Freelance Travel Writing

I'm considering doing some freelance travel writing for WT next year--probably in Uruguay (they're looking for South America). I don't have any writing samples yet, but I could write up a few when I visit Europe with the family, just for sampling. I could also offer to send some when I'm in Europe next month. I think it's good that I have a lot of future promise (with my education in French coming along) for travel writing, so I'll emphasize that too, I think. Right now I'm looking at LonelyPlanet, but let's see where else I could possibly apply. This is exciting. I'm seriously considering it.

The Naked Diner, etc.

So, I finished my short story called The Naked Diner! Thank God I got away from the sci-fi theme--it was headed in that direction, and that genre never works well for me because I'm not original enough. So, for this week, I have left (1) Benedetti translations, (2) finish reading Orlando by Woolf, (3) start screenplaying work on SOAP, and (4) work on some poems, if I can. Next week, botany story! (And continuing screenplaying work on SOAP.)

Here's a bit of The Naked Diner:

“Have you selected what you’d like yet, sir?” She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, but it might just be because she’s nude. In fact, I’m sure that’s the reason, the mix of her brash nudity, showing all she’s got to give, and her polite stance, quiet voice, use of the word, ‘sir.’ I’ve never seen anything like that before. She’s the purest woman I’ve ever seen, because she’s got more to hide from me than any other woman. She gives herself last, her body first. And she’s blonde. I’ve always had a thing for blondes.

Well, I guess I'll get to the Benedetti later today. Right now I'm working on a short story called, 'The Naked Diner,' which is exactly what it means (although, with some sort of existentialist doubt, etc, black coffee, missing shoes..etc.). The Virginia Woolf is amazing, and will be a great thing to read for the botany story--so I'll have to get back to the botany story next week, as I imagine I'll be finished with Orlando by the end of this week. Work, as my boss is not here, is even less work than it even was. Which is why 'The Naked Diner' is coming along so smoothly, and why I might have a story and some translations done by the end of today.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being narration-style is getting to be annoying. The overbearing-author thing isn't subtle enough for me, and this guy is so contemporary that you'd assume that he might have figured out what he was doing...I'm more forgiving if that sort of stuff happens with, say, Thomas Hardy, because he hasn't had as many authors he's been able to read...You must always expect more from newer writers, even though, quite unfortunately, they're the ones who usually end up being worse. But, anyway. Now I've decided, again, to change SOAP into a screen play.

Europe...Among Other Things

My plan: while on vacation in Europe with the family, I will write one short story every day, or a poem--although poems usually take much longer than a day for me, but we'll see what I can do. I'll edit everything on the planeride back, then I'll be back a day, and then off to France for study-abroad. (I don't understand the logic of traveling thusly, but my parents affirm it's the best thing to do.)

I've been meaning to write a poem lately, so let's see if that happens...perhaps I will just do the Benedetti translations instead, as I had been planning to do this weekend anyway...Translations always help my writing in general, though, so perhaps I'll work on a poem and some of the botany story after working on the translation. So, this weekend, I should start revising SOAP, and do somewhere from 1-10 Benedetti rough draft translations (this is of poems--not prose).

I'm basically halfway through The Unbearable Lightness of Being, so I can probably get that out of the way soon. Metro rides make a great thing for reading. It's a touching subject, but I think that's more on a personal level than with the actual level of the writing. Too bad it's a translation, I can sense so terribly how much is lost there. Perhaps I'll learn Czech after French? We'll see how quickly I learn French. I'm advanced in the language lab and in the homework thus far, so I'm doing some outside reading from books my brother has lent me (he took French in high school and has a bunch of books). I should have known that French would consume me this way. The same thing happened with the English language, and that's why I read so much; it took such great effort for me to learn it, and language has seemed so powerful since then.

I would like to add, this blog has made a huge difference in my writing: not just how much I write (which has expanded), but just, how I feel about writing, how much I read, and how confident I feel about the whole thing. I recommend it to anyone who takes writing seriously.

I'm putting in an excerpt from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, because I've been meaning to since I started reading it:

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children's ball. Yes, a children's ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler's time, in Stalin's time, through all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.

For Franz a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones.

Socrates on a Plane (again!)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being has taught me that it's okay to have a narrator who's overbearing, as long as you give the rest of the characters enough credit. So, I'm going to give SOAP another chance at being written in prose. That said, I have to basically rewrite the entire thing. That is, have the text next to me, but have a completely new word document opened on my computer. I'd really like to work on the old typewriter if possible, though...I'll see how much it costs to get that thing fixed.

Experiments in Ethics

Experiments in Ethics (by Kwame Anthony Appiah) was an amazing book. It was a fast read--it's not too long--but very engaging, complex, and like a piece of art, better the more you applied from the outside world to the text. I just finished it now during work (instead of looking up information on Uruguay...well, while looking up information on Uruguay...). I did extend my coffee break, and read it on the Metro, but no matter! It is finished, so all my intense reading today was totally worth it.

The entire time I referred to Appiah as a she, and I could never figure out why, and it turns out he's gay (looked him up on Wiki!), so, as Alyssa puts it, "That's probably why you thought he was a girl." Now I'll be connecting him to Michael in my mind all the time, because I miss Michael very much, but that will make my appreciation of his work even more awesome, so it's a good thing. I was very moved by the book as a whole, and was almost moved to tears this morning, but it's not a very appropriate thing to do during a coffee break, especially in front of a cafeteria full of employees. It felt like a mix of philosophy, very fun journalism (a la Freakonomics, a la The Omnivore's Dilemma), and literary criticism.

The entire book centered around ethics, but did so in such a way that it would show the faults in many ways we look at ethics, and then show that these faults, once we are aware of them, allows us to better our ethical views. The way he played around with ethics was absolutely wonderful, and it makes more sense now to know that, other than being affiliated with philosophy, he's affiliated with comparative literature and translation. I'm considering e-mailing him and letting him know I'm a fan, and that I'd love to talk about the criss-cross between comp lit and philosophy. This is especially important because many consider the two to be quite opposite one another (i.e.- East v. West dichotomy), but once you bring cosmopolitanism into the picture, the exact opposite happens, and there are many things the two subjects have in common with one another. (Come on. Everything relates back to philosophy.) I'm also apparently, for a while, the only person at school to double major in Philosophy and Comp Lit, so it'd be good to talk to someone who's a big fan of both (even though, Prof Deppman is big into philosophy and literature--but he focuses on continental philosophy, mostly).

This book, and George Michael's song 'I want your sex,' have made work today quite wonderful.