On Writing | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

3/Aug/2015

On the Music of Language and All That: review of Le Ton Beau de Marot, by Douglas R. Hofstadter

I’m trying to write this review to sort out my thoughts on the leviathan and a half of a book that is Douglas Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. Here is one of my thoughts. Observe a new symbol make its way into language: it squiggles and squirms and then suddenly it’s everywhere, diluted, like you just stepped on a worm on the pavement. This is not a bad thing nor a good thing, except maybe for the integrity of the worm. It’s just how we process language, you know. A useful image comes into our possession and we paint it everywhere until it only means itself. Hofstadter would like it if I provided an example or two with my generalisation here, because that is the best way he knows to get information across. Very well.

Take sexting, that utterly ridiculous word. Sometime a few years ago some American news channels got their collective breaths caught in their throats by another in their ritualistic series of tantrums about teenagers having sex lives, or preambles thereto. Apparently, teenagers were sending each other erotic messages via cell-phones. Possibly even, and look away now for a while, nude pictures, colloquially known as “nudes.” Texts about sex. Sexts. This word took the US by storm, and when something takes the US by storm, the US takes to the Internet. Especially Twitter. It became a thing to preface your tweets with “sext:” and then say something longing, something horny, or something plain weird (the humour mostly coming from trying to imagine things like “sext: I stuffed your refrigerator with crystals” as a serious mating call). Patricia Lockwood deserves a mention here because her sext poems are amazing, though we have come to expect sexts from her now, so we don’t get them anymore. Her other poetry is equally amazing.

Anyway, likely, people have not actually changed their erotic messaging habits because of this word, but the word has become a thing. What you are referring to now when you preface a statement with “sext:” is this weird tradition, not any actual attempt at passing your statement off as a human version of that bellowing sounds that moose make when they’re in heat. Or, should I say, that’s what I do. Sometimes I pass through the tradition and come out on the moose-noise side too, though.

Hofstadter’s book is full of translations of one particular French poem. Some of them are pretty good and get the message across very smoothly. But somewhere along the line, he just looses it. The translations start to be based on new challenges on top of the translation challenge, because the translators (most of them being Hofstadter himself) feel like they have mastered the art of translating this one particular poem from French into English. How many enjambments can we stuff into the poem? Can we change the genders expressed? Can we change the rhythm? Hofstadter has very rigid ideas but demonstrates and admits that he doesn’t know quite where his stiffness comes from. I could see where it was going, though, when a translation that reads “… Has some bug / Laid you up? / Made you up- / chuck a lot? / Knuckle not / Under, but …” shows up somewhere in the middle of the tome. (That is also the sequence of lines quoted in the only other review of this book I’ve read, and I feel bad about that, but oh well. Take it as a sign that this particular line was particularly egregious.) That is not a good translation of the Marot poem, but he is very proud of it. I will get back to that. Essentially, there comes a point in the book where the only way to appreciate the poems he shows us is by having read all the other poems, and had the French original explained to us in painfully clear language. At the end of this particular trainwreck of thought is a lipogrammatic explanation of John Searle’s Chinese Room Experiment written in the format of the original Marot poem, and Hofstadter has the audacity to call it a translation. Gasp.

A Cubical Kubrickal Rubrical

The structure of the book is this: I’m at this family gathering. I am fourteen years old, I would perhaps rather be out talking to my older, cooler cousins, but I’m listening to my uncle talk and he never shuts up. I don’t know which side of the family he’s from. Maybe he just barged in here. He talks about anything, everything, occasionally says incredibly racist things without realizing it. (At one point, he compares the Israeli government to the Nazi regime, not based on things they do that are actually genocidal but based on their fucking attitude to language, which is shared by the Academie Française and countless other institutions, but he doesn’t find the symmetry of comparing the French or the Icelandic to Nazis funny so he doesn’t mention those. At another point, he recounts an anecdote about a tribesman asking questions of an anthropologist, and because he’s a tribesman, Hofstadter calls him naïve and laughs at him, even though what he did in the unsourced anecdote sounds more like sarcasm (to me). But I digress. Hofstadter deplores racism where he can see it.) Mostly he comes back to two topics: his dead wife and the translation of poetry. And he gets drunker and drunker, avuncularer and avuncularer. The bits about his wife are very touching, and she sounds like she was a wonderful person, and I am sorry for his loss. I wish he would shut up about the translation of poetry, though. I’ve structured this review like it’s a bit of his book, because, well, why not. Nothing has meaning, it just repeats until it can reference itself. And then it does that until there are two factions: those who are smug about it, and those who are smug about having fun. No-one has fun.

