Something I might need to recall from time.

Since I was a kid, my favorite band has been Tool. They took anger and directed it into something that was powerful not for its own sake (for anger is power; if you don't believe me than recall the Incredible Hulk, and then recall that comics are one of our meanest myth platforms running). Tool took their anger and targeted the place that inspired it, be it inside themselves or outside, and made beautiful weapons out of the things that could have made them weak.

I am an angry person. There are lots of other emotions running around in the ol' noggin, but anger has directed so many of my choices through my life. Frankly, I've been its victim too many times, with my decisions being often more destructive to myself than to the situations that created them.

Maybe its time to stop that. Maybe the feeling I'm afraid of, the reason I'm afraid of writing, is that it means tapping that boiling place in the bottom of my guts and bringing it up. That is a stupid thing to be afraid of (I am angry at that fear): by bringing it up with care and love it will turn to passion. Destructive passion, certainly, but directed into sick things in my life and in the world around me that need burning to the ground.

Anger might lead to the dark side (and can we really trust George Lucas's creativity at this point?) but one hand plays the white keys and black keys. The black notes are labeled "minor." This is a bad joke; they are the most moving and powerful notes when played properly. Their power makes them frightening, though, so we limit them in title and regard their emotional expressions as poisonous.

I'm angry about that too.

Let's take the anger out, then. Let's look at it honestly and break the black off and pull out the diamonds that are hiding inside.

Roar.

reversal of fortune

I left Holographic Moon today and went back to Mirror Box.

That was a good idea. That story stalled out on me when I realized that I'd filled up most of the space that is reasonable for a short story (I was over 5000 words on it, with the end a ways away), with material that didn't do at all what the concept needed. Going back today, I moved nearly half what I had into a slush file and restarted at the last point I felt some degree of confidence in. The new stuff is much more effective and exciting for me to look back at.

There is a funny feeling that is starting to happen. A weird sort resignation to the material. There is little doubt anymore that writing these stories is going to be hard on me--the vulnerability that is called for, the willingness to try and fail and accept it and try again, other things--but I feel increasingly called to sit for longer amounts of time. Its a matter of immersion, and of pushing myself into the mind states of the characters. More than that, pushing myself into the very language the concepts require. Its like dancing, but more exhausting. And yet I feel compelled...

Part of it is the increasing of synchronicities all around me. Some of these are related to my material, and seeing direct relations between concepts and characters corresponding to things in the world around me. Those could be chalked up to my material being near the top of my recent memory, causing my mind to pattern my experiences onto the stories I'm fooling with. But its more than simple things and chance meetings; the whole world around me seems to be changing, and me with it.

I can't help thinking of butterflies cramping in cocoons, pushing out into a world they'd witnessed before in another form but now equipped to move and interact with it in a whole new way.

It might behoove me to speak with Artemis again soon...

Two daughters and a beautiful wife

Greg technically only has one daughter, but its still apt...

Good morning folks! The writing is going well as of late, and damn if that ain't fine. It's sort of funny: I'd been kicking Holographic Moon around in my head for years now, saying That's the one, I just gotta write that one and then I'll be on my way. I had the whole thing worked out in my head, from characters to setting to dialog. But the damn thing would never work when I sat down. Now, after tearing the whole thing down to its barest conceptual levels, I'm practically sprinting through this story (I just jinxed myself I'm willing to bet you anything).

I guess what I'm learning is that, when centering a story around a concept rather than a neat character or a striking scene, its important to be sensitive to what the concept needs to express itself.  The story I had built in my head was drawn from my own experience with the visual component of the concept. This makes sense: it seems perfectly likely that when my executive function told my creative structures to come up with imagery (which is what a story often is until it gets filtered through words), it would pull from the most immediate images in relation to the conceptual catalyst (i.e. the night Cheryl and I went for a walk and saw the moon's image broken into billions of copies and reassembled in a thin sheet of ice floating in the atmosphere).  Unfortunately, the immediate images weren't particularly interesting, nor was much else in the story. To put it bluntly, if every character in my first concept was killed horrifically, I think any reader would have said 'good.' The women were bitches and the men were wusses (and my inner Jungian just squirmed a bit).

The new version will be more effective, I think...

