So, "After the Blackout" has been driving me batshit, and not in the artistically acceptable way where I feel myself being stalked by shadows of the main characters, or unable to sleep, making me instead stay up all night at my desk, drinking gin by candlelight with shaking hands (a bad mix all around. In other news, I need new batteries for my smoke detector), and penning rambling letters to my sick wife in the sanitorium about how I long for the release of a squalid death. No, it has been driving me to hair-ripping, wall pounding, procrastinating, run-on sentence Hell.
I was in a coffee shop yesterday (I was waiting for someone! Don't judge me!), and I made a bunch of notes, so I think I know what is wrong, and what I have to do to correct it. The problem is, it means scrapping everything so far and starting again, which I'm not keen to do. I have other ideas I want to move on to.
Part of my reason for having this site is to keep myself disciplined. I have the attention span of a lobotomized gnat, I want an egg salad sandwich.
Sorry, sorry, really, I'm back, but see what I mean? I know lots of writers have trouble finishing projects they start...that's a pretty common problem for people in general. My way of combatting this is by making myself work on only one project at a time, and I don't let myself touch anything else until it's done. My reward for completing my work is more work. This website is also a disciplinary tool of sorts, for publicly shaming me into working so I actually have stuff to post.
Right now I'd love to throw "After the Blackout" across my apartment, or bury the notebook in the garden, and work on the next thing. I know if I do that though, I'll fall back into bad habits in a second, and not finish a piece for another two years. I have a few writer friends who seem to actually work steadily on multiple projects at once, and I look upon them as unicorns. Pink unicorns, with glittery manes, and ruby hooves, who speak fluent French.
I'm still a bipedal, non-imaginary anglophone, I'm afraid.
So, for the sake of any and all future works, back to the beginning I go.
(sorry Shayne)
Showing posts with label boring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label boring. Show all posts
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Secret Identity
If ever I feel the need to publish under a pen name (I currently feel no such compulsion), then I've determined that my name will be Alex Fawn Timfly. A bag of candy for anyone who solves the intricate mystery of the name*. And in all my works published as Timfly, I will use this as my author bio pic:
In other news, no longer having my pet around, I can no longer mask my insanity, and have become reconciled to the fact that I just talk to myself most of the time.
It's a good life.
*Shayne is excluded from this. She knows too much. And the mystery is not that intricate. Have you read the Da Vinci Code? Yeah, I'm sorry too. Anyway, it's not much trickier than that. You don't care anyway.
P.S. Yeah, this is supposed to be a writer's blog. I may or may not have a story twitching anxiously in the inbox, or possibly even on the desk of the editor of a sizeable horror magazine.
In other news, no longer having my pet around, I can no longer mask my insanity, and have become reconciled to the fact that I just talk to myself most of the time.
It's a good life.
*Shayne is excluded from this. She knows too much. And the mystery is not that intricate. Have you read the Da Vinci Code? Yeah, I'm sorry too. Anyway, it's not much trickier than that. You don't care anyway.
P.S. Yeah, this is supposed to be a writer's blog. I may or may not have a story twitching anxiously in the inbox, or possibly even on the desk of the editor of a sizeable horror magazine.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
White Lighting
I'm beyond the point where I take an overtly holistic or spiritual approach to writing, but some residual belief in faeries and winged muses clings to the inner walls of my brain. Case in point:
"Stage 28" HAD to be written in the wide black journal with yellow pages and the silver placeholder ribbon, with black pens, in handwriting.
"After the Blackout" HAS to be written in the blue-ish "inspiration" notebook my mother gave me for Christmas, with blue pens, in printing.
"Stage 28" HAD to be written in the wide black journal with yellow pages and the silver placeholder ribbon, with black pens, in handwriting.
"After the Blackout" HAS to be written in the blue-ish "inspiration" notebook my mother gave me for Christmas, with blue pens, in printing.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Stage 28: the story of the story, Part 3
Alternate Title: A Sue By Any Other Name Would Destruction Wreak
Flagrant narcissism was the answer, isn't it always? My main character would be an obsessive devotee of the Phantom, trying desperately to create the one "true" film version of the story that would essentially launch all the other tacked-together versions into the sun. Not bad. It was a starting point, but where to go from there?
I fidgeted through the rest of the bus ride, and when I finally got home, hardly said hi to my mother as I made a beeline (meaning I ran quickly but crookedly and unsteadily...pretty much my norm) for my computer.
That thing I said about no research? Okay, so it was a bit of a lie. But it wasn't much, really. I think I still held to my new "lazy" resolution quite nicely. I needed a catalyst though. So, armed with the Complete Phantom of the Opera and Google, I began to feel my way along Phantom's cinematic history. I didn't have to probe long before the perfect setting landed in my lap, and Telly began to take on more detail in my head, along with a cast of utter idiots. I was jitterbugging all over my room, except not really because it was the size of a horse's stall and the open floor space in it measured exactly one foot by three. So instead of jitterbugging, I sat on my bed and began to write.
I wrote two pens into Bic Heaven. Around seven o'clock in the morning, brain feeling like cotton, eyeballs on fire, and shivering like you do when you haven't slept a wink, Stage 28 was done. Rough to be sure, but done. I went for a much needed cup of tea, then came back and read the story.