Tous grêlent le nuage incandescent

One of Hofstadter’s main rigidities is that he doesn’t think poetry is poetry unless it’s the very metrical and rhyming things that you can imagine wouldn’t trouble a troubadour. He respects form very much. He doesn’t understand that with the millions of young men who marched right into death in the First World War, the authority of the old form completely disappeared. He doesn’t realize that the war poets faltered the more they were shot at, lost the grip on rhyme schemes the more they died. Near the end of his life – he could not know but he suspected his luck was running out – Wilfred Owen wrote a poem rhyming with consonant clusters more than the fullness preferred by, say, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Here’s the first stanza:

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

– Wilfred Owen, from “Arms and the Boy” (1918)

I mean, that’s just one poem. He kept trying to rhyme until the end, for certain. His sonnets were breaking down. He kept being ordered to shoot. Hofstadter doesn’t know this. Hofstadter thinks poetry should be beautiful, should concern only love or grief or scenery, more or less. To him it shouldn’t be about cruelty, shouldn’t be rooted in its time but rather you should easily be able to shovel it up and move it elsewhere, like a factory of bonsai gardens.

Another rigidity of Hofstadter’s is that only native speakers can translate poetry. As evidence for this, he at one point offers up his graceless “Knuckle not / under but”let in the middle of one translation, saying he has a hard time imagining a non-native speaker wielding language so skillfully as he has done right there. Take it in. Don’t take too much of it in, though, for your own good. That’s graceless gunk right there, honestly. Hofstadter also translates a poem into French at one point, probably because he contains multitudes or some shit.

私はGoogle翻訳に「Googleの翻訳」と「日本の「ヒット型付け

Another thing Hofstadter talks a lot about is artificial intelligence, especially the machines’ use of language. This book has taught me why the Chinese Room Experiment is silly. For which, thanks, I guess. I already knew it was silly, but now I can dismiss it with reason. The thing about machine translation that Hofstadter brings up but doesn’t really explore is that it all rests on the immense weight carried by the human translators that came before. That metaphor was inconsistent on purpose. I see no way that machine translation as it exists today or in the next hundred years can learn to do more than repeat things that old translators have said before. Perhaps this is a failure of imagination on my part, similar to the failure which Hofstadter accuses John Searle of imagining, but still.

As a tangent, Google Translate – what seems to be the best thing out there – still uses English as an intermediary language between other languages, almost as if they are deliberately making machine translation seem unappealing. I think you have to teach machines to think before you can teach them to speak, and teach them to speak before you can teach them to write, and then to translate. I don’t think anyone is really trying to teach machines to think. I doubt you can teach the bloody things to dream before you can teach them to sleep.

En underrubrik på svenska. De betyder ingenting ändå

What also becomes clear from reading the book is that Hofstadter considers translation to be an equally creative endeavour as is writing at all. Sometimes translation requires even more ingenuity, he almost says.

The combination of the last of his rigidities up there, that you can only translate into your native language, and the thing he traipses around but wants to say here, that translation is extremely creative, is this: Hofstadter thinks that you can’t write poetry in a language you did not grow up speaking. This is not a bad book, but don’t take it as an authority on anything except maybe artificial intelligence, the things that Hofstadter has actually worked on.

I like form. I write rhyming poetry when the mood strikes me. I attempt grace. Hofstadter makes me want to write ugly poetry.

