Life continues regardless

Well...

Recently handed in my submission: 'The Man Who Lived in a House of Mirrors'. I love Metafiction. Stories about stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories...

Still smoking too many cigarettes. Still enjoying the weekends perhaps a little too much. Still breathing and so on.

Going to start work again on a short story with the working title 'Bottling Sunlight'. Bouncing ideas around my head during the idle moments, trying to form a narrative from them. Now comes the writing.

Also got another idea: 'Unwritten Letters' / 'People I Used To Know'. Stay tuned.

Yep.

The man who lived in a house of mirrors

An old photo I've been messing around with in Photoshop lately. Tentatively entitled 'Another Life'

Well, I've been doing little recently except reading, working out, and watching movies. A bit of writing too. The deadline for this year's uni Creative Writing Competition & Anthology approaches and so far I've got one poem I need to finish up and edit, one rather short prose piece that I'm considerably less confident about than when I wrote it, and a rather longer one (it'll be around 2000 words I think) that I started today and quite like so far. The working title is 'The Man Who Lived in a House of Mirrors' and it has a sort of parable-ish vibe to it. It's all about how we use art to reflect the cluttered junkyards that are our inner selves, which can be cathartic and can also be like wandering purposefully into a maze from which we may never really return. It's been fun to write and I think it'll probably be the one I submit

Writing tips from Clark Ashton Smith

"The main objective of the short story is to stir the reader's emotions. How you stir them or what emotion you stir is not so important as the fact that to hold the reader's interest you must stir his emotions. You must be able to create various emotional effects thru your characters, action, description, setting, etc.

Constant practice is the key to success. You cannot learn music without practicing it, neither can you learn to write without writing. I suggest that, for your own benefit, you write a few hundred words depicting an emotional experience. Write up one of your own experiences or invent one. But remember that you are writing it with the purpose of stirring an emotion in the person who reads it. The sketch is not to be a story but merely an incident-no opening explanations are necessary.

When you are reading a story watch for the passages in which the author is relating an emotional experience and inducing the emotional feeling in you. By studying how that particular author is doing it you will be better able to do it in your own work."

Full text here.

More bits & bobs:

Atmosphere in Weird Fiction
Fragment of an Essay
On Fantasy

Further nonfiction by C.A.S. may be found here.

'The Crisis'

Have you ever seen stone rot away in seconds or dissolve like sugarlumps in boiling water? That was on the day the ceiling collapsed and the shadows of airships fell through the building’s cracked ribcage. I recall them drifting corpulently like boats seen from below the water. It seemed like we ran for hours after that, never fully escaping the shade.

The start of a short new piece (click here to read more) that I'm working on and thinking of submitting for this year's Creative Writing Competition/Anthology at London Met.

Defaced

"He was never entirely sure whether the thing he did next - the thing he always did next, the thing he had to do - was because the woman before him was not the one he had become fixated with or because in a way she was, whether she bore too striking a similarity or not quite enough. He knew that when the deed was done (heart beating so hard that he thought he was dying) she was neither, and her face could no longer taunt him frustratingly with what was different and what was the same, what he had and what he had not, because it was no longer there. He watched her bleed out in the morning light, noting the final slow and steady breath as he cleaned his equipment."

Progress

Yeah!

Don't bother telling me that's unreadable...

My problem is...

...I can't write padding. Well, it's one of my problems.

I don't know how on earth this novel's going to reach 15000 words - I'm barely at 15K and I've already given away too much, moving on too quickly, and so on.

Hopefully by the time I hit 50K I'll have developed a better sense of how to pace it, and will have bulked up the chapters I've written so far. Once again I'm reminded just how big an undertaking this actually is.

When satire transforms into sincerity

I'm so taken with an idea for a nonexistant book that I posted on one of my other blogs that I'm actually considering writing it as a proper story. It started off as a sort of generic Magic Realist pisstake but I've grown increasingly fond of the title and basic plot idea that I came up with. It's funny how these things turn out.

Extract from prologue

...sated, it turns its head ponderously this way and that, eventually facing upward: a dizzying wealth of stars. Once they were familiar but now they are made strange by the years. It reminds itself that there are no stars where it lies now, in a place where memory comprises almost the totality of existence and all else is cold stone and silence. With a deft exercise of will it scatters these thoughts and returns to the past.

