In addition to the random middle of the road stop and go ATM (which, btw, according to a local, only happens on that one street and quite often too), I really like to disregard the traffic signals and just cross whenever it looks clear. I’m really gonna miss that when I get back.
The food in Iowa City, or at least in downtown Iowa City, is atrocious.
Well, not so bad that it’s unbearable, but bland and mediocre so that choosing a place to eat is more like choosing between dying by electrocution or lethal injection.
Two restaurant advisories: Stay away from Z’Marik Noodle Cafe next to Prairie Lights, and make sure to brave the walk out to Aoeshe on Gilbert, a Japanese/Korean/Chinese restaurant. In most cases, Asian food in Iowa would be suicide, but this place was surprisingly good and definitely the best place I’ve eaten at during my stay here in Iowa.
Of course there are still a lot of restaurants to visit, but my experience so far has not been pleasing. I’m close to resorting to the fast food chains for reliable and cheap food.
The free coffee in the morning was way overrated.
Here’s my daily schedule first: Morning coffee from 8:30 to 10:30. The Elevenses Series, presentations on a variety of topics of interest to writers, at 11:00. Workshop session from 2:00 to 5:00. Prairie Lights readings at 8:00.
Any time before, after, or between those is free time. Heck, anything other than the workshop is free time, all other activities are optional.
The Mayflower dormitories I’m staying at are out in the middle of nowhere. I kept waiting for the cities and then downtown to appear, but instead the Shuttle made a random U-Turn, and sure enough I was at the dorms. I looked in both directions down the road when I got out…nothing.
Another passenger on the shuttle who came to the festival last year told me campus and downtown was just a 15 minute walk down the road. We also shared the shuttle ride with a New Zealand post-graduate neuroscientist going to the University of Iowa for a conference. She has never been to America before, so wonderful Iowa City will be her first experience of America. “It’s so weird to be driving on the wrong side of the road,” she said.
Continue reading “Iowa Summer Writing Festival - Day 0 (Part 2)”
My name is Eric and I like running on an hour of sleep.
I arrived at LAX two hours ahead of my flight departure time. United Airlines decided to go “self check-in” with this e-ticket business, and naturally about 90% of the people who go up to the kiosks don’t know how to use it and need someone to help them with it. It’s amusing to watch the “paper ticket” lines move about ten times as fast.
After 30 minutes of standing in line, a representative informed me that if I had no bags to check-in (which I didn’t), then I could do the express check-in at the machines hidden under the bridge.
Thanks for telling me earlier.
Continue reading “Iowa Summer Writing Festival - Day 0 (Part 1)”
A designer at my work found it amusing that people would hear me say “Riding Class” instead of “Writing Class” when asked why I was going to Iowa, so he made a little something in Photoshop to have some fun (Just like Wang Chung). Then one of the animators said he would animate it jumping hurdles and all that great equestrian stuff (He hasn’t yet).
Damn designers.
I’m getting rather antsy about going and feel like I’m gonna forget something important. Like a pencil. Ooh paper! Gotta bring that…
A week from today I will be in Iowa attending the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. The University of Iowa offers writing workshops, either lasting for a week or just a weekend, each specializing on different topics and helping to further writing and the various techniques.
I never really use highlighters. I enjoy keeping everything I own in pristine condition, and yellow marks all over the pages of my books doesn’t go along with that mentality.
I still don’t and probably won’t highlight things I read today, but I can see the importance of being able to locate a favorate passage easily. Perhaps with just little stickies, or marking down the page number on the inside cover of the book. Nothing too intrusive. Regardless, I found the big yellow highlighter would work fine for this task.
It requires effort to get the cap to stick into the little peg on the back of the highlighter, and as I try to pry it off again I squeeze it ever so hard, enough to make my finger physically hurt. Don’t ask me why I did; I don’t know either, I’m probably just used to pen caps being fairly pliable.
Highlighter in hand and ready now, I begin reading through the descriptions until I finally come upon one that interests me. I’m not sure how visible of a mark the yellow color will make, so I make a curly stroke with a little loop at the end that comes back up. Yeah, that’s visible. Didn’t need to get fancy.
