Goodnight, New York

My last night in New York. I'm exhausted, having walked roughly 60 New York blocks today. I did some more shopping (some gifts, another pair of sneakers, a few dvds, etc), met up with Self-Service (who no longer works at my company but will always be associated with Self-Service) for awesome ramen noodles in the Village. Good times were had.

Back at the hotel, I had a minor panic attack after putting all the stuff that had to be packed on the bed. But I persevered, and now it is all packed. Yay!

I shall leave you with some more pics from my excursions.

Street art in the Village.

Basketball on an open court on 6th Street.

Playing American handball, one-wall, on asphalt. Hardcore.

"Come on! We were tied at 20!"

"We're up 20-19!"

"Oh come on! Tied at 20!"

"Fine. Tied at 20. Whatever. We'll still win."

And they did.

Scrap Yard. Heaven for graffiti artists. This is

where I bought the bag from yesterday's post.

I was so happy to stumble over this wall painting,

as seen in the mind-blowing documentary Up There.

The Dude abides.

Can you hear it calling your name, Melon?

The cupcakes, in all their glory.

Cookie dough cupcake on the left.

Oreo cheesecake on the right.

*insert Homer drooling sound here*

Sadly, the store didn't exist anymore.

A typical Nolita street.

Rack 'em and stack 'em.

Me and my homie Squeaker.

Bag. Bug. Drink. Fish.

I bought a bag today. Though it's the black version.

I killed a bug today. Then I changed rooms at the hotel.

I had a drink today. With a OdFellow 2009 and her romance writer friend.

And before bed, just now, I ate a bag of these:

In Sweden, they're called "Fish".

I also bought some other stuff. And I walked. I walked and walked and walked. I walked until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I walked some more.

Tomorrow, brunch with two co-workers, who happen to be here. Then shopping. Then food with an ex co-worker, who also happens to be here. Then agonize over packing. Then sleep. Then fly home. Good night, Internet, where ever you are.

On the streets of New York

I have been walking around New York for a few days now. I've done a shitload of shopping (sneakers, a few dvd boxes, cargo pants, Hellboy's Right Hand of Doom, a Kangol hat etc) but more than anything, this city is always about the people and what goes on around them.

So. Pictures. More text some other time.

Playing petanque in Bryant Park.

"My balls are closer together than yours."

Sit down in Bryant Park, borrow a book, enjoy the sun.

Old men watching a chess game.

Like something out of a movie.

Bryant Park in all its glory.

A street percussionist. He moved all his stuff around the whole

time, and created complex layers of beats and noise. Awesome.

Best fries I've ever had, and a slider. You're really supposed

to eat more than one, but this was more than enough.

In 1995, I saw Deftones open for Misery Loves Co here.

Now it's a small shopping center with hip designer stores.

I had to buy stamps, so I went looking for a

post office. I wasn't expecting The Post Office.

Foosball tables in Greeley Square.

Hanging out with my boy Bob.

Bright lights, big city

It's 1 AM and I'm on my hotel bed at The Mansfield, a really nice hotel on West 44th Street. I managed a few hours of walking and shopping today.

I found the Boomtown dvd box, an excellent police show that was sadly cancelled after only one season, and a bunch of stuff at Nintendo World, for myself, Miss Red and my niece. Tomorrow I will go to the new Lego concept store, Midtown comics, an Army/Navy store and a bunch of other places. My wallet is already screaming in panic...

Times Square. The Virgin Megastore is gone!

Best. Street name. Ever!

Me and my buddy Optimus at Toys R Us.

If they'd had this in the right size my niece would have been

set up for Halloween. And if they'd had it even bigger, so would I.

I have a writing deadline tomorrow, since Meta, Peeko, Alaska, Palin and I decided to submit a story to each other, to keep the momentum from Odyssey going. I went the insane route and started a new story. Today. It's called "Going Viral", and I will post it here as well once it's done.

Malls and madmen

Friday was Shopping and Circus Day.

I walked downtown to where all the malls are. They're all connected through the Underground City and offer pretty much any kind of shopping. I finally found a memory card for my phone (curse you Sony Ericsson, or rather, curse you Martin Larsson for using an old phone!) and went wild at a t-shirt/merch store called Labyrinthe. Best tshirt assortment I've seen in a long, long time. I walked away with one Watchmen, one A Perfect Circle, one White Zombie and one Tea Party (the band, not the political movement). Now I shall have to restrain myself from buying tees in New York. Yeah...right.

