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.

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.

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.

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.

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.