Access the Process

A Prologue to Action:

2010-03-27T17:06:00.000-07:00

His mouth hung open. He wanted her!
right then, he wanted her!
And she was not unwilling.

they fell to, on the ground
You've seen a baker rolling dough.
He kneads it gently at first,
then more roughly

He pounds it on the board.
It softly groans under his palms.
Now he spreads it out
and rolls it flat.

then he bunches it,
and rolls it all the way out again,
Thin. Now he adds water,
And mixes it well.

Now salt,
And a little more salt.

Now he shapes it delicately
to its final shape
and slides it into the oven,
which is already hot.

You remember breadmaking!
this is how your desire
tangles with a desired one.

And it's not just a metaphor
For a man and a woman making love.

Warriors in battle do this too.
A great mutual embrace is always happening
between the eternal and what dies,
between essence and accident.
-Rumi, Mathnawi

I missed her skin. Then. I wanted the molecules of her dermis to remain behind. The quiet residue of her existence that would mix with mine intermittently in the dustclouds of our small apartment. I missed that. When she left. I missed the thin hint of tine in her voice. The way that voice could cut through a crowded bar full of drunkenness like a razor. The way that thin hint of tin went all nassally when she'd call my name. At first.

Every thing changes. And everything we think and hope beyond all clear thoughts and true hope will stay still for ever in the magic of some moment or clarity or beauty or razor-like intenseness of reality, it will change regardless. Stillness is ephemeral. change is all that ther is. Everything else is pure illusion. Just a conjurer's slight of hand, making us feel secure in our own selves, in our own time. Yet still that security slips through the fingers like the grains of sand through an hourglass. Trickling slowly through the tightest grip. The tighter the grip the faster it slips. I'd say. The trick becomes more clear as more sand passes through the hourglass. There was never any self. There was only the motion of time.

When she left, I found myself surpringly feelingless. There was just a quietness and an emptiness. No tears or high emotion. Just a small apartment that suddenly and irreparably felt big. I guess that's why she left. I guess I know that's why.

I've always been curiously fascinated by the idea of interior lives. Whenever I read history or meet people, I'm always wondering what's going on inside. What in the world is their inner world like? Is it in any way similar to mine? Sure we can line up our thoughts, sor of. We can speak them out loud; but feelings are different. Emotions are like colors. Except with colors there's a thing out there that we can all point to to agress on what's /the/ what. I mean, I can say I feel sad, but what does that really mean? And how do you know that what you feel when someone dies or someone leaves is in any way similar to what it is I feel?

You don't. Not really. Sure we can talk it out. We can describe the minutia of the feelings. The nuances of that psycho-psyio response. If so inclined. If so inclined, we can delve into the literature and language of neuro or cognitive science and find the neural or psycho-neural correlates of the emotions, but what does that really tell us? It's just a color we can point to and say there, that's blue. You see it. I see it. None of thatmeans we see the same thing. It only means we're pointing at the same thing.

Which may be why I find subjectivity so curiously fascinating. And beyond that, this notion of the sociologists that our interior lives are, in a certain way, re-representations of our exterior, liminal, interactions. Intersubjectivity. And if you think about it, it certainly complicates things. For example, when you think to yourself thoughts about what you should or do feel, it can change the feeling. What was previously part of some undifferentiated, blog-like mass of feeling becomes sadness or meancholy or ebullience or sated happiness or what have you. And these thoughts form in the ways they do because of the previous conversations we've had or television programs we've watched. So, my unique color of emotion is the reslut of the way John Hughes used to write about life and love and high school.

I still find that hard to swallow sometimes. Regardless, still, I remain forever curious. I want to know what's going on inside of hter people's heads. What they think and feel in their most private moments. In the quiet times. When they/ we're all alone. Why they then decide to do the things they do. Make the choices they make. I mean, we see the choices in the actions or the words, but how they got there; what causes world historical decisions. Or delusions. It's gotta be the quiet, offstage moments. Those have to take primacy. And we can only know that through hearsay and logico-philosophical speculation.

Maybe I just lost my salt. Maybe that's what happened. that's what she said, in her way. That I wasn't there. That there was nothing going on inside anymore. That I waslost to the world outside, and was losing my interior world as a direct result. That was basically what she said. And there was truth there. She wasn't wrong. Witness, my reaction to her deparutre. Nothing. Nada, zip, zilch, zero.

that's not to say that my interior life was evaporation, evaporating. Well, in a sense it was, but it was for good cause. I'd become obsessively focused on the interior lives of my characters. I'd become so immersed in their lives that my ownlife had slowly then rapidly become inconsequential. And that was what became, had become of, my interior life. The immersion in their lives was my life. Became my life. And so I guess it's not wrong or unfair to say that I'd lost my interior life. Just not really the truth. I hadn't lost it. I'd just subsumed it in the lives of the others, in the other. In the lives of the characters. Hell, they were more important than I could ever hope to be.

When I'm having trouble writing

2009-08-30T13:48:00.001-07:00

Lately, I've been expending generous helpings of time on long winded blog posts as a means towards one part of an effort to gather up some ideas on the idea of the mythic, among other things. Econ has gotten some time as well as behavioral econ, political economy, pol-econ history just now (Amity Schlaes' The forgotten Man, which is this seductive siren song of American prosperity. Yakuza!), and just in general books and ideas related to the questions of superstructural economic organization, which really can't be sensibly extricated from the superstructural problems of national political organization. I'm just saying. Can't be done. Not meaningfully. When the fields are split (and this applies more widely to all methodological narrowing known generally as disciplination and specialization), the assumptive choices that could've been answered through a wider scope of knowledge and methodology then become more problematic because, well, quite frankly, you could and probably will guess wrong.

Just quickly on economics cause it's in my head right at this moment. They do guess wrong. I've been looking at some basic economic formulas, and the pscyho-socio-political information that is ignored or assumed to be X is so far quite generally missing the mark. The formulas are not wrong, they are just at best one small equative estimation of human existence and interaction. I won't say more as I've only taken brief and small glimpses at the math in the field.

So, I've been doing a lot of studying and organizing ideas and some small, wandering blog writings. And I have done some editing of the novel(50 or so pages [of which probably 65% of the original drafts 50 pges were totally rewritten {i.e. cut and then started from scratch} and the other 35% has been partially rewritten and now feels like needs to be just cut and started from scratch]). And I have done substantial reconceptualization of the plot and characters of the first novel and some of the conceptual and structural work of the second novel. It's just that the structure of the second novel becomes exponentially more complicated than the first (and it's quite possible that if I do really get this stuff to at least fit, that this process will repeat again at the next iteration beginning the next novel and it will be that novel to the second power or the first novel to the third power or something).

So, I've been in a bit of a rut what with not being able to make real progress, because it's now time to, while continuing the structuro-conceptual work, it's time to sit down and write. And I just can't get it right right now. Everytime I sit down, and I have to write some of the material in notebooks and some on the computer so..., I just feel flat. I don't feel like I've got the mojo to start off a novel and get the motor running for a year of in-between all the other obstacles of my life I'm gonna write an, at least, acceptable first draft. A first draft that I can say: "well, this is dog shit, but I think we might be able to use it as fertilizer in the garden of the second draft."

That's what I want. That and a way we can organize society so that everyone can be satisfied with a good chunk of their lives. Really all of their lives. If everybody could be happy with every moment of their lives, that would be...a different world than where we come from.

Anyway, all this is just to say that I'm scattered right now, and I'm trying to organize the pieces in a way that makes sense both for the moment and for the future. And that's really hard to do sometimes. Really hard.

Trying to think things through on a Subway Platform Pt. II (for real)

2009-08-03T09:34:00.000-07:00

Now that it's been almost two weeks since the subway platform incident, I'm going to try and generally recreate some sort of vague impression of the gist of what it was I was then thinking. Since that time, the work on the trilogic myth project (which I've just now decided maybe call it for the moment) has expanded exponentially. The world in which this story takes place is really starting to open up and build momentum in ways that it hadn't since the idea first started to take shape last summer. I think that's one of the difficulties in working in the longer form of a trilogy of novels vs. one novel or one screenplay, play, or short story. Even an individual novel is, as Murakami says, a marathon, but a trilogy all planned and executed together as one tightly interwoven structure is like an ultra-marathon (which is an actual thing and involves running 100 miles in one day [Murakami documents his own running of a UM in his semi-memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running]). And that day, going to see The Hurt Locker, was the day that the second phase or plateau of the project was reached, and this whole new vista opened up and allowed me to really begin the structural and conceptual plot and character work that was necessary to both really dig into a rewrite of the first novel and also lay the groundwork for beginning to write the first draft of the second novel, which will hopefully get underway this week. (There is a somewhat massive conceptuo-structural puzzle piece that has to be fully and deeply outlined before actual writing can begin on the second novel.)

So, once the film, The Hurt locker, wound up and the credits started rolling (leaving me a little shell shocked in intensity), I made my way out into the afternoon heat and high overhead sun. Going from the dark cold of a movie theater to the almost diametric opposite of a normal summer day is always a little jarring, but the nature of this film, this no bullshit verite of war, made the experience just that much more of a shock to the system. Apparently, that was just what I needed because although I went down the escalators and out and across to the common on autopilot, not really thinking about anything, within minutes of having started the walk to the Park St. T stop, I was instantly accosted by the inspiration of what was essentially a completely new ending for the work.

I've been struggling a little bit with how to approach the idea of talking about the work. I want to kind of stick to just a meta-discussion of the process, but it's also really tough, as talking about the process without talking about the content is like trying to wrestle a greased pig; Every time you get a grip on what you're trying to get across, the idea goes squirting out of your hands as you contort yrself around the actual specifics of the story. And, I think, the story works as a sort of mystery, and that it might ruin the effect just a bit to reveal all the details in advance.

Not that that's such a huge deal currently, as the possibility of even trying to get this thing published is light years away (at least probably two or three), and nobody reads this blog anyway. Still, I would hate to have to retrospectively have to scrub this site of spoilers for some future contract obligation or give away all the intrigue to some potential reader who happened to stumble over here by googling subway platform anxiety or something. Well, whatever. So, that kind of makes this conversation more stilted than I would like, but let's just say that there as I was walking through mid-afternoon crowds of tourists, students, business people, homeless people, all kinds of people this rush of inspiration came on that opened up the aforementioned new vistas, and I could see this whole amazing world and was then trying to maintain the level of concentration necessary to follow the thread of the story through this world as I made my way to the subway.

The first thought I had was that I can't get on the T right now. I need to just wander the city, preferably some part where the streets are deserted, but, of course, there's almost nowhere in the area around the Boston Common that would be quiet and empty of people on a Thursday afternoon; So I decided to just push on through and hope to at least hold onto the thread until I could get home and have the peace and quiet really necessary to the kinds of hyper-concentration that it takes for that kind of work, for me at least. Somehow I not only managed to keep the thread but really followed it to a somewhat satisfyingly robust conclusion, in terms of fully understanding the implications of this new shift which was itself a complete reimagining of how the trilogy would end. The old, vaguely outlined ending was essentially scrapped, and a whole new and way cooler ending were, for the most part, outlined right there on the T as it shimmied it's way down to Dorchester, and all I had to do when I got home was just write out in as detailed a manor as I could muster this newly outlined shift. Which was not just in plot but also in theme and sort of also in structure. And these shifts, as I said, have really reinvigorated the process and brought me back into that state of excited anxiousness to keep going that is a necessary component of staying with the grueling training and execution that is an ultra-marathon writing project.

part II (sort of)

2009-07-26T17:26:00.001-07:00

So, this isn't really part two, in that I am not going to being relating the thoughts and experience I had after seeing the Hurtlocker. But I did want to talk about some few ideas I had while I was riding the T over to Cambridge to meet my mum and see Aurelia's Oratorio (unfrickin' believable). My subway book is a slender volume by Roland Barthes called Mythologies. It's a collection of essays about aspects of what Barthes seems to feel are the modern day myths, which are the banalities of modern lifestyle lies (kind of a thing).

