On Fiction: An Overlooked Reminder

Not that the reminder is overlooked, but that the thing I am reminding you of is overlooked I find more than a drop of coffee passes the lips of your's truly: a thing has to be itself.

Case 1: If you write about an artist, that person should art. They should make something. They should make something arty. If you spend half a novel having an artist running around and never once at least comment on the shape of a piece laying in the trash you might as well be writing about a politician.

Case 2: A Comedian should be funny. Even melancholy comedians should at least have been funny at one time, or they need to so mammothly depressing that they play it up for laughs. If you sum up the past of a comic writer in 3.5 pages and there isn't a joke on the page I don't believe that person was actually a comedian.

Glossening

I am dashed and bashed and ready for the abuse of the weekend which will be thick and served in a glass mug, a very large glass mug. And in that spirit I have committed this affront to punctuation, pacing, and preposition, based on this past week's image at Elephant Words:

Glossening

He sat there on his ass and couldn’t believe, in the same way a person chooses to believe or not believe in recycling as an act of and expressing value, that she was going to turn the music up since he hated all the music played tonight never really getting into Modest Mouse which kept playing because they all thought the lyrics were just oh so clever but what the hell did look out the window of my color tv even mean, and so tensed up his shoulders thinking maybe he should do more than just mouth the words ‘wait wait wait I don’t think that’s the solution’ though instead he just sipped from his beer as she slid the knob to the right bringing to light more neon bars of LED-platinum illumination calling up a burst of bass compression like the air had compacted, crunched with rising density, matter spilling into an already defined space from another direction you couldn’t get sight of with simple three-dimensional perceptive physiology, gripped his beer tightly to ensure it remained where and what he expected it to be looking into the next room wondering if anyone now talking louder would comment the music was too loud and pulled his feet in closer to the couch as she set a vase full of fake flowers in front of the stereo on a piece of paper before angling the speakers at the long petals of fabric which began to quiver and wave loosing dust that fell upon the whiteness of the paper in grey abstract over which she now hung the crystal chimes off the front porch by a hook in the ceiling and directing the articulating neck of a lamp at the crystals shivering in sonic, prismatic glossening over the ever-evolving mandala of dust on the paper’s surface.

The Day of Attrition

I have no juice in my gonads of creativity at the moment. I am stealing everything. I'm robbing Warren Ellis blind. I just tackled Chabon, punched him in the back of the head, and ran off with his notebook. His wallet I tossed into the bushes where he’ll never find it, just the way we used to do it in high-school. If Robert McKee wants my blood he can come and fucking try.

In the meantime, I need a crutch, to hobble on my ill-fitting writing legs up these uneven hills with jutting rocks everywhere that don’t hide any secrets more interesting that telling of how a big fucking block of ice the size of Canada once raped the shit out of this place. Not exactly impressive.

That dog is wearing a foot-brace, or a wrap or something, and he still doesn’t look as ridiculous as the fat old man in a Montauk t-shirt and running shorts. Still need to get into the bathroom seeing as how I’m not actually competent enough to drink coffe without snorting it all over myself like an idiot, like this orange shirted dude here.

You could choke on the humidity out there and I don't even need to think about a jacket for another three weeks yet that dude has a parka on and moon-boots. He is also holding an open umbrella under a dry, overcast sky and carries a plastic bag filled with what looks like rotten weeds so there you have it.

The problem is still mine, because these people are offering me gold, more shit than I could ever want, and I can't mine a fucking thing out it.

Time just to throw away the shovel, shut down the drill, and just dig my fingers into the rocks until they are bloody. Someday it'll all be interesting again.

Mid-Week Fundraising: Writing Off of the Ass

HEEeEY Everybody,

So this is one of the best things I do, because a) it helps to raise all kinds of money for a great, great cause, and b) gives me an excuse to spend the day writing.

New York Writer's Coalition helps at-risk youth, battered women, the formerly homeless and others to find a voice. It gives them something great and he chance to create, and that's a good thing by any means.

I am going to be writing my ass off, and believe me, there is still a lot there after the holidays, so help out and donate to a great cause:

http://www.firstgiving.com/thebookhouse

Cheers,
William

I'm Not Saying I Attained Enlightenment at New York Comic Con but...

