Tuesday, June 24, 2008

"He turned."

I seemed to be typing this sentence a lot. Or variations on it. People seem to be doing a lot of turning in my story. I don't know if this is some weird tick in my writing that needs to be hunted down and eliminated, or some motif of some sort, something going on that I am not yet aware of. I do seem to be focusing very heavily on vistas and views, and the turning seems to be about people taking in some new tableau that comments on the last one. And the way I seem to be heading in this opening section is to relate the beginning of the story in a bunch of short sections told from various characters perspectives. So maybe it means something. I am feeling, kind of, after some of my attempts on M ended up feeling as if all the life had been sucked out of them, to to not worry to much about editing at this point. If I edit to much I might just draw all the vitality out in my urge to streamline it. Better to let the quirks lie for now, until I figure out what they all mean. Any changes should concern themselves with getting stuff that is plainly shit out of there, providing I can find something better to replace them with. Oh, and typos and awkward sentences, of course.

Creative Devolution

I have been trying to get some fiction writing done on SK today, but it has been going nowhere. I have been continuously falling down rabbit holes of online pseudohistory, looking for just enough information to come up with a description of some event that has taken place as background for my story, but isn't even a necessary part of the story itself, just some historical flavor to get the ball rolling, but doing that has become a kind of insurmountable task as I try to sort through all the various historical sources to find the one "correct" image of the past that should be pithily described, and the whole time I am kicking myself for not having finished Gibbon already, since that might actually supply me something of an outline to all these various quandaries. As such, my writing quickly became little more than editing that rapidly devolved into research, and I got less than nothing done. Literally: My work so far today has soncisted of removing a paragraph that I realized was historically inaccurate, but I don't know yet what to put in it's place.

I just wanted to get some writing done, to work with words and such, but it seems that that is nearly impossible to do as I am working on the bloody opening of this book.