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About This Author
I am SoCalScribe. This is my InkSpot.
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Blogocentric Formulations
Logocentric (adj). Regarding words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality (especially applied as a negative term to traditional Western thought by postmodernist critics).
Sometimes I just write whatever I feel like. Other times I respond to prompts, many taken from the following places:
Thanks for stopping by! 
January 24, 2012 at 8:41pm January 24, 2012 at 8:41pm January 11, 2012 at 5:19pm January 11, 2012 at 5:19pm
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True story from this morning:
I'm running just a few minutes late to work. My wife, already at work, calls and says she forgot something. The school she works at is in the same direction as I go, but it's not exactly on the way. It wasn't a critical item either; I could run it by her school (and make myself twenty minutes or so later), or I could say, "Sorry honey!" and be on my way. I opted for the former, deciding to be a good husband and help her out.
Not two blocks from her school parking lot after I drop off what she needs, a funny smell starts coming from the engine of my car. Then steam starts to pour out from under the hood and the temperature gauge is quickly climbing toward the red. At the intersection I stop at, there's actually an auto repair place... and it's open! While I was waiting for my car to be fixed, I checked the reviews on Yelp and it turns out that this is one of the highest-rated mechanics in the area.
It ended up being my radiator that was busted, which they replaced for a reasonable price with OEM parts. This place offers a three-year warranty (standard is one year) on all their work for free, and are known for dropping you off and picking you up free of charge (they've even dropped customers off in Burbank - more than 50 miles away!), and will give you a car to use at their expense if they have to keep yours for more than a day.  Oh, and since I was rushed this morning, he wants me to bring the car back after a few hundred miles so he can check the work to make sure it's holding up and give the car a more thorough evaluation... free of charge. Hell, most impressive of all is that he replaced the entire radiator and all the engine fluids in under four hours! Last time I had that done to one of my past cars, it was a 2-3 day affair. And did I mention that he even washed my car while it was being fixed?
Even though I had to pay a big chunk of money and ended up losing most of my morning to car repairs, I was able to get lunch with my wife (which never happens since we work 40 miles apart), and I can't help but think that - had I been selfish and just gone to work without bothering to bring something to my wife - I would have been stranded on the side of the freeway somewhere, would have needed a truck to tow me to who-knows-what mechanic in the middle of nowhere that might or might not have been able to fix it right then and there, and wouldn't have found such a great mechanic that's actually semi-convenient for us.
{e:karmic_fistpump}
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January 3, 2012 at 7:43pm January 3, 2012 at 7:43pm
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I was going to write my own writing resolutions this year, but this guy beat me to it. If you want a good kick in the pants (and don't mind a little crude language), behold:
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/01/03/25-things-writers-should-stop-doing/
Reposted here:
25 THINGS WRITERS SHOULD STOP DOING
1. Stop Running Away
Right here is your story. Your manuscript. Your career. So why the fuck are you running in the other direction? Your writing will never chase you — you need to chase your writing. If it's what you want, then pursue it. This isn't just true of your overall writing career, either. It's true of individual components. You want one thing but then constantly work to achieve its opposite. You say you want to write a novel but then go and write a bunch of short stories. You say you're going to write This script but then try to write That script instead. Pick a thing and work toward that thing.
2. Stop Stopping
Momentum is everything. Cut the brake lines. Careen wildly and unsteadily toward your goal. I hate to bludgeon you about the head and neck with a hammer forged in the volcanic fires of Mount Obvious, but the only way you can finish something is by not stopping. That story isn't going to unfuck itself.
3. Stop Writing In Someone Else's Voice
You have a voice. It's yours. Nobody else can claim it, and any attempts to mimic it will be fumbling and clumsy like two tweens trying to make out in a darkened broom closet. That's on you, too — don't try to write in somebody else's voice. Yes, okay, maybe you do this in the beginning. But strive past it. Stretch your muscles. Find your voice. This is going to be a big theme at the start of 2012 — discover those elements that comprise your voice, that put the author in your authority. Write in a way that only you can write.
