Recently, Time magazine published a list of the 100 best novels. But the praise of professional critics hardly matters to the book-reviewing readers at Amazon.com. A compilation of the best of the worst… about the best.

I have a new regimen. This is a different regimen than my new “do a half-hour of circuit training three times per week” regimen. This is a more intellectual pursuit, and it consists of three parts.

The first part is that I have started writing again. The plan is this: one thousand words per day, minimum, outside of weblogs and personal journals. The trick here is that the subject matter has to be different. No blithering on for one thousand words about the random crap with which I filled my day. No talking about websites or games or other random crap I found on the internet. This is supposed to be more exploratory stuff — fiction, non-fiction, whatever. Exploration into realms about which I do not normally write. Delving deep into memory and self to carve out pieces and put those on paper. It’s actually a lot less cliche than it sounds.

I’ve been on this new regimen for three days now. The first day I managed to get twenty-one hundred words out before I faltered and fell silent. Day two was seventeen-hundred words. Day three (just now) was another seventeen-hundred. I’m not allowed to cheat, either. If I do two thousand words on one day, it doesn’t mean I get out of the one thousand words the next. Minimum one thousand words, every day. Maximum: unlimited. No carryovers. No touchbacks. Tag.

It has been interesting so far, in that I’ve already found myself thinking about what I could write about at various points throughout the day. I could write about my childhood heros, perhaps, or my recently acquired love of cooking. Maybe I could put out a thousand words about Zen and what it means to me, or at least how I interpret it (which, for what it’s worth, is probably quite unlike what any real Zen student would tell you). How about how I learned to love reading and language? Maybe a piece about my utter disdain for current advertising and marketing and how they’re missing the boat by trying to lie to us incessantly, bombarding us with blipverts that we simply Do Not Believe (seriously, guys, your audience is smarter than you think). I could easily churn out one thousand words about joining a (women-only) gym and starting a new workout regimen (don’t let anyone tell you for even a second that women are less competitive than men). A thousand words about the death and secret rebirth of television as a medium for storytelling. A thousand words about my first trip to the local library (which I haven’t yet done). When I think of it, I jot these ideas down for later retrieval, but haven’t needed to use them yet.

When I actually sit down to write, of course, all bets are off. As yet, there has been no pre-planning. Tonight’s Daily (I’m calling them Dailies) started off with a somewhat vociferous rant against Margaret Atwood which churned itself into a thousand words about Canadian Culture. Yesterday was about cooking, food, dinner parties, and some reflections thereupon. The day before was (quick pause while I go check) about embracing change, later turning into a bit about the strange clash between horror and beauty that we all endure every single day. None of these topics were preselected — they just happened to be what poured out of my brain and into the keyboard while I had the word processor open to a blank page.

Naturally, the vast majority of what I’ve written is utter trash. Breathless at times, totally disorganized, wholly unrevised. Just raw. But that’s ok. For now, that’s all I want — I just want to get into the habit of producing a certain amount of raw content on a daily basis. Writing, you see, has two phases. Generating raw content is, by necessity, the first. The second, which can only happen once the raw content is available, is revising. Unlike sculptors, writers don’t start with a block of material and just spend their time taking away the parts that don’t belong. We need to create the block first, and only then can we start chipping away at the edges. Right now, I just need to produce giant chunks of rough marble.

The second part of my new writerly regimen is this, my weblog. In addition to the one thousand word not-for-other-people minimum, I intend to spend ten to fifteen minutes churning out an entry for my weblog (not including revision and additions). This has two purposes. First, it will mean my weblog gets updated daily, which I’m hoping will draw in more readers. Behind this interminably timid exterior, I really do crave an audience. Second, it will get me used to the idea of actually writing for an audience every day. The one thousand word minimum is all well and good, but if I don’t get used to the idea of having other people actually read my writing, I’ll eventually end up cheating by typing the word “house” a thousand or more times, until the word itself becomes utterly nonsensical and loses all meaning. So, yeah. The weblog entries are intended to keep me at least partially anchored in reality. Writers write to be read. Anything else is just intellectual wanking.

The third and final part of my new regimen involves reading. I used to read a lot. Books upon books every week. I had no TV, I wasn’t caught up in the whole gaming craze, I wasn’t yet jacked into the Matrix (read: Internet). I had a lot of hours to fill, and I gleefully filled them with books. In bulk. When I lived in Montreal I would spend $300-$500 every paycheque on books, often going downtown daily just to browse the bookshops.

