 Goodbye, Amy Tan. You were posted during a time of high fever, and although I loved the lecture, it's time your face moves down a notch on TedTorres.com.
With that out of the way, once again over a month has passed since my last post. But it's been a busy month, occupied with recuperation from a minor illness, lots of shows with my band, and as I am happy to report here, lots and lots of editing on my new novel. In fact, I'm only pages away from the half-way point in both the edits and the inserts, and soon it will be time to implement the third part of my three-part plan, which is to send this completed first half to an editor in New Orleans. Most of the work on the book was done in the building you see pictured here, the Hoover Public Library, with its rows of quiet study cubicles, its in-house coffee shop, it's art gallery, and its post-modern ambiance ... especially at night. Among other locations in the library, this room was where most of the new book was written before my moving to the country, and I've since had the pleasure of revisiting the library a few times during trips into town, utilizing its resources for a few more hours of intense work, reminding me both of how good it can be to get out of my office at home during the editing process, and how much love and nostalgia I have for this facility. If you ever find yourself in the greater Birmingham area, be sure to visit. It truly is one of the most amazing libraries in the country. Now, as a completely unrelated aside, I would like to address the lack of recent movie reviews on TedTorres.com, reporting that I have in fact seen lots of current releases, but at the same time, admitting that my takes on most of these films have been so to the contrary of most mainstream critics lately as to almost look as though anything I'd post here would be intentionally argumentative (if that's even the right word). In no way am I the guy that will say the sky is red or that water isn't wet just to prove some point, but I'll be damned if even Roger Ebert and I have been on opposite ends of the opinion spectrum on a lot of these films, and I've always considered Ebert to be the closest (at least 95% of the time) "real" critic there is out there to me. I've in fact wanted to write about most all of last year's films, and I even had a pretty good rant about how sick I am of the media complaining about how long the Academy Awards show is every year. C'mon! If you're a movie fan like myself (and unlike myself, if your not working on Sunday nights for the past four years!), a show that celebrates film in all of it's facets like that one does couldn't go on long enough! Glad I got that out. Peace.
While sick in bed today with nothing by way of any sort of editorial productivity on the horizon, I instead found this very relevant clip on what influences creativity, or in my case right now, the lack there of.
I am a strong believer in the whims of the universe, especially when it comes to omens as to whether or not I'm on the right track, from perfect page numbers and word counts, to having just enough pages in the printer to print exactly what I've written that day. It is the same place where ideas come from, the same energy that pushes and pulls everything into its rightful place. Amy Tan touches on this wonderfully, and it's the only reason I need to justify why my mind is sick and can't work today. Who am I to ignore the signs? I found this clip, didn't I? And it's got my name all over it ... literally. |