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

– Issa (trans. Robert Hass)

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22/Jun/2015

FakeReview: Bedouin Some by Georgia Atlanta

The first thing you see when you walk into a bookstore these days, for the coming few weeks at least, is the garish cover of Georgia Atlanta’s first and last book, its title chosen by some arcane process by controversial Penguin editor and publisher Mars Gauchèlle. Bedouin Some is a perfect example of outsider art becoming mainstream while still keeping the outsider on the outside. I won’t go into details about the publishing history – you can find those accounts everywhere on the Internet yourself – but suffice to say it is one thing when a real person writes under a pseudonym and another thing entirely when a pseudonym starts writing under a real person. That is all I will say about that.

I bought a used copy of the book, since I do not want to support the industry that exploits authors so, but I do want to support Bethy, the woman who owns my local used bookstore “The Man Cave.” She is a lovely lady. She is also crepuscular and coiled with age, which means she cannot reach up to change the sign from what the store was called before it was a bookstore. Therefore I might have a slightly different first impression of the book than those who buy it crispy clean and bright yellow from Waterstones, not to mention those who get it streamed into their brain through the nostrils or whatever it is the hyperkindles do. This discrepancy between editions of such a recently published book only serves to underline for me the very ununiversal nature of reading a book: you can never read the same book as your friends. You can never even read the same book twice.

Bethy also sold me the book on the cheap, saying it would soon be “unprinted.” I asked her if books that go out of print aren’t worth more, eventually, and whether or not she should be hoarding these, but she did not think so. This is all to say, my copy of this book looks like a train ran over it, which is fitting.

Georgia Atlanta introduces us to a Ginko-like protagonist, Fievrish Qualm, who partakes in what the narrator – understood to be him at an advanced age – charmingly calls “adventures.” His task, which is either the task given to him by the penumbral figure called the Unauthor or the exact opposite of that task, is to collect literature that belongs to a nebulous but flourishing genre, a movement of literature, that he calls hole fiction, HoleFi for short. Most of them exist only as original manuscripts, things publishers wouldn’t touch, although Mr. Qualm can sense them, somehow.

You are sensing a pattern here, I hope. This outsider art comments on the outside nature of outsider art, but in the world above the adventures of Mr. Qualm, publishing houses have grown legs and opened their maws to throw themselves over the identity of Mrs. Atlanta. Something obscure in a world below becomes hallowed in the world above. The unbearable jerk that is Holden Cauliflower is revered as an American hero in the world that read his book. Hole fiction, stories set in worlds of legends and heroes, is buried in plain dirt in the world inhabited by Mr. Qualm, but dug up like treasure in the world inhabited by Mars Gauchèlle, if that is his real name.

It’s all rather perverse, really. Mr. Qualm purports to start a doomed publishing venture and bankrupt himself, or maybe the bankrupcy orchestrated is that of the Unauthor. A few throwaway lines (like the Unauthor’s vague rant about “the reproducibility of glitches,” and Mr. Qualm’s own living cancer) suggest that they plan on breaking out of their little world and joining the “beings akin to them,” as Nabokov would have called them. All to make money from this literary sensation. As if to add to the perversity, most of the time the literature he tries to find has been destroyed by well-meaning relatives who think that Max Brod is a villain. Here the pattern is again: the literature that does no longer exist in Qualm’s world is something of a sensation in the world above, where it does not exist yet, but rest assured there will be fanfiction.

Which brings me to my last realization upon reading this frivolously titled Arabian noctography, something you’ve perhaps already pieced together: this book does not actually exist. I have been treating it as a book that is real, but it will soon be unprinted. When I am not actively reading it, I do not really see that collection of paper as a book. It is rather something concrete and thus somehow less real than a story. When I quote it, I am making things up. When Fievrish Qualm reads his forgotten manuscripts, they exist and I’m right there with him, but when he stops they fade out of existence. He never quotes a whole fiction, only bits and pieces. You’re not even getting that, are you? To put it another way: HoleFi is a genre. Meanwhile, in the world above, outsider art is no genre, it is a medium. In this world, the world above, stories written by loners all might share some common characteristics in themes of pariahdom and the longing for legendary status. In the world below, there are well-developed tropes, stock characters, common plot twists, and intertextual references, all developed by authors who never spoke to one another or even knew that they were not alone. If you read those scenes closely, you will see the implied author is saying that they did communicate even though they did not know it, while the implied implied author is adamant that they are all referencing events which the implied author is purposefully keeping from us in order to tell her story. What I am telling you is that there are worlds between the worlds here, and the book has folded in on itself in a way that will soon make it stop existing. As soon as you stop reading this,

