Bleeding Fiction

I've got a lot of extra Vacation/Personal/Sick days saved up (nine total) and I didn't particularly feel like going into work today, so I called in sick. I slept in a bit (which for me these days means I got up at 8:30), showered and then got down to writing. I had a bit of a slow start due to some trouble I'd been having sorting out exactly what people were trying to say in the scene I was working on. Basically, I'd type out some dialogue and then the character I'd typed it for would start screaming at me and telling me I was misrepresenting them and, no, that wasn't what they meant at all. *grumbles* Stupid characters. In the end I sorted it all out nicely, though, and as of the moment I write this I've got just over 3k under my belt for the day, though I'm planning to write some more later tonight. Finishing by the end of the coming weekend seems more and more likely.

(The music for the day, by the way, amounted to the collected works of Pink Floyd, which I've got to tell you is a really strange sound to write to. It worked, though.)

I also called the Asian Studies grad office at Berkeley. They sent me my application packet (after I'd already applied online, so either I'm quick or they're slow) and on the requirements page it mentions that I need to give them an academic writing sample. The online application didn't mention this. I mean, it's no problem; I've got tons sitting around my hard-drive. Only thing is, where am I supposed to send it and how can I be assured that it'll get in with the rest of my application?

Sadly, no one answered at the grad school. Fortunately, since they're on the Left Coast I can keep trying them for another few hours.

Now it's time to check my dailies (see "Visitations" at left) and start figuring out what to do with the other 8 days off I can take between now and New Year's.

Since I plan to finish Wolf's Rain this weekend, I've decided my next project will be the second draft of my first novel. To that end I'm reading a book called Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. It's decent so far, but I've got two complaints:

1. They believe in the "least common denominator." They advise, basically, that you keep your narrative and description as short as possible and appeal to readers on the same wavelength that movies do. Now look, I realize that fiction and the audience of fiction today is not the same as the it was years ago, and I don't expect it to be. I understand that a writer has to write something that will appeal to other people or else earn no money. But there's really something lost if we can't aspire for the full and rich prose of men like Lovecraft or Dunsany (or, to go out of genre, Hugo or Tolstoy. To name a very, very few.). More than that, prose isn't meant to appeal to audiences in the same way that movies are and to try to make it do that is just... well, sad.

2. The authors of this book claim that "self-editing is likely the only kind of editing your manuscript will ever get." These folks are professionals and I assume they speak from experience. But spent a summer interning in the editorial dept. of Tor Books and I saw some editors there who really care about the state of prose and really want it to be the best that it can be. I have seen books dedicated to dearly departed friends thanking them for their valued insight and help. I've heard editors sit around the table and lament that some book or another wasn't better edited, with the clear tone that some other editor, somewhere, wasn't doing the job they were supposed to do. So on behalf of my friends, I'm pretty damn insulted by these folks.

Still, despite all this, some of their advice does seem valuable and the book's not very long, so I'll see it through.

Moving on, many of my grad school apps ask for an academic writing sample. I've decided to use an essay I wrote in school detailing Foucault's misinterpretation of the point of the Arabian Nights and what I felt the point of those stories are. It's a good essay, but my writing's improved a bit since I wrote it and I have a few new insights into what I said then. So, I need to edit the essay a bit. Which means I'm going to have to spend some time in Barnes & Noble this weekend doing research. To remind you all of what a geek I am: I'm really looking forward to doing this. It'll be heaps of fun.

Woo hoo! I'm very happy to report that I have finally finished Wolf's Rain!! Final tally? 67,539 words and 3 and 1/2 months of writing. Vast improvement over my last novel, which was 100k and 7 months of writing. I don't know if the quality of writing is any better, but the story is tighter and that's good, at least. I may (or may not) relax for the rest of today and then move on to the next project tomorrow; no time to rest on my laurels!

In semi-related news, I edited that essay for grad school yesterday. It didn't need as much work as I thought it would - mostly I just had to get rid of a lot of passive voice stuff, add a paragraph to shore up one particularly weak argument and add in a few more footnotes (since parenthetical citation is the bane of true academica!). I'll print off a few copies at work tomorrow and add it to the growing stack of application stuff. Now if only I could get my references back I could send these things off...

Anyway! Big accomplishment, feeling mighty fine right now. Feel free to either shower me with praise and adulations or try to take me down a peg. Either response is perfectly valid.

One of the things I like most about having this weblog is coming up with interesting titles for each of my posts. In fact, I won't make a post if I don't have an interesting or appropriate title to go along with it and I have titles worked up that I've got no idea what post goes along with them yet. If the same held true for my fiction, I'd be in pretty good shape. Instead, though, I usually have to struggle hard to think of a title for a project. Even when the title comes easy (as it did with Wolf's Rain) there's usually a complication in there somewhere (Wolf's Rain is apparently also the title of an anime).

That brings us to my first novel, which I started re-reading last night to get ready for writing my second draft. I finished the first draft about four months ago, and I spent seven months writing the novel. So, in 11 months, I've got no clue what I'm calling the damn thing. Part of what I've tried to do with the novel is depart a bit from the traditional European fantasy novel, and that should hold true with the title, too. Your typical European fantasy novel has a title somewhere along the lines of the following:

The (noun/adjective) of the (noun)

I'm sure you can think of just a few titles that fit the scheme.

I thought I'd depart from the European stereotypes and go with something more Chinese in flavor, as my novel was more Chinese in flavor. So, I turned to the classic Chinese literature that influenced me and found the following:

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The Outlaws of the Marsh

The Journey to the West

The Dream of the Red Mansion

I tell you, sometimes you just can't win.

After about a month of total slacking I finally started in on the second draft of my first novel again yesterday. It went well, I know where it's going, I've resolved all of my quibbling little plot problems and it's just a matter of sitting down and doing it now. Fortunately, I've got 5 days off from Wednesday to Sunday to build up momentum.