Then I stopped reading. Not entirely of course, but from a diet of three or four books per week, I ended up down to about one per month, usually read in ten page increments right before bed. That’s no damned good. I love reading, and so I’m going to make time for it again. I don’t have a minimum daily allotment, but I’d like to be able to spend a couple of hours every day, on average, just sitting on my butt with a book.

And with that, I think I shall.

(43 mins, including revision. 1056 words. So much for 10-15 mins.)

I’m rereading Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki, because, as Suzuki puts it, “[i]t is the object of Zen…to save us from going crazy or being crippled.” Zen is interesting.

I’ve also started going to a fitness centre. So far, so good. Of course, I’m two whole days into this, so “so far” isn’t really that far at all. The nice parts are: a) the place is really, really close to where I live, and b) it never takes more than half an hour to do a full workout. I bit the bullet and signed up for three months. Wish me luck.

Devmo is going well, with lots of stuff going on lately. We’ve made some significant progress towards moving to beta, and it’s all very fun and exciting. Watch this space for beta announcements in the near future. Woo!

In other news, it turns out that Firefoxes are really damned cute.

That’s about it. My friends zab and blizzard and shona are in town for the Ottawa Linux Symposium this week, which is always much fun. Busy busy.

Movie

Boolean and I just finished watching The Elephant Man, starring John Hurt and directed by David Lynch. This is an utterly phenomenal movie, telling (part of) the story of Joseph Merrick. It’s tragic and heartbreaking, while also somewhat uplifting. I won’t bother with any more trite cliches, I’ll just strongly recommend you rent it sometime soon.

Food

Last night, somewhat on a whim, I did a garlic-rosemary sirloin tip roast with potatoes, onions, and asparagus, accompanied by a nice bottle of wine from Portugal (Quinta D Encontro ‘Bairrada Superior’ 2001, $19.95 @ LCBO). Sirloin Tip roasts are roughly half the price of Prime Rib, which is a bonus, and I think Sirloin Tip actually makes for better sandwiches. Tonight’s dinner was leftovers, transformed into total yumminess as Hot Roast Beef Sandwiches with Cordon Bleu Beef Gravy, extremely fresh thick-sliced white bread from the local bakery, and fresh, very lightly steamed, peas. So, a $22 hunk of meat from the local grocery fed 4 people for a nice proper meal, and had enough leftovers for 3 more sandwiches (I’m having the last for lunch tomorrow).

Games

A bunch of us have been playing a strange little web-based space game called Ogame lately. It’s interesting, fun, not very time consuming (unless you’re phik), and a strangely interesting diversion every so often. It’s not for the weak of heart, however, as there’s basically no documentation. Still, if you like space games (or even just resource management/building games with an exploration/piracy twist), you might get a kick out of it.

Books

Tried reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake. Didn’t make it very far. It…I dunno. Maybe I didn’t give it enough time, but after an hour’s reading, it still felt very much like he was just rambling aimlessly. Felt much more like a drunken weblog than a novel, I’m sad to say. Abandoned it.

Started reading Oblivion, a recent book of short stories by David Foster Wallace. I’m only about halfway through the first, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it. It’s a bit of a jarring leap from Roald Dahl to this, I find, if only because Dahl’s stories are actually short, while Wallace’s first in this volume is 64 pages long or so.

Work

For those of you who don’t know, I work for the Mozilla Foundation, managing the Devmo project. It’s coming along nicely, but we’re always interested in having more people come on board to help out. If you’re interested in Web or XUL development, drop by the Devmo Wiki and take a look around. The place is still a bit rough around the edges as we’re still officially in “alpha” stage (which, here, really means we’re still building stuff), but we’re hoping to shape things up for a beta in the near future. Comments, suggestions, editorial help, and content are always welcome.

Technically I’m a bit late, but Happy Canada Day!

Our day was relatively sedate, but that was largely because we began our celebrations Thursday evening, finally crashing at around 2am. Today was mostly sleeping in, eating bacon & eggers for breakfast, having a nap, cleaning some, and doing laundry. Dinner was garlic-ginger pan-roasted pork tenderloin with asparagus. After dinner we did what we usually do (gaming, reading), and watched an episode of Deadwood. Now it’s time for bed. All in all, not a bad day off.

