serai

.
Just want you all to know that I am still turning that E/C/Z idea around in my head. I think it could be something really interesting, a challenge. Unfortunately, I'm impeded by my lingering sadness and sense of betrayal at having Ethan snatched away like that.** But I am trying! At the moment, I'm just sort of "dreaming with it", as Robert Duvall calls his process of preparing a character. I let it drift in and out of my head when it wants, and examine it. It seems pretty, though I don't know what it is, and hypnotic. It tastes strongly of absinthe, and if it ever incarnates, I think it'll be very fun to write. I can give you this, though, as a little taste. The one thing I'm sure of, and that's the title:

Daguerrotype.

**(You know, if it turns out Logan has forced my fucking hand into doing his goddamn job for him and writing the entire goddamn fucking story the way it should have been told in the first place, I will bitchslap him into the next century. Should I ever get the chance.)

.
Okay, back now. Sorry about the freakout, but you guys are really the only people in my life I can cry to. Pathetic, I know. Thanks to those of you who were so kind about it. HUGS BACK

Since then:

1) HOLY SHIT, SCALIA'S DEAD.

2) I got weed poisoning on Thursday night. I was sitting at my computer, watching a movie and toking the way I usually do, which is taking a hit or two maybe every twenty minutes or so until I'm at just the right level. Usually when I smoke too much, I just end up falling asleep in my chair and then waking up and going off to bed, but this time... hoo, boy. After just a few tokes, I got hit with a MASSIVE wave of dizziness and nausea. Nearly fell out of the chair and ended up crawling to the bathroom, where I threw up a few times and then slept curled up next to the toilet, because I couldn't get up from the dizziness. I'm still feeling a bit of it - the dizziness, that is - but it's passing. I've only been able to eat some slices of whole wheat bread and drink seltzer, but I had a fruit smoothie today and I'm almost back to normal now. Gods, that was awful. The only other time that happened to me was a couple of years ago when I took a Vicodin for my shoulder and forgot to eat first. NIGHTMARE TIME.

3) I can't write that story I mentioned. It's just much too close to my emotions at the moment and far too painful for me to actually enter it now. I'm still taking notes, and want to wait until I get some distance before I try to write it, mostly because of the pain but also because I'm not completely certain it's actually a good story - it may just be a scream I need to scream. It's hard to tell for me, because so many of my stories come out of my own life and emotions, are ways to express things I'm feeling or grappling with in real life. But no, this one has to wait awhile. It's okay, though, because like I said earlier, it's a one-off, not part of High Contrast, so letting it go for a time won't affect anything else I'm writing.

4) HOLY SHIT, SCALIA'S DEAD.

5) Looking forward to John Oliver coming back tomorrow night. Anyone seen Samantha Bee's new show? She is SO awesome, and she's having a fucking great time with this. And MAN, is she vicious - it's utterly glorious. I think I may be crushing on her now that she's doing her own thing and not that Fox News Bunny character that she did on TDS, which was a wonderful caricature, but I didn't like her much. She's so much better as herself. <3 <3 <3

6) Drum Tao was on Stephen's show the other night. I have such intense desire to see these guys live. They'll be here in March, but I haven't got the money or anyone to go with. *sigh* Maybe someday...

Fullscreen that puppy and TURN IT UP TO ELEVEN.

7) I'm tired of writing angst. Somebody give me a prompt I can mess around with to take the taste of tears out of my mouth.

8) HOLY SHIT, SCALIA'S DEAD.

.

.
I'm being tormented by an almost unbearably sexy image of Zeke and Casey (fully clothed, mind you) that I have no idea how to write about. The image exists several years after the events of the film, and it's just blowing my socks off. But these are two very different guys than the ones that have inhabited my stories so far, with very different emotional and even physical presences. It's seriously weird. I feel like one of those old-fashioned pressure cookers, with this thing spinning around that can't find a way out. HEADDESK.

Suggestions? Anybody got any ideas how I can shake this thing loose?

.

.
Oy, I'm SO crap at doing things in plenty of time...

Nevertheless, I'm getting to the holiday stuff, so if anyone would like a card, please leave a screened comment with your address, or you can PM me with it. I'll get them in the mail this week.