Having shopped and walked around downtown for a while, I took a breather at the hotel before Circus picked me up. Circus is Moonfish's beau, Moonfish being one of my classmates from Odyssey.

We went by their place, a glorious apartment with hardwood floors, a brick bathroom and a small courtyard with a spiral staircase covered in ivy, and then on to a really good vegetarian Asian restaurant. The best part was the banana fritters. Banana fritters are standard desserts at Chinese restaurant in Sweden, but they tend to be rather soggy sad little things. These were fried to perfection. Nom nom nom.

Then on to the circus.

The big top

We saw the circus troupe Rasposo do their show La Chant Du Dindon. It was very funny and felt like just as much theatre as circus. It was like staring into some demented family's living room.

Note how close the audience is to the action.

It was all acrobatics and aerials, without any fancy machines or effects. They utilised the scene brilliantly, modifying it to suit their needs. It was all done in a single flow and seemed improvised. Very nicely done.

Then snacks and hanging out with some circus people. Then back to the hotel for sleep.

Solid men of Boston

After Readercon, I poked around the area around my hotel. Which by the way is The Most Depressing Building Ever:

Somehow a building from East Berlin in the

80s had been teleported to downtown Boston

I found some interesting shopping, most of it closed, and a movie theatre were I sat down to watch Transformers 3. Far far better than the second one, and worthy of an insane amount of popcorn. Which I don't eat anymore. But, you know, the whole Big Movie Where Things Explode thing doesn't work without some reference to popcorn.

The next day we braved the horrid heat and went out. We walked down towards the water and met some interesting people:

Wool? Really? In 30+ degrees? And they are able to look

enthusiastic at the same time. Surely that deserves some sort of medal.

Down towards the docks we found a sort of open mall thing, which looked interesting but turned out to be filled with tourist traps of the worst kind.

I took a picture of the street, and since I've learned that pics are more interesting with some people you recognize in them:

Dundee failed spectacularly in his

attempt to stealth out of the picture.

Then we laughed about him failing spectacularly, and I

decided to take another pic where I don't look so frikkin' serious.

Having abandoned the open air mall, we went to an actual mall and did some shopping. I picked up a little something for my brother's spawn and bought a Decepticons cap (will be seen on pics in later posts) for myself.

The mall had a Cheesecake Factory, and since Dundee is a fan of The Big Bang Theory he wanted to go, and having partaken of their cheesecake on several previous trips to the US, I was easy to convince. I may, in fact, have suggested it . . .

Some kind of brownie cheesecake, apple strudel cheesecake and

pineapple upside down cheesecake, surrounding the kick-ass Mojito I had.

Needless to say, we walked away full and on a major sugar-rush.

Later, after yet another movie - Super 8, which I had seen but Dundee hadn't, and it was just as awesome the second time - we went for lobster. Because you have to eat lobster when you're in Boston.

Grilled lobster. Nom nom nom.

And that was two days in Boston. On Monday morning I got into a rental car and headed north to Maine. Which will be covered in another post.

Readercon

On Saturday, Dundee, Barbecue Man and I got on a bus bound for Boston. Barbecue Man was flying home, to Texas, while Dundee and I would spend a few days in Boston.

While checking into my hotel I noticed my Swedish cell phone was gone. Most likely it fell out of my pocket on the bus or in the taxi to the hotel. D'oh. So I had to deal with that, without any luck (still gone gone without a trace), and then check in before Dundee and I went to Readercon.

Our intention was to sit in on a number of panels, look around and then hook up with a bunch of OdFellows. We missed the Urban (Fantasy) Renewal panel, which could have been interesting, and sat in on Location as Character with Djinni, a panel that turned out to be mindnumbingly boring.

After that, Dundee left for something else, which was his loss because the Cities, Real and Imaginary turned out to be really good.

The subject of the panel was:

Great stories have been set in cities both real and imagined. Does a real city require different writing techniques from an imagined one? How well do you need to know (and research) an actual city? If you're making one up, how do you apply your knowledge of real cities? When can you "cheat"? When do you have to?

The first panel member to speak (I think it was Lila Garrott) has some sort of academic background in analysing cities (I didn't catch what exactly) and opened by saying that whatever strange cities we come up, few if any will rival the strangeness to be found in the cities of this world.

