bringing out the big guns

THE FIRST THING WE DO --

LETS KILL ALL THE LANDLORDS --

Post Script blah

Water

A video about photographing water. I've lost count of how many time I've watched it. Amazing.

Mnemosyne

A short film Michał Brzeziński

The Ship of Death

A poem by DH Lawrence.

The Eight Circuit Brain

A good book by Antero Alli, whose website can be found at verticalpool.com

Log 1/4.13 Sex with Lampposts

a blind mans blueprint

From Wasserman's 'Templars and Assassins':

"Did I not wish the sultan well, that dagger that was stuck in the hard ground would have been planted in his soft chest" Hassan I Sabbah.

"The Assassins became the the dark embodiment of the shadow self of Islam"

There was only one thing for it; finish the thing. Get it done, get my head back.

Somewhere in between the words my character was robbing the banks of eternity and using my identity to do it.

"And this shall be deducted from your part of heaven"

200 words to go.

I still have 200 words to go but I'm a little less absorbed. There is a small corner of my head reserved for nuthink. When it comes to my reflective commentary, I'll have to say: I don't know how long this took. I don't remember which exercises I did, or in what order. I've lost count of the hours and drafts and days. I'll have to blame time-warps, muses, angels and aliens. I wonder what will happen when i start on the autobiography module :-/ "well, there was this big spaceship... the idea that Earth is itself a stargate...my meeting with a Lovecraftian alien, the money launderer, almost being shot....my grand-father being a gun runner, my grand mother a prostitute....the suffering of my parents....living in at least two different realities at once.....inventing demons to bring join the dots for me...." Blah. Blah. Blah. Can I get away with that?

Then i can start talking about systematically executing my friends one by one just because I could. About actually, beneath it all, being very alone if not lonely. The burden of dream. The burden of vision. The burden of imagination. Well, that could lead to my blabbing about how i become a tongue tied douche bag when i talk to people who've felt what i've felt and been where i've been, or at least who have felt similar things or been to similar places, and about the selfishness of my need for people to hear me.

Suppose I could dig up some value in exploring what it is to have greater understanding/intuition than skill, and greater intelligence than skill, and how it drives so many people to drink and drugs and sex with lampposts. I could...write about a character who does not knowing who they are. Who doesn't know why they're here, or what they want. About being divorced from an innate and primal connection to the continuing process of unfolding creation, the hells and high waters and advertising to be crossed in reconnecting with IT, and the beauty of the stars at night when the sea is still and no one needs to say a word.. Yeah, I like that last idea.

That's what I want to write about, and forget "Ultimate Soldiers" who have amnesia, or Vanilla Sky/Matrix characters who wake up in a box; I want the the actual condition to come through in my work. It's a tough thing to do.....a tough thing to do.......make no mistake......if I'm frying my brain and being an arse its because I'm carving David with a spoon.

I just wish in my heart of hearts, at times like this when the work is almost done and i'm sat typing my reflections at my desk, that there was someone who was also carving David with a spoon to talk to. But I have you, my loyal words, and maybe you'll be enough yet.

I'm going to sleep without sheets tonight, out of a rebellion against keeping up appearances and because my skin wants to feel the prickles of my mattress.

There is the possibility that I will need a new approach next month. In fact, it's almost a certainty. I've played my hand at the fantastical, but it doesn't feel enough. I need the prickles of my mattress.

Ah, but, you know what. All of this is always in my writing. Everything from the Dreams to the Seeking to the poverty and heartache and ordinary suffering of ordinary people. Why else would the superhero I come up with be the dreaming-self of the protagonist, and why else would the protagonist be an ordinary guy in a world of illusion.

And, hold on a minute - for the last month I've been writing a single monologue, a monologue about dream detached from the body. No wonder I'm half way to the moon.

Log 1/4.12 A Mechanics and Geography of Dream.

Space is everywhere.

When I strip away the sentimental value of Earth, of Home, when I lose my perception of Earth as being the centre of existence, then I find myself on a rock in outer space. Outer space is the only space.

Between all matter is emptyness; Space. Quantum theory suggests that on a subatomic level there is no difference between being "here" and being "there". Space is everywhere.

In 2003 I built myself a spaceship similar to the one above. What happened when I used it was this: I spontaneously combusted. Literally. I felt the vibration of each and every atom increase until they spun apart, and I was nothing. Paradoxically, there I was. This experience had absolutely nothing to do with drugs or religion.

I'm not entirely sure that I woke up in the same universe that I left.

I Built This Spaceship in order to investigate a theory that was itself born of a previous vision. That same year I awoke one night in the "lightwater realm", breathing water. The walls of my room glowed orange and yellow and seemed to be made of music. Everything glittered church bells and soft symbols.