Last week, my review The Cult of Numbers was published by Pamphlets for the Apocalypse! It is a review of a book that doesn’t exist, just like this one, and tells the tale of what happens when a cult forms around a one-of-a-kind textbook on economy. Please buy it, and tell your easily influenced friends to buy it, too. They rely on you for guidance. Don’t let them down:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/237006205/the-cult-of-numbers-johannes-punkt-with

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21/Mar/2013

Announcement and Advisories

Short version: daily flash fiction! Trigger Policy updated! Read things what aren’t my writings also!

Hello! I’m Johannes Punkt and you may know me from such PR stunts as travelling into your dreams and releasing spiders all over the place! Haha, who am I kidding, that’s a thing that starts tonight. Starting today, I will resume a thing I hiatused almost a year ago with the Day of a Whole Lot of Drabbles (2012/06/28/the-day-of-a-whole-lot-of-drabbles/). That is right, I will post drabbles (self-contained 100-word flash stories), once a day, for at least a few months. The first of these will go up in about six hours if my calculations are correct.

I have updated the Trigger Policy page. It is now different from before, in light of the change of pace and content of this blog. You can read the whole thing at /triggers/

I have made the decision to not put any warnings, trigger or otherwise, to the daily drabbles that appear on this blog. Please be aware that anything that shows up might be upsetting and proceed with caution. It is impossible for me to warn adequately as triggers are often too specific for a generalized warning to be useful.

The bigger posts like the conlanging and technobabbling will be less common now, perhaps one every three or four weeks, or when inspiration strikes. I will try to review a book again and maybe make that a thing; that was fun.

Lastly, I will mention some serials I am enjoying at the moment. In order of the installations’ length.

The Ritual is like a treasure hunt that is currently most likely to turn you into a dead wooden statue that always stares and never blinks. mercerbox.wordpress.com/tag/the-ritual/

The First 500 is like a few details of a huge painting being filled in slot by slot like a meandering snake, and the brushstrokes are wide and the details are fine. alastairjrball.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-first-500.html

Berlin Confidential is always on my list of recommended reading because damn why is this not a big thing yet? It has mysterious murders, tension, myriad and well-defined characters, angst, gay sex, and Weimar Berlin. AND MORE. I can never sum it up. Just go read it. berlinconfidential.tumblr.com/story

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28/Jan/2013

Open Letter to Ken Woodruff

[Trigger Warning: rape, bad police officers, torture]

[Spoiler Warning: uh, season 2, episode 14 of The Mentalist]

Hello Ken,

I hope you appreciate feedback. This open letter concerns an episode, Blood In, Blood Out of the hit show The Mentalist, an episode which you wrote. More specifically it concerns the ending of it, which I felt was handled very very poorly. I know it is an old episode, and I hope that your writing has grown since.

When you (general you) do writing, you generally write about what’s important to you, and ignore what is not important. I think there was a scene in your episode where you (specific you) overlooked something very important, and I am going to explain why. Do excuse all this build-up before I get to my actual point. It is here so that you (or other readers of this letter) do not misconstrue my critique.

It was a well-told story; you explored a new side of Kimball Cho [an agent of law]; you tied everything together nicely at the end; there were some cool scenes with guns in them.

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1/Dec/2012

NaNoWriMo is over

The old Romans partied so hard at the end of the year that they had to have a few monthless months between the end of the old year and the start of the new year. Winter was the of the world. The old are not people to look up to.

I got some useful writing done. Certainly, more useful writing than I would have got done, had I not NaNoWriMoed. Now,about 20,000 or more of the 50,016 words I wrote are complete unredeemable bollocks, but a 2:3 useless:useful ratio ain’t half bad, I hear certain actually publisehed people hang around at 5:1. I might be misrepresenting interview snippets to make myself look better.