( In other news... )

.
Here's another great writing tool, courtesy of Metafilter:

Writing Exercises from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction

A series of hard-core writing exercises to help you sharpen up your skills as a storyteller. I call them hard-core because they're very focused and no-nonsense. Here's the first one:

1. Write the paragraph that would appear in a piece of fiction just before the discovery of a body. You might perhaps describe the character’s approach to the body he will find, or the location, or both. The purpose of the exercise is to develop the technique of at once attracting the reader toward the paragraph to follow, making him want to skip ahead, and holding him on this paragraph by virtue of its interest. Without the ability to write such foreplay paragraphs, one can never achieve real suspense.

They're all like that - do exactly this, and here's why you should do it. They're all intriguing exercises, at least to me, because they isolate specific things that are key to good storytelling and give you ways to work on those things. Not areas, mind you. Things. I really like that, the one-pointedness of the prompts, as well as the insistence on focus and outcome. (Each of them leaves you with this implication of "and don't fuck around" that amuses me. I keep envisioning Sister Mary Ignatius, with her imperious glare and her long ruler, waiting for us to take our seats. Anne Bancroft really should have played that role, alas. But I digress.)

Anyway, I think this is another great thing to put in one's bookmarks. It's the kind of thing that's great for writer's block too, of course. Enjoy! :)

.

.
I've been having some trouble reconciling my story lately, and the trouble almost all has to do with silence. As it's gone on, I've been more and more unsure about the silence between them. How can people feel so fucking much and never say anything? Anything about what they're feeling, I mean. I was starting to get really kinda nervous and unsure about this aspect of High Contrast, when I read this:

There are layers of pain and mistrust and betrayal that keep all of us so far away from saying simple things of love and belonging.

-- Richard Gere

That's Gere talking about his latest film, in which he plays a homeless man. In the quote, he's talking about a scene where his character visits the estranged daughter he never sees much, and how they just sit around and don't say all the things they must and want to say.

And that kinda did it for me. When I read that, I became re-connected to all the times in my life when I've wanted, needed, absolutely had to say the thing that was hurting and tearing me apart, and couldn't do it. I remembered a day when a friend of mine said something that hurt my feelings, and I couldn't say anything to her for maybe an hour, because my mother taught me by example the virtues of the Nasty Silent Treatment, and I ended up being UNABLE to speak in situations like that, even though I was thinking right then and there that I really, really wanted to say something. BUT I COULDN'T. Really. It was like tape was over my mouth - I was physically unable to speak.

The things that happen in childhood, in adolescence, shape us far, far more than we are ever aware. Sembene was right - the past is not past. It's who we are. Eugene Hutz said it perfectly, "The past is always living right on the side of us."

These boys are struggling with their pasts, which have scarred them so much they can't say the things they need to say. They quite literally can't, and up til now I'd forgotten why or how that could be true.

Fear and mistrust and betrayal, all things they've both had intimate knowledge of. No wonder they can't be happy, either together or apart. *hugging my boys*

.
So I finally got my fics up at AO3. Not all of them - some of my earlier stuff makes me wince, frankly, and I'm not letting them out of their LJ cages, thanks. But all the stuff I like is there.

My AO3 archive

Zeke has calmed down, thank the goddess, though now he's withdrawn instead of angry. I figure if I just play Salt Lick and sit quietly until he feels like talking, I may get this thing back. (Apparently he hates his stepfather, so that's interesting.)

Christ, why couldn't I be a fucking basket weaver instead of dealing with this insanity? Wicker wands don't have moods, I hear.

P.S. Jesus, I just started posting over there last night, and I've already got a bunch of "kudos" and a couple of comments. Not very interesting comments, but still - damn.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Depends on what you mean by "snakes" or "spiders". A pit of cobras is rather different than a pit of garter snakes.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

*eyeroll*

It's "When the moon hits YOUR EYE", not "the sky". Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Good gods. Is this REALLY the level to which you're going to stoop? I thought this was supposed to be about helping people write by giving them interesting prompts. Favorite TV show? Why don't you just ask us what our favorite color is?

[Error: unknown template qotd]

It would be an epic tale of how Luke Skywalker and his crew journey across millions of light years to arrive on Earth, decapitate George Lucas and put his head on a fucking spike for all to throw rocks at.

Sorry, but I'm in a SERIOUSLY foul mood today.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

That's easy: Gunpowder.