I had no fingers. This was a little disturbing, but not as disturbing as the fact that I was shrinking, growing younger and younger until I was a baby and still shrinking. My first reaction was to reach for a cigarette. Bad idea. My tobacco pouch launched itself like a rocket into the air, taking the ceiling with it, and leaving in it's wake a trail of images like an un-spun cinema reel. Immediately after this every object in the room follow suit, until I was surrounded by walls of images and my body had completely disappeared.

The experience didn't stop there. Everyone of those moving images then open up, until I was surrounded by countless eyes. These eyes then shattered like glass.

Beyond those eyes, the world spun beneath me as a complex series of interwoven circles, all spinning around a centre point.

Space is everywhere.

Reality is a dream.

Everything I perceived is composed of those reals spinning so fast that they give the impression of being one thing: the world before me. This world then became a different sort of territory for me - it was inhabited by other beings - dreams - that I do not notice on an ordinary level of awareness. They exist within this thing I call "reality". The dreamtime and the....'wake-time'....are interwoven, and both are simply platforms for the creation of story.

We are playing a game we have forgotten the rules to. My dream-self and my waking-self have become separated not by a difference in space or time, but by a difference in perception.

There are plenty of people out there who will disagree with this, but I am not trying to have "the right way of seeing". I am simply using what I have at my disposal.

I give myself the right to be a "schmuck" and to grow a massive ego when i come close to articulating these visions and manifesting them as story. Nothing is more important than realising these visions, than creating a mechanics and geography of dream, not even being a "rounded human being", or a popular one. Truth is, I put myself on the line for these things. When I get close to them, things like drugs, sex, philosophy, charity and even liberty and equality become trite and pathetic. That's just the way I currently see it, and I see those things in myself as well.

But if people need these things to give their lives meaning, they haven't been where I've been. I try to remain aware of the unfolding story in each person I meet, otherwise I would write the world off and shoot myself.

At this time, three things get my goat. I present them here in order of least important to most important: the first is the drug, dance, rave scene - which I grew out of years ago. My personal opinion is that no one in this scene "has the love", no one knows what "all is one" means, and no one is experiencing anything more than a chemical imbalance. Anything you can do with drugs, you can do without them. No one, in my gross opinion, in this scene has anything like the "secret" they think they do. I know a lot of people who will not like to hear this, but it has nothing to do with them.

The second thing are those specific people who like to take control of other people's minds. The "barging", "raping", "cutting" crew who do stuff like attempt to talk to peoples subconscious minds while they are asleep and shock them with violent images when they least expect it. The "psychonauts" who use what they've learnt to further their own quest for power and influence, and who look at other people's minds like they are property up for grabs simply because the people who own those minds don't have the wherewithal to protect themselves from sociopaths.

The third and most important thing that gets my goat is the any opinion or perception based on the idea "that's the way it is". Nothing needs be said about this. These are notes to prompt myself, and I only need to read the words "that's the way it is" to know how much this jiggles my jangles.

These are the things that push my big red button, that offend me on a core level.

So those are the personal reflections out of the way, my gris to the mill milled.

I spent several hours yesterday working on the same piece as I have been for the last few weeks. It's still evolving, changing, and at times I wonder whether I've written the life out of it.

I've been rewriting it and rewriting it, solely those first 200 words, compacting them and refining them and reordering them because even if the first draft was a "good piece of writing" I'm aiming to make it something more than that. Yes, this is a quest for perfection. I'm not trying to get good marks or get an audience, I'm aiming to relay the vision in accurate terms. Dream is the prime component of my mindscape. These 200 words are the voice of a creature from that realm. They have to be authentic.

It's for this reason that I keep going from my desk to meditation to my desk to meditation, because I need to hold a clear vision of that voice. I'm now spending more time meditating than I am writing as at times it takes 40 minutes of meditation to find a single line or image.

The process of this meditation is as follows:

1. Still the mind. Ease away thoughts of facebook, social interaction, work (the three prime movers of my conscious mind at present).

2. Find the voice.

3. Allow the voice to move and create a mindscape.

I can't ask it to do anything. I have to wait for it to speak on it's own terms.

At the beginning of this course I came to the conclusion that I needed to spend less time theorising and more time taking sketches of people and the world around me. This worked for a time, in that it revealed the things that interest me and gave me practice in wordsmithing.

However, things have changed. The ideas are back, the inspiration is back, and a few weeks ago I made contact with a larger sentience that my simple self - whether this sentience is part of me or not does not matter. What matters is that it lead me from one idea to the next, and made the whole world sing with relevance. It was like being on a path that I couldn't get off - even when I left my room, the songs that I played to myself between sessions followed me. Odd songs that I havn't heard in years in shops and pubs that have a pop-clinetel.

