The Duck's Nest: online home of mizducky

Will blog for food? Will write for money?

As those who have been following my blog know, I have been furiously working on strategies to deal with the job situation and associated financial insecurities. Especially as the standard procedure of simply sending out resumes and networking like crazy has not turned up anything long-term, my strategies have needed to get more creative -- like going back to school to update my computer skills yet again, and buff up the ol' resume.

Or starting to write for Examiner.com to build my portfolio of online writing samples and gain experience with SEO and viral marketing; the actual pay on this gambit is symbolic at best, but it does allow me to claim that I had a paid online writing gig. Plus, God/ess help me, I do love writing about food...

Y'know, a couple of decades ago there was this totally-hot New Age-y type affirmation book called Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow. I always had my share of doubts concerning that philosophy, knowing that several of the things I loved to do more than anything else in the world (writing, acting, scholarship) had long-established track records of not making money for more than a very lucky few. I wish I could track down the wag who re-coined that slogan as "Do what you love, even if the money doesn't follow" ... I want to say it was someone associated with the Artist's Way movement, but my copy of the book is in a box somewhere and I can't verify it through a Google search.

But in any case, over the past several years I have been trying to come up with various ways to do what I love, either combined or not combined with something I do for money. Let's just say it's not succeeding as planned, which finds me in this situation. So ... back to the drawing board once again.

But in the meantime, I figure there's no harm in putting out to the world at large that, hey, if you like what you see in this blog, and are interested in having me come write or edit for you, or run your blogs and other online viral marketing stuff, I'm available.

Advance-cooking up a storm: ratatouille, black beans and rice

Decided to have a serious cooking day today, mainly because I'd been getting lazy and doing too much fast-food meals--even if I stick to relatively healthy and inexpensive fast-food options like Vietnamese takeout or a rotisserie chicken, I can feel my bod begin to bog down and see my wallet begin to empty out. I also wanted to get a few food photo opportunities under my belt for future articles for my Examiner.com gig. So just consider these teasers for the real deal--with recipes--to follow.

First, the ratatouille. A confession--I am so way behind in my movie viewing that I've yet to see that Pixar/Disney movie, but I've been making variations of this stuff ever since I saw a recipe in the 1970s-era Joy of Cooking ages ago. This is one of those dishes where there are a bazillion variants, and fierce arguments over what constitutes an "authentic" ratatouille--while the layered one that Remy the Rat makes has got plenty of adherents, there's also plenty who make a more loose stew-like concoction like I do. Though I've seen fairly few that include roasting some of the vegetables--that's an innovation I dreamed up when I was deep in my roasted-vegetable enthusiasm.

Then, the black beans and rice. I first got into the beans-and-rice thing the way many of my generation did: through Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet. In later editions of her book she conceded that food science had found that it wasn't crucial to get the grain/legume thing happening in every single meal in order to have complete protein, just as long as you got them in sooner or later. But beans and rice go so well together, why the heck not keep 'em together? Another thing I got from Lappe: a fondness for the pressure cooker as the premiere tool for taming beans and brown rice, and her handy  trick for cooking both separately-but-together in one pressure cooker simultaneously.

The folks at Examiner.com prefer I write in third person journalist-voice in their articles, and opposed to chatty first-person blog-voice as I'm doing here; they're also okay about writers sharing some of their content between them and elsewhere. So I'll probably develop a habit of being a Chatty Cathy over here in my blog about stuff I write up more formally for the Big X. Who knows--maybe I'll get some visitor traffic going both ways?

Now I've gone and done it: I've started writing for Examiner.com

Yeah yeah yeah, I'm all too well aware of owner Philip Anschutz's politics, but hey, I couldn't resist the opportunity to take a whack at trying to monetize my food-writing jones ... so I am now officially the San Diego Budget Meals Examiner, and my first article, Five great ethnic markets every budget-conscious San Diegan should know, is now live on the site. Nor am I the only queer foodie that I know of who's working for Examiner.com -- my old college buddy Sandy Smith is doing so as well for the Philadelphia outpost of the site. So, I hope you check our stuff out, y'all--not only because it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when people read my writing and find it useful, but also because we, like, get brownie points and stuff for every person who clicks our page.

New chapter of my Lupin fanfic now posted

Finally got the latest chatper of my Lupin fanfic done. It was a lot harder to write that I expected, because at first I had a much more angsty concept in my head, but that felt wrong somehow, but then unangsting my ideas and coming up with different ones was a challenge. But the result, I think, is just as intense without the waterworks. Plus I got some action into it. But it still remains what it is, an opportunity to drag Lupin into further supernatural weirdness, now with a distinct Hunter S. Thompson goes Carlos Castaneda feel.

Check it out here: clickie

New horizons on the verbing-of-nouns front

Alexander Haig may have been a little more famous for his "I'm in charge here!" verbalization, but for word-geeks like me he'll earn a special place in one of the circles of literary purgatory for declaring that "there is no noun that can't be verbed."

Well, the flood of verbed nouns has continued so unceasingly since then that it's easy to miss a few here and there. So I hope I can be forgiven for missing the fact that, somewhere in there, Facebook became a verb. Geez, it hasn't even been a noun all that long!

Mind you, I'm not only a member of Facebook, but I have this little widget (now there's an annoying little word invention right there) that posts a little notice on my Facebook page every time I post to my Typepad blog. So I don't really have a leg to stand on here.

