Log 1/4.17: shinyshiny!

Yes, it's finished. The first two pages done.

I have a face like bubblegum

badumdumdumbabababadum

Can I maintain?

On a more serious note, I would like to point out that i am not talking to The One here. I don't want any more accusations of being a stalker... that would ruin my plans for the rest of the week.

Now all of that's out of the way, what did I spend today doing, dear log? Well, I worked in the book store - found lots of shiny things there - all morning, came home, meditated for 45 minutes. Forgot about lunch, approached the thing that glares - my script - gingerly, picked it up gently, rewrote the imagery for [some amount of time]. Blew my head off, lay on the floor for [some amount of time]. Meditated for 45 minutes. Wandered around the internet for [some amount of time]. Meditated for 45 minutes. Ate. Threw up on my blog. Meditated. Now I'm writing this. [also wrote random stuff on facebook in between everything else].

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Thou Shall Not Throw Up in Public

Stuck my foot in it again.

LOG 4.10 Gaffargleyaarrrshitandbollocks.

Sort of hate it. I hate it looking at me, staring at me from my wall, perched there above my desk with it's bleeched white smile and all-too careful lines in serious black. Maybe it's an aversion to boxes. I feel claustrophobic just looking at it. What have I created, what I have spent the last two weeks doing? I swear to god it wasn't as intentional as i made it sound. It's a blur.. a bblluurr.

Ah, what a pleasure to come back to art work on my walls and a clean, organised space. Ah, joy, ah, peace, solitude, perfection.

Mental Note: Do not get a girlfriend. Don't do it. This is far too rewarding. Keep it aaall to yourself. Mwuahaha.

I have just had a royal bollocking from my boss, i step through the door, and it all goes away. Bye bye distant woes.

Now, if only I could get somewhere different with this piece. I feel I have just written half a novel on nine pages. There's faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too much going on. Again. Too many ideas. TOO MANY IDEAS! Hehee.

Man, this is a post going nowhere.

I know what I should do...I should write in the scenes. The city scape, the lighting, the buildings, the smells, the sights, the sounds, the people. That's what I should do. That's probably about 3000 words bare minimum for the first three pages.

Hmm...

Reculer Pour Mieux Sauter

The day began as the last ended, with me at my desk dissecting monologues, clearing up the narrative device. The idea is that the first page is three different monologues run side by side; one a board room presentation, one a TV interview, and one a school room religious lesson. The idea is to make the reader feel talked at, in the way that the protagonist is: too much information.

Within this is the voice of the Dream Protagonist, who is essentially still delivering a cut-up monologue through this sequence, using different people's voices. I am really trying to keep this too a couple of pages so as not too swamp or burden the reader.

This work seems to be taking a lot out of me - while also making me happy, it is tiring. I lasted maybe three hours before I had to resort once again to the peace of lying on the floor, just observing the ideas and feelings aroused.

If it wasn't for feeling tired, I doubt I'd stop at all.

The Black Box plan has begun. I have cleared a good space, the size of myself lying down in any direction, which seemed more practical than using arm span. Clearing this space has entailed sorting through a lot of stuff - photographs, letters, documents, old art - hence the title of this post.

The image of the Mad Genius at work in a study bulging with books, papers, plates, stationary, drafts, et cetera is not a productive one. Doing all sorts of things in the same space is not productive, but perhaps I had the intention of looking at all of these processes together before dividing them up into suitable parts. I forget.

The paradigm i have been living with has been one of exile. This is why I am using such a small space, this is why I don't have any posters or photographs. It has all been about the damn task. Well, enough of that. I have found some photo's and art and have put them in appropriate places about my writing area - to remind me where these ideas I have come from, and of where I fit into all of that. If I can't separate work from life, then i can at least make work feel like home.

I am developing all sorts of approaches and skills at the moment - i feel like I've opened up a treasure chest. This isn't the first time I've tried to organise my space efficiently, and each time I do it the space becomes stronger, more dynamic, more productive.

So it seems that today I take a break from the act of writing, and focus on the act of living as a writer. There is nothing cool about my being a messy fuckwit with great ideas, no matter how great the ideas.

Residue

My as-yet-unnamed dream protagonist has become rather lyrical and poetic, albeit while motivated by a "simple" thing. Why do I say simple when 'the hunt', 'blood', 'the chase' - ah, the Freudian connotations within "the thrill of the chase"... - are complex things? More complex than morality, ideology, politics, for they are instincts. So I have created a character of instinct who is lyrical and poetic in their use of language. But there are some things still troubling me - these words:

Attuned
Disembodied
Riddled
Labyrinth

Which seem more intelligent than:

Hunt
Blood
Whisper
Echoes

Really, though, I feel I am slipping into some dark nocturnal territory. I've created a "superhero" who does what he does for the hunt, and not out of compassion - but I think, after a glance at all the blood, combat, weaponry etc in superhero comics, this is sort of true.

