The Organic Satan Company

This morning, my alarm went off and then I dozed off again for about 15 minutes, during which time I had a very strange dream. In the dream, I was at a party that I'd helped set up for, one that evidently had my dad and stepmom involved since lots of my Pakistani step-relatives were there. I was wearing a shalwaar kameez that I hadn't worn in years and I was convinced was really out of fashion (something that could very easily happen in real life), and glittery red shoes that strongly resembled Dorothy's ruby slippers. As the guests arrived, I greeted Yasmeen Auntie, my step-cousins, and my step-grandmother Amijan, and various others, all dressed up much more nicely than I was, of course.

While wandering through the sprawling beige-carpeted house where the party was being held, I passed through a room with a TV blaring. The channel was MTV, and they were showing a video by a band called The Organic Satan Co. As I'm sure you can guess, this was an aggro rock band, and the lead singer, a guy with short spiky hair, was chained to the floor of the stage--a very minimal dark gray stage set with no adornment--and screaming the words of the song while glaring up at the camera.

Shortly thereafter, I woke up. But I can't get The Organic Satan Company out of my mind. It would be a GREAT name for a band. Or maybe a literary magazine, or a comic book, or a new novel. P.S. YOU CAN'T HAVE IT. IT'S MINE! SEE THAT COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE? Sorry. Mine.

But I still have to figure out what to do with it. And what does an Organic Satan Company do, anyway? Do they sell organic Satans? Or is it a company selling organic items and run by Satan? I don't know, but I'm going to figure it out. Stay tuned.

Self-Conscious Blogging

Sometimes I'm too self-conscious to blog.

It's true. Lame, but true. I'll question every word, every sentence, every thought. If I write about what I've been doing lately, I'll fret that it's dry and boring, a mere laundry list of daily minutiae. If I write about my innermost thoughts, I usually end up deleting them or being as embarrassed as a teenager getting called on while daydreaming during class. (Yes, of course that happened to me. My AP/IB Biology teacher had some kind of radar.) I have a weird arbitrary boundary when it comes to divulging my true and deep feelings--up to a point, I'm really not worried about what people think about any of it, but beyond that line, I'm very guarded. And I'm very good at keeping those things under guard, such that even some people who know me well might not know as much as they think. But basically, every time I sit down to write a post, I worry about crossing that line, and I get a little uncomfortable. So there you have it.

In other news, of the laundry list variety, I can hardly believe it's less than a month until we leave for Italy and Spain. I haven't been out of the country for more than 2.5 weeks or so since 1996, when I was in college and spent a summer in London. We'll be away for a month this time, two weeks in each country. Neither Rob nor I has ever been to Spain, so we're excited about that, but perhaps most of all I'm excited about seeing Rome and environs. I love visiting world-famous cities (I love traveling, period, really--nature's good, too) and I've never been to Rome. The Clipboard of Fun is rapidly taking shape, though it's really more of a Spreadsheet of Fun right now. I made my shopping list of assorted crap I gotta buy before we leave, like fun-sized toiletries and a bottle of vitamin C to protect us from swine flu (since the vaccine doesn't come out until after we leave).

A couple of things put a small damper on my excitement. One was that the transmission went out on our Honda, which we ended up having to replace (the transmission, not the car) at a cost I'm embarrassed to repeat. The other is that I'm having a hell of a time getting our overnight train tickets from Barcelona to Sevilla. Rail Europe wants me to wait until only 2 weeks prior to our trip and only sells certain ticket classes, Renfe website keeps saying esta bloqueado every time I try to choose any kind of ticket class, which seems bizarre, and the Renfe U.S. agent wants to charge a somewhat ridiculous booking fee but I'm willing to pay that in order to put my mind at ease, except they're encountering some weird booking problem, too. Perhaps they, too, are bloqueado. If they solve the problem, though, I'll happily pay the extra 40 bucks, since I don't want to try to call Spain and argue with someone in my doofus Spanish.

Still, though, I'm excited. I'm also working my ass off on freelance work so I can try to chip away at this transmission payment.

Music and Art

If you're following my Twitter feed or correspond with me in any other way, shape or form, you'll no doubt already know the big piece of news--the offer on my YA book. All I can say right now is YES!!, which seems inadequate to what I actually feel, but will have to do. More info later.

On a separate note, yesterday we spent the afternoon and evening in San Francisco, starting things off with lunch at Hotei, where Rob had ramen and I had nabeyaki udon and we both worked up a sweat just eating the hot soup. Our walk in Golden Gate Park after that was a nice cool-down (with mist and cool breezes, unlike the 90-something degrees we left behind a mere hour and 45 minutes away).

The DeYoung Museum's King Tut exhibition, which we saw in the afternoon, was fantastic, though when you consider that they found 5,000 artifacts in the actual tomb, the fact that there were only 130 in the exhibit made it seem like we got only the tiniest taste of the incredible objects. If it comes to your area, you shouldn't miss it, though. Really. I was too young to go to the 1979 exhibition (at age 2, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have cared) so I was very excited to see this one. Plus, I love ancient Egyptian stuff.

After the Tut show, we did some more walking around and then drove over to North Beach--our friend Jess is on tour with his band, Los Tikkilyches, and since he lives in Mexico these days, we hardly get to see the dude, so we had to seize the opportunity when it presented itself. The band was playing at Grant and Green Saloon, kind of between North Beach and Chinatown--a location which presented some excellent dinner options. We ended up at a Basque restaurant we just randomly walked by, and at some point during dinner, we found out that the owner/chef is currently competing on Top Chef. So that was exciting. Plus the tapas were tasty.