As part of my renewed work schedule, I've figured out the name for my novel, for the series the novel is in and even the name for the next novel in said series.

I call the series The Sorrows of Earth and Heaven.

"Sorrows" because I'm writing a tragedy of the most Shakespearean proportions. I'm writing a fantasy novel in the Chinese tradition, not in the European, and I want to make it plain to my readers from the outset that they shouldn't be surprised if most of the major characters die by the end of the series; in Chinese drama that's pretty much what happens.

"Earth and Heaven" because that's the Chinese way of saying "the whole world." (tian di is more accurately translated "heaven and earth," but I liked the flow of the phrase better when I reversed it.)

The title of each book in the series will be two of the "sorrows" in question - in other words, two of the topics/themes/whatever that feature in that particular book. So, the first book is Fire and Jade and the second is River and Pearl and that's as far as I've got.

And after over a year of not knowing that, it makes me very happy to have it down.

I had a good run writing today. I covered over a few of the problems I was having with few minor cultural snags that the real China's real history doesn't answer well enough for fiction but I still needed to answer. Overall, it went well.

Until the hammering started. It seemed that some new tenants were moving in downstairs and preperatory to that they were constructing an entirely new house within the bowels of the old. I ignored the noise as best I could. I can put up with a lot of distractions while I'm writing, but the hammering? Dear God the hammering! It cut under and above everything, jarring a word out of my head with every beat.

I weathered it for hours, sneaking in furtive sentances in the pauses when the carpenter's arm got tired, but finally, at half past two, with only 1,100 words added to the page, I had too much of a headache to continue. I ran away to the mall in search of refuge.

I left the mall at four o'clock a hundred dollars poorer then when I had entered and went home. Construction had not stopped, but fiction waits for no man. I was about to get to work again, ready with a glass of water and bottle of tylenol and prepared to slog through my fiction three words at a time in between the irregular beats of the hammer when the doorbell began to ring with such joyful insistance that I could only assume some errant three year old had found a new toy.

Erik answered the door and received a letter. The letter read, in part: "effective this date, [My Landlords] have conveyed the Premises to [My New Landlords]. [We] are hereby authorized and instructed to forward all future renatal payments, beginning with the January, 2004 rent directly to the new owner."

Oh, joy. My new landlords speak English well enough that... well, let's just say that were I interviewing them for the Camp USA program, I would turn them down on the basis of their English. They raised my rent, on top of it.

All in all, I can't complain. The increase in rent isn't even enough to sneeze at and we'll be able to muster through the language barrier the rare times we need to speak to our new landlord. We could have been kicked out and had to find a new place for likely more rent, so I consider myself lucky.

Now if only the damned hammering would stop...

Words and phrases like "Machiavellian" or "coup d'etat" carry a certain weight beyond their meaning. They are summaries, without need of explanation. Use them, and no one's really going to question your meaning.

But they arise from a specific set of cultural, historical and linguistic circumstances; they would not be if our culture had no exposure to or we lived in a reality without the existence of either Machiavelli or the French. Without the scheming of Venetian princes, without the existance of a man named "Machiavelli," we would not have the word that is his namesake. Likewise, without, say, the French language, we wouldn't have a "coup d'etat."

Which brings us to the worlds of fiction. You're writing a book that takes place, say, on Troar, a world formed from the broken tusk of the primeval boar-god of the same name. Not even the omnipresent, gelatinous eye of Ybalemond the Many-Tentacled Beast can perceive the Earth. Can you call the scheming wolf-shaman Agorakith "Machiavellian?"

What if you wrote about the Space Confederacy of Yan, in a future 30,000 years beyond our own time, when great golden barques sail through space propelled by sails which harness the unfocused radiations of space and all men speak naught but Esperanto? When Admiral Sevali brings the warfleet down on Alturam, the Confederacy's capital, can you, in writing your tale, claim that he engages in a "coup d'etat?"

On some level, it must be alright. After all, you're telling your tale in English, including the dialogue, even if it's written in the first person and no matter what language your fictional characters speak. But all the same, does it break the reality of the fiction too much?

This is a question I don't really have an answer for, at least not one I'm satisfied with. So I open the floor to my readers: what do you guys think? Is it ever ok? If so, when? Universally or in some specific type of story? Does it matter if you're writing in first person or third? Does it matter if your narrator is omniscient or limited in knowledge?

The titles of my past two entries have been references to the story "The Call of Cthulhu" by Pulp author H. P. Lovecraft. I guess I've had a bit of Lovecraft on my mind lately which is, if you've ever read Lovecraft, a disturbing prospect. The man was, truly, a master of horror. He wrote stories that you scoff at and dismiss as obvious and childish. But three days later, late at night when everything else is quite, while you're walking the ten feet from a friend's house to your car or you look out the window of your bedroom, you think of a particular turn of phrase, a certain indescribable image and you shudder uncontrolably.

I need to take some time soon and re-read a few of his stories (particularly "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth") as research for stories I'm working on that deal with some similar themes. One of them is, quite possibly, one of the stranger ideas to ever scurry across my brain. I want to write a comic book, a redeaux of Aquaman done for DC's Vertigo line connecting Aquaman with the Cthulhu Mythos.

Aquaman is, of course, one of the lamer superheroes to ever exist. His main power is the ability to speak to fish. Whoopie. As if most fish would have anything interesting to say. But the thing is, Cthulgu and the Deep Ones are fish. Of a sort... For this series, I'd discard the entire panoply of superhero paraphenalia and iconography and tell the story of a man who washes up from the ocean onto a strange New England shore and the things he discovers about the quiet town of Innsmouth... and about himself.

It's still in the works, but I like it a lot, and I have always wanted to write a comic...