Don't get me wrong, I love fireworks. But I'd happily give up every lovely dahlia, chrysanthemum, willow, Bengal fire, Roman candle, and Catherine wheel ever created in exchange for humanity never having figured out how to kill with almost no effort.

.
Today's Writer's Block question:

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Praan - Gary Schyman

Featuring the glorious voice of Palbasha Siddique

Adapted from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore. Here is a translation:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

This song never fails to fill my heart and lift my spirits. The video images are a great match to the lyrics.

The kinds of emotions that deeply religious people feel in their temples and synagogues, I feel in nature. Walking among redwoods; gazing at mountains; tasting the spray of the ocean and dancing on the sand; marveling at birds and butterflies, snakes and coyotes, bears and wolves; working the soil and loving the plants in my garden - these experiences fill me with intense spiritual rapture. My religious feelings and emotions are deeply tied to what Carl Sagan called "the numinous" - the experience of the natural world and the universe as inherently sacred in and of itself. My gods do not live outside or above the world; they are the world. I see the Earth as my mother in a very literal sense, and feel myself her daughter just as much as I am my human mother's daughter. This song embodies all of that for me, and much more, because besides expressing thoughts and words, music itself contains a dimension of emotion and insight whose currents and patterns can never be wholly translated but only felt, a river within which the soul swims towards the ocean of the universe.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Okay, this is going to sound odd, but the meanest movie bully I ever saw was the New Age teacher in Todd Haynes' Safe. He had that sweet, "positive" tone that so much of New Age philosophy has, but he also had the mean-spirited, selfish bullying that is so prevalent in that area of thought. The whole blame-the-victim mentality, berating (always politely, of course) those who dare to get angry or feel resentful of the hardships life rains down on them. I find that kind of thing much uglier and more damaging that straight-out shitheadedness, myself, because it pushes the damage-doing onto the victim - hearing this nice teacher say these things makes the person think it's her fault. And how can you fight back against a guy whose bullying is "nice" and polite? You can't. That's the power of passive aggression, and it's really, really ugly. A real villain for the modern world.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

1) Yes.

2) All of them.

3) In Congress. For obvious reasons.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Excuse me, who?

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Datin' myself here...

PONG. The original video game. And interestingly enough, it wasn't in the U.S. There was a Pong machine in a bar in Seville, Spain, in 1975 when I and my family visited there for the summer. At first none of us knew what it was, but when another customer told us, we all sat down and spent a couple of hours switching off and playing it. (The machine was a sit-down one, somewhat lower than a normal fast-food table, with the screen horizontal so the players could all look down on it, and the controls under the screen on two sides of the table so your hand were under the machine.)

It was a BLAST. Hard to believe now that video games have become so complex, but that rectangular paddle and square ball seemed like magic to us. The idea of being able to control what was going on on what was basically a television screen - wow. And the steady unchanging action of the elements was really strange after so many years of pinball machines and their rollicking, gravity-controlled motions. It would be about 25 years before I saw a video game that imitated the world of actual physics.

I sure would like to sit down to a real, original Pong machine again. It would be fun to see how it stacks up now.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Are you kidding?

Isn't it obvious?

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Bill Moyers. Because he's intelligent, erudite, incisive, curious, diplomatic, calm, compassionate, and understands how things work. I think he'd be an excellent man for the job.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

I don't think it's possible to express how utterly ignorant, blinkered and just plain STUPID a person would have to be to even begin to doubt this.

Simple answer, really.

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Profile

serai

November 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30

Page Summary

Syndicate

Style Credit

Style: Starflower for Mobility by branchandroot
Resources: Rounded Star 005

Page generated Friday, June 27th, 2025 05:22 pm

|

Entries tagged with writer's block

sigh

sigh

Mind is the biggest tease of all

Cards?

Okay, now Serius Bizness!

The silence that drives love apart

AO3 up and running

Writer's Block: Between a rock and a hard place

Writer's Block: When the moon hits the sky...

Writer's Block: Remote control

Writer's Block: Lucas for a day

Writer's Block: Eraser dust

Midnight Media Cafe - Praan

Writer's Block: "Anybody home? Think, McFly, Think!"

Writer's Block: Into the wild

Writer's Block: Mother Monster returns

Writer's Block: Beep, Bop, Boop

Writer's Block: Arms wide open

Writer's Block: Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known

Writer's Block: Let the sun shine in