So we were satiated and happy by the time we walked a few more blocks over to Grant and Green, and then we were even happier to see our friend Jess and his fiancee and bandmate Alyssa already at the bar getting set up. It was an evening of running into old friends, in fact; the kind that you've known so long it feels like they're family, even when you haven't seen them in years. We saw another college friend there, Jason--in fact, Jason was there the first time I ever met Jess, over 12 years ago at a party in the house Rob and I would eventually move into about eight months later.

We also hung out with Jess's dad and brother, who we'd last run into at a concert in Berkeley last summer, and another former roommate and bandmate of Jess's from a different band, Jackscrew. The band had a great time, and the audience seemed to be feeling it, too, so it was a fun evening. Best of all, though, it was awesome to see Jess after about a year. He was rockin' a goatee that was very nearly a homeless-beard, which made Rob ask him if he'd gotten any change thrown at him on the way over. Jess claimed that yes, someone had given him spare change in Washington Square. This may or may not be true, but it made us laugh.

All in all, the evening was most excellent, with a few pints of Newcastle (for Rob) and Lagunitas IPA (for me) putting the icing on the cake (or perhaps the head on the pint o' beer?) and yet again I do not have documentation since we can never seem to remember to bring our camera when we do something fun, and our phone cameras are truly sucktastic. So you'll just have to hear me now, believe me later.

A Brief Emergence

I'm here. More or less. I spent the past month basically just working my ass off--grading essays for Rob's online classes, plowing into a new freelance project (which was awesome but made me very busy) and working on my novel revision. The novel revision is now largely done, I'm pleased to report. I did the first big pass through the whole thing, moving major scenes, rewriting some new ones, tightening things up, and generally being attentive to those items that the editor suggested I look at. Now I'm at the point where I'm re-drawing the two cartoons which appear at the beginning of one of the chapters, and I'm planning to do two more.

I just wanted to be sure that they're as well-done as possible--I felt like they were a tiny bit untidy, that I could draw them better. And, should the novel get published, I'd really like to see them make it into the final version, rather than having someone else redraw them. As an artist that idea makes me feel pretty squicky, though I realize it's pretty much par for the course to have little or no visual input into one's published work.

Still, I hold out a vain hope that I might have SOME input someday. I used to want to be a book cover artist, actually, for quite a while when I was in high school. If I'd ended up in a different type of art program, I might have, but the Berkeley program was very fine-arts oriented, which means that if someone uses the word "illustration" to describe your work, it is actually an insult. Conversely, if your work is both a) monumentally large and b) incomprehensible to anyone but you, you will thrive. Just kidding. Kinda.

Anyway, I finished that bulky part of the revision, and have one more pass to do wherein I will try to look for anything I missed, and judge how well it's flowing now that I screwed around with the timeline of the story. And after that, I will reward myself by playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii, which has been waiting patiently for me for several months. Though I've also heard rumors that we may be purchasing Rock Band 2, as though I need any more irresistibly fun time wasters in my environment. Oh well. I should learn to say yes to more fun things now and then, anyway.

Buried in a Dung Heap--er, Rubbish Pile--of Words

I have been writing like CRAZY lately, and not just because of my revision. Thanks to Beth I have a new freelance job doing some work-for-hire writing, and it's been good so far, but it's been keeping me super busy. Yeah, yeah, I know a lot of people say you should avoid work-for-hire, but a) I need money, and b) I'm not sure I'd necessarily want my name attached to some of these for posterity so I'm not concerned about my future "ownership" of it. Oh, and did I mention I need money? Going to Italy and Spain for a month this fall is not going to come cheap, even though I was an Expedia ninja and we're getting a good deal. Can hardly wait for October now, though.

In the meantime, I have been working on the revision and have also been experiencing quite a bit of revision-related fear. Certainly nothing insurmountable, but definitely annoying. Here are a few choice fears that have come up lately, as I find myself recasting several subplots and majorly revising the timeline:

• Fear that I won't be able to do it well enough, despite all my efforts. That I won't put enough into it, or that I'm just not good enough to begin with. This I can generally deal with, because I tend to have an inferiority complex about most things in my life, so this is nothing new. I guess it's probably why I've had a corresponding tendency to try to be an overachiever. (That, and my dad periodically telling me about various more-successful relatives and/or children of family friends, most of whom are evidently either getting multiple graduate degrees or amassing wealth and fame in practical and worthwhile careers like medicine, law, and engineering. Sigh.)
• Fear that even though I'm putting my all into this revision, and even though it's going to be a very different (and hopefully better) piece in the end, all the changes and all the differences will only lead to new and interesting types of suckage. I have a lot of trouble overcoming this one, but there's not a lot I can do about it at the moment other than keep plugging away.
• Fear that, even if it all works out at this stage and I end up with a published book, at the end of it all people will read it and think, "THIS is the kind of thing that's running through your head?" while looking at me very warily, slowly backing away; or perhaps laughing derisively, or stifling a yawn, depending on the doom scenario of the day. However, this is one of those "fears" that I should be so lucky to have materialize, right? Err....

At the end of the day, though, I'm still incredibly excited about it, and the majority of the time, that helps me overcome the fear and actually get down to work. That, I guess, and my inability to stifle my inner overachiever.