Sam looks exactly the way you would expect a great wizard to look. He has a pointy white beard and an equally pointy hat (but his hat is blue, not white). He wears a gaudy silk robe and carries an equally gaudy wand (but his wand is made from the bars of a long-forgotten song, not silk). He has a mischievous smile and a twinkle in his eye (and the twinkle is mischievous too... or is it?). Sam looks so much like a great wizard that whenever he walks by, people say "look, there goes Sam, the great wizard."

"No, no," Sam says, and here he always blushes red, for Sam is a modest sort who can't really help the way he looks. "I'm not a great wizard. I'm not even close. I'm mediocre. Semi-great at best." Then, to the crowd's astonishment, Sam exhales a cloud of phantasms who waltz through the air.

It happens just this way on Wednesday, which is sacred to fewer gods than you would think, since not even gods like Wednesday, only instead of exhaling he flashes a smile and a bolt of lightning that paints a vivid picture of the dawn times.

The crowd "oohs" and "ahhs" and a child says, in a winning, precious voice that only children in movies ever have, "Sam is the greatest wizard ever."

And Sam kneels down to face the child and he shakes his head slowly. "No," he says in a voice as cold as the grave, "I'm not a great wizard. If I were a great wizard I wouldn't have to fear the Shadow."

The child would shudder then, but before she can a man (perhaps her father?) steps forward. "The Shadow who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"

Sam looks up at the man, a little cross at having his moment ruined. "No," he says, in a voice now grown cold as the dark of nothing, "not that Shadow. The other Shadow."

The whole crowd shudders, then, and they are gone. Sam walks home to his tower. But the Shadow dogs his steps.

No, not that Shadow. The other Shadow.

* * *

Wednesday night is longer and darker than the townsmen feel it has any right to be. This is because they haven't been paying attention. They shiver in front of their fires and they hunger in their bellies and in their souls and they think of the dawn times that Sam showed them, the times when things were good. Things twist inside their guts. Things they call "fear" and "loneliness" and "sorrow" and "hate" but which don't really have names. They haven't slept a wink, they haven't said a word, but by the time morning comes (and it comes with more than a little hesitation) they have torches and pitchforks in hand and are mobbing towards Sam's tower.

"He's a witch," cries one man. "Burn him!"

"First of all," another man replies, "he's a wizard. Second of all, I think this joke's been used before."

"Oh, right," says the first and, embarrassed, he slinks to the back of the mob.

They smash open the door. They climb the long, spiral stairs. They find Sam, dead in his chair, a victim of the Shadow. No, not that Shadow. The other Shadow.

Afraid and uncomfortable around the corpse, the mob leaves as quick as it came. If he had been alive, Sam would not have been able to stop them. He was, after all, only a semi-great wizard. But his corpse is smiling. A timely death has saved him from being burnt alive.

Two beggars sit by the side of a small road that leads into a smaller village. One of them is tall. His name is Luo. One of them is short. His name is Yi. Neither one of them is fat. They are beggars, after all. Each wears robes that are ragged and threadbare. Each has a cracked alms-bowl in front of him. You have to have the best tools you can if you expect to do your job well. But despite their fine tools, no one gives the beggars any money.

Without money, the two beggars cannot buy the finer things in life. They cannot buy monkeys. They cannot buy elephants of either the African or Indian variety and they certainly cannot buy the pagodas that balance splendidly upon the elephants' broad backs. They cannot buy shape-changing robot battle-suits equipped for trans-galactic space travel or the beautiful alien pearls that power them.

Oh, and they can't buy food, either. Without food, the two beggars get very hungry. Soon, they are so hungry that they stop wanting money altogether. The Buddha might say this is a step towards Nirvana. Then again, he might not.

Up the road Luo and Yi see a monk in saffron robes. People give him food when they pass.

"Why do people give those monks food," Luo grumbles. His stomach grumbles, too.

Yi considers. "I think it's because people recognize the monk's Enlightenment and hope to touch that Enlightenment through charity, thereby bringing themselves a step closer on their own path to Nirvana."

"No," says Luo, "I don't think that's it. It must be because of his fine robes. People feel more comfortable around him because he's not dressed like a beggar. If we had his robes, people would give us food, too."

"Maybe you're right."

Luo and Yi attack the monk! The monk demonstrate his Enlightenment, but he's humble, so it's over quick. Luo and Yi are covered in bruises. The monk leaves. Yi says "that was a very enlightened monk." Luo just groans. Then they both pass out.

Unconscious, they dream. Yi dreams of a mouth-watering banquet. Luo dreams of a soaring hawk, strong and proud in its flight. In Luo's dream, the hawk gives forth an echoing cry.

The noise startles Yi awake. "What was that?"

Enlightenment!

Snowed last night, about as much as the meterologists predicted (which was a bit of a surprise). I woke up early this morning and went to shovel my car out so I could get to work. That was when I looked down the length of the neighbor's driveway - about seven yards of pure, pristine, foot-thick unshoveled snow - and saw the Little Old Lady pushing away in tiny fists and stops with her ancient, heavy shovel. There was really nothing else I could do; I got to work on her driveway.

An hour and a half later I had finished. The Little Old Lady thanked me profusely and gave me a twenty dollar bill, which I'd rather she hadn't done. I told her so, but she refused to take it back. I spent the next hour and a half shoveling out my own walk and clearing off my own car. After all of that, though, I was done. I couldn't be bothered to go into work, so I called out. I didn't call out "sick" or "snow;" I called out "Boy Scout."

Hinduism tells me that I have incurred positive Karma and this will help me be born in a better place in my next incarnation. Christianity and Islam would say something that is, in principle, similar about my post-mortem rewards. I could even take a "new age" approach to Karmic doctirine and say that staying home today (and the $20) is my reward for helping.

Buddhism says fuck that noise, helping out the Little Old Lady is just the social and ethical obligation of any human being and looking to get any reward out of it, in this life or any other, is just going to lead to suffering. For example, if I expect to be rewarded, I will be disappointed when I get in to work tomorrow to find that they've docked me a personal day for not making it in. On the other hand, it's good to smile at a $20 turn of good fortune.

