Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Identity

Have you ever just stared into a mirror, and looked at yourself? An almost sublime sense of selfhood emerges. A realization that you are really you, bound to this body, and to no one else. It is both incredibly limiting, and incredibly freeing, at the same time. Truly, truly sublime. I couldn't help but smile as I did it. I seemed so... unfamiliar... as I looked at myself. Yet who could I be, but the person staring back?

...

Consciousness, the existence of such, has, I think, always been the main source of my inspiration. I am just truly fascinated by what it is, what it means. Everything I have been trying to unwrap has boiled down to this very specific question. What does it mean to experience the world subjectively?

...

I have been thinking about Father, off and on, lately. He always comes back, it seems in waves, ebbing and flowing. More intense and more intense, then less so. Well, lately, Raymond Frederick Raven has played heavily upon my mind. I have been thinking about the normal person, how their conception of a distant parent differs so drastically from mine. How they see their absentee parent as at fault in some way. That is not the case for me. It is strange. I feel that I am constantly inundated with people whose stories of parental disconnect are so much worse than mine, yet so much better. Everyone is still alive. Sometimes, it feels exceedingly, fatalistically cruel, that I should unabashedly love my father so much, and yet be denied him. Everyone else seems so unaware how lucky they are, yet I can't help but feel that, given their blindness, that it is I who should be grateful, for I knew, Before, just how lucky I was, to have both of them. And though I feel sometimes, a resentment , born of my own stagnation, I know, KNOW, that without them, specifically, I would have been dead long ago.

Thank you.

Monday, October 26, 2009

bleh

Really too tired to write today. Between last post and this I worked sixteen and a half hours within a twenty-seven hour period, and though I have been off work for over six hours now, I am still exhausted. And I need to be up at nine tomorrow.

However, I did come to a realization about a major plot point that had been staring me in the face for a long time, and, I now that I have realized it, a whole bunch of other stuff has opened up. This means changes, but it also means excellant opportunities, and a chance to tighten up the major thematic elements, by laying out the cards sooner as to what it's about, which means I have more time to play around with them, instead of just letting them twist in the wind as I pile up incident after incident. This is one of those times where you change your mind about some prior choice you made, then only belatedly realize you had it right the first time. Funny how many of those you run into. Sigh. It's too bad, the change comes way, way farther down the line in the writing process. I really want to start working on it now, but I wouldn't know where to start, and I am surrendering more and more to just letting the story work itself out on the page(other than advance planning such as this, of course). If I tried to start it now, I wouldn't know where to start.

Also, Mad Men was super awesome tonight.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Faster, stronger

I have written for the last three days. I wrote about 800 words on Thursday, around 700 last night, and just these last 45 minutes I wrote about 450. I am not worried too much about word count, just that I am doing it, but the numbers are a nice way of thinking about progress. One thing I have found, is that as I write more frequently, the entire process becomes less precious. It is easier to dismiss what I have written as junk, and start over. So usually at any stopping point I reach I have practically on my second draft, because I have done so much editing. In fact, After finishing last nights work, I realized that a significant amount of it was not really necessary, and depending on how the rest goes, I might throw out everything from that session. And I didn't feel bad about it! It was just that I had to write it that way, in order to find the way that I actually wanted to write it. It wasn't a finished process, but getting my ideas out like that was a critical step along the way.

I think writing, and probably a lot of other artistic activities (like, say, drawing) is a lot like exercising. Doing it is hard, but it gets comes easier the more you do it, and the less you do, the more it goes back to being hard again. So just doing it often enough will help you work up to doing it longer, and vice versa. Really just doing it is making it easier for me to just sit down and write.

Anyways, here's the bit that I plan on junking, since it probably won't see the light of day anywhere else. Dig those long sentences.

Last night, he had not been out participating in the festivities of Samhain. Though he could hardly have stopped the men from joining, many of them being followers of the old gods themselves, and the others, though Christians, were not above a bit of fun and lechery, he knew that Varus, being not only a Christian, but a Roman Christian, was not amenable to the Celt's somewhat looser interpretation of scripture, (as if always seemed to find room for the old gods and their holy days) and thus he thought it wise to, as the chief negotiator involved in the dispute at hand, to maintain the proper decorum desired by his host. Thus, as his men, including his brother, were out drinking whiskey and wine and bedding the local women, Emrys sat the ready in his small apartment, by the light of a single candle, in his full Centurion uniform, waiting, on the off chance he might be called for.

Last night he had been alone in his room. He was dressed in his full military garb, with his sword at his side, and was sitting upon the only chair in the room, it's back placed against the wall by the doorway. He was sitting perfectly still, his legs side by side, his hands placed gently upon his legs, and his back as straight as a post. He had pushed the table to the other end of the small room, upon which sat a candle, the room's only source of light. Outside he could hear the distance sounds of revelry: whooping, shouting, laughter, and other that, further away, but cutting through the din, the clear melody and rhythm of pipes and drums. He wondered if the people outside could hear them.