Stars. No end of stars, blinking into existence and disappearing again as quickly, the life cycle of entire worlds played out before there is time to recognise it. Time is liquid, abstract, to be lived or recollected as slowly or quickly as it chooses. It slows then to the tempo where concepts like nights and days have meaning in time to see a meteor shower rake the horizon.
       As the glittering fire falls through the atmosphere a new image transposes itself: dust motes caught in a beam of light, in a small room with bare floorboards, and now it is shooting down toy soldiers with a cork gun...

The story so far...

Well, this isn't all the story so far, but a collage of small sections representative of it. One that you can't read. I know, what's the point of it? I don't know myself. Sort of satisfying though. Look! I am actually getting things done!

I'm very pleased with how it's going. One thing I've realised is that you can think and plan all you like, but it's only when you're really in the process of writing it that the story blossoms. There's not a buzz in the world like it.

As you might be able to tell from that series of screenshots, I've set the page layout up as close as I can to that of a "real book" - this helps me psychologically, as weird as that sounds, to feel more like I'm writing "a real book". Laugh it up, I deserve it, but it works for me. It also gives me a better idea of pace and structure.

I wish I could post up an extract. I really do. Soon come.

Two productive days

Well, I've almost written a chapter. I'm aware I have to write roughly fifty times this much to reach publisher expectations for a novel 'in the genre', and that I'll probably spend even longer editing, but it's a start. I'm really tempted to post up an extract, but I'll have to keep that impulse at bay. I think it's a bad habit picked up from Creative Writing seminars and DeviantArt - the need to have instant feedback/validation as soon as you've banged out a few thousand words. The 'real world' is a very different place, and needs certain adjustments in attitude and approach accordingly.

I had a couple of chapters I wrote months ago, but they were on my old hard-drive that spectacularly died on me, a terrible loss that I'm still mourning. Those earlier few pages bear so little resemblance to what I'm doing now, though, that maybe it's a very good thing: a fresh start.

Let's hope I can keep up the momentum.

Insight into the process

Recently author Jeff Vandermeer has been posting various notes and extracts from drafts on his blog, including ones that never made it into the 'final cut', on his blog. It's fascinating stuff.

In case you're reading this several months in advance of writing, in which case the posts I'm talking about won't be on the front-page anymore, I'll post some links up:

'Shriek: An Afterword - Genesis'

'Shriek: An Afterword - Alternate start to the war'

'Shriek: An Afterword - High level notes after completing first draft'

This selection is by no means definitive, and I'd heartily recommend a thorough exploration of the site, not just in terms of this material but because it's a damn good one.

In some cases it's like being provided with the literary equivalent of deleted scenes and director's commentary, and it definately allows new insight into the texts and the process that brought them to fruition. This sort of thing elevates Jeff's blog to a different level than that of many other authors, and is apart from anything else a very generous gesture to the readers, especially those who are writers themselves. You don't see this sort of thing very often, and it's a testament not just to the quality of Jeff's blog but also to blogs and their potential as a unique, invaluable format on the whole.

Harsh times

Is it just me or are things seeming decidedly dystopian these days? The 21st century started with a bang and it seems like we're now living in a very different world - but then perhaps in the 90s I was too young to fully appreciate 'the state of things' and maybe, whatever age you happen to be living in, there is a tendancy toward pessimism. Also I generally try (not always successfully) to put things in perspective: there are always bigger woes out there than those I've seen or imagined. It says something quite dismal about human nature, though, that we're not usually quick to remember this. "Me, me, me" is the credo.

I wrote something today inspired by certain circumstances that you may have heard about in the media. It's a rough first draft, but here's an extract:

“The university had been aflame for months. Some faculties such as Natural Philosophy and the Department of Hydrothermal Mechanics cobbled together engines from rubber hoses and old bathtubs of rainwater collected through smashed ceilings or in the few quadrangles not open to sniper fire in order to tackle the blaze wherever it encroached upon their territories. Others were not so fortunate: the poets watched sadly, with trembling lips and pens ascribble, as their halls were reduced to dark oaken ashes.

Government troops had issued the ultimatum: pay us what’s ours or we’ll come in and take it. The bean counters responded by reassuring themselves of the strength of their barricades and that, while the coin still flowed (even at a trickle) they would still remain to tap it. Casualties were many and missed. Students and academics tried to continue their activities as best they could.