I didn’t go with The Great Onebyone very far. I had plotted at least 30,000 words and figured I would do that famous seat-of-the-pants thing that many writers do. I seem to suffer from brevititis, however, an at 6,000 words I was almost out of plot. Next year I will bring bullet lists and diagrams. I am still not sure how I managed to write >50,000 words on a single project in previous years, but somehow I did it. If I plan obsessively until next November, I might be able to make one idea stick for that much. The brevititis must be fought back though, so I better plan for thrice as many words as that. (Thank you, Jaymes.)

I inspired people and was inspired. I made friends. I made some terrible puns. I made some terrible puns at friends. I failed at creating trending hashtags on Twitter.

Shout out to Evan and the Ghost Bear, Eros Fountain, the Ministry of Plenty, Tiaxint, and a bunch of other things whose creators I respect a great deal.

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6/Nov/2012

Rules of Style

Presented with only this for a comment: these are things I need to remind myself when writing; it does not contain some of the more – to me – obvious writing rules such as ‘no rule is omniapplicable’. List updated as of 30-dec-2015. Subject to change; am still figuring things out.

1: start the story where it needs to be started for the rest to make sense, not earlier.

i. chronology is appreciated. Every scene shall be the obvious choice of scene given the preceding scene. This also goes for sentences.

2: use ‘thought/felt’ as little as possible. [The show-don’t-tell rule. Courtesy of Chuck Palahniuk.]

3: no thesis statements/topic sentences. Do not start your paragraphs with ‘Gullvig was in love’ just to follow up with examples of how in love Gullvig is. Just give the examples directly.

4: do use specific examples and not category nouns, if possible. ‘His car drove into a tree’ vs ‘his ’78 Buick hit an oak’.

i. however do not exaggerate; do not confuse or anger with this.

5: if possible, write what people DO rather than what they do NOT do. What they do not do becomes clear from what they do.

i. to accentuate something a person does not do, make hir do the thing in a previous scene; use repetition to highlight the lack of doing.

1. if it is important to show what someone does not do, there is often a good verb for it. E.g. ‘avoided’ or ‘fasted’.

6: read everything aloud. If possible, get someone else to read your shit aloud.

7: as few words as possible to say as much as possible; verbs over phrasal verbs.

i. verbs over nouns.

ii. and over but; metaphor over simile.

8: on flow and feel: sentences trump individual words; paragraphs trump sentences.

9: obsess over details. Rework until it feels right. Do not put anything up that does not feel right. Do not apologize for this.

i. see everything before you write it. [Another show-don’t-tell rule. Courtesy of Stephen King.]

10: murder-your-darlings. If someone has a problem with your writings, listen to them as if they were your conscience. [Courtesy of Kristina S. who knows me by my old name and was a wonderful teacher.]

i. but treasure some darlings. [Courtesy of Warren Enström.]

11. only use ambiguity when you mean both guities.

i. remove all the almosts and somehows, all the seems and appears tos, and words serving similar functions (anything that vagues stuff) from your manuscript. It is now a better manuscript.

12. be more interesting than esoteric. Hooks are important.

i. do not compromise between interesting and esoteric, though: rewrite until it is more interesting without removing the esoteric elements.

1. no one should have to read a sentence more than once to understand it.

13. the only time the reader does not get to partake in essential information is when that is the point of the story. Style is secondary.

i. write. What. You. Mean.

14. if many explanations are in order, mention once what needs explaining, and explain them calmly one by one.

i. only give things names when they need names.

1. double-check that the name is superfluous before excising it.

15. to establish viewpoint character in a 3rd-person paragraph, mention something simple first before divulging their biases. A section may only contain text from one character’s point-of-view.

16. run freely with the metaphors. Organize your kaleidoscope so that the words belong to the image.

17. any given sentence should, upon inspection, only contain one kind of comma, if it contains commas.