The world seemed to speak to me, and here's the thing that interests me: I've just had the biggest rush of my life and I kept it together. This calls for a fourth "truck point".

I've read only one book on writing this month: Alan Moore's Writing for Comics. Tis a very small book, but it said something I've been wanting to hear for the last four months: Have a very good and established idea of what you're talking about before putting pen to paper. I love that. That's what turns me on, baby. A bloody good idea.

The meditation has been my launch pad - through it I've uncovered the ideas that are most relevant to me. I've gone back through those two formative visions and utilised the symbolism from them, the most important element being WATER. Only THEN did I do any research on the relationship between dream and water, discovering things like the "water gate"/"star gate" mythology in media, in conspiracy theory (I don't believe in conspiracy - for the sake of the work, I believe everyone has forgotten what's going on and who runs what, even those people that run things have no idea who runs things), going back into my classical roots to research things like the river of LETHE, and also have a peak at the Atlantis myth for its WATER symbolism.

The LABYRINTH myth is also a prime component of my dream mechanic and geography; it is a place where dreams are born, and in my mindscape it is also part of the waking-world. People who still value the phrases "it's only imagination" and "it's just a dream" will not get what I'm talking about.

These ideas rushed me like a flood gate had been opened, and I suspect that is exactly what happened. Six months of stripping away layers opened up a wellspring of imagination, and THIS TIME I remained in the drivers seat. This is why I've been so happy.

If drugs, violence and reality get my goat, these dreams are what have my heart, and they are welcome to it. I love them - that kind of love that at times will cause me to shed a tear.

In conclusion, the piece is shrinking. I'm no where near 1500 words, but the words I do have become richer and richer. I'm taking all the time of a poet over each line, and forsaking the accredited expectations of the institute, but I have a dream.....

Log 4.8 So far, so far

I've done what I set out to do at the beginning of the month. I've turned an idea into a script - i havn't yet written out the whole thing as a script, but I have the dialogue, the scenes, the story. Were I to write it out as the script I will submit, only about a quarter of what I've written would fit the word count, and I've only written half the "issue".

It begins with a superhero, who is the dream self divorced from the protagonist, a primal force whose only motivation is 'The Hunt', the thing that joins the dots and chases, hunts ---

The waking self.

While I'm still only just dipping my toes into the writing game with any sense of integrity and purpose, I am still trying to avoid cliche. I do not wish to construct a post-modern superhero in the Alan Moore sense, one who is motivated by personal agenda's and various neuroses. What motivates [The Shadow] is the hunt. I have this idea that characters like Batman are who they are because they are in touch with their animal selves - obvious when I think about it. [The Shadow] is what he is because he's in touch with Dream itself - and in this work dreams are not fluffly wuffy safe places to be. They have big teeth.

The story is essentially about uniting the dreamer with the dream, via an explosion of spurious ideas that turn the world upside down and inside out. It's in no way as simple as 'you have this world over here, and it's real. You have that world over there and it's everything else'. The dream self is as real as the waking self, and this is about what is created when the two are united, fusing those two worlds to create something new.

In it there is a sort of conspiracy by the media to own dreams, to seperate them from the audience so that the audience becomes dependent upon the media to feel alive, whole and like they have an imagination. It begins with a revision of previous methods in the light of the death of what is known as "The American Dream". This death is the reason for Open Auditions and Reality TV; the public are becoming rowdier the more they see that celebrity, fame and wealth are unattainable for the majority. This group of conspirators has the responsibility for maintaing a unified global paradigm, and is now considering providing not only entertainment, but an experience.

They are not the "bad guys", because if they were things would be as they seem, and I'm aiming to move beyond things being what they seem in the story. They are providing a service, in a way, although 'The Old Order' has become decayed as it's members succumb to the pleasures of their own successes.

There is a new technology, which I have fiendishly called The Natural User Interface, which has been designed to hunt down terrorists. They whole thing is set against the back drop of the war on terror, with the two main elements of this war being

a) The enemy is no longer defined by uniform or territory

b) The soldiers/heroes don't know who their superiors are.

Thus the scene is rife for paranoia, the waking selfs cousin to dream, the consequence of two much stimulation, too much information, not enough trust and a dawning realisation by the characters that truth and belief are fictions.