Perhaps strangely, I wasn't expecting any money and I am expecting to be docked a day. I was genuinely happy to help. Maybe I'm better at this Buddhism thing than I thought.

* * *

In other news, I'm taking the opportunity provided by my extra day off to get more writing in. Yeah, I've got an extra day off and I'm being industrious. What happened to the days when I was lazy and proud of it? What's become of me and my slacker ethic?

First, this web comic link from Gabe: Dr. Devious vs. Lincoln High. Because really, the world doesn't have enough web comics. Ok, well, it does. But it doesn't have enough web comics about former evil overlords who're now teaching high school as their rehabilitation. Plus the strip just started two weeks ago, which makes reading their archives a cakewalk. Plus they have a cool site design.

Second, the obligatory comment on my blog and the nature of blogging: It seems like there's some mystic imperitive in blog-land to get existential about your blog - to comment on how infrequently you're posting to it and promise to post more. In lieu, I suppose, of anything else to say. I've been posting a lot. I pay for the site, so I figure I should, right?

My posts lately have been links to and slight commentary on other things because, well, that's easy. Plus some of these things are just odd. I'd like to do more flash fiction, like the sort I posted here and here, the sort that Rebecca Borgstrom does every day on Hitherby Dragons, but that's not easy. I don't have the time while I'm at work, and if I'm writing at home, well, mostly I have serious projects to work on then.

But there's time some days and flash fiction is fun... Well, maybe twice a week, then. Wednesdays and Sundays, let's say. I can spare the idle hours before and after Smallville and West Wing on Wednesdays and the random times on the weekends. Good.

In other news, I meant to post something about it being Valentine's Day on Saturday, but I was busy and didn't have much to say in any case. Can't even call the day "Black Saturday" or whatever this year. I'm totally neutral on it. Which is a nice change of pace.

Last, the writing: I'm 6 chapters and 80 words into the second draft of Fire and Jade and that's all new material. This shows both that the second draft is going much, much slower than I wanted it to and that I had no idea what story I was writing when I did the first draft. At this point I've abandoned all sense of an estimated completion time and will simply say "as soon as I can finish." Tonight I tackle chapter 7.

Well, I'm off to San Francisco tomorrow for the American Camping Association's National Conference. I'll be there until Saturday. Should be a fun time, not the least of which because it'll be my first trip to San Francisco and I'll actually have a little bit of time to explore the city. San Fran is probably the one city in the States that I've always wanted to visit more than any other. No idea why, just has been. Just to fuel my undeserved hippie image, I guess. We'll see if I really like it or only thought I would. I'll try to take pictures.

I won't get any of Fire and Jade done on the trip since I've decided not to bring my laptop with me. With all of the stuff I need to bring for the conference I'll have enough baggage to worry about without it. No biggie, really. Depending on how roomy the flight is and how comfortable my hotel room is I may write one of short stories I've put on the back-burner. If not, the wandering time and the reading I'm bringing will make up for it.

And since I already brought it up: I got in about six thousand words this weekend, which is not the best I've ever done, but better than I have lately. I've also broken past the bit where I was writing entirely new material, which was a major source of frustration for me. Of course, I'm discovering that doing big revisions of old material has its own unique set of problems. Still no clue when the draft'll be done, but I'm about a fourth of the way through it now and finishing is no longer looking like a pipe dream.

Take care, kids. Try not to break anyone while I'm gone.

Jon recently posted a poem he wrote on his livejournal. A bit of a discussion sprang up about poetic form and critique. I'm an indifferent poet at the best of times, and I haven't written poetry in years, but in the interest of sharing I figure I'll subject you all to three of my less crappy poems:

Writer's Block - a rondeau

I'm sitting here lacking inspiration poetic.
I'm tired, I'm hungry and feeling pathetic.
My roommates are all playing video games,
Dropping squares, forming lines which take over their brains.
They sit there calmly as I become frantic.

The cold night outside is quiet and stoic
And bare winter trees offer no thoughts heroic.
The bell rings, it's late and I'm suddenly drained.
I'm sitting here lacking inspiration poetic.

The wind blows in the window. It's howling, melodic.
The rich smell of popcorn is strangely hypnotic.
It's seeping in slowly beneath the door frame
But my lack of a story's still causing me pain.
The absence of vision is strangely ironic.

I'm sitting her lacking inspiration poetic.

The House

Sad and lonely there it stood
The grey old house upon the hill,
Its broken windows and rotten wood
Giving the air of sorrow. Still,
I knew that more than memories lived there,
Those long-abandoned waking dreams
That hung heavy in the stagnant air.

My eyes stared so intently that it seemed
As if I had seen the ghosts
My imagination told me must be hiding
In each decaying shingle, ledge and post.
With sharpened claws they sat deciding
Which parts of me would taste the best.
They'd gobble up my brains and heart
And cackling they'd leave the rest
To scatter to the wind. I darted
Home afraid of wraiths
And left behind no spirits in the house, I know,
But sure as I have breath and faith
Just memories of loss and sorrow
That always dwell in empty homes
When men have gone
And left but bones.

Cursing

A curse upon the weak-willed
Poets of this day and age,
Who write of nothing save their
Dreams of youth or misspent rage.
Who sings today of ancient
Magic or of fiery dragons?
Of brave heroes who with
Sword and shield raised flags on
The fields where lay
The bodies of their fallen foes?
Who knows today Ulysses,
Would follow where his voyage goes;
Through the peril of ten long years
'Til safe on native ground?
Who sings today of Arthur
And the knights of the table round?
When Keats told tale of Endymion
And Coleridge wrote of Kubla Kahn
And dreamed their dreams of ages gone
They both held greatness in their palms.
Yet none worship now Calliope,
Fair muse of epic poetry,
Who brought old Homer to his knees
And made at last the blind man see
The crew of the ships
Who longed for a kiss
From the lips of a maiden fair.
None tell tale of Schezerade
And Arabian nights of sand and air.
So I curse those poets of today
Who know only the span of their own years.
They write important things, perhaps,
But not with ancient blood and sweat and tears.