The dream protagonist is as unrefined as the waking protagonist since both need each other to develop, but both are unrefined in different ways.

The line "attuned to rhythms left like splintered rumours" could read "listening to the beat of splintered rumours", but....I dunno.....maybe this character should be more intelligent than average, more lyrical.

Dream Protagonist - Lyrical, poetic
Waking Protagonist - Technological, factual

But the whole point of this entry was to say - hunting, blood, disembodied, beast, lair, labyrinth, desire, despair, whisper, splintered, rumours.....I'm...well, feeling a little disturbed at times.

I say the dream protagonist is lyrical and poetic, but he's lyrical and poetic in a carnal, primal way...

workworkwork

I've been working on something for a couple of weeks, something that could be described as a noir, science fiction mystery thriller WITH DIALOGUE. Ideas are coming together and my writing is improving, so that I feel like I am working on something specific, a brainchild, that THING thats been LIVING in my HEAD since i fell out of time and into the collective imagination. And I could go on about how I'm using everything I've learnt up to this POINT, and that this course is the best THING i've done in a long time, possibly my whole life, because it is drawing together my ideas and not impoverishing any of them the way SCHOOL did, or university did, but encouraging them, growing them.

The story is about self and other and place inbetween, about the FICTIONS we are the FICTIONS we LIVE by, about a simulacrum called STANTON which is where all the unsolvable and incongruous elements of B.T.'s existence find a space to dwell unincumbered by the DIVISION from earth that we call HISTORY. Where London is a fiction, and the only real thing is a biocomputer that calculates statistics and is ultimately meaningless.

It is about the COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUS being divorced from the individual and becoming almost autonomous, about its collusion with TECHNOLOGY to create an independent body that will be listened to, but which is some how monsterous because it has been divorced from humanity.

It is about not ONE world but MANY, layered and overlapping, with different times cohabiting and while our world is defined only by selective attention.

It is about all of philosophy being about creating a link to the collective lest the collective become so divorced. It is about the telling of an awakening that will occur with or without humanity. The Goetia is in there, as both a collection of humans, a prebiotic sentience and as an autonomous technology. It is essentially about projection, about creating angels and demons external from the self, and it is about the internet.

That, today, is what its about.

Now, how do I make it different from what's been done before?

Reflections

I'm very close to finishing reading a novel, in bed with lemsip and cigarettes and trying not to get ill again. It's taken a long time (a month) to read this novel, and I've enjoyed it. Thus, I want to finish it. But I can't! I'm thinking about writing.

I'm half way through the course now and I didn't even notice it. A 12 month course and I'm half way through in 2 months. Thats the way, uhuh uhuh, i like it, uhuh uhuh...do do dooo do do dooo do do -- DO --

A review, post haste:

Part 1: spent the whole time rewriting exercise 1 of about 10, possibly 15, forgetting that the rest existed. Ultimately, my assessments were made up on the spot. 2 poems and 2 pieces of prose born of pure necessity.

I learnt: to use all five senses when creating a scene, to free write and then highlight what I wanted to keep, underline what needed to be improved, and isolate those nuggets to be reworked, i.e. metaphors to be made more lyrical, more poetic.

Part 2: I did all the exercises and had about a week to do the assessment, which was jolly good n' whatnot.

I learnt: to use a thesaurus - to expand upon my lyricism with selective words, to get to know my language and to get an understanding of why i've used that language, of the bigger picture involved. I learnt how to echo character in place and place in character - vital.

Part 3: I'm half way through. Its dialogue, so completely new to me. I'm learning to expand what I've learnt previously, to build on it - to tell the story through different characters points of view, still using scene to inform the reader of whats going on. I know need to learn to mirror character in place in dialogue and dialogue in character in place etc, to turn all these elements into plot.

I've been laid low since my last assessment with weeks of illness, and my prolificity has been mediated by it. I need to work through these exercises so i can spend time on the assessment at the end, like I did last time.

Now, I aint a bad student when it comes down to it, but it isn't in my background or experience to organise myself as effectively as some other manage to organise themselves. I had to learn from each of these previous parts of the course, to develop my habits through them. The first thing I learnt was to do all the exercises and give myself time to do the assessment at the end. I still do most of the exercises at least twice, and take at least twice as long as is suggested to do them.