Effectively the machine synchronises the Soldier/Superhero/Hunter character with the Enemy/Villain/Hunted character. The obvious consequence of this would be that one would not know who is good and who is bad, the Superhero would take on villainous characteristics, the Villain would take on heroic characteristics. No! This will not happen, because the machine is not in touch with the Enemy in any way. The Enemy is a construct created by the programming in the machine, L.I.S.T. (living information systems technology) and thus is also a fiction. The justification for this by the "Gov" and the Inventors is that while the programming creates a construct, the Soldiers do actually find enemies.

The protagonist I have yet to work on. Given the genre, and the readership and my own inclinations, it seems obvious that the protagonist will be a 20-30 something "ordinary guy". The S/S/H, Scientist, Media contingent are much more developed than the protagonist, since he only comes into this "issue" half way through and I havn't had a chance at all to work on him yet. So far he has had an experience of his partner becoming divine during sex, which then initiates a psychic breakdown that ties in with the S/S/H synchronistic hunt in a round about way - both events are essentially the same thing in different worlds.

All of this is why I have given the piece the working title of "PSYCHONAUT".

I hope that having these different characters will mean that I have sharpened up my voice and POV skills, and have given myself the challenge of having my characters echo each other through different paradigms.

Writing all this it's clear to see who and what my influences have been. I don't, however, feel like I am copying anyone or rehashing old ideas since the "issue" is largely based on my own experience. Primarily, even. There are themes here that have been in my heart and in my head for pretty much decades. Dream is the most obvious one.

Man, if anyone has sat through a class room of people telling you "You have no idea of the real world" while they spout tired and trite but acceptable cliche's and moralisms, you'll know what I mean.

Personal Reflection: Wow. How alone am I. All dressed up with nowhere to go.

LOG 4.4 THE BIG IDEA, and not the plot

The idea is to explore the POLITICS OF VISION against the backdrop of MODERNITY and the difficulties of maintaining a sense of self and identity in a world that changes by the moment.

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?

Dialogue

AM:

I began to read a book about espionage and Charlemange. I picked it up for the labyrinth motif, and the mystery of what happened to the protagonists father. I was very disappointed in it. The writing was terrible. It was like reading a colour-by-numbers detective story, or like a transcript of a TV show. The characters were one dimensional stereotypes, although all the ingredients of "good writing" were there: scenes were set well, information was given, all five senses were used, but it had no depth.

I have been conflicted recently, wanting to write something that touches on what it is to be human, an existentialist drama, and at the same time wanting to use a mystery genre and some novelty ideas. The idea of writing a detective story seemed to jar with writing a piece of literature. I wanted my character to be an ordinary person that stumbles across a mystery. Then I realised, a detective is an ordinary person, and that was what the Charlemange book was missing. Everyone was a stereotype. People pull out guns for no reason, except "that's what happens in espionage stories".

So I've let Ben Trovato, my existential occult detective, infiltrate my story about Fat. Fat is now Ben Trovato. I've moved on from Fat coming home with his fathers diary, and introduced Suzanna, who I took for the student handbook, where she is defined as having "no job, no funds, no hope". I made these characteristics a spiritual practice and began a dialogue between them that explores their individual philosophies and why it is they do what they do. I havn't paid much attention to the student handbook otherwise, except for this morning when I read the dialogue guidelines:

"Dialogue must never be written for its own sake and should always have at least one of the following functions:

1. impart information (8/10)

2. enrich the characteristation (8/10)

3. move the plot along (6/10)

4. develop the characters within the story (8/10)

5. further the complexities of the plot (3/10)

6. crank up the pace (3/10)

7. enhance the theme or core truth (8/10)

8. reflect relationship changes and emotions (6/10)"

Beside these functions I have given them a mark out of ten for how well these functions are served in my dialogue. None of them is missed out. Again, it seems only natural to me that these functions are what a dialogue should be about. In the Charlemange book, only one or two of these functions is served at a time, which gives it the paint-by-numbers feel.

The characterisation is enriched because both characters are talking about backstories, their own, and comparing philosophies at the end of a week. The complexities of the plot are thickened, in that we learn of Trovato's motivations and personal ontology. We also learn of Suzanna's. Their relationship is illustrated, and the core truths are begun in their philosophies.

It's little more than a first draft at the moment, but I'm happy with the information that has been developed, and with the themes revealed.

The guidelines also state that dialogue should be kept short, which I didn't do for Susanna because she's telling an emotionally charged story. They are swapping stories, which means that their speech will be longer than usual.

One of the things I've noted is that for every guideline proposed by this book, there is a novel I'm reading that utterly disregards it. This is what makes me think that writing "is" art. Even the guidelines are arbitrary, and I can't help but feel sorry for the people who read this stuff and stick to it, probably writing more than they read and never realising that the guidelines are just a prompt.