I had this idea that this is true. That mythology has been reduced to empty signifiers, and that the secularity of society has drained the mundane of the potential for the type of insight that can flash from the spiritual experience. And the repetitiveness and universalness of mythic structures (the origin of genre?) are this way to inspire a reminder in the imbiber of said myth that they are on the hero's journey already in their own life.

There's this connection between individuality, spirituality, and both the loss of individuality and the insistence on the primacy of the individual that comes out of techno-modernity. And I really had that hook while I was riding the train, but I didn't have anything to write with. Now I'm trying to recreate the sequence of thoughts, and I'm struggling a bit.

Yeah, I'm having trouble reconstructing. Let me just quote a passage of James Altas's Bellow, in which he pontificates on SB and then quotes him at length:

But there was nothing abstract about Bellow's theme: The cataclysmic events of the century- the two world wars, the Holocaust, the rise of mass society- had made art superfluous. The modern world had conspired to drown out the novelist's- his- distinctive voice: (now quoting from Bellow's letters)

The enormous increases in population seem to have dwarfed the individual. So have modern physics and astronomy. But we may be somewhere between a false greatness and a false insignificance. At least we can stop misrepresenting ourselves to ourselves and realize that the only thing we can be in this world is human. We are temporarily miracle-sodden and feeling faint.

Now I do feel that Atlas is a little rough with his subject, but regardless, the idea here that our individuality is getting lost. Individuality that is quite possibly the experience of a fully conscious self (which I consider to be the spiritual experience, but we can quibble over terminology if it's totally necessary), and this experience is attenuated and frustrated by the modern secular economic society; a society that places its highest values on materiality, which the ethnographic record tells us is the antithesis of the valuations of the saints and mystics of the world.

William James is right when he says that the saintly disposition of early christian saints to remove themselves from the world is not bad but not particularly helpful either. The problem of staying a saint while surrounded by the sins of material secularity pose a greater challenge than the pure asceticality of a monastic cell. And those saints are needed to help steer this spaceship Earth away from the abyss of foolish, infantile destruction that we are currently flying right for, at no less than full throttle.

So, what we need are saints who can live in and effect change in the way we all live in this wild, wild life we call the global society of planet Earth. We need exemplars of the saintly life who can teach how to live within the insanity of modernity and maybe help deflect the collective consciousness in a direction that's a little more sane and really rational. And saints are inspired by the symbols that deeply unlock that spirit of self, the great myths, and when those myths (those symbols of authentic artistry) really tap the universal human archetypes, they can inspire the human creature to unseen heights of generosity, compassion, and love. A level of furor only otherwise met through greed, aggressiveness, and rational self-interest.

One of the things that might be useful, that might be valuable in this direction, would be to try to bring to the mundane this spiritual perspective, and by staying present in the banal moments of life, it might be possible to bring to life the majesty of the mundane in words or images or somehow. Okay, yeah, so that was basically the idea I had on the T today. That quote kind of knocked it loose. And trying to concentrate and follow those ideas on a train full of people was no small task, I can tell you.

trying to think things through on a subway platform (pt. 1)

2009-07-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

So, I was sort of taking S. Bellow's advice last Thursday. In James Altas's biography he quotes a letter of Bellow's where Saul writes that in order to overcome writer's block he says he goes to the movies every day for a week. Which I really love. Course, I don't have the time or the inclination (in terms of available movies) to go to the movies every day for a week, but I figured it would be good to get out of the house and my own head and try and get over a sort of obstacle that I've found in the way.

That obstacle being, of course, trying to edit a piece of work that's overly sentimental, and, as it turns out, is substantially too 'small world', uninteresting in it's current form. I don't say that just to be self-deprecating. When I wrote the first draft, as a first full draft of a novel ever completed by me, I suffered from a usual symptom of first novelitis in that I kept the world of the novel too small. Now, the fact that there is too be a series of three novels (and potentially more, as there are concurrent storylines for both the male and female protagonist, but we stay with the male as narrator, etc.) makes the need for a larger world just that much exponentially bigger. It does seem that you need to expand exponentially in order to fulfill the requirements of a longer work.

So, I've been doing little bits of actual editing. Both going through the work on the computer and doing a full dress edit, as well as working through a printout copy and doing a sort of minor tweak edit. And, as well, I've been doing substantial conceptual, world creation, work in terms of making the characters more interesting, breathing more life and detail into their half-empty forms, and expanding and coloring in their world.

But I'd been sorta' stuck a little bit recently. I was having trouble fully gearing up and getting into the fight because I was realizing just how much was going to have to be rewritten (most of the material [very little of the original 1st draft is going to be alive past draft two or beyond). It's a daunting task, especially as I'm also trying to gear up to start the 1st draft of the second novel and can't wait much longer.

So, as I said, I decided to take Bellow's advice and go to the movies. The two choices that I somewhat fumbled between were Woody Allen's Whatever Works and Kathyrn Bigelow's The Hurtlocker. Ultimately, the fact that the hurtlocker was playing at the cinema right in the area where I've set some of the novel (the place where the protagonist works is a fictional bookstore close to the Loews Boston Common) decided for me. And what a decision.

Clearly, the intensity of this movie had something to do with the explosion of ideation that occured after. Although, as I was walking from the Park St. T I did have a few interesting ideas about personality and how the main character's personality is dis-integrating (as in breaking apart and not entirely of his own control) for various reasons and also the idea that it would be both fun and unusual to try to warp yr own personality to make yrself the antagonist. In something. It being that a little dash of anti-hero might be useful for the complexity of our protagonist, Thomas. And that that anti-hero element comes out as a result of this dis-integrating personality.

So, I was having a few thoughts as I went into the plush theaters three stories up at the Loews by the Boston Common. And then The Hurtlocker got underway. Holy effin' shiite. That movie is an intensity of tautness and tight wrapped, adrenaline filled life of a solder grit and realness that hasn't been seen very often committed to film. The movie doesn't preach or moralize about the characters or who's right or whether the war's right, it stays with the individuals and examines what it means for these three people (mostly) to be experiencing this war now.

And partly the experience is traumatic for the audience because the realness of the violence is so close and not outlandishly cartoonish. So, there's this distance that you might naturally feel to your own emotions as numbness is a common response to trauma, so there was this numbness for me, but a numbness that was hiding that deeper well of (potentially) hysterical emotions of trauma. Which started to come out as the movie went along, and I became more invested with the characters. By the end, I was feeling it all deeply, all scrunched around in my big, comfy movie sofa chair with my feet up on the back of the empty chair in front of me.

So, part two will be the ideas that organically sprang from the this experience as I made my way through the Boston streets and subways to my house. The power of the ideation that grew out of the experience was such that I was having trouble navigating public spaces but was afraid to let them fully out of my range of concentration lest I lose the jist. It was really tough.

And a side note: Is it true that no woman has ever won the best director Oscar? If so, I think we've got a viable candidate (as this is one of the best movies I've seen in years and certainly one of the best war movies ever committed to film). There's been a slight shift in the masculine nature of film direction, but let's push that even farther and break that barrior. Anyway...

Play it as it lies

2009-06-15T21:46:00.000-07:00

Several years ago I read a book of William Goldman's recollections about his many years as a novelist and screenwriter. He said he always had to write his first draft in one great rush because if he read anything as he went he would have to give it all up and start over or words to that effect.

I'm beginning to understand a little about what he was getting at. Also there was a saying that he emphasized but that came from older writing lore; it was something like you have to be willing to kill your darlings to be a good writer. Again, I'm paraphrasing miserably here.

The real weight of what it is that I'm trying to do in writing this thing, this novel or collection of novels (whatever it is that it turns out to be), this weight begins to reveal itself. But it's the weight of life and truth. It's not some added weight or affectation. It's just the true dimensions of life. The really felt consequences.

Or at least that's the general idea. Who knows right? What is it that any of us do? What is the real, earnest meaning of our thoughts, our words, our actions? I don't suppose that I know.

Really, it's that kind of abstract, somewhat mindless sentimentality that I'm struggling to winnow and focus. Mostly I'm realizing just how much of what I've written has to be rewritten. Editing is a daunting task, and I really failed to budget sufficient time for the process. Time management becomes such a crucial task as the freneticism of multi-tasked realities burrows its way deep into the soul.

So, I'm rearranging the schedule. It's seems that I am perpetually rearranging the schedule. But I'll leave off on that. I am trying to get back going for the second round, but there is so much conceptual work that needs to be done. Why I didn't either realize how much time needs to be spent on that (on research and on plotting and on character building), I don't rightly know. My timetables tend to be wildly optimistic. They assume a level of discipline that I have yet to show myself capable of. I suppose I have more confidence in myself than the evidence would seem to warrant. And whatnot.

Making corrections in the editing room

2009-05-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

So, now that I've nominally finished a first draft of the first act, I can for a brief minute see clearly how really bad the writing is. There are moments. Don't get me wrong. There are splashes of useful writing, but most of it has to be junked. Especially towards the end.
I was so caught up in trying to finish. In dashing for the finish line, I wasn't truly doing my best work or setting myself up to do my best work. It's frustrating how easy it is for the work to take over in importance from other things, and then when I'm not working, well, then all things go wrong.
But the first draft is done, and in my head now, based on the size and the projected edited size (which is 25-50 thousand words longer) of the first act, I'm thinking it'll have to be a trilogy. Three novels in three acts. 350-450 thousand words is waayy too long for one novel. They would have to be highly sequalated though. There's no way to make then totally resolved until after the third act. So the first two acts would be somewhat unresolved novels, which we know from experience is difficult for people looking for escapism.

But a competing desire is novelty. People want things that seem or are new as much as they want strong narratives, righteous heroes, or the escape. So, the slight alterations of the forms that I have in my head could be successful. Cross-platformality seems to be one of the paramount financial success factors, diversity in cultural dissemenation. A more democratic, more decentralized cultural creationary process is what I would like to see. Which we do see to a degree on the Net.

I won't get all up into all the crazy designs I have in my head about new ways to develop alternate perspectives on the same piece of art through alternate media, different forms. I'll just say that there are big ideas stewing. It's all just card castles and sand dreams, anyway. Big ideas blow around in the breeze. Sometimes they blow away.

The process

2009-05-09T23:06:00.001-07:00

All writers have their own process. All writers must find out for themselves what works for them. And what doesn't. They must wander in the wilderness (or maybe that was just my requirement) for all of eternity trying to make sense out of senseless worlds in a work of fiction that both makes sense but also shows how that sense is in direct conflict with prevailing culture mores or how it gives us a deeper sense of what the unburied, unbridled, unconstructed, and dismanipulatedness of the clear-viewed pure culture has, is, and will always be, remaining untroubled by the human manifestations of the sharply narrow views of that all encompassing, all embracing cultura. Just a reworking and remolding of the nature of humanity through the conscious attempts towards exploitation, vapid escape, and a decidedly narrowing process of human awareness.

So, the truth is that culture, can be glimpsed by art, music, film, TV, but that glimpse is just the atomic smash of denting, destroying, Thatonotic, twisting. [to be con'td at: A Hyperanaphlaxis Univeral Mean]

My process is one of facetly layered levels of interconnectedness with the true autobiographical elements of my life, but filtered through a philosophic imagination. That's kind of how this whole novel project came about. I was finishing up a pretty quick, 40ies style inde flick, and the end of the screenplay there's a character trying to write a novel.
And so it occured to me as I was writing some of the last narrative overlay from the actual film, it occurred to me that I should write a novel about a character who wants to write screenplays.
Early on the idea that he would enter into the scenes he'd written, and that that would play havoc on his life, as he was becoming a character in a film, the script of which he was writing himself.