One particularly striking set of lightprints that made the papers was of an assault on the eastern wing. A large lizard, one eye encircled by a monacle imprinted with targeting marks and with ragged filigree extending from its brain to a repeating rifle embedded in its back, scales a tower and makes a furtive entrance. A student can be seen struggling with the creature, eventually wresting back the tome it sought to steal and pawn for a few coppers, and next he is seen putting a deftly-aimed round through it’s unnaturally augmented head. In the final picture we see a sullen administrator demanding the hard-won book, presumably to line his own pockets or to fund the School of Mercantile Enterprise, one of the few faculties that the higher-ups deemed consequential and, of course, profitable.”

Harsh times indeed.

An interesting metafictional idea...

...occurred to me when reading/commenting on this entry on Mark Charan Newton's blog (he's an intriguing new author by the way, one whose writings I'll definately be paying attention to in future).

Here's what I had in mind:

It's a story about a writer. He has a manuscript. So far, so samey. However...

What if you were to include extracts from that manuscript, various drafts during the editing process (including after feedback from publishers/friends/etc) and subtly show how the changes have occurred due to events in the author's life during the novel's span, changes in his/her attitudes, and the writer's relationship with the both the characters in the story and figures in his/her life?

Slight rewritings of the same scene in various ways can produce very different meanings, and I think it might be quite good to illustrate the author's psychological and emotional states not so much through the 'real' part but through the 'fictional'. Each fills in the gaps of the other.

What if, at the end, the final story/draft is almost entirely different from the initial one, forming a kind of story arc in itself, two journeys that mirror and contrast each other, and gradually the story being written becomes the main narrative and the writer's 'real life' plot-strand the secondary one? Or maybe in the end the one that you thought was fact was actually fiction, and vice versa, or maybe both were, or neither?

I know what you may be thinking. Yes I have seen the film 'Adaptation'. I'm thinking along quite different lines though, and also as far as I'm aware (correct me if I'm wrong though) I haven't heard of anything precisely like this in terms of literature.

I love metafiction. It's a wonderful concept, and the way it's been used over the last century or so has been one of the great successes of literary postmodernism in my opinion.

Two of my favourite metafictional works, in case you're interested, are Italo Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' and 'House of Leaves' by Mark Z. Danielewski. I recommend the hardcover editions of the latter. I feel like some books almost have to be read that way, a quirk I suppose, and this is one such novel. You'll see what I mean if you read it. You're in for a real treat if you do.

If you want to follow metafiction right back into the depths of history though, you'll invariably end up at the 'Thousand & One Nights'. I always seem to find myself there anyway.

Fictional Myths

I've been deriving a lot of enjoyment lately from thinking up and writing legends and folklore. This has taken place in the process of worldbuilding, 'doing the background' so that when I come to write the main narratives, stories and novel(s?) that take place in that world it'll be able to flow without having to stop all the time to come up with these things from scratch. I used to think this kind of planning wasn't important, and it could all be done on the fly. Little did I know.

The importance of research is something that has been drummed into me at various points during my degree, especially in terms of writing Historical fiction, and I would say Speculative fiction is no different in that it takes the same kind of rigour. "God is in the details." You have to know where you are before exploring it without getting lost, and a flimsy world will fall to pieces - it needs a solid foundation.

Returning to the subject of myth however, I find there is a wonderful simplicity to writing in this style that is its strength. It reminds me of the glee with which sometimes I used to embrace convention within certain types of fiction in the days when I was easier satisfied. From "There once was a..." or "They tell a tale in the land of..." onward I know what I'm doing, what tone to take, how to structure it, and so on. It seems at times almost like ancestral memory kicking into autopilot, as ridiculous as that may sound. There is a lyrical richness and sense of mankind's deep narrative heritage that is palpable in writing and reading myth and folklore, one that makes it difficult not to romanticise. It's the same reason that the 'Thousand And One Arabian Nights' continue to loom large in my thoughts and will do for some time hence. These narratives, or this broad style, I think, exist at the heart and in the origins of all others right up to the present, which is perhaps why it's so satisfying to reconnect with them, for instance, in the context of a novel.