She used Tokyo as an example. The city was built as a spiral, moving out from the Imperial Palace, with those closest to the Emperor and the most powerful living closest to the palace. The form came about because everyone wanted to be as close as their status allowed them to be. This is an example of organic growth of a city, something which the panel concluded is lacking in fictional cities, which are constructed rather than organic.

Personally I would love to create a fictional city and set a series of stories in it, especially if I could start from zero and have it grow along a timeline.

The panel leader, Leah Bobet, went on to say that cities in fiction don't break. There are no subway problems, unless it's important to move the plot forward, and the city doesn't feel like the ecosystem it should be. Because of this, a fictional rarely feels lived in, but comes off as a stage, a backdrop to the story being told instead of an integral part of it.

During the panel, China Miéville's city New Crobuzon was brought up over and over again as an example of a working fictional city. I agree that New Crobuzon has texture, almost as if the smog and dirt and drone of the city leaps up from the page, but as he does so may other times, Miéville takes it one step too far and crams one thing too many in there. Just like Ben & Jerry's. If only those frikkin' chocolate fish weren't there in Phish Food . . .

Back to the panel. They argued that a city of one thing, such as a City of Flowers, where everything is tied to flowers, is one neighborhood in a major metropolis like New York City, and not plausible as a concept for a whole city. Instead of looking at the city and applying Weird to the whole thing, authors should apply Weird to individual neighborhoods. This is something that Miéville does really well in Perdido Street Station (we all agreed), and that more authors should strive for.

As to real cities, it was quickly agreed that the author should spend time in any city he or she wishes to set a story in. This goes without saying, I think, but at the same time there is much to be said for Google Earth and other internet resources. Combined with an actual visit an author can get a clear image of the city.

Lots more was said, but this was all the notes I took.

During the coming year I will work on short stories but also see if it's plausible to set a novel in a fantastic version of Constantinople (Istanbul was Constantinople. Now it's Istanbul. Not Constantinople. Been a long time gone, Constantinople) in the 11th century. If I come to the conclusion that it can and should be done, I will probably go there next year.

Outside the panels, I bought too many books (as in more than none), found a ninja rubber duckie for a friend, talked for a while with John Joseph Adams who lectured for us at Odyssey a few days earlier, and sat down with a dozen or so OdFellows and talked about this and that.

Then we fled, Dundee and I, because the post-Odyssey exhaustion crashed down on us.

In bed. And fireflies.

In class today we talked about grammar. Punctuation, that vs which, the evils of adverbs, dialogue tags, etc.

Can you believe it, Mom? Me? Talking about adverbs? And not cringing? Well . . . I cringed a little (and right there, before I, is the correct way to use ellipsis. See? I learned something today).

After class and the obligatory visit to the mail room (three packages. All for me! Yay! From Amazon! Yay!) we went to the reading room to do our crits. The reading room is my friend. The reading room is cool. Cold, even. I had to put on a hoodie in there today.

Later today I went to the Taqueria in Manchester with Meta, Charley and Sarah Palin. Much laughter and an awesome burrito. Me likey! Then off to Target to buy food, ink cartridges, etc. I bought a pair of shorts, since I only brought two pairs, and a Where The Wild Things Are-tee. Sweet.

And then write. I am writing a postapocalyptic fantasy story. Sort of. My goal is to have it be around 4000, maybe 5000 words. Our limit is 6000 and I would like to turn in a story to the class that doesn't require a synopsis for the parts I can't turn in. We'll see how it goes. I managed 2000 words today. Which is good.

I have two stories left to turn in. My intention is to use this new one and a revised version of Something Wicked, my submission story. One is due next Friday and the second one the last week, hopefully Wednesday. We'll see. So I have a long time to finish two stories but little time once one is submitted.

I ended the evening with a short walk with Sarah Palin, to get some air. We saw fireflies! I've never seen fireflies before. I really understand why people thought they were fairies.

The other night we went for Chinese food. Barbecue Man had identified a good place, and it was really good. Unfortunately they didn't offer Dim Sum (I wanted dumplings!) the time we were there. And unfortunately I can't remember between which hours they do serve dumplings, so I'll probably miss it the next time we go too. D'oh.

