to infinity and before

I am completely and totally a writer who is at his most creative, or at least thinks he is at his most creative, while I am struggling through the strains of physical illness. The gift this time around was an exhibition bout with a middleweight strain of food poisoning. Gods be praised.

So there I was in the waiting room this morning, and bam, out of nowhere, I get an image of one of my supporting protagonists in a location which he wasn't supposed to be at until the end of the story. That's it! Three plot hiccups solved in one nausea induced moment! Rock on. Should work. Very happy.

The long work-related drive back through Iowa with Missy on the edge of vomiting inspired a few world-building things too, but I don't really need her to be sick to get inspired. 

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I've also been toying about writing a tv script or short fiction piece which gets to Star Trek territory by way of Jodorowsky, Lynch and Del Toro. Some seriously f'ed-up "planet of the week" thing which would out-seventy-the-seventies. Now, I am no fan of Star Trek (give me a "lived in" universe like Star Wars, Bladerunner or even Firefly any day)or it's imitators and spin-offs, so I don't know what else like this may be out there. The more I think about it...  

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I dreamt about creating a wikipedia entry for "Schwa Dome". Just you wait, it may happen.

redshift

redshift

she is rattling 

off B, R, Z, T, and 145, 658, or 367

focused sharp

to receive 

light from stars

12 billion years old

she has to wait

for dark

for the sun to 

bring its heat elsewhere

the nearest star

is too easy to see

the enigma is rapture

stars she longs for 

are so old that they 

will only

arrive after her sun

has gone cold

-TW

A Tota Light in the Attic

For the last eleven or so days, I’ve been immersed in the Writing for Young Adults and Children program at Hamline University. Not strictly as a writer, but as a documentary filmmaker. (Long time friends of mine will no doubt find this a pinnacle of irony. But it is true, I have taken quite a liking to non-fiction production.) When the camera wasn’t rolling, sometimes when it was, I allowed myself to engage with the material around me as a writer.

I discovered some amazing things while I was moving through these days, I am sure not as intensely as the other students who were actively developing their manuscripts, but probably more unexpectedly. I didn’t enter the week as a student of the genre of young adult fiction, or even as someone who really understood it. I was burdened with the distaste of what Twilight hath wrought. I had placed young adult fiction on the same bittersweet shelf with past loves, obsessions and ideals that have not withstood the facts or evidence of this one particular life.

I am not going to do the experience justice. I will say at first I felt an alien warmth returning to some cold part of my inner life. Maybe like one of those moments when a lick of flame graces its way across the ashen powder of an hours old campfure and ignites the last nugget of naked wood. Maybe like one of those impossible lighting forks where two bolts manage to connect by the briefest sky spanning arc.

As the time and the study deepened, as my own engagement slipped through the “porous membrane” between observation and participation, this new warmth brightened into a burning beacon, not lighting the way into the future, but illuminating a path which had been followed. This light fell across the pages of Charlotte’s Web, Jacob Two-Two, Watership Down, The Hobbit, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, David Macaulay, and Richard Scarry.

While I have no expectation of suddenly dropping everything and converting completely to being a “YA Writer”, I will say that what I could see, for probably the first time, is how much I owe to this genre and this kind of work; both as a human being and as an artist. What I’ve been missing, I suppose in my eagerness to justify my interests as legitimate and grown up, is the childish impulse and pure imaginative joy which is the raw matter which all imaginative “adult” fiction springs from.

I can say that I am somehow more alive in my art, more aware of some shared struggle to preserve the paradise which has been so crudely taken from us by time, crime and the banalities which both protect and destroy our bodies and desires. In illustrated page after illustrated page of a children’s book, I can see the impulse of comic books, of storyboards and graphic novels. In the smell and crack of every freshly opened first page, I can feel the awe and terrors which have carried me forward from year to year, and link backwards further than I can say I remember.

So, before there was HP Lovecraft, JG Ballard, Phillip K Dick, Borges, Calvino, Marquez, Boyle, Murakami, Ligotti, Oates, Barker and countless others who have inspired and awakened me, there were people like L’Engle, Seuss, Blume, Silverstein, Lewis, and Edith Hamilton; artists whose work fuelled and protected the fragile source of a child’s imagination and sense of wonder.

I believe that each and every one of us who have a stake, interest or belief in the redemptive power of imaginative fiction, whatever the form, owe it to ourselves to look back and look around, not only at the early works of our cultural history, but at the early works which nurtured our eager and expansive minds.