In recent posts I've mentioned a few of the things that have been going on in my head over the past few weeks, including my thoughts on Digital Religion, my new-found interest in science and my growing concern over cloning (ibid). As an outgrowth of that and some web discussion, I came across this essay by science fiction author Vernor Vinge.

The essay is about what Vinge calls "the Singularity" - the development, by humanity, of greater-than-human intelligence. It's "the Singularity" because, Vinge argues, after it happens, the world as we know it will change quickly and dramatically into something wholly different from what we know it as. In the first half of the essay in a discussion of the most likely (and most popular) form the Singularity might take - Artificial Intelligence. I'm far more interested, though, in the concepts of Intelligence Amplification he discussed in the third quarter of the piece, which is a sort of gestalt between one or more humans and computer networks. Vinge cites the Usenet and Internet as somewhat basic forms of IA and discusses (without naming) the possible development of a sort of informational cyborg.

This is exactly the sort of science fiction I'm interested in working on, so this and related essays make good research, but reading Vinge's essay coincident with finishing Taylor's About Religion makes me think of Intelligence Amplification in terms not only of a scientific, but also a religious gestalt. I'm thinking of a sort of unspoken, underlying sacrality to society - a sort of God-made-flesh, not in the context of Christ, but in the context of, as Taylor quotes early twentieth century anthropologist Emile Durkheim as saying, "god and society [as] only one."

It's an exciting time to be me.

Blog: Slightly wonked due to a hacker. Bastard. Host is cool, providing on-site visits and discussions of poetry. Also, she fixed the blog. Mostly. Last update along these lines lost to the digital ether. Good riddance, I say.

Vitaly: Got married recently. Yay! Nice wedding, very traditional, right down to the break-dancing-Brad-Pitt-look-alike rabbi.

Kiki: Now engaged. About damn time. She and Raphael have only been dating for eight and a half years.

Erin McKeown: Free show at South Street Seaport past Thursday. Excellent music, as always. Open air = poor acoustics but great breeze. Too much sitting, not enough dancing.

Visitations: Something Positive went pro; creator-dude Randy got mad donations and quit his job to do the comic. That's cool. Also, Bekah started a livejournal. Its bilingualness astounds me. Go be astounded too.

Lena: What I said I'd write: Everything she says about why she and I should not be together makes perfect sense. But my life bleeds fiction and makes no sense, so there. Plus, I love fairy tales and happily-ever-afters.

Mother: In hospital for non-serious, non-diabetes problems. Yeesh.

Borges: My current reading. Witty and self-deprecating. Major images are mirrors, labyrinths and knife-fights. Very cool.

Saved: A movie. Pokes fun at very religious types. Funny as hell. Go see it. I want to see it again. And own it on DVD.

Work: Increasingly less busy. Or decreasingly busy. Whichever. Yay.

School: Registration papers to arrive... soon?

Writing: It's June. Leave me the fuck alone.

Back to a regular schedule presently.

I'm not the first person to do this, and I doubt I'll be the last, but some of my spam over the past few days has been particularly lyrical. I've changed some punctuation here and there, but not a single word. So, here we go:

Support Group Curses

Fetishist living with philosophers,

Behind dolphin and gypsy,

Behind oil filters.

What made America great?

Still pee from blood clot near customers.

Boogie her about,

Curse with near power drill.

He called her Kevin

(or was it Kevin?)

Synchronous intimal betoken position.

Fancy white.

Ridiculous.

Curse Labyrinths

Unlike so many necromancers

Who have made their gentle onlooker to us,

Unlike so many brides

Who have made their boiled avocado pit to us,

And pour freezing cold water

On the dark side of her maestro,

Dingy gainesville buried whomever.

The trouble with natural disasters is that, to the layman's eye, they all leave the same sort of wreckage behind when they're done. Oh, while they're happening there are certain visual cues that you can use to tell, say, a tornado apart from a volcanic eruption, but once the dust has settled (so to speak), it's really impossible for anyone but an expert to tell a tsunami from an orbital laser strike. It's not really the natural disasters' fault; the things weren't exactly build with subtlety in mind. They can't help but be what they are. (Though there are always those who mutter that maybe, with a bit of better parenting, some stricter rules around the house and so on...) So unless someone were there at the time, unless they'd witnessed it themselves and lived to tell the tale, no one but an expert would ever know what it was that had reduced a city to kindling.

Which leaves us with two types of people: experts and survivors. The experts aren't so bad, so long as you don't mind the sort of stern, serious-minded people who wear white lab-coats as a matter of habit and tend to frown thoughtfully into their morning coffee. They put on faces that smile well enough when they find something salvagable in the wreckage, they joke with each other over beers when the day is through, and when they award points (for thoroughness, for wantonness, for artistic merit), they make sure to sort through all of the evidence first and award their points to the right player in the game. They do their best and if they make mistakes, well, they're only human.

The survivors, though, they're a scary bunch. They've seen natural disasters at work first-hand. They've seen the atomic fires Godzilla breathes out, endured the indignity and pain of the stings of hundreds of thousands of Africanized Killer Bees and seen the earth quake under the weight of buildings. But they've also heard the tight-band microwave transmissions, the ones that direct the carnage. The survivors, the ones that aren't catatonic, they've decided they don't like living on the playing field of a game for billionaires, aliens and gods. They've found enough left in the wreckage of the cities to build from. And they're ready to start playing a game of their own.

(On a purely factual level, concerning the actual detritus of natural disasters, this entry made much more sense while I was half-awake and half-dreaming at three in the morning. On a conceptual level, this is a topic I will revisit elsewhen, for something that doesn't make a lot of sense to begin with.)