Anywho. The first time we went for Chinese I learned that one must add a little something to the fortune in the cookie. I forgot to tell you people, of course. You add "in bed" at the end. Hence my fortune, this time, was "You have a quiet and unobtrusive nature. In bed."

So now off to be unobtrusive in bed. I will leave you with some quotes:

From Meta:

Conjunctions for the win!

From Sarah Palin, after the car ride to the Taqueria and Target:

All sorts of weird stuff are going to show up in my story because you guys traumatized me.

And from Mr Stephen King:

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Saturday slam!

Every year, Odyssey holds a slam at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Nashua, New Hampshire. Odyssey students stand up in the coffee shop part of the store and read a story no longer than five minutes in length.

So off we went. Five of us in Charley Horse's car. For some reason we had hand-written directions on a piece of paper instead of using one of the smartphones along in the car. We didn't get lost, really, we just weren't sure of where we were...

Barbecue Man whipped out his phone. Tap, tap, tap. Turn here. Go here. After a while, it dawned on us that we were in a holding pattern. Round and round we went. Which wasn't that strange, we realised. Barbecue Man is a retired air traffic controller. Holding patterns is what he does.

This lovely exchange took place.

Dundee: We're going the right way. I remember trees.

Barbecue Man: Yeah. There was also an oxygen nitrate atmosphere.

But we arrived in time. We had time for lunch before the slam, and ate at a micro brewery pub in Nashua. I had a killer lobster stuffed haddock with scallops. Nom nom nom.

Then off to the bookstore. Walked around in the store for a while. Bought some stuff. And then did the slam. There were some former Odyssey graduates there, and some people that had actually come to listen. Wow. So we read our stories. Commodore (formerly known as Assistant Teacher) and Evil Overlord (formerly known as Teacher) also read a text each, which was cool. We haven't heard anything from them before.

I suck at writing flash fiction. So I was in awe of some of the stories that were read. In awe. There are some hideously creative people here. A source of endless inspiration and angst.

Afterwards we learned that the slam had been broadcast on the store PA. So everyone heard our texts. Even in the bathrooms appearantly. Commodore tried the innocent act, but we all know she knew. Curse her and her puppet dragon!

And then the quote of the day.

Charley: They don't celebrate birthdays in Sweden.

Sarah Palin: That's because they all come out of rocks.

Thanks, Sarah. Really.

Taken apart

Today I had my text "Sacrifice" critiqued in class. The whole class gets the texts in the morning, and then usually we have the afternoons and evenings to go over them, by marking the printed manuscripts with comments and corrections, and also writing a separate critique, a few pages in length.

"Sacrifice" was written before Odyssey, and it was one of the pieces I really wanted critiqued. The feeling of being critiqued is hard to describe. At the CWA gatherings (props to my CWA dawgs!) we listened to the author reading the text in class, and then gave response right after. Here at Odyssey we have hours to process and write up our crits, even sleep on them, and as such they are much more thorough. And in many ways, we're exposing our inner selves here, to be dissected and analysed.

It is a learning experience. There are 16 people in that room, including Teacher, with a much better chance of seeing the flaws in my work than I have. And they do point them out.

I got lots of positive feedback on my use of language, which feels really good coming from people for whom English is the first language. My big problem was, not surprisingly, plot. I confused most of my readers. Of course that's never nice to hear, but I knew the piece was flawed and the whole point of putting it in front of the class is not to get a pat on the head but to have your weaknesses pointed out. How else can I evolve as a writer?

After class, I went to the mail center and picked up an armful of packages for the class. Among them, two Amazon boxes and an Amazon envelope for me. Yay, stuff! I will order some stuff here, mostly text books on writing, and then ship it home with my manuscripts once the course is over.

Then I went downtown with Charley, Barbecue and Meta, to visit a second hand bookstore that is closing down in a week or so, and as such had 50% off already low prices. A Thieves' World novel and a present for Ribbed For Her Pleasure, who loves all things zombies.

The rest of the day has been spent critiquing and writing. I submit at 0730 on Thursday, and right now I can't really tie my sf story together. So I'm looking at options. My gut feeling is that I will have some late nights this week. Which is supposedly what Odyssey is all about.

Quote of the day, after we ranted at Barbecue for submitting a 5800 word story for crit tonight (the absolute upper limit is 6000). He replied:

I have a one-word story. It's just an exclamation point. Try and critique that.