PM:

Wrote more dialogue, once between Suzanna and Ben, and twice between Ben and "Loisha" (actually two very different characters). Dialogue improved each time, although I was least pleased with the second attempt.

I also read the course text book for once. It says that you need to have a very good idea of character in order to generate dialogue, of their conflicts, desires, histories. I had to flesh out Ben/Fat considerably in order to do this, which I did by freewriting and creating a family tree. Suzanna and Loisha are essentially the same character, with modifications here and there. There's a relationship developing.

I merged project 3's exercise 3 with project 4's first exercise using an african-scottish dialect, which provided some good ideas and a good sense of character. However, I'm stuck with my detective. He's yet to have a case to solve. I think the best way to find one is through having him converse with lots of different characters, at this stage.

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....

LOG:2.5-4

Yeah, so, 95 pages in the last three weeks, not including anything in my notebook, and every single page I've poured over for hours with red pen, highlighter, black pen, thesaurus. Its been exhausting really, and I still feel like I'm fumbling around in the dark, unsure of things like a common place book and this learning log itself, confused by reflective commentary and all those things that support my writing.

Only two exercises left, so I think, considering I have flu and am barely out of bed, I would do well to study rather than write for the next week. Read through the course book, looking for things about common-place books and commentaries, perhaps finish Kings "on writing", peruse "elements of style", do some research.

I would be happy to submit my second to most recent piece entitled "Negredo", and imbroglio about the fictitious Dunn Street - really, I don't know where the imagery for that street came from, certainly nothing I've written recently, but it reflects the character and vice versa - except that there are a few unharmonious elements.

The most notable of these is the protagonists fathers notebook, which gets dislodged from a shelf in paragraph 6. Nothing wrong with it in theory, but its a clumsy addition, remniscent of my attempts to write to much, sticking cats and burials and office jobs into a simple ghost story about a grave yard, a la project 1. I guess its sort of a stand alone element, too removed from the rest of the piece.

Actually, the idea of a diary fits well with the grafitti on the street and the bag lady picking up old newspapers, and perhaps I shouldn't lose it. Maybe its just that paragraph that needs tightening up - i've noticed something of a trend, whereby the first two paragraphs are strong, and then the rest get progressively weaker. Rewriting it I might make the third paragraph as a strong, then the fourth with the second rewrite, then the fifth with the third. I don't seem to make much of a mark on the thing as a whole, but seem to work progressivly through the paragraphs - the character leads me through a story, clearly at first, and then I become tired as I go along and the piece loses its clarity.

Time for draft 5?

Redrafting is the most valuable thing I've learnt so far. Before I learnt how to use a highlighter and red pen in this context, together with a thesaurus and my notes, I never would have known where to begin with a redraft. Now I eat them up and churn them out, draft after draft. It's a skill not to lose the original 'zen' of the piece, which is always perfect to begin with, and only alter the form.

I managed to get out and do some sketching this afternoon, which was good. Nice and simple, no pressure to create a story, just trying to capture a moment instead, to improve my writing rather than my ideas. This sketching still needs to become more of a habit, though.

Log 2, 5, X: Riding the Wave

The new draft, which I've called "Dunn St"...well, it fucking rocks. Its a little piece of bile fermenting in a heat wave, a blast of hot air, a tasty synthesis of character, scene, history, motivation, psychology and any other ingredient that might be important but that I havn't noticed because I've been writing it in a trance and havn't stood back far enough to see it all.

I've written 350 words of a second draft tonight, after going through the first with a red pen (what was that about?) a highlighter (thats what I'm talking about!) and a black pen (add this). I then took out some key words and devoured a thesaurus, taking a page of notes on the first paragraph. I could spent hours going through a paragraph at a time, and am honing this skill. In the end I wrote, four paragraphs, extrapolated from the mood of the first and incorporating the information of the first drafts first three paragraphs. Same amount of words, tons more POW.

There's a lot in it - no filler. Everything fits snuggly; its claustrophobic and breathless, full of commas with a dearth of full stops. An imbroglio, everything a symbol of everything else.

What have I learnt? I should learn from previous drafts, and write something new. Yeah, redrafting is a good practice, and I couldn't avoid it if I tried, but when it comes to the next exercise i should abandon what I've written, taking the themes and the moods and the style if useful, but not the words.

NOT THE WORDS!

Not the words. The themes, the mood, the style, maybe even the action, but not the words.

I can't really explain why, except that the words become deader and deader. They need to sit and germinate for a while, a couple of weeks perhaps, before I approach them again in order to write a new piece and not just a new draft.

Anyway, I'm happy again. I feel I got to my essence with this one.

