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Thursday, April 4, 2002

Well, heck. There are various interesting conversations going on currently, and though I'd like to jump in and blather, I have to race to the airport and fly off to Connexions, which should be a nice mix of seeing some old friends and meeting some other people for the first time. So -- back on Monday, perhaps with some con chat.

Posted @ 11:23 AM CST [Link]1 Comment

Monday, April 1, 2002

Driving to the store at 6 a.m. for some smokes, in my leather jacket, Ramones blasting on the tape player, singing along and banging on the steering wheel, and it struck me -- everything I've been seriously working on for the last ten months has been Benton Fraser first-person POV. I love the inside of Fraser's head, don't get me wrong, but it can get a little...dense, in there. I think I need a vacation. A day trip to Krycekville, or something.

That is all. I have no life; I am so boring. I spent all day yesterday hunched over the computer, mumbling and poking at keys. You know, sometimes I think I'd have been better served if, rather than spending my formative years immersed in Virginia Woolf and Henry James, I'd read a little more -- I dunno, John Grisham or Tom Clancy or somebody who focuses on quick punchy description of external action, rather than leisurely exploration of internal states. I am so flummoxed when it comes to writing any quick bing-bang-bam sequence of events. It took me four hours to grind out a few simple paragraphs in which the frickin' dog sled overturns. I mean, I could have done pages on what was going on inside everyone's mind during those few seconds, but at some point one just has to describe a thing happening, and it stymies me. Which is of course why nothing ever happens in stuff I write. People talk. People think. Every once in a great while people have sex. That's about it. Arrgh.

Posted @ 07:35 AM CST [Link]7 comments

Sunday, March 31, 2002

Ha HA! I've just figured out the wherefore of my recently-acquired obsession with doing on-line jigsaw puzzles! It is ... [drumroll, wait for the thudding of anvils] ... the perfect metaphor for what I'm going through with my writing just now!

No, but really, it is perfect. I've got the picture, sitting off to one side of my mind, seamless and whole, of what the damn thing is going to look like when it's finally done. On the other side, I've got a big messy pile of little bits and pieces. And in the middle, the assemblage is starting to take shape. The edges (first scene, last scene) are pretty much complete, and after all that's where one starts with a jigsaw puzzle. And I've got most of the left-upper-hand quadrant put together. But there's still just lots of random pieces. I've got some of them put together in little sub-chunks, and some I can look at and tell--oh yeah, there's that patch of red, eventually that'll be somewhere down there, toward the bottom right-hand side, but I can't yet figure out which pieces to hook it up with that'll connect it to the parts I've already got assembled.

The joy is that every so often I'll take a fresh look at the pile and suddenly see -- oh yes, ah hah, I can just snap this bit together with that one, connect the ending of this scene together with the start of that one, and shazam! Another sub-chunk put together! Or once in a while, someone else will wander over, squint at the whole thing, point to a piece I've been struggling to somehow make fit over here, and say, "Nah. It goes over there instead. See?"

And the compulsive working-through of the actual jigsaw puzzles is (like all play) simply a ritual of enacting mastery, a way of proving to myself over and over that I can in fact bring order out of apparent chaos, a reassurance that I will prevail.

Heh. Either this is a great (albeit inanely obvious) insight, or I'm even better at rationalizing my procrastinatory time-wasting than I thought I was.

Posted @ 08:58 AM CST [Link]3 comments