Except for the fact that I'm becoming a curmudgeon in my old age, and curmudgeons reserve the right to be curmudgeonly at anything, at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all. How's that for the gentle art of curmudgeoning? (Hey, do I get extra points for not only verbing it, but gerunding it as well?)

Brief writing update

Got another few pages of chapter 7 of the fanfic done. The prose is not pouring out of me like it was at earlier points in the writing. I spent a lot of time writing the same text over and over, not being happy with the tone. Finally I got it where I liked--removed a lot of the angst that was originally in there, and figured out how to put some action into what had originally been a very non-action chapter.

I feel like I'm finally understanding how I need to work as a writer, and being patient with myself that way. They never tell you this shit in any of the writing books or workshops or classes I've ever attended. With me, the voice and flow is everything. I need the voices and the interactions of the characters to make it feel real.

And I've actually had writing instructors tell me to tone that crap down. They were trying to make me distrust my own writer's voice. But even more, they were wanting to strangle the part I find the most fun about writing--creating and inhabiting that voice.

But now I finally understand--when I'm hitting that right voice and it's turning me on, that's when I am in fact doing the best writing for me. If it means lots of people don't get it, so be it. I can't write for them, or for anybody else besides myself.

The enthusiasm du jour: my Lupin III fan-fiction project

Fun and Thieving in Las Vegas: A Lupin III fiction-in-progress

Anyone who has known me for any serious length of time knows that I have a tendency to get caught up in what I am here euphemistically calling "enthusiasms." Perhaps a more accurate, and less flattering, term would be "obsessions" -- especially given the all-consuming nature of these activities once I really get rolling. Though the original definition of enthusiasm implies a pretty all-consuming state too ... but I digress.

Anyway, the enthusiasm du jour turns out to be a dual one. I have had a fondness for the long-running anime/manga franchise Lupin III ever since I first discovered it on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming several years ago. However, it wasn't until early this year that some random urge prompted me to start tracking down more of the franchise--Adult Swim had only been broadcasting the first 26 episodes of what turned out to be the second TV series. And once I did, I suddenly found myself falling head-over-heels in love with the whole thing. It's got just the right combination of wacky over-the-top outrageous humor, surprisingly intricate plotting and storytelling, and occasional flashes of more serious themes, to really grab me. Plus the main characters are incredibly rich and fun.

And finally, there's just such a huge amount of material out there to investigate--several manga series, three TV series, five movies, and a few dozen TV specials, OVAs, and other assorted stuff. It's fascinating to me how this series is so little-known here in the US, because in Japan it's apparently a pop-culture fixture comparable to Superman and Mickey Mouse; for instance, the tradition of a new annual 90-minute TV special has been going strong on Japanese TV since 1989. Some of this video material is only accessible to us English-speakers through either volunteer fansubs or dubs in other languages (for reasons I've yet to understand, Lupin III is huge in Italy). And while the first two manga series have been translated into English, there are several more that have not yet gotten the treatment. But this is exactly the kind of challenge that lends fuel to the obsessed fan's fire.

Anyway, at a certain point the writer-geek in me started longing for more Lupin stories, headed in different and sometimes even weirder directions than the Lupin tales I had gotten my hands on so far. So inevitably I found myself starting to write those tales.

Now the thing about fan-fiction, as some of the so-called "professional" writers I have known have taken great pains to reinforce, is that many pros look down on it as a lesser form of writing. After all, you didn't come up with your own goddamn characters, what kind of a failure of imagination is that? And they also then point at the huge wealth of mediocre fan-fiction out there on the web, much of it just sketchy excuses to create sexual fantasies between fictional characters (the so-called "slash" genre, which got its name from the amateur erotica generated by fevered Star Trek fans envisioning forbidden Kirk/Spock liaisons--the added irony for this-here self-identified queer being that most homoerotic slash is actually written by straight female fans).

Well, given that 90% of any field can and will be dreck, to dismiss a genre because there's a lot of dreck to be found is IMO specious. And as to the not-coming-up-with-original-characters bit: well, given the recent huge upsurge in the re-purposing of historical figures as fictional characters, and even the embrace of previously pop genres, in works of serious literary fiction (cf. Michael Chabon), not to mention the blithely unrepentant re-appropriation of whole texts by post-modernist writers (cf. Kathy Acker), it strikes me that this objection is specious as well. So that brings us down to the basic question one has to ask about any piece of fiction, which is not whether you approve of the tropes and rules of the genre, but simply whether you like it.

Now mind you, my little fanfic project does not have such high-flown literary aspirations as Acker, or perhaps even Chabon. I'm more interested in just having a damn good time writing a damn good read. But inevitably I'm finding some of my own philosophical and literary interests creeping into the work (note, for instance, the blatant reference to Hunter S. Thompson in the title). Plus I confess that the way I'm writing it--first person present-tense stream-of-consciousness from the point of view of the protagonist, the irrepressible gentleman thief and womanizer Arsene Lupin III, has turned into a fabulous opportunity for me to encounter the transgender male-identified part of my psyche--which I didn't realize I had until I let that randy little monkey-man take over my brain (my writing practice has a lot in common with Method Acting, so I wind up having some pretty damn close encounters with my characters).

Anyway, this is all a very round-about way of inviting you to check out my Lupin III fanfic and see if it turns you on. And if it does turn you on, do let me know--and do pass the link on to others who you think might also be turned on. I'm not too proud to admit that I adore having an audience--hell, why else would I have a personal website/blog thing anyway? :-)