4. Stop Worrying
Worry is some useless shit. It does nothing. It has no basis in reality. It's a vestigial emotion, useless as — as my father was wont to say — "tits on a boar hog." We worry about things that are well beyond our control. We worry about publishing trends or future advances or whether or not Barnes & Noble is going to shove a hand grenade up its own ass and go kablooey. That's not to say you can't identify future trouble spots and try to work around them — but that's not worrying. You recognize a roadblock and arrange a path around it — you don't chew your fingernails bloody worrying about it. Shut up. Calm down. Worry, begone.
5. Stop Hurrying
The rise of self-publishing has seen a comparative surge forward in quantity. As if we're all rushing forward to squat out as huge a litter of squalling word-babies as our fragile penmonkey uteruses (uteri?) can handle. Stories are like wine; they need time. So take the time. This isn't a hot dog eating contest. You're not being judged on how much you write but rather, how well you do it. Sure, there's a balance — you have to be generative, have to be swimming forward lest you sink like a stone and find remora fish mating inside your rectum. But generation and creativity should not come at the cost of quality. Give your stories and your career the time and patience it needs. Put differently: don't have a freak out, man.
6. Stop Waiting
I said "stop hurrying," not "stand still and fall asleep." Life rewards action, not inertia. What the fuck are you waiting for? To reap the rewards of the future, you must take action in the present. Do so now.
7. Stop Thinking It Should Be Easier
It's not going to get any easier, and why should it? Anything truly worth doing requires hella hard work. If climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro meant packing a light lunch and hopping in a climate-controlled elevator, it wouldn't really be that big a fucking deal, would it? You want to do This Writing Thing, then don't just expect hard work — be happy that it's a hard row to hoe and that you're just the, er, hoer to hoe it? I dunno. Don't look at me like that. AVERT YOUR GAZE, SCRUTINIZER. And get back to work.
8. Stop Deprioritizing Your Wordsmithy
You don't get to be a proper storyteller by putting it so far down your list it's nestled between "Complete the Iditarod (but with squirrels instead of dogs)" and "Two words: Merkin, Macrame." You want to do this shit, it better be some Top Five Shiznit, son. You know you're a writer because it's not just what you do, but rather, it's who you are. So why deprioritize that thing which forms part of your very identity?
9. Stop Treating Your Body Like A Dumpster
The mind is the writer's best weapon. It is equal parts bullwhip, sniper rifle, and stiletto. If you treat your body like it's the sticky concrete floor in a porno theater (that's not a spilled milkshake) then all you're doing is dulling your most powerful weapon. The body fuels the mind. It should be "crap out," not "crap in." Stop bloating your body with awfulness. Eat well. Exercise. Elsewise you'll find your bullwhip's tied in knots, your stiletto's so dull it couldn't cut through a glob of canned pumpkin, and someone left peanut-butter-and-jelly in the barrel of your sniper rifle.
10. Stop The Moping And The Whining
Complaining — like worry, like regret, like that little knob on the toaster that tells you it'll make the toast darker — does nothing. (Doubly useless: complaining about complaining, which is what I'm doing here.) Blah blah blah, publishing, blah blah blah, Amazon, blah blah blah Hollywood. Stop boo-hooing. Don't like something? Fix it or forgive it. And move on to the next thing.
11. Stop Blaming Everyone Else
You hear a lot of blame going around — something-something gatekeepers, something-something too many self-published authors, something-something agency model. You're going to own your successes, and that means you're also going to need to own your errors. This career is yours. Yes, sometimes external factors will step in your way, but it's up to you how to react. Fuck blame. Roll around in responsibility like a dog rolling around in an elk miscarriage. Which, for the record, is something I've had a dog do, sooooo. Yeah. It was, uhhh, pretty nasty. Also: "Elk Miscarriage" is the name of my indie band.