Well, that's quite a condensation of the first act, but true. let's just say this before I get my podcasts up. I promise some top shelf podcasts of the story, probably through podiobooks.com.
And maybe my insights, possibly vid/blog of my ideas. I actually have a half hour breakdown of an early screenplay I wrote. I need to review that shiite and get it going.

How strange is the creative process?

2009-04-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

I remember reading an interview with Haruki Marukami somewhere, and the jist of it was that he didn't really consciously develop the symbolism that shows up in his novels. It just kind of happens. Actually, I'm probably totalling reimagining all that from my own jangled brain, but the point I'm trying to get at here is that for all the planning and coordinating and structuring you do, when you actually sit down at the writing table, things can take completely unexpected turns that seem to come from nowhere.
I'm at this juncture in the work where it's essentially a transition, and I was really trying to get from point Q where we were to point R, which should have been a fairly simple move. And yet suddenly our protagonist has lost the ability to use his legs for no apparent reason, and I couldn't for the life of me tell you why that happened or where that came from or what it might symbolize or any of that shiite. I really don't know. It's just that wierd magic that happens when the blank page is in front of you, and you try to cross the jungle. It's a mysterious thing this creative process. Very strange indeed.

re-triangulation

2009-04-27T03:21:00.000-07:00

So, the truth is it's gonna be awhile before I get the vidblog stuff in full effect. The main problem is one of verbosity. I can't get 'em down below fifteen minutes, and that's working real hard at it. So, the vidblog stuff is still in development, but that don't mean I gotta maintain radio silence on the work.
I've been blocked, distracted, and generally incapable of sitting down to the writing table with even the most minute amount of confidence that I have any skill at writing whatsoever. So things have gone in fits and starts. I've been on the verge of finishing the first act for what seems like months now, and it's been killing me.
The problem really was that I got myself caught up in writing a film at the end of the first act. The idea was that our hero, Thomas, goes to a double feature, the first being Charles Vidor's Gilda. I had a great if very meticulously tedious time of retelling the film, for whatever reason.
Then came the second feature, which was entirely made up. From soup to nuts. I concieved a whole film noir set in Memphis in the 40ies, and practically wrote the whole dang thing. Of course, it wasn't formatted like a screenplay, it was all written like a story within the story of the film Thomas goes to see, and yet it was still more complicated than that. Thomas enters into the film. He becomes the camera. He becomes the liminal medium between the interior world of the film and the external world where an audience is watching this film.
At times Thomas was in both places, other times neither. All very wierd, but I made the push with a fourteen hour writing session, and I finished off the film in a very satisfying way. Now I'm down to the last chapter of the first act. Sort of.
There's actually a new aspect to the first act, which was there from the beginning (I just wanted to write that stuff after I'd finished the meat of the act), which requires me to go through the city of Boston and thru a kind of poetic, surrealistic, impressionistic writing follow Thomas as he goes from seeing Derrick Morgan at the Middle East Downstairs all the way into the first scene of the screenplay he's just written the first scene for.
Crazy, crazy. Should be fun.

All access pass

2009-02-07T14:25:00.001-08:00

So, I said in that last post (which at some point will appear behind the post of a vidblog because I'm gonna post that in a draft I've already started from a few weeks ago) that I wanted to really open up and document the process of writing this novel, Mythic Structures. And I'm within striking distance of the end of the first act, of which they'll be three. As you can see by the giant time jump between now and the last post (or the post before the last post depending on when yr reading this), I have been remiss in my intentions to document the creative process here on my blog or really anywhere else.
I have started twittering, god help me, and I can see how addictive it can be. I do want to do instant miniture flashes of the process as it's happening, which you really can't do here. Here you have to actively stop work on the novel and then write a blogpost about what you remember or recognize from what you've just done (write, concieve, edit, reconcieve, or my fav. storytelling [which is the absolute essence of art, even the plastic ones]). So they are two different processes, and it'll be interesting to watch and compare the process of documenting the process of writing through these various forms. So, just for the sake of shiites and giggles, here's my twitter link.
How did I get here? I keep asking myself that question, and my mind just goes blank, emptying out of anything resembling useful information in regards to this so basic of questions. I have no freaking clue.
Anyway, I've also started to explore other multi-media stuff. I got a vidcam for Christmas, and I've done several vidblogs and a reading of a chapter of the novel and general miscellaneous, nonsensical ramblings. I just gotta get my vimeo shasta in effect. I think I need to go ahead and pay the sixty bucks, because I gave up on the last video I tried to upload. It wasn't that big. Like two hundred megs, and I was getting nothing. Maybe I'm just way too impatient. That's probably it, but I'll join anyway cause I dig their scene. And I can see myself going way over the free upload limits. I've got a bunch of stuff to post there and here and over at AHUAM and even maybe some stuff for The Dancing Fool, which we'll have to see about.
Over there at The Fool I'm going to be documenting the process by which I lose the extra twenty or so pounds I've put on since last Oct, and get my dancing chops back into tight formation. So far it's a little sad and very embarrassing. I think I may have to post accompanying embedded audio commentaries where I shred on myself ruthlessly because that's the only way I'd feel good about putting that stuff out there. Now once I get back to my dancing weight, get my flexibility back, my stamina, and my cardiovascular strength...Yo, if I can get back into that effect, well, I think you'll be impressed. I do have the skills, even as they're as rusty as an old metal fencepost right now.
Okay, let's see, other stuff I wanted to say. Oh, I just got an upgrade for my digital voice recorder, and so once I rerecord my readings of the novel chapters, I'll post them. Basically have a podcast of the chapters of the first act of Mythic structures. I also want to start recording brainstorming and conceptual workouts for the novel (it is all and everything about the novel right now, as you'll see) and then posting that stuff.
Basically, my plan is to obsessively document as much of the process as possible from as many different media angles as I can, and then after it's all done, well, I can see just what a complete and utter waste of time the whole thing had been, and I can relive in the most minutest detail all of the blood, sweat, and toil that went into a novel that probably has very little chance of getting published because of the wierdness factor, the complicatedness factor, and the ultimately unresolvedness of a good bit of the stuff factor. Sorry to be vague there about stuff, but I'd hate to give away too much, too soon.
So, lots of multi-media stuff coming. And, well, I'll just call it for now.

the current project

2008-08-23T14:35:00.001-07:00

Many of the projects I set for myself this summer were themselves requiring of individual attention, and of course I had planned to work on all of them at the same time. As things would have it, I just finished the one screenplay, and that took most of my time. In the procrastinations between work on Eddie the Grouch, I did however begin to develop a novel idea.

It started as an extension of the work on the memoir, which had become big and complicated enough for me to have to actively stop work on it so that it didn't take over from finishing the screenplay. It really became one or the other, and I went for the quick and dirty over the long and drawn out. I then thought about trying a more straight forward autobio fiction, reimagining my time at Spottswood Square in Memphis, TN. Briefly I was distracted by the idea of writing a collection of short stories based on characters professions starting with a minor league baseball Umpire and working from there.

Again, I had to shelve this idea if I was to have any hope of finishing the screenplay, which became wierder and more complex as I went along. In the final breaths of the script, it hit me like a ton of bricks as I wrote a section of the novel Eddie is writing. I wanted to write a novel about a writer trying to write a screenplay. It was perfectly synched with the Eddie script, as it was a screenplay about a character trying to write a novel. They would complement each other in a lovely way. Of course I knew in the back of my head that this was a much bigger undertaking. A novel is no small thing, and I've yet to complete one, although I've got a couple of novella length things that are incomplete. I do know that it's not as easy as writing a screenplay. Not necessarily easier but exercising different writing muscles, and as Murakami says novels are a grind.

Still, I was committed to it being my next project for the next year or so. I still have 9 undergrad classes to finish, which take only time not effort. So, it's all just a question of time management. Still I did want to get started before school, but I was having trouble. The idea had to be filled in more before I would be ready to write. I had to do much, much more conceptual work, which I have been doing over the past several weeks, really for longer but just intermitently. I go wander around Boston trying to find inspiration in the architecture, which I have. It's freeing to be out walking, surrounded by people and business and life.

I began to see how I wanted to weave the real beauty of my city in with the fantasy of my story. I began to stake out real places to have in the story, and transplanted my Memphis story to where I actually live. It's been an amazing process, and I do want to document it all which, of course, won't happen. I'm already skipping a whole lot, but let me say this. I do hope to write this project openly here at this website. I want blogging here to be a document of the process of writing this particular novel. Hopefully as a way to maintain focus on this particular novel, as my mind has a tendency to wander. I try to keep focused.

The ultimate inevitability

2008-08-09T19:02:00.001-07:00

It was an undoubted inevitability that blogging would become a responsibility and lose the sheen of offhandedness. The approach was all wrong from the beginning. While I had, in my head, been true to the notion that blogging was just a form of digital journaling that happened to be accessible by a wider audience, in the end it was that wider audience that I sought; not surprisingly unsuccessfully. I've always craved a wider audience, even as I refuse to do anything in the way of compromise on the 'integrity of my artistic vision' to satisfy anyone outside of my own head; read: I can be a real asshole when it comes to blowing smoke.
The problem was bound to come to a head as work, school, more structured creative projects, etc. began to interfere with an increasingly wide range of blog forms and the mania of inspired first moments waned. There was no possible way to maintain that kind of fiery pace indefinitely. It had to burn out. In the end, I was lucky that the landing was as smooth as it was, and I'm able to come back to this at all instead of a total abandonment of the persona, the Brown Dog Affair. So, I'm trying to reground this project in it's original intentions; return to form, as it were...just tighten up a little bit.

Drawing a straight line

2008-04-19T10:51:00.001-07:00

Alright, so as of that last drunken post, it's clear that I'm running in circles a little bit, and I've got get my head right. Coincidentally or perhaps omenly, my crappy old computer has finally had a major hardware malfunction. So, it occurred to me that some non-wired time might be just what the doctor ordered. Take a month or so to clear the old head and get out in the sunshine. Try to get a grip on directions and steps towards goals and all that kind of nonsense. It's good to unplug once and a while.

the update

2008-04-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

I've got fragments of success with the once again probably too many irons in the fire process, so I thought I'd do a quick rundown of what's the what.
To start I've just finished the first act of Eddie the Grouch, which actually went fairly well. There was a roundabout comparision of Hemingway and Chechkov, and it ran fairly deep while still remaining conversational. Eddie blows up at Harold, the director of Lilly's play The Seagull, over his lack of appreciation of Hemingway. Well, actually we need to build the psychology of that a little more. Somehow maybe the Harold/Lilly, director/actor, relationship should be made more explicit. Maybe she is not necessarily awed of him but respects him, and Eddie of course feels she just pities him. The blow-up, as did Sal's in The Coffee Shoppe, feels forced and just a way to have something happen, which in a sense they both are. So little action occurs in either of these scripts, but...
I reactivated Darwin's Child last night with great success. I brought in a quick car chase in which the French Canadian Woman, who is completely unaware of the shadow conspiracy, then has to evade a bunch of goons in black audi's while pissed as hell at the American Man for getting her into this shit. It's a good scene, and I brought forward all of the characters that were introduced in the last act of the first draft of the script. I'm not sure if I now want to have two twin pregnant women because of the babysitter twins from Planet Terror or not, but it's a cool idea, so...I've written a fairly good little expository section before their safehouse is attacked and we get the first taste of the AM's genetically superior strength and agility. I can't decide if their should be another quick car chase before they make it to the cargo ship headed for Japan.
I've got some good ideas for FCW too. I've said here that I really want to make her a mythic character, well all of them, but especially her. Over the course of the three films she ultimately comes forward and takes the leading role in not saving the world from the apocalypse but helping to give (I want to say the forces of good here, but that's way too manichean) the survivors a chance to start over.
I could spend all day running out the storylines on some of this stuff sometimes, but given that I'm feeling the writing bug, I should continue to push on those two just now.