18. it is bad luck to talk about stories you are currently writing. Explaining it removes the urge to tell the story, and you are left with a half-finished husk and no motivation. Guard your secrets like a dragon does gold, until they’re polished enough.

19. delete all instances and synonyms of very, actually, apparently, and definitely that show up outside of dialogue, but remember that adverbs are your friends. No-one can argue with lugubriously, abominably, or borderline. (This rule is not in conflict with rule 11.i; borderline does not vague anything, it places another word exactly on a spectrum.)

20. is this the most interesting time in your character’s life? If not, why aren’t you writing about that instead? [Courtesy of Rich Burlew.]

21. coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. [Courtesy of Emma Coats. (That whole list is great. Go read it every now and again: io9.com/5916970/the-22-rules-of-storytelling-according-to-pixar.)]

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26/Aug/2012

Worldbuilding 3: When to Let Go, & New Stuff

Last entry in this series: https://zombiesintelligently.com/2012/07/20/worldbuilding-2-the-points-of-departure/

If you don’t put your heart into something it can never have the pulse you’ve taken all your life to protect. Similarly, I’ve grown disillusioned with the poisonbeasts and shall instead talk a bit about the deaths of things.

For me, most projects do not simply die, but poison the water and then appear as ghosts in the lucid dreams of my other projects. Which is a fancy way of saying I reuse things, at times, and ideas gnaw on the back of my skull often and hard.

It’s good to let things die, though. I can’t tie that into the other metaphors I’ve used here, so I’ll just say it plainly: deciding that a project is not worth your attention means you’re doing quality control and also that you won’t have to decide that /later/. Saying goodbye at 500 words in is better than 500 pages in, etc.

Letting things die isn’t the same as giving up. Giving up is all defeatlike. Someone once told me, or said in my vicinity, that creativity is the creation of many ideas and then pruning them until you find the ones that are salvageable. In light of that, whenever I let something die I write down another idea, or gravestone the thing into a drabble at the very least. Even if it’s bloody stupid. So, related to that last post about things you can have, here’s a bunch of things I might use, which are of course up for taking (do show me the work when you’re done with it if you pick one of these plots):

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20/Jul/2012

Worldbuilding 2: the Points of Departure

Last post in this series:
https://zombiesintelligently.com/2012/06/30/worldbuilding-1-a-radiating-background/

(I think people who write fan fiction use this term when referring to the relationship between their worlds and the canon, so, apologies to fanficpeople for appropriating your very useful phrase.)

You need points of departure in any world you build. If you’re making a TV-series about a copper in a well-known English town, you need to first establish that space is weird so that people don’t get confused when the copper runs into an alley in the south end of town, and out of an alley in the north end.

Seriously though, if you don’t point the strangeness of your world out, readers will (rightfully) assume that the world you write in is the same world as they live in. The underlying rules are still there. This happens on Earth … Rome is still in Italy … physics still work … entities that have selves still feel entitlement – the prejudices run deep! This is as it is, because you can’t rasa a tabula, not really. It’ll still be it-shaped.

The best introductions are often the ones that only show the main point of departure from the world in which the reader exists. I like to achieve this by, er, talking to the reader as if they are of a third, unseen world. For example, the time I explained Stephen King to people who would surely know about Stephen King. That was fun.

When you’re writing high fantasy, you can often get the point of departure by just having a map in the beginning of the book. Lots of points-of-departure are in the paratext (defined by TvTropes as ‘[e]verything that is an element of the whole package immediately encompassing the text and not part of the text itself’). But it’s good to have it in the text too, otherwise things get confusing when you send the thing off to someone to read simply the manuscript, before you’ve got the book deal and stuff. (Almost entirely unpublished, am I, so I’m not speaking from experience but assumption.)

There are of course lots and lots of points of departure in your work of any fiction. But you’ll probably have a main one. The one that causes all the consequences.

So! I need points of departure too, for this world! Obviously the poisonbeasts are a difference. But why is the world suddenly killing humans? (And other animals?) Did they do something wrong?

I think they set fire to the atmosphere.

(When asked what could go wrong during the first nuclear test, the American scientists responded that there was a tiny risk they’d set fire to Earth’s atmosphere. But at least that’s better than the Russians doing it.)