Well, I am the burning elation of exhaustion and excitement. I dare not actually try to make anything at this point, since I am far too overcharged, but nothing a nice day of the job won't cure (ok, that's a lie, I did write for about an hour or so last night, but it was just mind-garbage).

I used to feel like this after my residencies in the Grad School days. We'd burn through 8 or 9 days, talking about books and writing, just a pack of little Prometheus' and Promethea's in the woods of Vermont spinning in circles as we carried the light down the hill, and when it was all done, after 6 or 7 hours on the road, always glad to be home where everything was soft and warm the only thing I'd feel was that we'd burned, held over the coals and our minds flashed, cerebro-spinal fluid glowing with the luminosity of imparted wisdom and the shared passions, spent and delirious and washed in the rains of a rebirth.

NYCC was like that for me this year, for the first time really. I went in raw and tired, stressed on too many fronts, and unsure of what I was going to do. Which is perfect sometimes. It is the state you have to be in to summon angels and demons, the state Gautama reached under the tree when the wheel opened up and he saw himself at its center. In comics, it is the place Jack Frost reached when fighting the King of All Tears, stepping out, but coming back having seen it all. You empty your cup and wait for it to be filled.

I'm not saying I attained enlightenment at New York Comic Con, but I came out the other side to stand in the rain and knew it was good.

For the first time in a long time, I am happy to have been royally screwed over and out of two jobs I loved. One was simply a political game I hadn't known I had to play, one was because my bosses boss was an asshole. Both times it knocked me flat on my ass, because I still had the Kool-aid in me, and that tends to turn to poison when it sours. So I like my job now, but this job is just a job, and I am going to do it well for a while, and then I am going break free of it and I am going to write, and that is very encouraging thought. Because if I hadn't been screwed over in those two jobs that I loved, I wouldn't presently be more determined than ever cut my own path and work on the things I want to work on, not the things someone else tells me to.

Wait, Twelve Monkeys What?

Never mind. Twelve Monkeys say what. Got you again.

Ooo, hmm, beh. So the weekend skaned (because I didn't go) and writing was sporadic though it did happen. I was not several floors up in the dead of night though. That would have been preferable. Still. Still. Stillness (also didn't go due to attendance at an enviro film festival, but you should check out Tim's stuff here).

Wrote a Venture Brother's fan fiction this morning, which is odd, because I'm not a fan fiction writer for the most part. I only rarely wrote Spider-man stories growing up, and I've been working toward and holding toward any success I have as a writer I would prefer come from ideas I've worked up myself. I've always spent far more time creating my own worlds, my own characters. At most, I'd prefer to follow a trajectory like Gaiman or Moore, and work with or completely transform earlier creations into a more rich and nuanced form. Maybe I am. Maybe I can't. We shall.

My Brock Sampson fan fic more specifically was really my way of coaching an essay on the limited wonderment of an individual who can deftly and martially wield a broom. That's how I play that.

There is a spec of dust on the screen that suggests to me it is a period where I'd not want one. Specifically at Brock Sampson.fan fic

I have no use of a period there. But I am hopeful I can find a way to make sure of this essay I have written. And then find the time to finish writing this damn novel, although I do actually have many pages of the story written out in ink on paper, in ye olde fashioned way. I am troubled by the fact that in a script I am writing for a comic series, the spell check doesn't like the work Old-fashioneds, as in the drink plural. But I like me the old-fashioneds, and it shouldn't not, if there is any justice in the universe, be long before I have aforementioned cocktails. But aside and away there are pages yet to write, novels to enrich with the tears of people who've never had bodies, and the smattering of instants to craft into a series of pages with art hopefully drawn by people far prettier than me, and so I leave you. Do as thou will.

PS. If you do draw and are prettier than me, and possibly want to draw things I may write of which you would have very little idea except a vague sense based on what I have assaulted you with here on this page, please feel free to contact me.

This is the Post Where I Post Nothing

Give me a break. I've been holidayed, and as such, required much time to read. See Goodreads blurp on the side. I've twittered, and been working on some of the fiction. I have much fiction, and I want more.

And because I am still very keen for it, I found out, after happening upon a free copy of Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, that Jenny Boully used one of the subtitles from that for her book from Tarpaulin Sky Press.