Anyway, early morning writing is so-so: the sun is blaring in my face pretty viciously. Still, there's a symbolic component there I sort of like...maybe I should stock up on sun screen?  :-)

I owe myself at least an hour today, and I'm thinking it might happen in the hammock with pen and paper, scotch and cigar. First though, I have errands to run.

edit! lAteR

Sat down for my hour today and was at a loss for what to do. Edited pre-existing stuff.

Spent time in the hammock with scotch and cigar, figured out what happens next.

Cool.

Once more, into the breach!

Well party people, here we go again.

In my last entry I told you that I'd given up on a story I'd been thinking about for years. The central concept, however, I still believe in. I spent yesterday brainstorming a bit, and I've come up with a much better story to couch that central concept in.

Further developments: the need for a solid schedule is becoming more apparent to me. From now on, 7 days a week, I'm going to devote a solid hour a day to these efforts. That's not too much time, and I probably waste that much dicking around on Facebook anyway. Less Facebook, more creativity equals good. Morning or night? Not sure yet. It will be fluid for the time being, and we'll see what hour I find most productive. I'm not limiting myself to only an hour, but that will be the minimal expected from myself from now on.

An opening ritual is going to need to be created as well. Steve King said that certain passes are required for him to enter the writer space, and I see the value in that. I'll discuss this more as I develop it.

Other than that, so far so good. I'm producing very little solid work at the moment, but I'm learning quickly what does and doesn't work for me. More than that, I'm showing more commitment to this process than I ever have, and that is really gratifying. Anyway, I'll try and stop by in a bit with a 'later' edit and tell you how the new story is working so far.

Listen to this song, if you like. It relates to "The Holographic Moon" in a round about way. Very sad and terrible, to be honest...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs6rgjWZXyQ



edit: later

Went very well.

Very pleasing experience. An hour is a fair amount of time to ask of myself. The new story is going to take my central concept to much more interesting places; actually, I think it would be fair to say that now the story is going to be better than the central concept (assuming I can do it justice, of course).

One of these days I'm going to tell you folks about the reality bending powers of writing, and about the very real magic at work behind any act of creativity. Not now though.

I'm bushed. Time to play some video games.

In Utero

Having a bit of a crisis of faith as of late.

I've picked my material apart little too much. Too much thinking has weakened my focus and resolve, as well as my confidence in the stories themselves.

A friend of mine was pregnant a few years ago, and on her Facebook she was begging the baby to come out of her in the last few weeks of carrying. I imagine that feeling of wanting something out of herself, to see the culmination of the process manifested and the thing brought into the world....I think that would be very much like what I'm feeling.

The last two weeks, as good as they've been at times, were false labor. The real deal hasn't started yet, and I don't know how to induce the muse. And, lord God, am I scared of miscarrying this thing. I'm so invested in it that I don't know what I'd do.

Of the more than four thousand words I have managed to write on the current project, I'd estimate fully a thousand or more are going to have to be trashed. That's a big portion of what I've produced, and it sucks that I put that much work into something that I don't like and doesn't represent what I was trying to show at all. Its just not good, compelling, or true to the concept. But at least I know that.

A friend of mine is a painter. He works with oil paints and he is very good with them (good enough that a single piece of his work sells for more money than I currently make in a year). One day we ran into one another and I asked him how the work was going that day. He told me it had been a very frustrating day because the light on some flowers he had been painting was not correct and that he was going to have to scrap all of the work and redo the flowers. He said he could tell it really wasn't working for awhile but that he'd kept on pushing through until he realized what was wrong. It was very impressive to me that he could spend hours working on something as small as some flowers; it was more impressive that he would erase hours worth of work because he'd realized he wasn't doing something correctly.

The lighting was off in my story, too. I wasn't representing the events accurately, and now I have to tear what I made down and rework it. But at least I wrote something; I plowed on with the words even when I didn't have clear sense of where I was going. I might have to backtrack a bit, but now I am more sure of what I'm doing.

Hey, you know what? I feel better. Thanks blog! This is exactly why I started you.


Edit:

Later

Well, its been nearly five hours since I published this entry, and I've spent most of that time in my chair trying to start a piece that's been on my mind for years. Turns out it is crap. Another false labor.

But I've kept my butt in the chair, and I've given it my damnedest. There's that. There's also the realization that my central concept isn't bad. I'm going to try something different with it. I might do more tonight, or it might be tomorrow before I tackle this again.