And as the fire burnt and left behind it some form of really terrible nuclear poison, the poisonbeasts appeared.

This has the consequences of: killing 40% of the human race (look, the poisonbeasts are good at what they do). Hitler is dead, along with most of the world leaders, because of reasons.

I think they set fire to the atmosphere, and then something else happened, but we’re not entirely sure what.

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30/Jun/2012

Worldbuilding 1: A Radiating Background

Last post in this series: https://zombiesintelligently.com/2012/06/12/ worldbuilding-0-intro/

This is a world about monsters. I’ve decided to have this be a fresh new world, not linked even a little to any of the old worlds. This means no baanklide, even though I love the baanklide and it is the best monster ever. (The baanklide even has a fangirl.) Please bear with me in this post, as I don’t really do segues, but everything in this post relates to all the other things, I promise.

Today I was reading from The Rediscovery of Man (Cordwainer Smith) and it was amazing and I noticed a trend: the stories in this collection seemed to all be about space-travellers who travèlle space and fall in love. This got me thinking to how I would write such a story and then, springing forth like a jack-in-the-box came the idea of something I will call the Great Onebyone. I like to name things.

Recently I had half on an idea called the Ritual of Ophoboshekin. This idea, while alright, doomed itself to fail, in my opinion. The basic idea went: sometime, somewhere, someone is going through a ritual that symbolizes a hangover, because their utopia knows the meaning of fun and pain. I only got a couple of paragraphs in before hitting a halting point.

For The Ritual, which I did not assign a world, got a couple of paragraphs. For The Great Onebyone, set in the Anyverse, I’ve got almost two handwritten pages after about 2 hours of working on it. Maaaajor contrast, right. This is how I arrive at the conclusion that for stories to work for me, they need a world or it’s a lot more work. And that’s why I’m not going to try to figure out a story here when I write these posts, the best of those will only happen in a whoaflash, because that’s how my head works. I will describe the stories afterwards!

With that in mind: Monsters. Humans? Civilisations? Uncivilisations? I’ve been using the word ‘poison’ lately to describe a lot of things, most things of these not actually being poison. So, how about: humans are dying, there is poison everywhere. The poisonbeasts have graciously stepped in to gasmask humans, but everything has a price. They are taking over the biznaz. Like some sort of otherworldly mafia.

Yep. Join me next time (sometime next week) for figuring out how this world relates to our world, where the point-of-departure is and so. Also for maybe understanding what a poisonbeast is, and how they can gasmask humans.

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22/Jun/2012

The Balance

as it relates to the things I write.

First of all: crud. I have a story with a deadline of tomorrow night (!!!) and I need to rewrite a lot of it.

This post is sort of a ‘me go too far’ post, countering the one where I totally figured everything out you guys with all the neologisms. I need less neologisms, perhaps. Still some, though.

Someone pointed out that I am probably complicating things too much, and being unaccessible in my writing. This is probably true when even I can’t figure out who the hell would relate to that story and feel emotionally compelled to continue on if they hadn’t already spent a lot of time inside my cranium.

This is not to say the story is bad – it’s not. It’s just lacking an element. Like, you have all these ingredients for an amazing salad but the ingredients are on different continents and you have to start a cargo company for others to be able to enjoy this meal. This fantastical scenario takes place in a world where you are the only entrepeneur at all, everybody else just … uh, makes a decent living doing other people’s laundry.

Anyway, posting publically about this so that I will guilt myself into finishing rewriting the story on time. I can do this!

Also to the people who are proofreading the story RIGHT NOW you people are awesome like fond memories or helium balloons or a pill that you can eat that teaches you jazz just like that. Not to devalue jazz. Jazz is difficult.

tl;dr? Even if it sounds awesome, things like “Patterns of electricity, or something smaller than electricity, spelled fear into the lack of an audience.” isn’t an easily understandable sentence and definitely something I shouldn’t put out there without context. And that was something I wrote trying to make the introduction more easy to follow. This might be a long night.

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Category: On Writing