How strange is the creative process?

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

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

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

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

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.