There is just one other little thing, and I'm just gonna start it here and get more on it in el futura. I've been thinking about the Masters program I want to get into, which is an interdisciplinary program called Critical and Creative thinking. It has the unique feature that they have a design yr own degree option, which...well, to be fair that can be a dangerous concept for me because when I did that in undergrad the project got so far out of hand that there was no way the whole thing wouldn't blow up in my face, which it did as in enough credits to graduate with a triple major but no degree because yr senior project was a fricking PHD dissertation. Every advisor I ever had as well as almost everyone I even knew casually told me I was nuts, and as it turns out they were all right, but I've gotten away from myself here.
Here's where I'm trying to get. I'd been offhandedly putting together a program in my head. The triangle I was originally looking at was art, spirituality, and mental health and illness. These were essentially the corners of my undergrad project. Hold on, just to prove my insanity sometimes and then I'm gonna break off this rambling nonsense for another post, I'm gonna post what was tentative title of my undergraduate senior project. Your gonna laugh.

A neuropsychohistoricosocio-cultural and philosophical look at the relevance of spirituality and art in efficient human cognition and it's relation to the extremes of neurochemical variability

and I wasn't being ironic at all.

some brief nostalgic elongations

2008-03-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

I wrote a one man, one act play when I was 19 about a man named Harold, who over the course of the act we find is quite mad. He's a frustrated writer, and in his spiral into the hells of writer's block actually goes on a shooting spree to give the serial killer he's writing about more versimilitude. At the end of the act, we discover that he's in an insane asylum of the old school nature, and he then hangs himself with the strap of the...shasta, I'm blanking on the name...that thing that Houdini used to escape from, with straps tied around you so yr hands are all caught behind yr back. (edited to say: straight jacket)
Anyway, in the drunken haze that was my early twenties, somehow this little gem turned into the kernel of the idea for what I then called The Conversation's Trilogy. The idea's been expanded now into a sextology or possibly a septology, but that's a whole other story. In it's original first reformulation as The ConversTril, Harold witnesses his good friend, the Ned Beatty character, slay another friend of theirs and his own wife as they were en fragante delicto. Harold gets all histerically blind, but in the magical realist vein, he gains the eyesight of our hero, J, and he writes a novel from the bowels of a nuthouse to somehow help J with his own troubles. Harold's story was to be told in a play and J's in a screenplay, and the book was to be actually written. It's to my mind a great novel idea. A kind of admixture of Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard on his good and vibrantly sharp-edged days, and what I have imagined Robert Ludlum to be like from the descriptions my friend Tom used to lay on me.
Again anyway, I had written the first act of the play in one frenzied drunken morning, and was working with my friend, Quintronic, on the screenplay on and off for several months of mostly messing about. Then one day, I just somehow grabbed a book called Mythology by Edith Hamilton to see if there was someway to throw it into the mix. I can't remember why or how it seemed like the thing, but it did. I went down to the Half Shell in Midtown Memphis, and was scanning through the various brief descriptions of the various Greek dieties, when an old man approached me. He gave me a bunch of apples from his farm, and generally talked about how much he missed his wife, who had passed on. It was a strange encounter, but I let him unburden his lonliness as best I could.
In some wierd way that moment unlocked a neural cascade of creativity, and the new story was born. Harold's trials and tribulations were simply a preperation for his being inhabited by the returning Dionysus, who spends half his time in Hades and half on Earth, as he is a shadowed early formation of the Jesus idea, whose worship on Earth gives Dio some still brief time amongst the living. As none of the other Greek Gods are still worshipped, they no longer have the power to exist in this realm, but Hades and all who believed in it still does. Only Dio is connected to this world, and the first act of the play begins at his previous return to Hades and the realization amongst Zeus and other greedy gods that he holds a connective power to the world, and so they trap him and try to draw on it for the lustful expanse that it gives them. Just as he is sacrificed in Hades, he returns to Earth in the form of Harold, and finds that in the preparation process Harold has through his troubles and the eyesight of J written this novel of grim set, hard-boiled, mutated detective fiction. Dio inhabited Harold then escapes the nuthouse to chase down J who is himself about to make the wild mistake of running away from his own problems. All of the three stories end with each character heading to New Orleans.
In the next level reformulation, they all meet there and are confronted with the fact that they are all simply aspects of my own psyche, cognition, volition, and emotion (I was then in the early stages of studying consciousness theory), and they meet a socratic like character who explains how the whole story is simply an attempt to converge psychically on the metaphoric New Orleans, which is intended as the spiritual center of humanity. All heavily wierd stuff, and not a little convoluted now some years past it's sell by date. Still...

thoughts reactivated

2008-03-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

I found a book in the recycle bin outside my apartment building just a few minutes ago, and I'm feeling the synchronicitiousness heavily. The book is called Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, and it's got all kinds of mythical women and their stories and explanations. I'm highly intriqued to say the least, but it also occurred to me that this book may be just what I needed to get the female character of the Darwin Trilogy to a more mythic place, as I was lamenting the need to do just that here on this blog a while back.
It then occurred to me that the whole story itself needed to take on an archetypal significance, as I'm not one to just leave it as simply an action film script. That would not be in keeping with my character. I'm now sure that there are three books specifically that will be required reading and in some cases rereading for a conceptual feasting on myths and archetypes and such. The aforementioned Women Who Run With the Wolves as well as, Gaia and God by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Patterns in Comparative Religion by Mircea Eliade are now going to be the trilogy of touchstones for the project, along with, if at all possible, Joseph Campbell's Mask of God series and maybe some Euripides. Since Euripides and Aeschylus and the other Greek Tragedians are themselves already a heavy influence on a play I've got in mind and made a few tentative stabs at, I won't make them required reading for this project, but I'll try to keep them in the back of my head.
It is not clear to me when I can actually get back to this project, but I'm projecting for maybe taking some time on it this summer. I really want to get Eddie the Grouch done first, and I had wanted to see what I could do with the Celebrity Without a Cause project also, oh and the memoir project. I had also wanted to sit back down with HTML-coding and design stuff this summer so I could snazz up the blogs here a little, but this is all way too much to think about finishing in one summer. I'll give it a crack anyway, and we'll see what shakes out.

Chayefsky, the mad genius

2008-03-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

Paddy Chayefsky, the mad genius of the early days of television, who so wonderfully embodies the values of the Hollywood Renaissance, I just felt I had to say how inspired and inspiring the film Network is; how intense and burrowingly perceptive the whole thing is. I was concerned early on about the portrayal of women, but this transcends gender as does business. It masculinizes everyone involved or scoffs them off to lick their wounds unobtrusively and out of the way. The performances all around are well renowned, but the smaller role of William Holden's wife played by Beatrice Straight is the moment of punctured life in the continued saga of histrionics. It's an important and well-placed moment that gives the film a roundness that I respect greatly. He nails it down with every word, and the actors give breath to those words with astounding dignity. It's just a really good movie, and one that has given me just a moment of inspiration and feeling when I thought films had lost that ability forever. A mild exaggeration, but then I'm prone for such things.
It occurred to me as I was watching the Ecumenical Liberation Army's squabble over distribution costs and anciliary rights or somesuch that there is a powerful tradition of great truth telling in the arts, and one that must be continued and fought for and sought out and delineated. It also occurred to me how much creative will must go into the creation of something like that. I'm struggling to get at my meaning here because as usual I refuse to speak directly. Let me try again. I think that there is so much that is creative and powerful and unique in our artistic history that it's a crying shame that the kinds of remakes we get are things like old sitcoms or cheap cash ins on a once popular or possibly solid artistic product (i.e. Sabrina). It occurs to me that there's this huge wealth of wonderful material that should be drawn from and used as an inspiration point, not just gimickified for a quick dollar bill. Some questions arise: is it art or business that controls the artistic markets, and is there an art to business that isn't a con, especially when it comes down to art? It really feels hollow and plastic when the business end of things gets through with our cultural representations, and it just occurred to me that this is not healthy, is entirely counterproductive, and quite possibly heavily financially restrictive. It's just that artists tend never to take financial considerations into play, and so the business end of things always feels they must find an exploitable element and try to play that up. It's slickness personified: an idea made manifest in our collective consciousness and then realized in individuals who find there ways into positions of control and influence. Perhaps I'm talking beyond my scope and not making much sense, but it just feels like a cheap con sometimes. I just think we can do better.

The Seagull among other things

2008-03-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

I started rereading this Chekhov gem this afternoon, and it was instantly clear that this was the play that I was looking for. I had virtually randomly selected it from plays that I have copies of to be the play that the character Lilly from the screenplay Eddie the Grouch is in, and it fits perfectly. In fact, after their first act falling out over Eddie's birthday outburst, he'll be dragged off to see it by Thera and it will inspire him to try for a more abstract novel project. It's also clear to me that I absolutely need to be more careful about leaving ideas just inside my head. I had laid out the major plotpoints of Eddie's novel and how it changes at the end of the second act, but this morning as I was reading The Seagull and thinking about the script for the first time in weeks, it occurred to me that the remnants of those brainstorm sessions are vague and not as solid as they were when I was working on them. This is not uncommon, it's just tough to always do notetaking, but necessary (as he reminds himself yet again) since we work on more than one project at a time and have work and school as well to contend with. You know these things, so keep to them.
Creatively it's been a languid time. I should be working this week, but I can't muster up much energy for the whole thing. Now that I have the play in place with it's relatively large cast, I have to work out who we meet, who plays who, especially whether Lilly plays Arkidina or Masha or Nina. Now that I think about it there would be no solid choice for a typecast, but certainly she would need quite a bit of range to get from her personality to Arkidina, who is clueless and grandiose. I see them as a group, so cohesive and intense about the theatre, quoting lines from their characters and discussing maybe Konstantin's desire to break with trad. theatre or Trigorin's soliloquey on writing. This will all make Eddie terribly jealous and finally set him off, maybe on David, the director or the actor who plays Trigorin or even Lilly herself. Who knows? Just letting it all hang out a little.
Of Trigorin's monologue, I've got to include this qoute:

"They're deluding me into thinking I'm sane, and I'm really not, and someday they'll creep up behind me and drag me off to the crazy house. And when I was young, and could have been out enjoying myself, writing was sheer hell. A beginning writer, unless he's lucky, feels completely out of place- awkward, useless, nervous. He's obsessed with successful writers and people in the arts, he hangs around them, but nobody notices him. And he's afraid to look anyone in the eyes. He's like a compulsive gambler without any money! I never knwe who my readers were, but I had this vision of them: hostile, unimpressed. I was afraid of the public, terrified of it, and whenever a new play of mine opened, I always thought the people with dark hair hated it and the ones with blond hair were bored by it. It's horrible." From the character Trigorin from The Seagull by Anton Chekhov.

Chekhov is such existential deepness, I can't help but love him. Definitely my kind of playwright, but still humorous at times but such meaningful discussions of life, and so universally and timelessly true. The discussion of fame and celebrity has only become more poignant.