Thursday, October 22, 2009

Work

I wrote for about 40, 45, 50 minutes today. And at least a half an hour of that time was spent writing precisely this:

The bridge was truly a most curious thing. In its way, it was more curious than the bodies and the wreckage. The Mount lay several thousand feet out to sea, where it rose out of the clear shallow water so quickly, it was as if some young gods or giants had piled up the earth while at play during some long-ago age. And then, just to make their sandcastle complete, they had added the Bridge. A single strip of raised earth running from the Mount to the far, sandy shore, just wide enough to support a traffic of carts (except at high tide, when it was all but underwater). Though the land bridge widened somewhat as it approached the Mount, suggesting that it was not, after all, the carefully planned work of tidy human hands, the convenience of placement and the precision of its height (rising just so above the water) were enough to imbue the bridge with a kind of mystical presence, as if some unseen, knowing force, perhaps gods, perhaps something greater, had seen fit to set such a thing deliberately upon the world.

Writing is hard.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Damned if you do...

So, I did some editing on an old story after writing that last post, just to be doing something. I am moving more and more towards the opinion that editing actually is writing, that it is so essential to the writing process, that good writing is so intrinsically connected to doing it, and doing it, and doing it, that it cannot really be separated from writing as a distinct act; it is as central to writing as the production of wholly new sentences.

So, I wrote today. Yay, me.

Except, by the time I got to where I left off, I was doubting almost the entirety of the procedure I had put forward. I realized that a good chunk, about 25%, of the story was unnecessary and besides the point, and maybe as much as 35%. Of course, what I had written after that was contingent on information that had been passed on before it, so If I was to excise that those sessions, I would have to completely re-write what had come after it. Then I realized, that the main thing that I liked about the story was those opening paragraphs (the 10% that I only maybe had to excise), that I had written the story basically as an excuse for that part, and that what came after, I wasn't sure I was interested in. I had just come up with that as a way to maybe bring the first part to some sort of conclusion or point. And I don't feel like the latter part is strong enough on it's own to bother shaping up, not unless I restart the whole thing form the beginning, and if that's the case then I simply have no idea what changes would have to be made to make it a self-contained, interesting story. So now I don't know what to do with the bloody thing, and until I come to some sort of decision, about what parts are worth keeping, I am either going to have to put it back on the backburner, or just abandon it as a failed experiment. Which is really too bad, because I really like my main character, and would kind of like to see her story get told. But I can't really justify to myself going through the bother of telling a story if I can't make it interesting. It's the creative equivalent of hearing nails on a blackboard, for hours on end.

Ugh. This is so degrading.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Where is my mind

Yes, so, no writing the last two days. Was working, and it was very tiring.

I've been thinking about my relationship to stimulants and depressants, namely caffeine and alcohol. I like both, but I have been, lately (as in within the last week) been cutting back on both, not out of any moral or self-improvement urge, but because, I think they might hamper my writing. I can't concentrate after a drink, and I can't fight through the cacaphony of voice when I have caffeine in me. (And now that I am cutting back, I can really tell when I have caffeine in me.) I need that calmness, that tranquility of untired reflection, in order to bring my mind to bear on writing. That's why I think in the past it has been easier to write in in the morning, at least morning when I'm not zonked out of my mind; I have no stimulants in my system. I have been sleeping. The most productive bout of writing I ever had was five days where I woke up at 5 and wrote until 11. I wrote an over 10,000 novella.

On the other hand, I feel that is still a place for such things in my creative process. Though caffeine is a poor aid to dramatic thinking, it's quite helpful when brainstorming ideas for things. And drinking has, for whatever reason, always worked to strip away my layers of anxieties, as opposed to many people for whom it seems to let them out; the times when I feel something like a religious experience, or perhaps just bouts of zealous humanism, have usually occurred while my mind races around after having a few. And both those states of mind have a marked influence on the things I think about writing, and the things I want to write about, even if they move me away from the disciplined state I need to actually write.

Still, best to decrease their usage.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Things I have learned about setting up your drum kit

1. Don't Frankenstein your kit. Drums kits are tuned to themselves; you start using parts of other kits, the drums will make ringing sounds in odd places. Adding a new brand of drum is like detuning one string on a guitar. It throws everything out of whack. Likewise, use one brand of cymbals. That one cymbal from a different brand will stick out like a sore thumb every time you hit it. However, allowances can be made for hardware, since it doesn't really effect tone, so you can use Tama Iron Cobra Double Bass Drum Pedals with your Pearl bass drum.