Now I am learning something important: I need to keep track of what I've done. This blogger -- is shit. Its a bad lay out, doesn't print well, I can't see my entries back to back, nor flick through them. I need a hard copy. i am now thinking I should revert to a paper journal for these entries, since the media - which would more be more appropriate for a common place book - has dried up. When it comes to it, I can "paste" (using PritStick) anything i print into the book.

Further, my folder of drafts is my saving grace. It has kept everything together.

My common place book is the weakest part of my skillset, since it is abyssmally scattered between here, a file, a book, face, my draws, my walls and my floor.

The most important points in all of this are thus:

1. Keep things together, and make a hard-copy learning log. I need to be able to see my work-over-time laid out clearly.

2. Sort out my common place book. Do more research on the people and places I'm writing about.

3. In each part of the course, use EVERYTHING i learnt in the previous parts.

4. Keep taking at least twice as long to do everything, and doing it at least twice (although I've done the last exercise 5 times now, which is becoming a common occurrance).

Freewrite

Illness for most of the last month..

There are times when I struggle so much that I feel like giving it all up, but this "giving up" is just an abstraction and doesn't really exist. What would it mean if it did? I don't really know how to give up. Two days after trying I'd only pick up a pen and write something about giving up that inspired me to continue.

I got some good feedback again, and have signed up for another writing course at the local college. This time I'm not signing up for the education - I need to meet some writers. I need some company, any company. There are times when I find this facebook phenomena so utterly dismal - I see old friends I don't know continueing to interact, friends from school who still know each other. Does anyone know what its like to be exiled and have contact denied? To have one of their parents die and the other simply disappear? At times I think "shit, I could fuel such a story with true life grit". At other times I think only that I should never touch those things with a pen - they can drive me, sure, but they should drive me on to better things.

I think of Vonnegut, who took 20 years to write Slaughterhouse5 because it affected him so much. I remember reading him say "people kept asking me what the novel I was writing was about. Some book about Dresden, I'd say". Yeah, man, I know that - "some book about genus loci and living history" I say. With each write these things become clearer - my places become more alive, my characters more in tune. I get clearer with each write.

But I'm on the edge, where I've always been. Maybe it won't always be this way - maybe I won't wake up each day and burn away every hour, the day going in a flash - a flash!, like a thought - and me feeling like I havn't done enough. Perhaps I won't feel like I'm racing against oblivion forever. One day I will start to publish things and I'll be able to sit back and relax a little more. Right now, as always, I'm chasing a dream many aspire to and few ever reach. But I really couldn't do anything else. One day, when I'm known as a writer, people will ask "why did you decide to become one "and I'll say "because I had no goddam choice - it was writing or oblivion" and it'll be the truth.

I need to meet some people like me. People who know the odds, who've felt the end and absence and who have that burning inside that says "make me", "tell me", "sing me - at all costs, and for the love of god, sing me".

I saw a man outside a cafe. He said "I'm forty, I have a good job, a family, a nice home, but I still don't know what it is I WANT to do". I counted my blessings. I know. I understand. I feel it. Its vital, an extra organ, a second heart. I'll never be in that place, at least.

I met a woman in a shop in York. "Look after that man - he's special" she said to my friend. Other people have said the same. I like that - life lines from strangers. I'm the guy who knew Dr. H. Who learnt from Alan Clements. Who was friends with Gaddafi's nephew. I'm the guy that threw everything away so I could start from scratch. A lot of people talk with that attitude, but I've never met anyone who's done it. And every time I say these things I feel like I'm boasting, or making up for an inadequacy. Maybe because I don't believe in it, I garnish it with bollocks. Anyhow, by the by, I'm going somewhere. I can feel it, and its hard.

The dream isn't easy - living the dream is like riding a psychotic horse towards a burning barn.

Log 22-12-09

The plates build up and dirt lines the edges of the room, take-away cartons and cold cups, open books and disbound pages like fallen leaves; hours are spent alone at my desk, writing things no one will read. I take a scalpal to all my children, still living. I lay them aside, bleeding, and try to ignore their cries. This log fails to capture the process. My notebook festers, my commonplace book starves, my mind ferments. I shower, and an hour later I have dirt under my finger nails. My hands are stained brown from old books. I must keep going....

I have finished my second assignment. I have won another battle, even as the war is waged within and without, a war that cannot be won. I must keep going....

I find myself in a strange land, a land where the walls are animated by stranger dreams, walls that bubble and whisper, casting shadows that slither and crawl. A white lady inspects my work while I sleep.

Like a man who cheated death, I feel the shortness of time, a trepidation exacerbated by the fire that burns within me, by that Burning Question. This, they say, is called Joy.