Also just quickly, The Seagull is also going to be used for the introductory scene between Sarah and Belle for the Play section of The Coffee Shoppe, so we'll get maximum umph for our buck out of this material. There's just so much there it's unbelievable, and I like the idea of characters from different projects getting to comment on the same material, maybe we'll get a whole different take from Belle and Sarah than we do from the crowd that's putting the play on or from Eddie who's at first bitter and then inspired by the piece. Okay, that's all.

kizmetic ponderings

2008-03-14T12:48:00.000-07:00

I noticed that there's been some wierd synchronicity in some of my posts here. The week I posted the idea about a film of celebrity fame as a haunting and an overarching destroyer, Heath Ledger overdosed. The day after I posted the novel idea about someone's destructive behavior building and building until it maybe destroyed their lives, it was revealed that Eliot Spitzer had been caught up in a sting operation for hiring prostitutes. If cartoons start coming to life and attacking us, don't say I didn't warn you before hand. It could already be happening, so be aware.

jagged stylechanges are my callingcard

2008-03-12T18:40:00.001-07:00

I've started a new series of blog entries on my myspace blog called 'reminiscences of Memphis', which is a fun way to go through all that stuff and see what shuffles out. The last entry there was a little pedantic, but in truth I...as of this writing now, which is forward from the time when I started this blog entry, I'm past the pedantic blog entry and have redeemed myself minimally, so we'll leave off on that. I have to say it's an enjoyable process, this reminiscing, and I should do it more often. I should also do some work on the autobio project, but not tonight. Hopefully tomorrow.
It's interesting to see the wierd jagged stylechanges that somehow occurred over at the myspace blog. For some reason I like the blog format, even if I really am not into social networking in any form and find the very word myspace annoying beyond belief. I also find the word blog pretty obnoxious, as I've said once or twice, so I guess we must simply suffer gracefully and endure or just suffer dumbly and eat a whole bag of Syder's of Hanover's Honey Mustard Pretzel Pieces. I couldn't say which way you should go, but I know which way I did. I'm not telling though.
I've been reading a lot of very mildly ironic, semi-sardonic, hugely humurous blogs lately, and as mimicry is the thing that I am most talented at, I've been copping there style just a little bit. It's an enjoyable way to write. I just wish I could pretend I thought of it myself. My own style is so dullingly academic it hurts. I should really work on that. Anyway, just trying to get the blogosphere caught up on all the exciting things going on in my head, so I hope yr feeling satisfied blogosphere, you've just wasted another day of my life that I will not get back no matter how much I complain to the manager. I think I'll have some cabbage.

dream processing

2008-03-10T03:37:00.001-07:00

I held it for as long as I could, building it's power and bridging the gap with the vestiges of sleep brought into the strange relief of the conscious field: a kind of tension of magic eye-like vision pattern shifts that allow the explosion of some great view and scene. I barely breathe as I try to hold the idea and it's meanings and explications in my head without losing the sense or the robustness of the idea.
The winds of the Santa Ana, the wierd winds of the Eiger, all of these strange winds that contain maybe positive ions, expand or elaborate (see Eiger Dreams), are capable of bringing to life when combined with the power of the collective consciousness the fantasies of comics and animation/ starting in the 1920's or earlier with the earliest of comics somehow imbued with the collective power of children's imaginings brings whisps of these creatures into a kind of holographic expression in the very places where these winds blow, seen and unbelieved, unacknowledged at first, but then grudgingly acknowledged and reported, building the collective sense of the reality of these visions which then pushes their reality farther, into the forties and fifties as the characters and creatures begin to fill in, they become more than hollow, to become ambulatory, to move farther afield. This gives them greater power and imbues them with more life from the collective consciusness. No one understands how or why our fantasies are being writ large across the sky. As the sixties and seventies dawn these characters both good and evil (in all their as written manichean glory) begin to take on wild and highly effecting life, begin to battle, to take out whole towns and cities, to be saved by Mighty Mouse, or destroyed by Bluto. Perhaps their manicheanistic tendencies get blurred, good becomes bad becomes good, characters shift and fight with each other and themselves: all kinds of maddening possibilities.
Somehow wild hard-boiled scientists of the modern times manage to isolate and interpret the data of the process and begin to understand what it is that's happening (clearly referencing Ghostbusters in their explanations to unbelieving politicians or military men [explore more non-cliched possibilities {possibly somehow The Rolling Stones, who are then a part of the process whereby the world is saved}]). Then in someway the zietgiest of collective consciousness must be brought back to earth in order to save humanity from ultimately their own collectivized insanity. Implications for social commentary on the memeticisim of pop-culture, on the process of furtherance of the formerly insane and out of bounds into the completely accepted, all kinds of wild implications.
I still see the dream slightly, the manic little man as he tries to build up the steam of his conviction that the wall holds the potential for Voltronesque robotic might, as the wall breaks apart with his intense convictions and becomes this crazy robot, swooping down into the Mall of America, against the mounted military defences which are so helpless to this oversized cartoon. Then clearly not asleep but with the image holding power, in that between state, not awake not asleep. The idea's building; it's enfolding itself, gaining momentum, adding to itself. Then trying to hold both the image and the ideas as they begin to snowball. Now the rush to the computer as I try to maintain it all, as the image is fading and what is left is my report here. I love you Haruki Marukami, Jon Krakauer, and Jennifer Hochschild. You are the birth of this great and fraught with potential novel idea. You and the Ghostbusters.

The slow descent

2008-03-06T15:35:00.001-08:00

I had a story idea the other day that I wanted to catalogue somewhere because it's not something I'm going to use any time soon. It's actually more of a character idea than much in the way of story, but it has implications for story that could be interesting. Essentially the idea is watching a character slowly fall apart as he's trying to keep it together on some front. Not a particularly original thought there, but how it's done makes all the difference. My idea was this would make good novel material since film tends to reduce so much of the subtleties of character in it's condensation process. So much of the meat of the story would be the internal struggle against the continuing poor choices that it would be very difficult to get that on screen.
Initially I thought just the ever so instantaneously molecule of a moment that this would be a interesting to see someone's descent into pedophilia, but in the end I just couldn't even begin to think about writing that character. Still it gives you the idea of what I'm talking about, the slow descent through the poor momentary choices that lead us to making a horribly awful decision about something: murder, abuse, armed robbery, whatever. The point of the story would be watching this happen to the character, and watching him or possibly her struggle against there own seeming inevitability. That would be a key psychological trait, that they see this awful possibility looming in their future, and every little thing they do wrong leads them to believe that they are incapable of stopping the process by which they move towards this possibility. They struggle against it, but the slightest moment of distraction leads them closer.
This kind of thing interests me greatly. How someone gets to a place where they might consider killing someone or abusing a child or even simply (within the context of this sentence) cheating on their spouse or significant other. It's a gradual process whereby they move farther along the continum of destructive behavior until at some stage you reach a kind of sudden and momentous moment when you are faced with a really messed up possibility, and you are actually considering it. I think it would be really compelling, if well written, to look at this process in depth, and see someone go through it, especially someone who was themself self aware of the fact that this process was ongoing in their life. Whether or not they give into the temptation or not, I don't know. Maybe, and this I would love but would be horribly problematic in terms of actual publishing, it's unresolved; the book ends right at the moment when the decision is about to be made, and the readers have to decide for themselves based on the whole thing what the outcome is.

Notes on MishMash

2008-03-05T11:31:00.000-08:00

So I thought I would include some notes here that I made during a brainstorm session for MishMash just to give a little bit of a better access to the process of conceptualization. Here we go:

MishMash- A kitchen sink approach
Start-work backward w/ jumpstarts and wanderings in The Two Hospitals Chapters-
Move through them & into the last year around Sept. to Sept. in a forward move then
1st year in the 'phis (forward)
thematic movements through next 7 years-
1. girls 2. academics 3. creative 4. friendships 5. drugs, etc.
>Africa>1st year back before phis
>high school & Comm. College-?Break thematically again? How?
/Maybe as character, not self-How far? Third person Omniscient?
Childhood as early Black Boy style-see doggeared pages-use a stylistic dreamlike approach and broad reminiscences, sentimental flavor, etc.
3rd level MishMash intro-is about airing out maybe good creative material that might otherwise not get a chance to see the light of day.

Those were just some quick notes I made one day while trying to figure out how I was going to shift the way MM was being set up as strictly moving backwards through time. As I was writing, I realized that although I love the idea of telling the story backwards and will maybe revisit the notion fictionally someday. It was just unsuccessful for my own story. Their was too much context necessary for some of the material. Although this may seem like a bit more complicated of a structure, it actually makes the writing process easier, as the backwards progression presents all kinds of complications with when to bring in characters, how to talk about the end of relationships before the beginnings, what kind of time-chunks to use for the movement. Just lots of complications that I didn't need for an already complicated storyline.
As a quick note, I do like very much the idea of talking about a certain period of my life as if it were fictional. The idea that I would use the very real life experiences and actions, but express them in a less straightforward, memoiristic way seems like it'll be fun. That'll also lead into the more surrealistic way I intend to write about the idyll of childhood, as I feel that's more accurate than trying to pretend like I really remember that stuff by going and talking to family members and dredging other's memories. Think the beginning of Joyce's Potrait of an Artist as a Young Man Parliament Funkadelic style. That's gonna be what I'll be going for. So, maybe now would be a good time to get back to the Skattershot (I've accidentally written Shattershot in some places, and I can't decide if I like that better) Backstory stuff, which I've still got about thirty or forty pages of to get through. I've been slacking on that hard-core what with...Oh forget the excuses just work the move already(note to self).

Conceptualization and idol play

2008-03-01T13:51:00.000-08:00

So I thought I'd try to talk a little bit about the process of building story ideas. It's a complicated and mostly intuitive process, so it's hard to really explicate, but I'll give it the old college try. Story ideas, at least for me, can come from anywhere: the newspaper, a film, something I overhear in the subway, a book, the way a certain building reminds me of something. It's all fodder, so the best advice for finding story ideas is cast the net wide, absorb as much as you can, keep yr peepers open, and just be generally receptive to the possibility of ideation in the general living process. The truth is it usually hits me when I least expect it, and the stuff that really sticks and gets elongated and worked on is generally the out of left field, where did that notion come from kind of stuff. In that way, I am not the colonel of my artistic process, just a tailgunner. I just try to keep the enemy in my sights. And by enemy, of course, I mean creativity and only in a inverted metaphoric way. I don't really consider creativity to be my enemy, I was just drawing out the metaphor farther than it was really capable of going.

Anyway, the meat of the conceptual process is as Einstein is credited as saying one part inspiration and 99 parts perspiration. It's a lot of work at honing in on the characters and plot because somehow it's in yr brain, and you just have to draw it out. You or as I really mean I work in a kind of dualing internal spitball process whereby I will throw out stream of consciousness ideas about the story or people in it, and then react to that stream by suggesting variation or alternatives. It's a pretty strange all around thing, and physically it manifests itself as wandering around my apartment muttering to myself. In that vein, it's good to live by yrself or have understanding or mostly absent roommates. I've never been able to work satisfactorily when other people are anywhere near my process, but I'm an admitted eccentric.

So, it's a winnowing process, a kind of fun battle as the characters struggle to get themselves right. I really believe that the characters I work on have their own sort of existence and selfhood, and I think that gives the process a very serious and delicate tone. It's still the most enjoyable thing to do, but I do take it all very seriously in a convivial way. Essentially, it's like wandering through the wilderness trying to find yr way back to civilization; panic and hopelessness are your enemies (for real this time), you gotta have confidence, pick a direction, charge ahead, and don't look back. Something like that.