I found out about the 19th Annual Iowa Summer Writing Festival when Jennie sent me a link about the top creative writing programs in the nation. Iowa was listed as the top school, so I went to their site, browsed around and found this summer program. It seems great; They have weeklong workshops as well as just weekend workshops. No application needed, only as long as there are open spots.
I figured the emphasis would be on fiction, but classes cover biographies, a few on playwriting, a couple of really interesting classes on screenplays, and even a narrative journalism class.
The poetry workshops I skip right over. Never been a big fan of poetry. They take too much analyzing for me to really enjoy, and some of them require knowledge of the poet’s history/background to really get to the root of the meanings.
Maybe that’s why I enjoy Death Cab for Cutie’s music so much. Their lyrics are always so literal yet still very beautiful. The Weakerthans are a bit like that too, but they’re far too smart. “Rely a bit to heavily on alcohol and irony /
Get clobbered on by courtesy / in love with love, and lousy poetry.”
I’ve heard back from an old writing teacher from college on some other summer programs offered, so I’m going to look into those as well. Either way, I need to move forward with this. Imagine that, me paying to learn.
Something I’ve been working on/off for the past couple of months, I finally did the launch last night of the redesigned Writer’s Block. The hardest part came in figuring out the right template tags to enter into my html code, and the archives are a sort of hack job at the current moment.
The search templates still haven’t been designed, and I think a comment preview template as well, but they’ll come in due time. My main emphasis here was to just get the text as readable as possible seeing as how that’s the point of the site. I wish I’d taken a screenshot of how the site looked before, but at the same time I’m glad I didn’t cause it seriously looked like crap.
Hopefully a redesign of my site should be down the line, but with my productivity levels, I wouldn’t be surprised to not see one until the summer.
Indie 103 has been playing a very cool mash-up of Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and Oasis’ “Wonderwall”. I’m not usually a fan of remixes, but this one is really well done. I managed to snag a copy online, but it looks like the link I got it from has exceeded its bandwidth limit. If you’re nice enough I’m willing enough to pass the mp3 out, or do a search for yourself. According to MusicBrainz, it is called “Boulevard of Broken Songs” and done by Party Ben.
I’ve become very big on music sharing. Not the whole p2p Napster/Kazaa thing, but on sharing good music with friends and getting recommendations for new music to listen to. I even add the initials of the person who recommended the song to me in the comments field of my mp3s, allowing me to create a smart playlist of a particular person’s tastes in music.
I never did get around to discussing how I organize my mp3s and my strong penchant for using a taxonomy to sort them. However, that I’ll save for another entry. My original point is that I’d love to find a way to setup a repository of music, where I can throw up the latest stuff I’ve been listening to and would love for everyone else to listen to and see what they thought, and others can similarly share their music.
Maybe I’ll run across something or figure a system out.
Last note. I need to write more. Which I’m doing now. So expect more lengthy entries, unless I get lazy again, which isn’t entirely unlikely.
Big thanks to JP for the heads-up on this one. November is National Novel Writing Month, where participants are invited (challenged) to write a 175 page (50,000 word) novel from November 1st to November 30th.
I’ve been a bit discouraged about writing for a while now, mainly because I just can’t find the energy, motivation, or ideas. This looks like it’ll be a good motivator though, so everyone out there either sign up with me or make sure I do my writing.
Thanks to Jennie for our little outing to Old Town Pasadena on our lonely Thursday night. All of our friends (and even our relatives!) abandoned us for their own evenings of fun. Nevertheless, we saw the saleless clothes at Urban Outfitters, shopped for new books at Barnes & Noble and enjoyed frozen yogurt at 21 Choices. Their Reese’s Peanut Butter mix was awesome.
I picked up Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves since I needed something new to read after having finished Fight Club. The whole book is a rally against bad punctuation. I was laughing in the store after having read this from the back cover:
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
Eric Lim smells like noodles; enjoys driving in traffic in the Los Angeles area; is scared of girls; tries to make people feel bad; is allergic to hot wings; is (almost) undefeated Go Fish Champion; is the destroyer of toasters; is a self-qualified CSS Ninja; wants to learn to ride a unicycle just so he can call himself "GizmoDuck"; and is an aspiring writer who doesn't write.
He is eagerly awaiting the revolution.
Reach him at
eric at pres.umptuo.us
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