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.

Log:2:2:3 Fucking poetry. Fuck it.

I'm finding it really fucking difficult to write about my family. Really, really, really fucking difficult.

And difficult to write poetry. Fucking joke. I don't want to write poetry, I can't, I have no truck with poetry. It doesn't sit well with me.

Fuck you, poetry.

I sat for about 2 hours last night with a blank page in front of me, unable to write a single word about my dad. I then tried this morning to write about my brother, and a similar thing happened. I managed to get a few words out, focusing on description, but most of it was about how I felt. The trouble is there are huge spans of my life were these two closest people are complete strangers. Even though I grew up with my brother, I begin to realise when I write that I never really knew him in a lot of ways. Everyone in my family was a stranger to everyone else, or so it feels - i never knew a thing about my mothers past, nor my step-fathers, and my brother spent most of his time saying "I don't know" and not wanting to "get involved". And we all ran away at some point or other. How the fucking blue jesus am I supposed to write about that. "Write about someone you know well" it says. Fucking joke.

Log:2.2.1-3 Splicing Again

It took me an hour to read through my drafts. It has now taken me at least 12 hours to merge them. I have a good 8 drafts. It was complicated to mix them; i lost some of the good details, and some of the atmosphere, but I have coherence.

I am trying something complicated - in the same way that I'm trying to fuse character and scene, I'm trying to fuse two genres: ghost story and spy thriller.

Its early to be so ambitious, but its the way I approach my writing with intent. I read a good part of Kings "On Writing" and one of the phrases that stuck was:

"You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it anyway but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page".

It took me an hour to read through the drafts, highlighting and editing. I cut them up, rearranged them, stuck them to my wall, and then tore them all down again. I did a brief mind map last night, rewrote it, plotted this morning, defined the character history, why he is where he is, what he wants, and what the action is, 99% of which I didn't put into the draft. Then I spent three hours rewriting it again.

Voila, coherence. Not enough atmosphere in the right places (so, yes, I'll write it again, and probably again) but a coherent and consistent sequence of events. Nothings really too out of place.

As an aside, one of the comments my tutor made on "Amicus" was that the "vampire" was at times a socio-path and ended up as a business man. Exactly my point - I wanted a socio-path, not a vampire. And I want spooks, not ghosts. And I want a history that unites these things. Han Soe is a philosopher who writes ghosts stories in Burma. Ghost films were banned in Burma from 1960-2005. Ghost - spook - ritual, I want to unite it all. Mwuahahahahahaha.

Shit, I'm tired.

Log24.42.1111.0 Stockholm Syndrome

Spent the last couple of days going exercise one. Have a first draft of 400 words that I'm happy with. Focussed on description, included all the senses, cut out 99% of the demon adverbs and any hint of a first person or otherwise explanatory voice. Wrote about a dignified, charismatic old man. Not a vampire.

Speaking of vampires, though........Lets face it, they signify nothing. Facebook has several girls on it singing the praises of Twilight New Moon, one particularly interesting message reads "boys, DONT go and see Twilight unless you want you're pride and ego broken". Another says "best bit is when Edward says "it's only blood, Bella, whats the big deal".

Can you say "stockholm syndrome"?

Does no one realise that vampires are essentially, historically a characterisation of the obese aristocratic landlord who has the legal right to rape as many of the village virgins as he pleases. No doubt he also said, on occassion, "its only blood, Bella, whats the big deal".

No, I aint no purist. I'm happy for the vampire myth to be reborn, so long as it means something. And these days it means.....it means......it means.......what?

Stab in the dark: taming the bad boy? making him see the error of his ways, making him a better man?

Dude, he's dead.

"its only blood, Bella, whats the big deal?". A sentence that has the potential to be utterly chilling, and equally trite. I still like the romantic idea of an undead triste, a meeting of the innocent young girl with the ancient magical creature. I'd stomach the kissing and the abs and even the sweet words. So long as they were describing a rape.

Imagine a young village virgin left undead. Lashing out. Not wanting to be alive. Knowing the ageless abyss that is hopelessness, and turning against even her closest family. Running in to the woods to live in the wild, only coming out at night. Eating live stock raw, hair matted, bed gown torn and blackened.

Are these things not important anymore?

Or is it, to quote Nosferatu's younger cousin, "only a bit of fun"?....

This bring to mind my poem "Rorschach Desk", which I think sucked as a poem. Perhaps I was aiming to high. But this is what I was trying to do: say something without saying. Describe food like a scene of carnage, using words that would describe a body, but subtly. One day I hope I can describe a love scene in this way - the example that springs to mind - outwardly a love affair, inwardly a scene of horror. Thats art.