A reminiscence

2008-02-26T18:09:00.000-08:00

The other day I was rummaging through the storage bins of my memory, and I found the remains of what may be the first short story I ever wrote. It turns out that in what must've been third or fourth grade we had to write somekind of story about living on the frontier, and I chose to create a journal for a cowboy who was on a cattle drive from Oklahoma or Kansas or somewhere on North along the Chisholm trail to the railroads that would take them back East. Well, being the strange one that I am, I chose to focus on the lonliness of being out there. There were stampedes and other troubles, but mostly our man was overwhelmed by lonesomeness and eventually he hung himself with his own belt.
Of course, all this is from memory, so I can't be sure of the exact details, but the general story is as I represented it here. Pretty wierd to think that I was writing existentially at the age of eight or nine, but actually that's probably fairly in keeping with my long held worldview. I've always been most captured by the difficult, the heavy, the solitary aspects of life. The things that we have to struggle through alone in our own minds, those are what affect me greatly, and it's just interesting, for me at least, to remember one more quick little aspect of my own long career as a dirging writer.

stylistics, bravery, tapioca

2008-02-22T12:42:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has read Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World will probably realize now that I've mentioned the book that the above blogtitle was an homage to Marukami's chapter titles. The difference being he actually works his way around to all the weird, non-sequitorish stuff he uses, and I'm just putting together some stream-of-consciousness nonsense. I do want to talk about stylistics a little bit because I do have to try and cut down on my steady diet of overused adjectives and adverbs. It's strange since I am actually very critical that I'm constantly hitting up the thesaurus for synonyms of superlatives like awesome and brilliant and amazing. I can't seem to praise stuff highly enough, and I think that comes from the severe negativity that I see in a lot of newspaper reviews and such. I should feel freer to be more critical. I never thought I would see those words come out of my brain, but there they are.
On the rest of the writing tip, there really isn't much to report this week. I've been on hold all week, just because I couldn't muster up the energy needed to get on the creative project at all. It is not easy to keep a steady pace of writing with all the otherness that I indulge in or do. Got's to pay the bills and such. Regardless, I did make some headway on the secretarial work of the Skattershot Backstory stuff for MishMash, so that's good, but I'm getting to a place that will require some real life editing, so we'll see how that goes. Made a few moves with E the G, but I need to work on my transitions a little bit. It's right at a crucial first act transition, and it's feeling a little curt if I cut away from them now, but the essential info has been delivered and we need to move into the meat of the act because there's been a lot of the wandering character development that is my stock and trade. I want to hit some offhanded chardev in the move into Eddie's big blowup scene. Oh, and I do need to bring in a scene with just Eddie and Lilly, so that we can see why she might be with him because right now it feels forced. Just trying to work out on describing the process a little. On to the show.

It's beyond time

2008-02-16T16:30:00.000-08:00

It is so way past my need for sleep, and I'm just crawling along for the vague reason that I felt like I still had something to say. The weekdays are chock full and overstocked with time constraints that keep me from writing, and so I wanted to get this little thing down since I've lost the ability to write coherently enough to work on the more structured non-blog projects. I had said over on my myspace blog that I was gonna make a mad move on them, but as it turns out, I just too wiped too really get that together. Understandibly so as it's been another week in the sleep deprivation chamber, but it just sucks is all, and tomorrow is for real people.
Righ quick here is...ShastA, what was it I wanted to say? Okay, it's interesting to note the shifting of style that has been part of the process of all the time blogging (I still absolutely hate that frickin' word), which is completely different than the tonal smoothness of my journal writing. There the tone shifted slowly and over time. Here it's much more dramatic and angular.
That's not what I wanted to talk/write about at all. One thing was the idea, ah there it is. So, just an idea about the nature of shifting from the freeformness of this stuff to actual paid writing for magazines or alternative newsweeklies, not that I'm trying to get into that kinda' thing just now, but an interesting idea. As opposed to reviewing a book or film or music from the objective stance so common in that kind of stuff, it's more interesting to talk about how that stuff effects you, and what kind of mood it evokes in yr subjectivity. Also the idea of looking at books, maybe in multiples as I often read several books at a clip, in the process of reading as opposed to simply once the whole process is complete and you've got the bigger picture (see last AHAUM post). It is now time for bed. I'm done.

I'm checking in, I'm checking out

2008-02-16T11:33:00.000-08:00

Admittedly, there's not a whole lot to report on the writing front. School has usurped a lot of my creative time, although I got a some good work on E the G and MishMash, if just briefly. I really need to buckle myself down to the editorial work required for this step in MM, but it's drudging mostly because I wrote out by hand all of the material that I'm in the process of editing. So, there's an element of secretarial work to this particular edit move, as I've got to type up all the stuff as I go.
It's strange that the transition from hand written to typed seems to augment the material. I'm not sure that I could have gotten the kind of tone I have going in the, let's call it, Shattershot Backstory if I hadn't gone with the paper and pen approach, but the writing itself seems more comfortable in the plainness and uniformity of typed-upness. Whatever that all might mean, it does seem to be true. I've been required to do surprisingly little actual editing, and mostly just have to sit and type and type and type. This is the distinctive disadvantage of this approach, and I have a lot of stuff that is gonna be a serious pain to process because it's all pen and ink work. Still, I'm not so totally unhappy with the results I'm currently getting that I want to chuck it all in and start an ant farm. Still it is actually fairly difficult to edit as I'm typing, which is probably why the whole thing feels like such a slog to me.
As far as E the G, I'm pretty happy with what's been forthcoming as far as characterizations. The tighter structure really allowed me to breathe more individuated life into the different people that populate this script, but I've got to get some handle on who are the people in the play with Lilly. Lilly is Eddie's girl or maybe more accurately Eddie is Lilly's boy, and she is in a play. When she brings the other cast members to the bar, Ed reacts badly to the whole thing. What that's all about I'm not sure. Like I wrote, I really need to spend some quality conceptual time with the next move in plot and character.
So, anyway, I do blog like a madman, which is good, and doesn't seem to distract me too much off of my schoolwork thus far, but cross-referenced modulates and the crazed-junkie fad diet have had to take a backseat. They require more character building than I have time for, especially CRM. I want to get Jhazz James into it, but he's like the serious straight ahead intellectual of the group, and so his first review is going to be a study of Cornel West's Democracy Matters. That kind of dovetails with the play part of The Coffee Shoppe because as the first act I want to have all the characters in one on one discussions about books or plays as a way to introduce them. Two of the characters are gonna get on West, so it'll fit together once I find the time. I do want to hit up crazed junkie a little today, and I have some stuff for it and a piece of his first review for CRM, which is Bukowski's Ham on Rye.
I just quickly want to address the idea of working out specific plot and character in this space, which I don't totally. I've hinted at it, and there's a taste of it here, but I mostly just observe where were at and structural and conceptual stuff. It's something to think about, but I'm not entirely sure how that might go. Okay, so maybe I did have something to report.

Self help book for the slightly inebriated

2008-02-13T22:45:00.000-08:00

I recorded this project about five or six years ago. Around the time I made The Lost Tapes of Murkinson and Burr, which are ironically enough now truly lost. Basically, it was ponderous thought on the nature of life and related troubles, but I found that when I went back to try and sift through the fifteen or so hours of material that I had recorded that the material came off as dull and vapid unless I'd had a few cocktails. Then it all sounded profound and lifechangingly meaningful. You know that extra color streetlights have after a few drinks? That's basically how this project came off. It needed just a little bit of added color from the recipient. Yet I had intended the material in all seriousness and had been very intent and serious in the process of recording. I guess that's a little sad. Well, in the end it was just offhanded nonsense in building through a transitionary element in my own personal writing from a highly emotional to a more philosophical outlook on the nature of the life of mine. In that sense, I suppose the project was a successful venture, but I still like the vaguely useless nature of a Self-help book that requires the reader to be slightly inebriated to be in a place to truly intake the unstructured and wandering lessons I would then impart. They would be heavy, I promise. Just have some whiskey.

detached irony

2008-02-10T16:47:00.000-08:00

The ironic distance that is such a successful and well-recieved tool of the modern writer or memoirist is completely beyond me. I can get ironic, but I can't get the distance required to really hit the right and not sour note. I'm just too wrapped up in the existing, and I can't get outside of it. I know it's my tragic flaw, but I feel endeared to it nonetheless. Besides, it's just so au cuarant (sic?), that I can't get with it anyway. I mean, I have my reputation to protect.
You see now, how ugly and useless my attempts are.
So, anyway, on to other things.
There is a strange or maybe just a natural connection between the inner emotional state and the exhalating creative work. It's a quite clear and yet opaque pattern that relates the fragility of imagination in a way that can't really be expressed well or at all. It just means that when we try to sit down with our daemons or face up to the wilds or however we break creative, we must be attuned to that innerself from which the tonal ambiquities are resolved long before we ever breathe life onto the page or word or string or whatever. It's all in the rythm of the soul, and will not be successfully cheated or pretended.

Where it's at

2008-02-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

While I've been heavy on the blogging, I've been severely limited in my creative work in the other areas that need moving on. The problem being of course that now with school back in I just don't have all afternoon to put in the conceptual work necessary to move forward on E the G or really hit up editing some of the other screenplay stuff. I can and hopefully will momentarily get down on some MishMash stuff, but I'm not totally into it because it's the full dress edit process. I like the mini-edit maneuver of as you go work, but going all the way back I always come to the conclusion that it's totally hopeless, and I might as well throw in the towel now and save myself a big steaming pile of trouble. That's unfair and I think I need to dance out some of my blues just now, but then, oh then, I am so on this memoir move. I mean come on. I'm past the rough patch that was my life at the end of '06, so it should be all downhill until we get to the bottom of adolescence and have to slog back up shiite messin' with my mind mountain. Can't wait! enough on that for now.

satiated and still not satisfied

2008-02-05T11:19:00.000-08:00

Just a couple of notes on a few different projects here:

As to the blogging, it's getting wild and wooly in here. I'm constantly getting ideas for posts for the various blogplaces I'm into, and I'm even beginning to revisit anything going on in my life as a blog post in my head. Every quirky turn of phrase I hear makes me think "hey, that would be a catchy blogtitle". I'm now constantly scribbling notes about the things I want to write about. I can't escape.

It also occurred to me after a particularly rough Monday morning coming down that all the togetherness I had built up over the past few weeks got spent on a weekend of mild debauch, which just kills me these days. It may result in some short-term creative output, but the long-term result is hindrance not help. So keep it together on the S+N+E+I=LP (sleep+nutrition+exercise+interaction=Lasting productivity).

I had this what I now think is a muddle-headed, harebrained idea for E the G, which was to create a trifecta of movies about bloggers that were all coming out together and would be the reviews that Eddie gets all paranoid-delusional about because he, himself, was blogging about writing. I now think that's the wrong approach. Upon reflection I realize that Eddie is so not a blogger. Also it's just too repetitive and inbred an idea. I do like the idea that I'll cast these made up movies with actual actors and have the fictional reviewers review their performances. That'll be hella' fun. For a minute I thought I would use the Darwin trilogy as the movies just because it would be cool to cast them, even just in my fantasies, but again way to repetitive and inbred, and also the storyline isn't fully in place all the way through to the third movie.

As to Darwin's Child, I think I want to use the Hashhashin as the final battle. Going with the idea that this band of wild hash smoking assassins who have passed down their skills from the old school Abbasid days still exists and is hired by the UN shadow conspiracy, we'll then have a final showdown with the hashhashins and the shaolin monks at the temple with the American Man and his crew. It sounds like an idea that could snowball into campiness if not carefully crafted, and I don't want that awful ironic campstyle that they tried with the Fantastic Four. That was miserable. I really want my thing more in the LOR mythic category, so it's a highwire act for sure. Anyway...

magniloquence

2008-02-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

Oh, to be wholeheartedly bombastic; it is the joy of life. Perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement, but that's entirely keeping with the spirit of the bombast. To be bloated and ugly with the malformations of uninhibited statements of questionable factuality, that is what it means to be really getting out there and digging into the heart of wide world of web-based anonymity. Making potentially damaging claims that can't be backed up but can't be disproved either, that's a skill worth pursuing, and an undoubted money-making venture. No, I kid because, well, for no reason other than the continuing movement of my fingers along the sleek and sliding keys of the board. I felt the need to share.

