Monthly Archives: January 2012

Waterscape as meditation

31 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in My Aquarium Obsession

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Putting rocks in a glass box. Putting plants and water in the glass box. Shining light in the glass box. Sucking out toxins and adding in carbon dioxide. Introducing fish.

Takashi Amano, you did this to me. Ever since I saw your stunning natural waterscapes, I have been mesmerized. I don’t know what it touches in me exactly, but I’m so delighted to be able to play with these elements.

Here’s my first attempt at a nature aquarium on a large scale. I set it up over the weekend. It’ll be a couple of weeks before the filter system is cycled to the point where it’s safe for fish. In the meantime, I can’t figure out why staring at plants and rocks in water is more compelling than television.

Here’s the list of gear: 40 gallon ADA rimless aquarium, Eheim classic 250 filter, Aquatic Life 30-inch T5 lights, Archaea Pro co2 regulator that can handle a variety of tanks.

Here are the plants: hemianthus callitrichoides, glossostigma elatinoides, selaginella wildenowii, echinodorus amazonicus, anubia congensis, dracaena sanderiana, and, of course, Java ferns.

Aquarium geek and proud.

The right question

24 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Story, What they said

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Robert McKee’s “Story” is my current best writing friend. It’s a book about how to write screenplays, but it is excellent as a guide to sorting out the architecture of a good story regardless of the format.

I love it for being pragmatic. Here’s an example: “Here’s a simple test to apply to any story. Ask: What is at risk? What does the protagonist stand to lose if he does not get what he wants? More specifically, what’s the worst thing that will happen to the protagonist if he does not achieve his desire? If this question cannot be answered in a compelling way, the story is misconceived at its core.”

But I also love it for recognizing why we love stories: “We not only create stories as metaphors for life, we create them as metaphors for meaningful life — and to live meaningfully is to be at perpetual risk.”

McKee makes me want to simultaneously write well and live well. How cool is that?

from page 149 of the 1997 hardback edition.

 

 

 

Wrong name

19 Thursday Jan 2012

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Should have called this blog “Exquisite later” since I much prefer fantasizing about getting things done to actually doing them. The year of finishing, that’s what I blithely said last week about my approach to 2012. Today? Forget it. Just want to listen to the rain on the roof.

Long time coming

17 Tuesday Jan 2012

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I have been thinking about “The Booker Rebellion” for seven years. I have been writing it in my spare time for five. And yesterday, a day of furlough from my newspapering job, I finished the final draft of the first chapter. It is good. It is pointing, finally, in the correct direction. I am easy in my heart.

I don’t know why I had to write so many bad first chapters (I think at least seven).

Now to overhaul the next 19  chapters. Yesterday, as I began examining how this rewrite will fit with the rest of the story, I could feel things falling into place, like the tumblers in a lock lining up at last because I found the right key.

A pile of decent work

16 Monday Jan 2012

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Writers argue, always, about careful crafting on the front end of a project vs. headlong writing to get the story in place before fine tuning sentences and paragraphs.

Here’s what Annie Dillard said about that:

“The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses — to secure each sentence before building on it — is that original writing fashions a form. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop. … A pile of decent work behind him, no matter how small, fuels the writer’s hope, too.”

from “The Writing Life,” 1989 hardback edition, page 15

Of course, she says the opposite one page later, that a writer’s early strokes are useless until the whole arc of the story becomes clear.

For myself a need the hope that a well-crafted paragraph provides, even if it will be discarded once more is revealed.

Boss of me

15 Sunday Jan 2012

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Who is it, really? I like to think it’s the most reasonable, experienced, thoughtful persona in my collection of selves. But if that were true, why did I eat the ice cream, and the chips, and drink the two glasses of wine when I weigh 160 pounds and stand 5’2″ and know that I need to shed 25 pounds in order to be healthy?

The five-year-old, the all-mouth, demanding instant gratification is quite frequently the boss of me.

This year, I’m thinking, I’ll work on that. Find a way to dial in the self who’s got the bigger picture in mind.

Beginning of the end of a very bad buy

15 Sunday Jan 2012

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The clown loaches in the 6-gallon tank in my kitchen have no idea what’s coming. When I got them more than a year ago for my then-new Fluval Edge fish tank I did not know several things. I did not know that I would hate the fish tank for its ridiculous design. And I did not know that clown loaches live decades and grow to be as much as 11 inches long, which is actually longer than the tank’s short side.  New digs are in the works.

Fluval Edge, in a few short weeks, you will no longer torment me with your impossible to clean idiosyncracies.

Hang in there Spot and Thug. There will soon be much more space for you to torment each other. And if, in fact, you do grow to 11 inches, no problem.

Right tool, part two

14 Saturday Jan 2012

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The Logitech illuminated keyboard. Perfect for those of us who stagger from the bedroom to the coffee pot and then to the office for a bout of early morning writing before we go to our day jobs (where if we are lucky or perhaps cursed, we also write). The keyboard’s backlit, so you can see the letters in the dark. That means you don’t need a boatload of light in the room, which matters more than I can say. Small desk lamp, lit keyboard. It’s perfect. The keyboard is also thin, and I’m getting used to that. But the key action, sweet mother, it’s fine. I’m old enough to have started my typing life on the ancient IBM Selectric, and my fingers have rarely met a computer keyboard that did not offend them in some way. But this little hummer, it’s like tooling around for most of your life in a Honda Civic and then somebody gives you the keys to the Lamborghini. Fingers flyin’.  Christmas gift from my beloved who knows technology. Probably not cheap.

Right tool

13 Friday Jan 2012

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In the newsroom where I work  cost-cutting measures have led the brain trust there to buy the worst pens on the planet. Since I spend a big chunk of my work week furiously scribbling down what people say to me,  I hate bad pens. You have to press hard. The ink often skips and you lose precious seconds while someone has moved on from one brilliant thought to the next, which you only caught half of because of the stupid pen. (Audio recordings require more time to transcribe, so reporters on tight deadlines don’t use them.)

I launched my own search for a decent pen and found a surprisingly good one. Who knew Sharpie, maker of those big fat markers, had a lovely little fine point? The pen feels good in my hand, the ink flows quickly and doesn’t skip. Sharpie’s claims that it doesn’t bleed through aren’t quite accurate. It mostly doesn’t.