I am half-mad with magick and drunken musings. My fingers curl in the fire. My seat is a chasm, the walls glitter with minerals that roll from disembodied tongues. My head sparkles; my head is a cave. It echoes with wormsounds.

Tonight I am possessed by a detective and a devil. Both vie for the page. I must keep going....

94

94 pages in three weeks.

Yep, yep...thats it...just...there....aaahhh

Bearing in mind everything I've been studying about scene, character, motivation (ok, so I havn't studied motivation yet, but I can't animate a person without motivation) yadda yadda, rather than root through my notebook for drafts or notes or whatever, i thought FUCK THIS I'mma write sumting innit, and I did, and lo, it was good.

I feel like I've lost 50lbs.

Once again I've proved to myself that writing from the heart creates something better than following a formula. I wrote from the heart and the scene fit, the character fit, there was motivation in it, telling signs about his psychology, a history, backstory, all of it, right there, right on the page, all at once, without any need to cut and paste and give a damn about whether I was doing the right thing - FUCK YOU WORLD, i'm taking you by the balls and I'mma squeeze the juice from em.

Even the form, fits, or the shape, or whatever you want to call it - bloody terminology - the first sentence containing the word "imbroglio" and the rest of the piece flowing rather like this, with no full stops despite the guide lines to put one everytime you need to take a breathe, because, dammit, its an imbroglio and designed to leave you breathless, and i fucking enjoyed it and IT HIT THE FUCKING MARK.

Ah.

Better.

Missing the Mark

I've got Mrs. Weatherspoon, Han Soe, Amelia, A Chancellor, and a couple of other characters crawling around my room like failed abortions. In every one of these drafts I've aimed at tension, at the sense of something cataclysmic about to happen, and I don't know why I'm doing this. Its not so much intention as "what happens" when I pick up a pen. I'm investigating characters that could support a mystery, mostly old people, people with links to the past - but its because I want my main character to be the reverse of this, a young person who doesn't know where they're from. I guess in the back of my mind I'm working with a novel that starts with a mystery - a stranger appearing, a Chancellor being murdered, a news paper clipping that changes everything for an old man - and then carries on with a young person essentially clueless about who they are and how they got where they are, fractured and disenfranchised and distant from his family. Someone who doesn't even know his family. These last few issues are important, and I think I may be guilty of glossing over them. Its easier to focus on some pulp mystery, easier to create some action, than to address these things.

Probably, when it comes to writing a novel, I will have several characters (I like the idea of a relationship that breaks up, with the gf's friends telling her watch a dick her bf was, and the bf's friend telling him what a cunt his gf was, but only as an idea - don't think i'll develop it, at least not right now). For some reason I'm drawn to mystery, to speculation - it seems the most obvious way of capturing my sense of intrigue and of making use of the strange things I notice on a daily basis.

My ideal would be to capture this mystery, this whodunit format, and make it about more than simply discovering whodunit - its a whoami: the biggest mystery is who we are, what we are capable of becoming. It seems like a trope that would marry well with the detective/thriller/espionage genre, and I'm sure its been done before (i.e. Borne Identity).

Is it enough just to focus on creating suspense and mystery right now, and not on the real grit of contemporary characters, inspired by myself, my brother, my mother? The real difference between something like the Bourne Identity and what I want to write is that Bourne is completely removed from the every day world. I want to show an ordinary person having as much of an adventure - which could happen, the deeper they dig into the past.

What I'm creating is minor characters. I havn't got the a good enough feel for a protagonist yet. Maybe thats ok.

Overall, though, I feel like I've missed the mark and failed miserably at merging character and scene. It seems like a really complex thing to do, and I can't even succeed at a simple effort. I've got about four times the amount of drafts I had for the first project, but I can tell i'm going to create something specifically for the assignment as nothing I've written will do. What the fuck am I supposed to do?

What a fucking waste of a day. Nothing I've written merges character and scene. Its all bullshit. I started off with two poems about people I knew, and I couldn't turn them into a fucking thing. I might as well go back to the beginning of the project and do the whole damned thing again. Its all at odds and contradictory, and maybe thats who i am. I should have just settle for a normal career, and fuck this writing thing. One guy tells me to write a novel and I believe him? Where is he now? Nowhere, its me alone against the world. I'm a fearful, insecure and lonely man, unsure of everything he writes and unable to build a simple bridge between character and scene; i've lost my job, I can't afford the rent, I've dropped out of every form of easily education, I've lost my friends, and what do I have to show for it? Purile attempts at fiction that suck donkey cock. And tomorrow - I'm going to get up and do the whole fucking thing again.