Editorializing for a cup of tea

2008-02-03T12:48:00.001-08:00

My editorial process has been developing over the years, but it's starting to get honed into the sword of Damacles as I've been actually trying to seriously edit some of my stuff lately. Now I'm constantly editing as I go; going back through what I've just written and then going back through it again winnowing away all the chaff that my long-winded self inevitably produces. It's really starting to be a fun process, although I do feel a little wierd and obsessive as I'm constantly rereading my own stuff now. It feels a little cannabalistic, but them's the shakes, right? That's what it's all about to be a writer: intensity, inspiration, and constant regurgitations.
I did some solid editorial work on...actually that stuff is strictly rewrite. I did some rewrite on Darwin's Child just a little bit ago, and it's not entirely overblown, totally cheesed out, or completely incomprehensible, so I feel mildly successful. While I do want that stuff to have a more mythic feel, I've changed my mind on hindering a rewrite until I have more time to soak up some good old Greek tragedy or general mythic stuff. There's always the next rewrite, which is rapidly becoming my mantra.
On editing I'm at a really good place with MishMash right now. Last night during cocktail hour I started to reread some stuff I had written essentially to be a novel, but that ended up being backstory on the actual novel that I've written the first third of but have put aside for the time being. It was actually not horrible. It had some existential evocations, which I was feeling, but I had had a few cocktails at that point, so, you know. No, seriously, I read some again this morning, and it does need some polish, but it's good in a, man, I really wish I could write like Willa Cather kind of way. My current thinking is that I'm gonna include it in the section of MM that I'm working on now, with some spitshine as I go. Things are good in the Brown Dog house today.

Choral structures, Coffee split, and other tidbits

2008-02-02T11:54:00.000-08:00

I realized yesterday as I was rereading The Coffee shop that I really need to work on how I structure choruses into songs. I wrote several songs into the movie, but the choruses (chorai?) only really work for the first one. I have a tendency to just write a verse as the chorus and then call for repetition instead of really building solid hooks that interact with the lyrics. I also don't have the melody in my head anymore for the last song, so it feels really awkward and off kilter. So I need to work on that, especially for the Song Cycle for Lyra, the world's most awesomest niece. I reread the one song I've written for the cycle, and it's not as horrible as my memory was telling me it was.
On a slightly related note, I wrote a concept album when I was 20 with the concept that all of our friends are really strangers. I wrote songs trying to get into what I really knew about several of my friends. Somehow out of the process came the idea to use the chorai (I'm going with that) as verses in a mid and final song. So there are two songs that collect together the choruses (okay, I'm wavering). It actually seemed to work, but my cousins and I only worked up the first few songs, so I never really got to try and sing the choral songs with guitars and such.
As to the Coffee Shop split, the idea being that in order to keep the read through of the original draft of Darwin's Child still a part of the CS, I could split them into a play and a screenplay. I actually think the idea could work within the context of wow look at how crazy I am I wrote a screenplay that leads into a theatrical play moreso than it's actually commercially produceable. That's all just gravy anyway. A writer writes to write, not to be produced. That will be my mantra until I get the chance to sell the frick out.
Anyway, enough on the ranting writer, I was trying to work how the play section would work. Would it just pick up where the movie left off, or how would that whole thing work? So my idea is to make it into a two act thing with the first act as character introductions, basically do some more slacker-like meet the characters as they hang around kind of stuff for the first act. Basically scenes that are missing from the film, and then go write into it in the second act, but really work up the whole meta-commentary aspect. I also want to really edit that stuff as within the script if that makes sense. The actual Darwin's Child has already been reconcieved heavily and partially rewritten, but I do want do decheesify some of the dialogue for the play and film even if it isn't a part of the actual DC stuff. Okay, now even I'm confused.

Eddie the Grouch

2008-02-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

That is ostensibly the working title for the screenplay that I'm writing currently, but it's growing on me as an actual legit title. No doubt no one but me will ever agree with that, which is why I will probably be writing for the fun of it and never make it to the rank of professional. It does give you a different vibe than the one I catch from reading interviews with long-standing professional writers. That's actually a pretty useless statement, as we all have completely unique processes, so it's a nontransferrable construct, this vibeness.
Anyway, I wrote a couple of the early scenes for E the G, and it went really well. Having a tighter structural wall within which to build was a solid success so far. I have decided that I'm going to stick with a 3 act structure, as opposed to the 2 acts and an epilogue, just because I have a lot of material I want to use for the third act. I also want it to be clear that the movie moment that ends the second act was not a totally lifetransforming moment; that his insanity and paranoia will creep back into his life if he's not careful, and that life is a constant emergant proposition. There is no eureka moment that absolutely changes everything and does away with all yr past flaws and inconsistencies. There are flashes of inspiration and understanding that can be built upon to continue on an upward trajectory, but the happily ever after is a known fraud that I think cheats filmgoers a little bit in that we can have happy within the context of reality that will help us all to move in that direction or we can continue to imbue escapist nonsense into the crevices of our minds that will leave us ultimately feeling unfulfilled by movies and by life.
Okay, enough on the ranting for the moment. I also decided that in the second act when Eddie starts to go all schitzoid and thinks that the local film and book reviewers are secretly critisizing his novel that I'm gonna make up film and book plots and concepts instead of using actual ones. Hopefully I'll be get it together on Cross-referenced modulates a little bit to get better at writing reviews, but all good things, right?

period of the zygote

2008-02-01T11:26:00.000-08:00

In some ways I really feel like my writerly development is highly embryonic, but I guess that's part of the trial by fire that is the process for all good things. What would it be worth if it was an easy and all-the-time fun process. Not that I don't ultimately love it, but it's hard and a lot of my current work feels sloppy and droll and whatever.
Anyway, I've broke through a little on the autobio project, and got to a place where I'm a little more comfortable and ambulatory, which is nice. I've also got Eddie the Grouch, which is my semi-amusing working title for the schitzoid paraniod man project, into solid structural shape to actually dig in and do some writing. On that note, I'm thinking that I'm going to make the thing two acts with an epilogue as opposed to the traditional three because it just feels more natural for the project. The idea is to get to the final filmic ending with swelling music and solid feel good moment (as much as is possible), and then fade back in on Eddie sitting on his front porch slouched and depressed smoking a cigarette. Then through the epilogue we get that he is in a solid place and moving forward with his life but slightly slipping back into the insanity of his paranoia. I mean just because he writes the book doesn't mean he's off the hook. Not in my world it doesn't.

Ye' Olde Coffee Shoppe

2008-01-28T11:27:00.000-08:00

So I just printed out the first draft of The Coffee shoppe (yeah, it's just the working title), and the thing is a behemoth. This is going to be a frustrating editorial process. I wrote the thing so that I could excise the first draft of Darwin's Child and get with the editorial process on that thing, and I've essentially given myself twice as much work. Now I've got to try and figure out if I can really split the whole thing into a play and a screenplay. The idea is to break off the read through of DC into a play, and just have a cursory one in the film in which Robinson tells Sal that he's full of shiite and he's written a really verbose action film with dialogue that would be better suited to the theatre with the re reversed from our American style if you get my drift. Well, I'm down in the dungeon of Umass's library, and the place is eight hundred degress, so I'm gonna get on. First day of classes-yeah, oh yeah!

The structure of success

2008-01-26T14:51:00.000-08:00

So, it occurred to me that I want to sit down with one of the two new screenplay ideas, and try and hack into them. I'm not in a place where I can work on the Darwin Trilogy or Willful Tragedy, as I've said I need a more solid mythic grounding for that, and I don't have the time to develop it right now. I'm also in a delicate place with regards to the memoir, so I'm a little stalled out on that for the moment. I'll work through that, it's just a thing. Clearly, I don't want to get into it.
Anyway, I was napping a little bit this afternoon, and I was thinking that instead of the process by which I've written the various screenplays and pieces in the past, that is to take a loose outline of the story as broken down into the trad. three acts, it would make more sense this time to try to really work the structure to a finer honed web than I have in the past. Usually I'll just sit down at the typer with that loose structure and see where we get to. This time I want to be more prepared before I sit down with the idea. I want to really work out all the characters, the specific scenes, get the whole thing sorted a little better than I have traditionally beforehand. It also occurred to me that I've been much to welded to the page as a way of writing. Character creation should be a much more live process than just dialogue and some slight action descriptions. In that vein I really need to get a tape recorder or a video camera to work through characters in a more live way. Cassavettes worked completely with a tape recorder. Just a reminder.

Ideational progression

2008-01-26T14:33:00.000-08:00

I had an idea for a screenplay yesterday about a guy whose megalo-paranoid personality gets so out of control that he thinks the local book and film critics are somehow reading his novel as he writes it and criticizing it in their articles about other books or films. He draws out their analyses to mean something about his writing, and it is driving him insane. Actually, that's the middle part of the story, while he's living in his former boss's basement trying to write a novel. He hides out because he thinks everyone hates him, when in fact they find him endearing if often frustrating for his paranoia and gruffness. He'll be a kind of Harvey Pekar, but slightly delusional.
The idea actually grew from an initial thought about a character that gets totally disillusioned by reading critics of other people's writings while I was reading some seriously harsh film reviews in the Globe on Friday. The movie's they were reviewing undoubtedly deserved the drubbing they got, but man, Burr and Morris were in slash and burn mode. I can feel for them. I mean having to go see every movie that comes out and try to come up with something intelligent to say about it, forget about it. Anyway, then I thought I might try to incorporate the idea into the Rebel W/out a Cause storyline, but that story's just too full as it is, so the idea was just kind of hanging around.
Then I was at home dancing in my living room to the Dennis Brown Anthology that I just got, and the kernel of the story hit me as this character idea. I then spent the next hour or so flushing it out a little bit to a slight 3 act structure. I want it to end with him finally pushing beyond the paranoia and writing his book, which is maybe rejected by editors or poorly received. Maybe he goes on a book tour and has to defend himself against the kind of criticism he was afraid of, but because he actually wrote the book he doesn't care anymore. Something along those lines. Not a totally happy ending, but he comes out with his own unique brand of success, which gives him a dignity.

Open-sourced possibilities

2008-01-26T11:09:00.001-08:00

I had an interesting thought the other day. I was thinking about the wikipedia and what a phenom that whole thing is, and it occurred to me that it would be an interesting project to try an open-source screenplay. I'm not exactly sure how the whole thing would work, but I like the idea of an unlimited number of interested people getting in on some core idea. Again, how to set it up is not entirely clear, but the idea bears some consideration.
Lego just built a whole line of toys through an open-source process, and, of course, there's the whole mozilla, linux, and apache successes. Admittedly, these are all totally different fields than what I'm talking about, but again, I think it could work.
I've seen there's some kind of open-source fiction writing going on somewhere out there, but it was just offhanded. I'll have to investigate further, and maybe try and work up a structure or something. Just an thought I thought I'd share.

The edges of dreamlife

2008-01-23T12:48:00.000-08:00

That a dream was the starting point of a trilogy of sci-fi films I've got in my head and just a little more than slightly down on paper, is, to me, kind of crazy. That a whole series of movies could come out of not wanting to get out of bed would be pretty rad, and the honest truth is if I can finish writing the thing. Well, if I can get the dialogue to a place that isn't shitty, the possibilities are infinitely skewered. By that I mean it might have a shot. Obviously, it's much too early to get any kind of hopefulness about it, but the basic outline is solid. It's just filling in the details.
On that note, I've been reworking the original draft of the script offhandedly over the past few weeks, and I really feel that I need to steep myself in traditional myths a little more if I want to successfully get the characters and the plot to a mythic place. I really feel like the story could take on mythic porportions, but I'm just in to much of a straightforward place right now to successfully write those types of characters.
It also occurred to me that The Darwin trilogy is an interesting counter-point to a screenplay I wrote a couple of years ago called Willful Tragedy. The story ultimately takes on a really Greek tragic tone, and it fits well as a kind of our world mythic tragedy in opposition to this slightly altered future world I've been working with in Darwin.