12. Stop The Shame
Writers are often ashamed at who they are and what they do. Other people are out there fighting wars and fixing cars and destroying our country with poisonous loans — and here we are, sitting around in our footy-pajamas, writing about vampires and unicorns, about broken hearts and shattered jaws. A lot of the time we won't get much respect, but you know what? Fuck that. Take the respect. Writers and storytellers help make this world go around. We're just as much a part of the societal ecosystem as anybody else. Craft counts. Art matters. Stories are important. Freeze-frame high-five. Now have a beer and a shot of whisky and shove all your shame in a bag and burn it.
13. Stop Lamenting Your Mistakes
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you fucked up somewhere along the way. Who gives a donkey's duodenum? Shit happens. Shit washes off. Don't dwell. Don't sing lamentations to your errors. Repeat after me: learn and move on. Very few mistakes will haunt you till your end of days unless you let it haunt you. That is, unless your error was so egregious it can never be forgotten ("I wore a Hitler outfit as I went to every major publishing house in New York City and took a poop in every editor's desk drawer over the holiday. Also, I may have put it on Youtube and sent it to Galleycat. So... there's that").
14. Stop Playing It Safe
Let 2012 be the year of the risk. Nobody knows what's going on in the publishing industry, but we can be damn sure that what's going on with authors is that we're finding new ways to be empowered in this New Media Future, Motherfuckers (hereby known as NMFMF). What that means is, it's time to forget the old rules. Time to start questioning preconceived notions and established conventions. It's time to start taking some risks both in your career and in your storytelling. Throw open the doors. Kick down the walls of your uncomfortable box. Carpet bomb the Comfort Zone so that none other may dwell there.
15. Stop Trying To Control Shit You Can't Control
ALL THAT out there? All the industry shit and the reviews and the Amazonian business practices? The economy? The readers? You can't control any of that. You can respond to it. You can try to get ahead of it. But you can't control it. Control what you can, which is your writing and the management of your career.
16. Stop Doing One Thing
Diversification is the name of survival for all creatures: genetics relies on diversification. (Says the guy with no science background and little interest in Googling that idea to see if it holds any water at all.) Things are changing big in these next few years, from the rise of e-books to the collapse of traditional markets to the the galactic threat of Mecha-Gaiman. Diversity of form, format and genre will help ensure you stay alive in the coming entirely-made-up Pubpocalypse.
17. Stop Writing For "The Market"
To be clear, I don't mean, "stop writing for specific markets." That's silly advice. If you want to write for the Ladies' Home Journal, well, that's writing for a specific market. What I mean is, stop writing for The Market, capital T-M. The Market is an unknowable entity based on sales trends and educated guess-work and some kind of publishing haruspicy (at Penguin, they sacrifice actual penguins — true story!). Writing a novel takes long enough that writing for the market is a doomed mission, a leap into a dark chasm with the hopes that someone will build a bridge there before you fall through empty space. Which leads me to –
18. Stop Chasing Trends
Set the trends. Don't chase them like a dog chasing a Buick. Trends offer artists a series of diminishing returns — every iteration of a trend after the first is weaker than the last, as if each repetition is another ice cube plunked into a once strong glass of Scotch. You're just watering it down, man. Don't be a knock-off purse, a serial killer copycat, or just another fantasy echo of Tolkien. Do your own thing.
19. Stop Caring About What Other Writers Are Doing
They're going to do what they're going to do. You're not them. You don't want to be them and they don't want to be you. Why do what everyone else is doing? Let me reiterate: do your own thing.
20. Stop Caring So Much About The Publishing Industry
Know the industry, but don't be overwhelmed by it. The mortal man cannot change the weave and weft of cosmic forces; they are outside you. Examine the publishing industry too closely and it will ejaculate its demon ichor in your eye. And then you'll have to go to the eye doctor and he'll be all like, "You were staring too long at the publishing industry again, weren't you?" And you're like, "YES, fine," and he's like, "Well, I have drops for that, but they'll cost you," and you get out your checkbook and ask him how many zeroes you should fill in because you're a writer and don't have health care. *sob*
21. Stop Listening To What Won't Sell
You'll hear that. "I don't think this can sell." And shit, you know what? That might be right. Just the same — I'd bet that all the stories you remember, all the tales that came out of nowhere and kicked you in the junk drawer with their sheer possibility and potential, were stories that were once flagged with the "this won't sell" moniker. You'll always find someone to tell you what you can't do. What you shouldn't do. That's your job as a writer to prove them wrong. By sticking your fountain pen in their neck and drinking their blood. ...uhh. I mean, "by writing the best damn story you can write." That's what I mean. That other thing was, you know. It was just metaphor. Totally. *hides inkwell filled with human blood*
22. Stop Overpromising And Overshooting
We want to do everything all at once. Grand plans! Sweeping gestures! Epic 23-book fantasy cycles! Don't overreach. Concentrate on what you can complete. Temper risk with reality.