Twilight New Moon? Thats fucking bullshit. Superficial, shallow. Just like men, huh.

LOG231310-11.12 Sentimental Musings

Ah yes, the writing rolls ever on, though today I stood back awhile and didn't touch a pen. First time in over two weeks.

I have some stories to work on. What else is there to say?.................

And if I cannot find the words to record my practice, then I can say this - I can comment on my purpose, on the reason why I write. Because in my heart, in my mind and in my dreams there are faces of all the people I've known, and loved, and lost. The places I've been, and may never return to, and all the experiences I've had, all things I've seen, things that may never find a place in the world without my writing.

And so I light another cigarette as the rain beats heavy on the windows by my desk, and drink another cup of coffee to toast the wonder of those worlds to which I've ventured, and escaped, and returned in almost one piece. Worlds that no one would believe, were it not for the compassion of fiction. That sacred window into possibility, and to the future.

For the beauty of our fumblings, for the lightness of our chilled recourse to seperation and for the passion of obsession. To carve a glimpse of those places made of lightwater, where houses are built of music, and history reverberates in each note. For the memory of earth, from which we came so long ago, and in defiance of those things that travel through the abyss of hopelessness and watch from severed eyes, and in defiance of those people that seek their immortality not through art but through a stolen catalogue of souls.

For the people who cannot be with me as I write tonight, nor join me for coffee tomorrow.

LOG231310-11.10 Word Hemorrage

Full day of work today, so not as much writing.

Woke up this morning, wrote a poem first thing. It was passable as a piece of writing, it captured some feelings well. Reminded me that I need to keep writing poems - poem after poem - digging through my note book and utilising the themes and associations I have developed. I read a quote somewhere;

"A piece of writing is just a postcard from where the author has been".

I've got a lot of ideas building up, too much too fit into anyone poem. I see at least three nesting in one page of my notebook.

Came back from work and immediately spent a solid two hours pouring over associations. I used an excercise from the course text book to firm up some ideas - basically took the important words from the most recent draft of "Logos" and drew a mind-map. It was very complicated, and fried my brain. Too much to contain in a single vision, a good set of notes. I asked myself what I was really trying to say, linking dreams, history, technology, language and architecture to make a labyrinth of the city.

The Minataur myth has really captured my imagination for the last several weeks.

LOG231310-11.9 Logos/Logo\s

Rewrote my poem "Logos", with the intent of imbuing it with a more coherent rhyming structure. Hard work, but some success. Its an unfamiliar process - in the past I've used poems lazily, when I've had too many thoughts to do anything other than spit words at paper in the order they appear.

Some of my ideas are so complicated that the poem I've written isn't a finished product, but another phase in my gathering of material. A consolidation of previous materials, illuminating certain relationships but not expressing them adequately enough for my liking.

There is the Logos, and there are Logo's, and both work in similar ways. Logo's create a virtual Logos. Its a complicated thing for me to fit into a poem.

Disappointed by "Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul". Its a humorous story, but the language isn't beautiful enough. Its not to my taste, I think.

I have another notebook about to be opened up, for the purpose of "reading as a writer" - noting things that jump out at me from the books I read, writing reviews and pillaging ideas.

All in all, its been a fairly productive day. Wrote out my story from last night ("Itch"), then rewrote the poem. Came back from the library with a couple of novels (my god, its the worst library I've ever been too). However, one of those days flavoured by excessive haunting; feeling out of place. What was it Anne Rice said about writing?....

"Writers write about what obsesses them," says Rice. "You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is."

Feeling out of place is my personal demon. And I do not mean in some teenage social angst kind of way. I mean in the sense of losing everything over night, having your history and friends denied you. That I know. I just can't write about it easily.

Much easier to write about the time I was almost shot in the face.

Oh god, its here right now. If only I could get fucked up, but the writer in me won't allow it. Arrrrrghhh.......

[...transmission terminated...]

LOG231310-11.8 1/2 Research Day 2

Research went well today. Gathered some good stuff. Turns out there's quite a lot of material on forgotten histories, usually involving conspiracies and aliens. There are There seems to be quite a lot of stuff on alien origins; on legends of Lemuria, a sunken country, on the Nommos of the Dogon, an amphibian alien race who gave great knowledge to an african tribe. There are lots of water connections, which is interesting because in writing about my dreams there is a continual water theme. Correspondences between subterranean, subaquatic and subconscious abound.

On the one hand, most of the stuff is paranormal, leaving me feeling like a nut. On the other hand, I invented this stuff. It came from my own searching within myself. Only after writing notes and recording using a dictaphone did i then hit the web for other people's ideas, leaving me feeling less like a nut and more like I've tuned into something other people share. An archetype, perhaps.