Just so there's no misunderstanding

2008-01-20T17:31:00.000-08:00

I wanted to say this here and now, so that there's no misunderstandings or hard feelings later on down the road. I've started two new blogs, and yes I have become a full blown bloggaddict in less than a month. That's beside the current point. I started a team blog called Cross Referenced Modulates, but the team members are all characters from my head. I thought it would be interesting to look various books from the perspectives of various characters, so I've created a place to do that. It all actually springs from an idea I had in 2000 for creating a imaginary thinktank, and having a roundtable discussion with various caricatures of the various political viewpoints. The roundtable was going to be discussing the lost tapes of Murkinson and Burr, who were themselves characters that I had created and recorded on an old tape recorder that had a feature which would let you slow down or speed up the tape as you recorded, so yr voice would sound either really deep and low or whinny and high pitched. Well, I recorded a bunch of philosophizing in a very abstract and then a very specific way, and would slow down and speed up the tape accordingly. The Burr character, who was the one raging on about progressive political stuff and had the really whiny voice, came out really hilarious, but I lost the tapes somewhere along the way. Anyway, this blog gives me the chance to bring back that idea in looking at some specific artistic expression through the lense of multiple characterizations.
I've also created a blog for one of the characters, who has a really crazy story. It's not entirely clear to me how the idea came about. I was reading the living arts section of the paper, I think, and had a clear idea for a blog about a kind of kooky character. That is basically how the idea for the crazed-junkie fad diet came about. So, just for the record, that stuff is made up. It will be treated as real within the bubble of the two blogs, but over here on the other side, I'll state clearly that that stuff is just imaginary.

Wild New Ideas come forrowing out of the ground

2008-01-19T14:20:00.000-08:00

So, I spent my afternoon on Thursday in wild contemplations just trying to keep up with myself, which when I'm in that kind of manic mood is a virtual impossibility. While I was at work I had a few one off ideas that seemed interesting, so I when I got home I figured I'd have a cocktail and try and work some stuff out.
One idea was for a film that is mildly inspired by the whole Spears debacle that is that poor girl's life. Actually, it's more of a film about generalized celebrity culture than specifically inspired by Britney, but she's just the most shockingly obvious example of how virulent the cult of celebrity gossip has become. I highly suggest you immunize yr children immediately (exactly what that means or entails I could not say). The idea is also to draw from both the film, Rebel Without a Cause, and the real lives of the actors that starred: Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood, and James Dean.
Anyway, I don't want to give to much away here in this most public of places. I have to admit I have trouble getting over being just a little secretive about my material, which is kind of understandable, but in the end probably a useless precaution against nothing, since who would want my ideas anyway?
Regardless, I also spent Thursday building a better structural house for the memorial conjurings for MishMash, which if I haven't mentioned is the tentative title for my autobiography. I had initially tried to work a reverse chronology, but I wasn't really feeling that, so I had to lay down a slightly more complicated structure that starts moving backward, but then moves through the central years I spent in Memphis thematically: girls, academics, creative work, friendships, drugs. You get the idea. I also think I'm going to tell the most sensitive and raw stuff from my adolescence when I was in and out of mental institutions as a story that's happening to someone else, and make my experiences into a character. I haven't figured out how exactly that's gonna work or how it will fit in with the rest of the more straightforward material, but we'll see what's the what when it all comes out in the wash.
Okay, so there's more stuff to talk about from Thursday, but I'm going to leave it for another post.

A moment of celebration

2008-01-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

I have to take a moment to celebrate a victory, even if that victory is tempered by the realization that I now have to try to go back through and edit sucessfully this monstrous screenplay that I've finally churned out. It is the first real project that I've seen to completion, and that in itself deserves a few moments of self-masturbatory adulation. In the many years I've been writing now, I have yet until this very moment managed to see any of my novel, play, or screenplay ideas all the way to completion. While I have started more writing projects than I can even catalogue, it is rare for me not to be distracted by some other project. There were several years when I had to be working on at least four or five different writing projects at the same time, and that's in addition to working and going to school. My life has required a high level of semi-successful yet highly necceary multi-tasking for years now, and I think a lot of the work suffered because of it. At the same time there are some aspects of this current screenplay that couldn't exist without the approach I've taken. I'll get into that more in a minute, I just wanted to shout a brief halleluiah for the completion of my first screenplay. Of course, the thing is like forty pages too long, and would be a four hour movie as it stands, so now to the editing.

On the straightforward tip

2008-01-06T17:17:00.000-08:00

I have claimed that this blog is supposed to be about the process of writing, ergo the title: access the process. So far we've been short of the mark on that front, but I'm getting to it. I wanted to get in a little background on what the progression has been for me, and how I've come to this place that I am now, which is no where in particular to be precise. Regardless, in keeping with the feel of the blogform, I've been a little discordant in my approach.
So, I just wanted to get down to it for a quick minute on a project that I was was moving on this weekend a little bit. I'm working on two projects right now. One is a memoir and the other is a screenplay. I think I mentioned that in an earlier post, but whatever. Moving forward, last night I was reading a bunch of screenplays. Actually I was reading American Splendor, Boogie Nights, and The Kingdom. A seemingly pretty random grouping, but the connecting factor is that they all can be found at the Internet Movie Script DataBase, which is a wonderful, if highly incomplete companion to the IMDB. One really interesting aspect of the imsdb is that many times you find early drafts of scripts, so you can see how the script was reworked if you watch the movie. Just as a quick example because I'm totally getting away from myself here, the script for American Splendor that's up there has some substantial rearranging in the final film. Check it out for yrself. Anyway, the point of all that was that I was trying to get some mojo going on my own screenplay. It has been stalled essentially since I saw Juno a couple of weeks ago and found it so ridiculously witty that my own writing seemed dull and lifeless: a truism, no doubt.
I'm trying to get some juice for the second act, which in my screenplay is a kind of mini-movie in the sense that it's the only act that has much in the way of a structured narrative plot. I'll explain this all in great detail at some later date. For now, let it suffice to say that my screenplay is a little wierd. Here again we're getting sidetracked, and I do have a writing proficiency exam tomorrow, so I'll try and get to the heart of it. The problem in essence was that I had a vague narrative outline, but I didn't have the specific scenes set up. The whole plot moves forward through conversation, but I needed to establish beforehand who had conversations with whom and when in order to move forward. So I had a few cocktails, and the whole thing got away from me. It was a little more complicated than that, and I actually did get some slightly useful stuff. Still I haven't really got a handle on this middle act since the first act was really a kind of Slacker-like wandering through the lives of people who habit this coffee shop.
I'll try and sit down this week with it and flush the thing out because I'm actually very immersed in this project, and I'm not totally unsatisfied either, although there is some editorial work to be done for sure. Anyway, that was all still pretty vague and useless. I'll try and get down to The Show at some near future moment, but for right now, it's just all too much.

Can I get a little meta?

2008-01-05T14:28:00.000-08:00

The whole idea of writing about writing is in itself pretty tricky. I spent several years working on art theory focused specifically on the writtten forms, but getting the theories into the practice was highly problematic. The problems being that characters and plots run away from you no matter where you start. You may start with a great story that has all kind of allegorical or metaphorical meanings, and by the end yr no where near the horizon line you were scoping from the starting block. It's a real trick to input those things in a conscious way, and probably for good reason. The films, plays, or works of fiction that have a clearly definable point many times come off as pointy and one dimensional, so I guess in the end it's good to just go with the flow. Still I want to get some kind of handle on what it is I've been trying to do for the past fifteen years. What is the drive, and what is the point? I can't even imagine. I'll try again later. Maybe it'll come to me while I'm sleeping.

Astrogeny and my own humble beginnings

2008-01-05T12:08:00.000-08:00

I wrote my first short story when I was about fifteen. I was a devotee of Kerouac at the time, so it was a kind of stream-of-consciousness semi-nonsensical story about an all american family's run in with opium smoking law enforcement officers. It was highly wierd but read well. I kept up in that vein for a while, but, at that time, I was more drawn to the poem than to structured story writing. Although it would be hard to argue there was much structure to the early nonsense that I called short stories.
I first tried my hand at a longer form novel a few years later with what was meant to be a novel about the process of achieving enlightenment through the discussion and description of the place itself, Avalon. I was hugely into Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, so it just came from that place. I think I got about twenty pages into it when I ran off the tracks and gave it up. Seeing as I was only sixteen or seventeen at the time, I can't really fault myself too much for it, but it was the beginning of a rather frustrating habit of conceding defeat at the earliest convenience.
My process is one of being hit by a wave of inspiration at the original notion of a story, which then translates into some manic hours or days or weeks at a clip, then gets snagged on some lowlying branch of plot, character, structure, or somesuch, and finally explodes into a void of depression that the idea is so hopelessly useless.
At least, the preceding years have been filled with many different iterations of this basic outline, but I think I'm slightly free of the grip of that pattern for the moment. I've been working steadily on a screenplay for several months in between work, school, and all the rest, and I'm not totally unsatisfied with where I'm at. It's good to be making progress; I think.

The nitty gritty AKA the show

2007-12-29T16:06:00.000-08:00

So in the intervening years between my youth and the now, I have worked at a rather lurching pace with an overwhelmingly ambitious scope. I am now as an older, wiser, and somewhat beaten down man trying to take a more measured and steady approach, which has a highly unsettling effect on me, but it also keeps me honest and just a little more straightforward. Not an easy thing to do for someone who is way out in the universe of vagueness and abstraction most of the time, but what can you do? We are who we are.
Anyway, before I actually get down to the nitty gritty or get the show on the road, by which I mean actually getting into what this blog is meant to be all about, I wanted to get meta for a minute. It's a bit strange that I've been drawn to this form of self-expression given that I don't actually have much to do with what's going on in the world of weblogs. I don't read any on a regular basis. Mostly I've looked through a couple and found them wanting. I want more than just the daily accounting of movement and action. It's out there for sure, and I've seen some good stuff. It just still feels like wading through a thick molasses of dulling detail that doesn't give me the innerlife without great effort on my part. That's just my first impressions of the little I've seen, and undoubtedly my mindless ramblings will be of little interest to anyone else also, so in the end I guess it evens out.
All self-deprecation aside, the point I was trying to get to is that this kind of freeform journal writing has a lot of draw for me regardless of the content that it inspires in others. I'd been keeping a journal since I was about thirteen, but in recent years it had become this thing, to put it rather blithely. It had become about immortal words being laid down for all eternity, and, like, way too heavy to just sit down and thrash out right quick, which was what I wanted and needed. So that's what I'm trying to do here. I really like that I can come and throw off random thoughts without having to feel the level of intensity that was starting to amass under the idea of The Journal. It is my intention that this particular blog will be more focused on the structured creative writing I'm trying to do but in a loose way. We'll get to that at some point.

The Process

2007-12-29T14:48:00.000-08:00

So I felt like it was important for me to seperate my personal blogomania into a two-pronged approach. The one being an all over the place full on rambling rant about whatever comes into my head, and the other (AKA this) being a slightly more structured focus on the process of writing. Initially I was going to call this blog simply The Process, but alas someone started a blog back in '01 with that title. He only kept at it for a few months, and it was way more content focused than I think I am capable of. He talks about adding new characters to his novel, and his ideas on the character's sexuality, which is pretty low in the list of important things in the lives of my characters. Mostly they are like me, so they have no sex life. Actually I just read his first post and it turns out he was blogging about the process of writing erotic fiction about the BDSM world. So there you have it.
I, myself, am working on two projects specifically, which I'll get into in more detail in a minute, but the pork chops just binged at me, so I'm gonna go do that right quick. More on the exciting details of my personal quest for self-fulfillment through writing, and then 10 easy steps to achieve it yrself. Okay...