23. Stop Leaving Yourself Off The Page
You are your stories and your stories are you. Who you are matters. Your experiences and feelings and opinions count. Put yourself on every page: a smear of heartsblood. If we cannot connect with our own stories, how can we expect anybody else to find that connection?
24. Stop Dreaming
Fuck dreaming. Start doing. Dreams are great — uh, for children. Dreams are intangible and uncertain looks into the future. Dreams are fanciful flights of improbability — pegasus wishes and the hopes of lonely robots. You're an adult, now. It's time to shit or get off the pot. It's time to wake up or stay dreaming. Let me say it again because I am nothing if not a fan of repetition: Fuck dreaming. Start doing.
25. Stop Being Afraid
Fear will kill you dead. You've nothing to be afraid of that a little preparation and pragmatism cannot kill. Everybody who wanted to be a writer and didn't become one failed based on one of two critical reasons: one, they were lazy, or two, they were afraid. Let's take for granted you're not lazy. That means you're afraid. Fear is nonsense. What do you think is going to happen? You're going to be eaten by tigers? Life will afford you lots of reasons to be afraid: bees, kidnappers, terrorism, being chewed apart by an escalator, Republicans, Snooki. But being a writer is nothing worthy of fear. It's worthy of praise. And triumph. And fireworks. And shotguns. And a box of wine. So shove fear aside — let fear be gnawed upon by escalators and tigers. Step up to the plate. Let this be your year.
I don't know about you... but that was pretty inspiring in a deranged kind of way. 
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January 1, 2012 at 4:01am January 1, 2012 at 4:01am
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Well, my goal for 2011 was to read more books than I did in 2010... and I read eleven more than last year. At 44 total for the year, I'm still a few short of my goal of 50, but well over my other goal of beating last year's record of 33. For anyone who's interested, here's what I read this year:
FICTION
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Graeme-Smith
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis
Deadly Honeymoon by Lawrence Block
Death Match by Lincoln Child
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Fantasy Lover by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
Impact by Douglas Preston
Left Behind by Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins
Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz
NONFICTION
1776 by David McCullough
5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Brain Rules by John Medina
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
Crime Beat by Michael Connelly
Decision Points by George W. Bush
Decoded by Jay-Z
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Drive by Daniel Pink
Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
Poetics by Aristotle
New New Thing by Michael Lewis
Wanderlust: A Love Affairs with Five Continents by Elisabeth Eaves
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
There are a lot of amazing books in that list... it was a very good year for quality writing (excepting Breaking Dawn, of course). But if I had to pick my three favorite books of the year, I think they would be Crooked Little Vein for its sheer bizarreness and ability to offend just about every sensibility any reader might have; Devil in the White City for a true serial killer story that rivals anything fiction can create; and Memoirs of a Geisha for being one of the most vivid and evocative books I've read in a long time. I highly recommend all three (although the first two only to those with a strong stomach). 
It was really difficult to pick favorites out of this list... they were all remarkable in their own way. If anybody wants any other recommendations or additional details about any of the books, just let me know.
2012 Reading Goal: 50 books, more nonfiction than fiction.
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I don't know how long it will last (the hard drive is fading fast, but that just means I'll be saving to my USB drive); nevertheless, it's a welcome sight to see my resurrected laptop working once again, proudly embarking on its second life after most had left it for dead. 
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