2. Get a Tama Iron Cobra Double Bass Drum Pedal. They're sweet.

3. Make sure your legs are directly aligned with your foot pedals, so that your foot and leg bones are along the same axis. Don't sit bowlegged. If you do, you spend too much energy and time moving your thoughts down from your brain to your foot, navigating the twists of your body, and thus lose on not just speed and power, but finesse as well. This means you also are going to want to angle your hi-hat/double-bass pedals out from the bass drum slightly. Don't make your pedals parallel. Accommodate the natural triangle of your legs positions comfortably at rest and place your pedal(s) where your other foot happens to be. Speed, power, and finesse are just as important for your hi-hat foot as for your bass drum foot.

4. Keep the floor tom positioned low and flat. If you angle it, you lose the force from your stroke, and bounce strokes become almost impossible to keep up. The mounted toms, it's alright to angle, since you will be playing them at an angle, (unless you're really tall) but try to keep them as close to the angles of your sticks as you can.

5. Don't mount anything on top of your hi-hat, like cowbells or tambourines. The extra wight throws off the clasping mechanism, and whatever novel little sound you get out of it isn't worth the loss of finesse on what is probably your most-used instrument. Doohickeys, if desired, can be mounted from clasping mechanisms attached to cymbal stands and other drum hardware, just nothing where pressure and weight are essential to function.

6. If you're short-sighted enough to have become a left-handed player at a right-handed kit, the easiest way to use your ride cymbal is not by placing it behind the floor tom, as right-handers do, but in front of it, so that you can play it cross-armed, the way right-handers play their hi-hat. This is a lot easier than trying to reach diagonally across the floor tom whenever you want to play ride. you don't have to twist your back or extend your arm or anything. Of course, it does make it almost impossible to play the ride with your right hand, so it's harder to do super-fast sixteenth-note patterns on it. There's always learning to drum ambidextrously!

The Magician in the Grove

So, I just signed up onto Scribd, after editing that story I had mentioned writing in the last post. If you feel like reading it, tell me what you think in comments. Thanks!

The Magician in the Grove

Works in Progress, or, In Search of Lost Time

A couple years ago I had an idea for a story, set around Christmastime. I thought the idea was clever, but, for some reason or another, didn't write it. Either it came to me in an off-season, and I just didn't feel like thinking about Christmas, much as nobody likes hearing Christmas songs before, oh, Thanksgiving, or it came to me during Christmastime and I just didn't feel like writing it because I am lazy.

Then, every year around Christmastime I would remember the story again, and think, oh yeah, I should write that. But then Christmas would come and go, and I wouldn't write it, and I would forget about it until next year.

Well, last year, I finally started working on it around Christmastime, with the intention of finishing it, and then coming up with some way to present it to friends and family. Heck, maybe even post it on this blog! I was writing it out, and liking it, nailing a lot of the little elements that had come to me over seasons past.

Then I came what might have been, might be, the climax, and I got stuck. I had a whole bunch of paths to choose to get to the ending I wanted and wasn't sure which was the right one. So I sat on it, trying to figure that out. Then the Holiday came and went, and I didn't complete the story. It's still sitting, uncompleted, on my hard drive somewhere.

Now, it's late October. The Christmas lights are showing up in the stores. The candy will be here soon too, just as soon as the Halloween merchandise goes clearance. And so this story has reentered my mind, and I realize that I have been "working" on this story for almost a year, that if I finished it this year, it will be over a year in the making, and several years in development.

I have another story, that I celebrated knocking out the rough draft of on this blog, somewhat around the same time. I have never done another draft of it. I have several drafts of the beginning of a novel, maybe thirty pages of one, that I have spent two years working on. At this rate, I will finish it in my fifties. Recently I tried to write some essays recently for this blog, one a piece of criticism, one on politics (maybe philosophy), Just to write something. They are both a couple paragraphs in, saved onto blogger, abandoned after I lost track of where they were going, or didn't feel like spending the time and effort figuring out how to cut the path.

My relationship to writing is like having this large sack of pus growing on the inside of my skull. I go too long without doing it, and it swells up and the pressure on my brain hurts all over. Then I sit down to write, and it's like pounding a nail into my skull. Some of the pus leaks out, and the pain goes away enough to be bearable, and I think "Whew! Well, that's go for now!" And I stop writing and go about my day. But pretty soon the hole heals up, and that bag starts to re-inflate and I start walking around screaming at myself again.

I would like for the bag of pus inside my skull to go away. But the only way for that to happen is if I really commit to writing, and really get some things written, things I feel I have polished enough to show off a bit. And the only way I can do that is if I actually commit myself to writing, all the time, every day, and not just in my head while pacing, but while sitting and typing (or writing longhand in a notebook, either one, I don't mind). And I keep putting off doing that, thinking "Tomorrow!" or telling myself that work has me tired. And time keeps slipping by, and that sac pressing into my brain doesn't just pound harder, it grows, too, creeping slowly around the concavity of my skull.

I grow afraid, as time slips by, that even if I do ever get up off the ground, it will be so late all I manage to do is crash into those trees in the distance.

Whew! I feel better!