(Since I refuse to have a day of totally negative thoughts, no matter how screwed I am, I present to you this work of short fiction, titled as above. I'm rather proud of it, so please spread word of its presence both far and wide. Tell everyone you know that it's here.)

I woke up groggy, my head clouded with so much cotton I could almost feel it coming out of my nose. I lurched out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom before my brain caught up with me enough to remember The Ring.

I felt it, heavy on my finger, but I looked anyway, just to be sure. It was always smaller than I expected; in my mind it was huge, big as my hand, and perfect and Green. The Ring was teasingly cool against my skin, that one single piece of… what is it? Crystal? Plastic? Glass?

I stared at it for a while, thinking, and by the time I looked away I was showered and dressed and standing in the sun, my headache a thing of the past. I was wearing shades, too, with perfect polarization. Rose-tinted glasses have nothing on Green.

There was a crowd of people at the roadside, waiting for the bus. I smiled when I saw them, thought Green Thoughts and I was gone. When you’ve got The Ring, you make your own transportation.

I worked then, at an internet sales desk. A trained monkey could’ve done my job, it was that easy. Just read from the script whenever someone calls. That was fine by me. I let my mouth run on autopilot and saved my Green Thoughts for The Ring. I used it to play Battlebots on my desk.

My girlfriend called while I was at work, told me we needed to talk, seriously talk, and asked me to make dinner. I complained. After all, what did I need to eat for? The Ring pumps me full of oxygen, makes my enzymes for me. Like Chlorophyll. But she started yelling, so I gave in. When I got home, though, I just wasn’t in the mood. I sat down to watch the Packers’ game and thought Green Thoughts so The Ring would take care of dinner.

The food turned out good; chicken quesadillas, heavy on the guacamole, and a broccoli rabe and avocado salad. When my girlfriend got home, I sat her down at the table, poured her a glass of wine and showed her dinner. “Look honey,” I said. “Green!”

She stormed out pretty quick, but she left a note behind. It had only two words, “Fuck Green,” and it was written with a Yellow hi-lighter. The Ring really hated that note.

I didn’t follow after. I didn’t want to think about my girlfriend, so I thought Green Thoughts instead and The Ring helped me forget her name.

I didn’t go in to work the next day, or the day after that. I was a little busy, thinking Green Thoughts. I felt like a kid again, my army men set up across the floor, battling in formation. But it was even better now. Thanks to The Ring, they moved on their own. I lay there and I played Captain Nemo in a Green submarine, Chuck Yeager in a Green airplane and Edmund Hillary with Green sherpas. The Ring told me those names, when I asked.

My manager called to ask why I hadn’t been in, then to threaten me with unemployment. He stopped calling when the phone company cut the line. It doesn’t really matter; if I need to talk to anyone, The Ring will help me out.

The power went next, but if I think Green Thoughts The Ring will make all the light I need. The Ring makes a TV that tunes me in to fifty-thousand channels, most of which no one else on earth will ever see. I got kicked out of my apartment a while back, too, so now I live in a house that The Ring made for me.

Sometimes I think about my girlfriend and I get lonely, but The Ring makes me something that takes care of that, too. And it’s better, much better, than it was with my girlfriend. I don’t need her anymore.

I don’t really need anyone.

Just The Ring, and my Green, Green Thoughts.

As I continue to explore this strange country named "writing," I wanted to try something a little different than my more usual novelistic stuff that takes forever to finish and people wait forever to see. So, I've set up a new project for myself; something quick and readable for people to enjoy. I've set up a site for me to post a series of short stories, each no more than 500 words. It's a sort of webcomic without pictures, a sort of serialized digital storytelling.

The series is called "Fables From the Morning After" and the site to visit is http://fables.bleedingfiction.com.

I'm going to update every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Read and enjoy. Give me feedback.

Most important, please spread word of this as far and wide as you can. Tell everyone you know about it. If you've got a website or a blog, please give me a link. I ask because, well, the wider the readership I get the more people I can (hopefully) entertain, the more feedback I'm likely to get and, yes, it's possible that, somewhere down the line, someone's going to want to give me money for this. I mean, hey, it works for some of the web-comics out there; why not for me?

So, please do check out the site and please do spread the word. It would really mean a lot to me.

I've been thinking about my post from yesterday and the conversation that followed, and I've turned that thinking towards something that's been on my mind quite a bit lately: webcomics. There are a lot of webcomics out there, and they have a lot of different formats. Some, like Penny Arcade don't have any continuity to speak of. But some of them really are telling a story. I'm thinking here of both MegaTokyo and Sluggy Freelance. MegaTokyo's just starting to really get into the heart of it - the love story - but Sluggy's been going on for a long time now. It still has a lot of heart, but I think it's best days are behind it. Like the X-men, I think it could be put to rest and I'd love to see Pete go on to something new.

So, why go on about this at such length? Why bother with a second post on it? Because I'm thinking about the Fables, that's why. When I started planning this whole thing, a few months back, I had a general idea of the setup, but no real clue where I was going with it. Over the past week, I've realized that I actually have a story to tell with the Fables. There's a beginning, a middle and an end. When all is said and done, this story should take me about a year and a half to tell, and then it's gone. In a lot of ways, it's a relief to me. It gives me something to work for, rather than just spitting something out every few days, but if it goes on longer, if it expands into something bigger than I expect it to be, well, I'm not under any pressure to cut it short, either.

...for those of you who are reading both this blog and the Fables:

Would it be helpful, or generally a good idea, for me to number the individual Fables? 1, 2, 3 and so on down the line?

Please advise.

The moving men brought my property to me this morning. Everything was nicely in order, except for my desk, which came to me divided into three separate pieces. For reference, my desk is not meant to be compactable. So I still have no desk, which means it's still a pain in the ass to get work done.

On the plus side, though, I have a bed, which will make for comfortable sleeping. As opposed to the sleeping bag on the floor.