I didn't get much writing done during the day. It seems that night is my preferred time - when all the phantoms of the day quit their jabbering about cleaning the kitchen and paying the bills, then my imagination is free. I felt a little blocked during the day, and planned for an early night. I then did one of the exercises in the Creative Writing Coursebook, and it got me all fired up and I wrote a 300 word story. Thats all my assignments done already, leaving aside redrafting and editing.

I started a new notebook specifically for the exercises in the book. First one - write down five sounds you hear and all their associations. This was gold dust! Its an excercise to find your creative voice, and it worked so well I shot straight off from the sound of scratching to a full blown story. I never knew scratching could lead to scouring, digging, unearthing, voodoo and skeletons in the closet. I will definately be doing more of this - the associations seem to be where the marrow is, and I love finding them. My thesaurus is my favourite toy.

I'm going to repeat the excercise tomorrow. There's something meditative about listening; listening to the sounds of the world, to my own associations, to the stories that are already in me, in who I am.

The story itself, not so great. But that makes it great. Its honest, an illustration of where my skills lie. I really enjoyed that it was loose and flabby, because it means I can tighten and trim it. More fun!

LOG231310-11.8 Research Day

I'm going to do some research online today. The internet can be useful for catching soundbites, following links endless from page to page. In the past I've come up with some really interesting free associations this way, connections between things that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. As Dirk Gently, Holistic Private Detective, says in The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, "I don't get where I should be, but I often get where I need to be" (on following cars instead of maps).

One of the things I'm trying to get a grip on is how to use this log and my notebook constructively. I'm trying to differentiate between them. Truth be told, I don't have a notebook. I have a 'workbook'. In it I write down a lot of creative thoughts, in the form of poetry and prose and mind maps. Its getting filled up quickly. The difference between that and this log is that this is a place for reflection and understanding. I think when I have delved into a particular theme enough, through this blog and my workbook, I will then go through them both and construct a notebook - a record of my research, taking key quotes, writings and images. It will be phase three in a process of continued refinement.

Today my plan is this: investigate a few recurring themes through this blog. Rather than writing down everything I find in my workbook I'll put it here.

Those themes are these:

1. A Forgotten History; A Forgotten Story; Unnoticed but present. It is not as if it has been burned, or buried or deliberately obscured, it is just that if you were in its presence you wouldn't think to see it.

2. Earth as collective memory; I am interested in the idea that we do not live on The Earth, but An Earth. Origins Unknown.

3. That we inhabit different worlds and different times, but out of a need for coherence and simplicity we reduce them to single concept.

Now, the best way I have found to explore these things and give them an element of possibility - and then probability - is through comparative studies. Finding correlations, associations and similarities between myth. Its sort of like A Grand Unified Theory of Origins and Influence.

My most successful venture into this field was several years ago, when I was attempting to write an article for the Only Maybe student magazine, part of Robert Anton Wilson's online academy. Essentially I discovered that Khazr, the sufi god of light, was a counterpart of Saint George, that Saint George was a an expression of the Archangel Michael, and that Michael was Adam in angelic form.

I then went on to find that in Sufi culture Khazir is synonymous with the Green Man. Just like Michael is the angelic form of Adam, the Green Man is the angelic form of Robin Hood. Rather, Robin Hood is a personification of the Green Man.

It is worth pointing out that the earliest sound reference to Saint George occurs at the time of the crusades, when he became patron of Soldiers. He was an abyssinian, and i used my imagination to suggest that he was encountered during the crusades. The worship of Khazir involves imbibing marijuana, and his name means "The Light of God". To experience this light, one needed only to get high.

The celebration day of Khazir is the 23rd of April. The celebration of St. George is the 23rd of April. Given the context of the article - counter culture magazine - i suggested that one of the bounties carried back during the crusades was marijuana, along with the myth of "The Light of God". Further to this, there are accounts of soldiers using marijuana to make them stronger fighters.

There were a lot of other correspondences, but due to my ramshackle life I've lost the notes and its too long ago to remember it all. This is just an example. Ultimately, my intent was to show that Saint George, like Khazir, was the patron saint not only of England, but also of Cannabis.

TODAY I intend to discover the relationship between myths of the unconscious, and where the spirits of the world reside. One of the things that came through in my writing of dreams was a transformation into sea creatures, and the world taking on water elements (the roads becoming rivers, rivers of consciousness, etc).

I start with the Enki - "the Enki lay asleep in the depths of the primeval ocean". Chthonic. Shit, I'm going to have to abandon this explanation and resort to my notebook.