. Being there was so inspiring that I had to force myself to keep experiencing it instead of just sitting down every morning and writing all of my vacation days away. There were more than a few moments during my holiday that I’m sure I’ll look back on as being simultaneously the most surreal and most amusing moments of my life (such as wandering through a park at dawn after not sleeping, weaving flowers into my hair, and promptly falling asleep on the grass in front of a castle).
Unfortunately, upon my return home, reality and its twin sister depression set in. There was a time when I loved Los Angeles (albeit in the way a successful, intelligent older sibling loves their forty-two year old brother who still lives at home in mom’s basement) but now everything here feels old and stale (which is somewhat ironic, considering eternal youth seems to be the mantra and creed of Hollywood). I feel more motivated than ever to sprint towards publication, but when I sit down to write, the words just won’t come. Each sentence I construct is a lesson in patience and a catalyst for self-doubt. And there’s always the big, scary question lurking under all of the little annoyances: am I good enough? Will people actually read the words I’m writing, or will they be just as bored by my two-dimensional characters and lackluster plot as I am? Am I just wasting my time? As the title suggests, I feel like I’m the blind leading the stupid when it comes to finishing these books, and lucky me, I’m playing both parts of the show.
Every neighborhood has ‘The Crazy Guy’ (in fact, I think Los Angeles has 1.5 million of them). My neighborhood’s ‘Crazy Guy’ is a late-night loiterer at the convenience store where I buy my cigarettes. He’s six feet tall, beer-and-cigarettes skinny, has a beard that would make ZZ Top weep with envy and a cowboy hat bigger than Texas. I see him three or four nights a week, and we’ve got that odd kind of camaraderie that comes about whenever two people frequent the same establishment: we see each other, we nod, we say hello, and then we go our separate ways. It’s a ritual, a constant; I know he’ll be there whenever I go to pick up cigarettes in the middle of the night, just like I know the late-night clerk will have a pack waiting on the counter for me before I even step foot inside the door. We’re all denziens of the same little 1200 square foot, midnight sphere of existence.
Tonight, as I was standing in line behind him and waiting for him to pay for his beer (Budweiser in a can, and he always asks for a plastic bag instead of the standard-issue brown paper), the clerk mentioned to him that I’m a writer. It struck me as odd that he’d even remember that about me until I got outside and Crazy Guy (C.G. for short) approached me and said, “I’m a writer too.”
As open-minded as I try to be, my first instinct was to give a little internal snort of disbelief. But I was feeling charitable and uncharacteristically talkative, so I humored him and asked him what genre he writes. According to C.G., he cut his teeth on the likes of Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, with a side order of Ginsberg and, more recently, Chuck Palahniuk. Color me intrigued.
Whether C.G.’s story is true or not is really anyone’s guess. For all I know, I might go there tomorrow night and he might tell me he was once a fighter pilot, or a secret service agent, or a bank teller. Either way, something about him made me want to listen to what he had to say, so I sat down on the hood of my car and said, “Yeah?”
And the song goes like this: C.G. was an only child with divorced parents. Mommy was a nurse and Daddy was a mechanic. Somewhere between teenage angst and twenty-two with a mid-life crisis, he stumbled across beat poetry and marijuana. After two summers of helping his dad restore a ‘57 Chevy and sneaking cigarette-and-poetry breaks behind the garage, C.G. developed, “…a little bit of craziness and an obsession with being a writer.” Unfortunately, he never got any of his original work published. After having two novels rejected by publishers, he got into ghost writing for not-so-notable people (“B-list actors, washed-up politicians, you know– you should see the shit they write, then give me and want me to clean up the mess.”) Between that and the mechanic work he does on the side, he can afford to pay the bills, keep his kitchen stocked with beer and cigarettes, and spend every night hunched over the old typewriter in his bedroom.
I listened to the story, and the whole time, I was looking at him– dirty hair, dirty clothes, beer in one hand and cigarette in the other, both making arcs through the air while he talked– and I was thinking oh fuck, this could be me. In twenty years, I could be The Crazy Lady. And that’s when I realized something: C.G. is happy. He doesn’t care that his pants have grease stains on them or that his cowboy hat is lopsided, and he doesn’t care that people think he’s crazy because “…life is a lot more fun when people think you’re nuts.” None of that matters because he’s happy.
Then C.G. asked what I write, and I told him. I write sci-fi, I write erotica, I write horror, I write fan fiction– I just write. I write, and I write, and I think about people like Nabokov and Alan Moore, who weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, to push the red button, to cross the line and then saunter away from the mess they made, laughing and flipping the bird. And I think yeah, that’s what I want to do, that’s what I want to be. No Dickens or Hemmingway here, man. (“Fuck Dickens and Hemmingway,” C.G. said. “Hunter S. Thompson and Alan Ginsberg, now they were visionaries.”)
And by the time we were finished, and I got back into my car to drive away, I’d learned more in the span of a fifteen-minute conversation than I would have if I’d spent hours studying the subject of life:
1) Always carry a miniature tape recorder, because you never know when you’ll stumble across a midnight messiah in tattered jeans and a lopsided cowboy hat.
2) Writing isn’t about how many books you’ve published or how many zeroes there are on your royalty checks. It’s part of you; it’s under your skin, throbbing hard and furious in your veins, dancing behind your eyelids whenever you close your eyes.
3) If I’m looking at my future whenever I look at C.G., then I think maybe, just maybe, I’m okay with that.