I'm frustrated. No doubt about it. But I'm here, and I'm trying. Failing is much better than not trying and regretting it. That's cliche, but its true.

Still here...

School work has intruded on my dreams. Test on Thursday, spring break starts Friday...we'll see what this ol' boy can do with a free week.

gurg

Important lesson: hangover + impending tests + work stress = a brain not well suited to writing.

I'm too me today. There's too much of Jeremy and his issues, and its making it difficult to disconnect and do the work I want.

To feel and see the characters and the environment, and then use language in potent ways to communicate the things I'm seeing so someone else can see and feel them as well: doesn't that sound great?

Can't seem to pull it off though.  Maybe I should go study my French and look for a new job. Maybe I need to take care of Jeremy's concerns so he can relax and get out of the way a little bit.

I think I'm going to go buy a new chair.

Most good

Its been good today.

I plowed through a section on the computer, and then switched things up and took a notebook and pencil out to the hammock. Killed it in the hammock.

Hand writing might become my go-to method for the rough draft, assuming I'll be able to read a damn thing I wrote later...

;-)

Not bad. Not great.

Sums it up. There was new material added today, and I understand the characters in this one better as a result. Another 1500 words and I might be done with the rough draft.

Still, I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped. Maybe I shouldn't have started this on a Mercury retrograde...

WHEEL.
OF.
FORTUNE!

Here. Watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdNbocU6wKc

Rainy today, with heavy cloud cover that makes things so wonderfully dreary. I couldn't stand this weather all the time, but I really enjoy it once in a while.

The work is going well today. Really well actually: I'm surprised at how coherent the narrative function is managing to be. I'm taking a moment away to tell myself that these moments do happen, because I'm certain to forget soon when the slogging starts.

On his website, Neil Gaiman recently wrote in his blog that sometimes writing is like driving on a crystal clear day where you can see exactly where you are going, and on other days its like driving in fog, and you just have to push through and hope your destination becomes apparent. I like that an awful lot.

For me, writing is often like walking in flat, delta farmlands. Enormous flat expanses stretching on and on,  making a mockery of any sense of progress and, when the going gets muddy, a mockery of even a sense of movement.

There is a transition to be made, I think, from the cotton and bean fields where I spent my early childhood to the hills and mountains of my teens...

I fear I could labor this metaphor until it gave birth to some really bad material. I think I'll go back to the story I was working on. I'll check in later...

I lied: I didn't come back yesterday with further information. Sadly, the only writing I did was in that blog entry.

This is disappointing but not really surprising. A pattern is in place for me to draw upon here, and it has been in a fairly steady format for more than a few years. My current behavior is falls very much within it, and that is fine. I understood there would be a need for observation and adaptation.

But I'm here, now. I'm talking about it and I care. I'm ashamed of myself for my failure, but I'm unashamed of admitting I am ashamed. A superior place to be than merely ashamed, I should think.

Anyway, less school and work tomorrow. Hopefully I can spill some words out of me, and hopefully the accidental pattern they make on the page will be pleasing to at least some degree. If not, I'll still try and swing through to bitch about my inadequacy, or try to rationalize it.

Testing...Testing 1,2...


And so, from nothing but a gauzy and insubstantial notion combined with the neural-network that is the  interwebz, another blog is born. As a statement of intent, I'd like this blog to be a running journal on my attempts at being a serious fiction writer. I'm really embarrassed to admit that I'm attempting that, but there it is.

Its something I've wanted for myself for a long time, but haven't been able to cook up the right combination of gumption, talent, and discipline into a stew that would sustain the process of bringing a single decent piece to completion. There have been an awful lot of half-finished stories over the last eight years or so, and a lot of frustration and swearing off of the urge to sit in front of a blank page or computer screen and tell a story. Not a lot to show for it either. A published excerpt in a small magazine is really the best I've got to brag about, and thats sort of like bragging that your band opened for a band that opened for Motley Crue.

Whatever. I'm still going to give it another shot. A really serious one this time.

None of my efforts will be popping up here, though. I'm going to use this blog as a venue to talk about writing. The magic of writing; the work of writing; the joys and pains of writing. Hopefully it will help keep me motivated and on task, though there is a distinct possibility that there will be a handful of further additions before I give up this effort and decided to take up dance as a new hobby and passion. I hope that doesn't happen though.

I'll be back later today. We'll see how me and the page are getting along...