Writing Exercise - New York, I Love You

[05.07.10] I watched the first thirty minutes of New York, I Love You tonight after I got home from work and balanced my checkbook and emptied the dehumidifier and it really got me into the mood for writing after the segment where Ethan Hawke plays a writer and talks to this woman he thinks is married until he starts to describe making sweet sweet love to her in a way that will prove he knows how to find her G spot and then she tells him she’s a hooker and gives him her card with her phone number and website on it and says she’s really looking forward to hearing from him and he ends the segment by saying fuck me and I still totally respond to New York going on six years since the only time I was there for real and it was only four days but I don’t know if there are four days in a row that ever inspired me as much as those four days we were in New York for my uncle’s wedding in 2004 and stayed at the 414 in Hell’s Kitchen and walked all the hell over the island and then I stopped watching the movie but left my headphones on and switched to music and listened to Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence album because I had talked to Dione about it at work tonight and then I started writing first this little piece about getting into the mood for writing from watching the movie and then the novel I have been working on and I teased my way through a slow Mafia section that may or may not end with one of the rival family’s capos whacking one of the guys on his crew for being too much of a loose cannon but I have to work in the taboo against taking out a made guy and somehow avoid making it necessary for the any of the characters to have cell phones and that part is way harder than you might think but I have to fight off the fatigue from this week of taking care of Jackson who got a viral stomach flu from someone at the day care where he goes to school and eventually I fight off the fatigue and wind up getting down over one thousand words in the novel and that is more than I have put down in one sitting in quite awhile and most of them I think are good words although it will take going back over them tomorrow night before I start writing again to know for sure whether they are good or if they were just written down in haste for the purpose of having gotten down some words at all [05.12.10] and all of that was five days ago now and I just got around to watching the last half of New York, I Love You tonight and unfortunately I did not respond to the second half quite the way I responded to the first half although I can say that overall I liked the film but that I did not always pay the appropriate amount of attention to it so I added it to the My List section of my account on the library’s website so that I can go back to it sometime and see if paying attention to the whole thing from beginning to end will make the movie open up a little bit more for me and I also added The Headless Woman to the My List section because I also failed to pay the appropriate amount of attention to that film when I had it from Netflix a number of weeks ago and I had a moment of pause there for just a second because I used the word also twice in a short span just now and it reminded of something I read in Poets & Writers many years ago in which Chuck Palahniuk defended the practice of repeating words like that if the repetition fits with the flow of what you are writing and though I am not sure if the repeated use of also in this case precisely fits the flow I am leaving it that way because when I re-read the thing from beginning to now it sounded good in my head and anyway I was having trouble trying to come up with something to put in place of one of the instances of also that did seem to fit the flow and now as I get down toward the end of this particular exercise I am not entirely sure which purpose has been served in the writing of it because I began by writing about how watching the first thirty minutes of the movie got me in the mood for writing but then I got off on a long tangent about writing about writing which turned it into sort of a meta-exercise and there are lots of little random things going on in it too which give it something of a stream-of-consciousness feel that could maybe translate into mumblecore if it were to be made into a movie but it would be an awfully short movie and probably no one would watch it and there goes another tangent and in the end it might just end up being that far too much of this exercise whether it is a meta-exercise or just an ordinary exercise was devoted to seeing once again if I could string together a really long bit of prose limited to a certain number of words and have it make a reasonable amount of sense and also be grammatically correct without there being any punctuation in it at all apart from the period at the end and I believe that I have mostly succeeded at least with that part of it and the exact number of words including the two bracketed bits indicating the dates counting as one word each is one thousand.