I’ve set up reading spot in my office now, with a comfy chair, a table for my tea, a reading lamp, and an ottoman. I’ve finished On Writing Well, and am now rifling through the shelves trying to find something to read next. Oddly, the next book about writing I picked up — Getting the Words Right — isn’t terribly well written. The Invisible Computer, while interesting and written by someone I’ve admired since I did my thesis (Donald Norman), isn’t quite what I feel like reading at the moment. In the interim, I’m poking my way through the collected short stories of Roald Dahl. I haven’t yet gone to the library to get a library card and a book, so maybe I’ll do that tomorrow.

Also on the topic of tomorrow, I think I’ll use the leftover pork to make ginger pork fried rice for lunch. Yum.

The following is an excerpt from a letter I received from Timothy Findley in 1992.

“Keep fighting against the uninformed who think writing - here or anywhere - is a waste of time and effort. If anything will save us, it’s the imagination - and there’s no way better way to keep the imagination alive than to write or to read. My mentor, Thorton Wilder, once said that cruelty is nothing more than a failure of the imagination — and all I can say is that there’s a lot of that going around these days…”

If you’re out there with a drink in hand, give a silent toast to Hunter, TIFF, and Elliott Smith tonight, would you? So much brilliance, too soon taken from us.

I would be remiss if I failed to post a link to the following story, given what I’ve linked prior to this.

I’m not happy about what’s revealed in this article. I’m not sure how to feel about it at all, actually. He did what he did for whatever reasons. It doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it understandable or justifiable or honourable or any of that. But it is part of his story.

It’s the ugly part of this story.

“See,” I said, “I didn’t want to know that particular part of this story.” I still wish I didn’t. But I do.

My respect for the man’s writing remains undiminished. Of the man himself, I can only ask, “What the fuck?” What could you possibly have been thinking, Hunter, to have rendered yourself so much hamburger while your six year old grandchild was in the house?

Here’s the story. Make of it what you will. I…still don’t know how to react.

“You idiot kid, you don’t have a clue…sometimes you just get caught in the eye…you’re pulling him through…” - Elliott Smith

This is the one I was waiting for.

Goodbye, Hunter.

This one’s worth reading.

The blogosphere has turned to other things now, but I am still sitting here, sad and angry. The bright point of the story so far is that Hunter’s friends are hoping to blast the old man’s ashes (his remains were cremated Tuesday) out of a cannon at Owl Farm. I think that would have made him laugh.

I’ve read a lot of articles about ol’ HST in the past 24 hours. Most of them are cheap hack jobs written by people who don’t know, don’t care, and are too lazy to do any research. News is like that, I guess — if it’s a breaking story, just cover it. Forget about covering it well, or comprehensively, or even putting an interesting spin on it. If nothing else, the general quality of the reporting of Hunter’s death should make us realize just how much we still need the old bastard.

Don’t get me started on the webloggers who write about Hunter while trying to write like Hunter. You can’t, so don’t. Just stop it before I reach through here and stab you.

I’m still angry, obviously. I’m still very, very sad. I want to know the “why” of this, but there are no reasons forthcoming. No one’s saying. No one’s telling. The old man had become a bit of a recluse in his last months, I guess, and people are respecting that.

“Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family,” said the statement released on behalf of Juan and Thompson’s wife, Anita.

Fine. Fine. Maybe there is no “why” at all. Maybe he just finally lost a game of Russian roulette. Boy, wouldn’t that be a pisser.

“The savage…the savage…the savage…the savage…” This keeps running through my head when I think about all of this, like a skipping record. The savage. Read like “the horror…the horror” in Apocalypse Now. I don’t know why. I keep getting angrier.

I have three people who I would call my literary heroes: Timothy Findley, Hunter Thompson, and Leonard Cohen. I wanted always to meet all three, going so far as to write to Mr. Findley a couple of times one summer. He responded. Those responses remain tucked away in my copy of Inside Memory. They are one of my few prized possessions. He’s dead now, too. Only old Leonard’s left, holed up in a Zen monastery somewhere in California.

Anyhow, I’m interested to see how the Rolling Stone memorializes Hunter S. He better get a whole goddamned issue. He deserves that much, at least.