I also have my CDs. They were the first thing I looked for, of course. I sliced through a dozen boxes to find them. It's incredible how just a few bars of music can change your perspective. Well, maybe not change your perspective per se (since I actually have the same perspective on things now that I did yesterday), but at least lighten your load a little. I popped in a CD (Dar Williams, of course) and my troubles just seemed lighter. Not gone, just a little easier to cope with.

Along with my other things, though, was a book that I needed to write today's Fable, so a slight delay came in there. I still got it up on Wednesday, though, so it's all good. Except for the part where I'm not thrilled with how it came out. I think I rushed through it too quickly. With the power of the internet, I may go back and edit it later. Won't much help the people who've read it already, but anyone reading it in the future will get something better out of it. And I'll be more satisfied with it, which counts for a lot.

This week marks the end of the character introduction phase of the Fables From the Morning After. I've got a few more characters to introduce, to be sure, and some of them quite soon. But the core twelve characters and the main six locations are now out there for the world to see. Not bad; it only took a month and a half.

So, from here on in, it's pretty much about the story. But the thing is, there's a lot of story. More to the point, there's a lot of different stories that all build up to a larger story. After all, I'm dealing with twelve main characters here (some of whom I have more to say about than others, of course); that really adds up.

I've got two options for dealing with this. One, I could make it linear. That is, I pick one story and run with it until it's done and then start on the next. The flaw here is that I'll end up with long periods of time before we even see certain other characters again. Also, linear storytelling can be boring. Option two is that I make it non-linear; I intertwine stories together, skipping from one to another, thereby making the whole more complex. This is good and it's what I'm going to do.

Where I run into trouble, though, is figuring out how many stories to keep going at once. It's like juggling. You toss a knife in the air, then follow it with another and a third. If you're a good juggler you can juggle more than that, maybe fix or six or seven, and your routine becomes more interesting. But if you juggle too many, you can't keep track and you drop them all, possibly through your hand. As a result, a certain judiciousness is called for on the part of the juggler.

So, given that I update three days a week, how many knives do I keep in the air at once? How many is enough for variety but not so many that each individual story gets lost in the flash of aerial steel? I'm not sure yet, though I need to figure it out soon. I welcome opinions and suggestions on the subject.

And remember, kids, if your parents don't give you at least five dollars for the juggler, it means they don't love you.

I posted a little short story called Green Thoughts a while back. It's sort of about Green Lantern. I said, at the time, that I was going to work on turning it into a comic book script. I finished that at the end of last week.

Today, I sent my script off to the fine folks at D.C. Comics, hopes and dreams attached. It's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that they'll buy it and pay me money and turn it into a comic book.

Cross your fingers and wish me luck, you bastards.

I'm pretty fond of the story I wrote as today's Fable. Go ahead and check it out if you haven't already. I'll wait.

Done? Did you like it? I hope so. I don't think that it's my best piece, at least in terms of technical craftsmanship or whatnot, but it was pretty entertaining to write and I do think it was one of my more clever pieces so far.

Why am I bringing this up, you may wonder. Well, I would never in a million years have the temerity to do this myself, and it would be a billion years or more before I asked anyone to do it for me, but if one of my readers had ever thought of cruising over to Websnark and suggesting to Eric Burns that the Fables might be worth checking out and snarking about... well, let's just say that today might be a particularly good day to do that.

Not that you heard that from me.

Then again, maybe it's just that it's nearing one in the morning and I'm a little loopy. Maybe I'll be so embarassed at the very idea of this post that, come morning, I'll be forced to delete it from my blog in a fit of blushing embrassment. We'll see what the morning brings...

I've previously mentioned that the Fables started as some fiddly bits of character interaction and have since evolved into an actual story.

I realized today that I'm actually serializing a novel. Sheesh. The whole point was that I was supposed to be doing short fiction, right? Little itty bitty bits of short fiction. And yet here comes this big story.

At the same time, the Fables are very much not a novel. Leaving aside the Set Pieces (and some similar entries that will follow, which are all entirely different creatures), every entry is (part of) a distinct scene. The entries that are more immediate, that are more scene and less fluff are the ones I get the best responses on (and, also, the ones I'm happiest with). There are little things that I leave out; the down-time, the connections between the scenes, (a lot of) the exposition. That's fine, really. The scenes are the parts that people really remember, anyway.

Still, I'm accomplishing what I wanted to do; I'm putting up a regular dose of fiction for people to read and give me feedback on. My readership seems somewhere in the area of one hundred and fifty people, which is cool, and feedback has mostly been positive (and constructive) which is also cool. So props to my readers.

Speaking of my readers, one recently asked me what genre the Fables are. He pointed out (astutely) that both Dog and Horse have swords and that folks effectively need to hop into a rowboat to cross a river. At the same time, he noted, there's a giant dam and a diner that used to be a space ship and a radio broadcast tower. I would answer this question myself, but Debra Doyle provides me with a much wittier answer (quoted from here):

If it has horses and swords in it, it's a fantasy, unless it also has a rocketship in it, in which case it becomes science fiction. The only thing that'll turn a story with a rocketship in it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.

As today's Fable should nicely demonstrate, Sheep is a huge pain in my ass. What possessed me to create a character who is undergoing an emotional metamorphosis and is at the same time mute and thereby unable to vocalize her feelings? What made me think that a character whose personality is that she effectively has no personality would be someone I could write about?

If I'm lucky, people will at least feel some sympathy for her utter pitifulness (pitiability?).

I've got some interesting things to do with Sheep, eventually, but it'll take a little while to get there. Until then, I get drivel like today's post and I have to dread every entry I write with Sheep in it. Until then:

Bah!

Thanks to a link from Megatokyo a few weeks back I found this PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi. A Doujinshi is a fan manga - a manga drawn by a fan using the characters from a pre-existing manga. It's essentially visual fan fiction.

This PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi is tremendously awesome. It's got great art, which is part of it, but it also extends beyond the realms of the PPG cartoon itself to bring in pretty much every major character from a Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon cartoon series, including Samurai Jack, Dexter's Lab, Invader Zim, Courage, Fairly Odd Parents, Teenage Robot, Time Squad, Megas, Billy & Mandy and Johnny Bravo and it actually blends these characters together in a way that's surprisingly compelling and true to form. So, I really dig this comic.

I don't generally get fan fiction. I'm not trying to insult the quality of the material; I've never read more than a handful of examples. I mean only that I don't understand what would prompt someone to spend time writing it or why a fan would much want to read it. I suppose it's because I tend to have as much love of an author's writing style as I do a character and tend to think of characters as being fairly inextricable from the stories that they're involved in (which is to say I put primacy on story and character as the fuel for that story, as opposed to primacy on character and the story as the thing a results from the character's actions; a subtle distinction). And yet here I am, delighting in the insanity of this comic, which is a fan fiction.

And even as I'm thinking about this I'm doing research/taking notes for two different comic proposals (one to Marvel, one to DC), both of which involve pre-existing comic characters. And I stop for a second and I realize that writing a comic book for a pre-existing character is writing fan fiction. You pick up your pen and you write (or draw) a Superman story not for the unique voice of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster or for the "strange visitor from another planet" story but to attach your name to the power and iconography that is Superman, that has been Superman for more than fifty years (I can't find the quote right now, but a great comic writer once wrote "When you write Superman, you don't leave your mark on him; Superman leaves his mark on you.").

It makes sense, of course. At least to me. Superheroes are the only characters that I see as big enough, that I see as having enough of their own reality (separate from their stories), that I have enough of a sense of ownership of or entitlement to to write about. (And this is limited to only a few superheroes, at that.) Superman's my mythology; why shouldn't I tell a Superman story if I have one to tell? If someone else feels that strongly about Harry Potter or Captain Kirk or whoever else, well, more power to them, and through the lens of superheroes I can understand, on some level, what they're doing even if I don't feel the same connection to their characters of choice.

At the same time, I wouldn't have an interest in writing fan fiction for non-professional reasons. That is to say, I'd want to see if I could get it published. Green Thoughts, which I guess is a sort of Green Lantern fan fiction, came to me as prose, but even as I put the first word to paper I knew that when I was done, when I'd gotten the structure of the story down, I'd turn it into a comic script and send it off to DC. That, of course, may just be my desire to do this writing thing for a living coming through, though.

Today, with all of that bubbling in my brain for the past few weeks, Teresa blogged about something she saw relating to the discussion of fan fiction vis-a-vis professional fiction. To wit: because of that sense of ownership, because of the nothing-to-lose-non-professional nature of fan fiction, because of the slashy nature of a lot of the stuff and because of a dozen other reasons, fan fiction writers are more engaged with the "squishy" stuff (the sex and the blood), and often better engaged with it than professional writers, who tend to feel uncomfortable with it and either handle it stiffly or avoid it altogether, to the detriment of their writing.

Which could bring me to an issue I'm trying to tackle with the Fables right now. But I realize that I've gone on long enough already and that the story currently available to the viewing public does not yet make this a good topic for conversation in a public place.

Right. Back from my vacation-ish thing. Not much point in re-capping what I did, since I saw a good portion of you while I was in that there New York Metropolitan Area.

Also, I didn't do much that was unique. Fun, sure. But not unique. It was the usual round of restaurants and bars, staying out drinking and eating and talking to all hours of the night. I got to see almost everyone I expected to and even a few folks who popped up out of nowhere and took me by surprise. Good stuff.

Some highlights of the trip:

House of Flying Daggers: Cool, but not as cool as Hero. It was more of a "standard fare" of wuxia movie than something with a huge amount of style. Also, some of the plot twists, while leading to a cool climax, were a little hard to stomach of believe.

Phantom of the Opera: I hate seeing movies with my parents, because they do things like talk through them. Phantom was visually spectacular, the girl who played Christine was beyond belief and Minnie Driver Rocked. I was disappointed in much of the characterization of the Phantom himself and at the deletion of a few of Raoul's lines. Overall, very worthwhile but I preferred the version I've seen on stage so many times.

Gifts: I would really rather my parents didn't get me gifts anymore, but if they're going to, they could've done worse than they did this year. They got me an iPod! A 40G iPod! Woo hoo! Also, they got me the first two volumes of the collected Peanuts, which may actually be cooler than the iPod. I love Peanuts and the first two volumes, filled with things I've never seen before, strips that are so different but still so identifiably Peanuts, are just beyond belief.

Surface Area: My parents don't really believe in flat surfaces. If they see something flat, they feel an inexplicable need to make it bumpy. As a result, their furniture is draped over with small statues, piled decorative boxes, plants and wicker. This makes it very hard for people like me to do things like put our wallets, keys, etc. down anywhere when we go to sleep at night.

Furniture: I bought a desk while I was away, through a mail-order catalog. Also, a bookshelf, through Ikea.com. These things should be here shortly. Yay!

Writing: I didn't write as much as I planned to. I didn't fall far flat, though. I wrote one short story, outlined a second, wrote a half-dozen Fables and took copious notes for two comic proposals (the only thing keeping me from writing the proposals themselves being that I've no clue what one looks like or is supposed to go in to one and couldn't find said information with the resources I had to hand).

And that's the most of it. I had a good trip, overall, and was happy to see everyone, but I'm also happy to be back. I missed having my own space, I missed defining my own schedule to do simple things (like, say, shower) and I missed the atmosphere of (as a few folks insisted on calling it) the Pacific Northwest.

Now, back to my regularly scheduled life.

I need to know how to say "Shoot him!" in Spanish. You know, as in a Columbian drug lord ordering one of his lackeys to fire his gun at the attacking American commando. Anyone with experience in this sort of thing?