So, maybe as paradise is lost, it can also be regained in time.

Everyone's a Captain Kirk

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Is my entire book obsolete? Nope. It's all just a natural extension of this commercial, really.

Real Horrorshow

I tried to wear my writer hat as much as possible this weekend at the CONvergence Science Fiction and Fantasy convention in Bloomington, MN. When I was off duty from the Horrorshow, I managed to get out among the mass of geekery to get some writing done and sit-in on a few panels.

I got about eight hours of total writing time in, and about a chapter and a half on the page. Maybe more importantly, I think I figured out the final stages on one of the secondary character's arcs and how is path is now not going to intersect with the rest of the plotline. I was starting to feel like I had to build some ridiculous plot gymnastics to get him back into the mainline of the story. Happily, I don't think he needs to get back there to be relevant and effective. So, that was a worthwhile hour spent in the smoking tables on the north side of the Sheraton.

I went to a panel on beta-readers (critiquers), which covered miles of old ground but I did pick up a few critical tools for the collection, not to mention a refresher lesson in how good readers and reading is an essential part of the process of getting substantial, serious, work from head to page and back again. Got some interesting tidbits about character work by way of digression too, so while the topic lacked real heft the discussion which followed was pretty useful.

I showed up late to a discussion on the 22nd floor about world-building. Again, most of the stuff was entry-level questions you get at these sorts of things, which is fine, but there were some substantial and interesting digressions. There was some talk about how the history of alien worlds, as it is revealed through artifact and ruin, can be as important as the current state of an alien world (Of course, at this point I don't have much interest in extra-terrestrial worlds, but I think the same guides can apply to "alien" Earths). Most interesting was a discussion about the human tendency to re-use language, to name new things and new concepts by the same terms as the previously known ones. A rose by any other name may still be a rose, but a rose might not always be a red flower with thorns. Got some great tips for character-building resources, too.

I think it is a little bit funny that I've spent many years now developing this science-fiction project, yet I know that deep down inside I am really a "horror writer" first and foremost. Maybe I am just using the SF tropes to create a very elaborate and extended kind of intellectual dread or horror, and not aiming for the more Appolonian goals/thrills of most science fiction writing. Anyway, point is that the panel which covered a spectrum of local and national horror talents sparked the most interesting, varied, and perhaps professionally useful dialogue. Again, ostensibly, the topic was "writing horror in the age of Saw" (never mind that the age of Saw is pretty much over). However, the actual conversation between audience and panel covered the differences between written and visual horror, between suspense and horror, between terror and horror, and when to show and when not to show (a conversation which ironically used film language to illustrate how to write a prose scene).

Went to couple of local readings, and was very impressed with the reading Michael Merriam gave. He is quite a local tour-de-force when it comes to the short story market, and after hearing him read I can see why. He has a great capacity for landing character at the center of the story, and knows very well how to dance on the familiar just enough that you think you know what is going to happen next. While his genre isn't my first choice for reading I was thrilled with the crafty acrobatics he pulled off in his fiction.

Looking out from the Cinema Apocalypse balcony I did have a fair share of lite beer fueled musings about the state of fandom. I tend to have some appolonian thoughts of my own while wandering the halls of this four-day geekasm, this year, I found myself wondering about which side may be losing the style/substance balance. MISFITS! the parent organization of the convention is dedicated to promoting literacy and interest in science fiction. Looking over the scores of Klingons, Stormtroopers, superheroes, and other faves of the popular media, I have wonder how much of the real critical thinking which lies in the subtext of the genre is being celebrated.

So, as much as the discussion of polyamory can get real annoying in these geek fests, as much as slash fiction sometimes seems like the last resort of the sexually frustrated, and maybe some body type activists are a little too proud and interested in flaunting it for everybody to see; however it seems to me that at least, at their core, these groups are actually interested in stretching the concepts and social foundations we all take for granted as part of "reality". I hate to say it, but maybe these folks are really more interesting than the hundreds of fools running around as Dr. Horrible this year.

I don't expect CONvergence to suddenly be awash in panels about the political subtexts of cold war Soviet science fiction, or the political effects of magical realism, or even the (strangely) anti-capitalist impulse behind much of the exploitation cinema we show in our little room. However, it might be nice if we got to mix a little more high-minded conversation in between beers, Romulan strippers and geek mating season.

Please just don't do it in a faux English accent.