I started to feel sick.
It started off well. It was funny, and clipped along well, then about a third of the way in, it became a mess. Not even a salvageable mess, just an absolute disaster. I suppose this shouldn't have been a surprise, given the circumstances, but for all of you who went to college or university and procrastinated like most students do, well...you get used to pulling off miracles. The panic doesn't hit until you've failed to pull off the standard miracle. Once the standard miracle has failed, then you're in the realm of the unknown. THEN you panic.
I panicked, and the first thing I did in my panic, was make another cup of tea. It was the same as the cup of tea I'd just drank, except my hand shook a lot more when lifting the cup. I re-read "Stage 28", and thought of what I should do with it, all the while, a nagging discomfort grew in my mind. There was something else wrong here, besides the story just being a pile of crap.
Wincing, I read the story again, tried to pinpoint what was bothering me, and couldn't do it. I forced myself to try again, this time doing the critical thinking and sniffing out of symbols and themes that I'd supposedly learned to do in four years of university. Then it hit me.
Dear God, sweet God, I had accidentally written a piece of homoerotic slash fanfiction.
Seriously...no seriously...was I an even bigger hack than I thought? Apparently so.
There's not much left to this sweeping, epic tale, then I'll actually start talking about current writing events, rather than a year old farce.
Flagrant narcissism was the answer, isn't it always? My main character would be an obsessive devotee of the Phantom, trying desperately to create the one "true" film version of the story that would essentially launch all the other tacked-together versions into the sun. Not bad. It was a starting point, but where to go from there?
I fidgeted through the rest of the bus ride, and when I finally got home, hardly said hi to my mother as I made a beeline (meaning I ran quickly but crookedly and unsteadily...pretty much my norm) for my computer.
That thing I said about no research? Okay, so it was a bit of a lie. But it wasn't much, really. I think I still held to my new "lazy" resolution quite nicely. I needed a catalyst though. So, armed with the Complete Phantom of the Opera and Google, I began to feel my way along Phantom's cinematic history. I didn't have to probe long before the perfect setting landed in my lap, and Telly began to take on more detail in my head, along with a cast of utter idiots. I was jitterbugging all over my room, except not really because it was the size of a horse's stall and the open floor space in it measured exactly one foot by three. So instead of jitterbugging, I sat on my bed and began to write.
I wrote two pens into Bic Heaven. Around seven o'clock in the morning, brain feeling like cotton, eyeballs on fire, and shivering like you do when you haven't slept a wink, Stage 28 was done. Rough to be sure, but done. I went for a much needed cup of tea, then came back and read the story.
I started to feel sick.
It started off well. It was funny, and clipped along well, then about a third of the way in, it became a mess. Not even a salvageable mess, just an absolute disaster. I suppose this shouldn't have been a surprise, given the circumstances, but for all of you who went to college or university and procrastinated like most students do, well...you get used to pulling off miracles. The panic doesn't hit until you've failed to pull off the standard miracle. Once the standard miracle has failed, then you're in the realm of the unknown. THEN you panic.
I panicked, and the first thing I did in my panic, was make another cup of tea. It was the same as the cup of tea I'd just drank, except my hand shook a lot more when lifting the cup. I re-read "Stage 28", and thought of what I should do with it, all the while, a nagging discomfort grew in my mind. There was something else wrong here, besides the story just being a pile of crap.
Wincing, I read the story again, tried to pinpoint what was bothering me, and couldn't do it. I forced myself to try again, this time doing the critical thinking and sniffing out of symbols and themes that I'd supposedly learned to do in four years of university. Then it hit me.
Dear God, sweet God, I had accidentally written a piece of homoerotic slash fanfiction.
Seriously...no seriously...was I an even bigger hack than I thought? Apparently so.
There's not much left to this sweeping, epic tale, then I'll actually start talking about current writing events, rather than a year old farce.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Stage 28: the story of the story Part 2
Yes, Phantom of the Opera.
One of my first memories is of being in our basement when I was four-years-old, eating dinner with my parents and watching TV, when suddenly I heard the most beautiful music.
And this was high praise from me: I HATED music. Hated the songs we sang in Sunday school, hated the silly rock and roll my parents listened to, hated the ragtime my mother played on the piano. What I did like was classical music, but I considered it such a separate entity from the normal garbage I heard referred to as "music" that I didn't even classify it as such. It was a pretty sound, but not music, to my young mind. Music was crap*.
But this, this was something I'd never heard before, and that deep, spooky voiceover (anyone else remember it?) was calling it music. The images on the screen were also like nothing I'd ever seen before: hundreds of candles on elaborate iron stands in a black room, swirling red velvet drapes, a beautiful woman in a fragile-looking white dress, and then there was the man.
It was his profile, and his hands, he had beautiful hands. I was in love, though I didn't know that. I wanted to sit next to him and listen to him play his organ** and sing forever.
So sprouted the seeds of obsession.
Phantom was all consuming from that point onward, and I didn't even get to see the musical until I was seven, three years after seeing that first commercial. Every film version of the Phantom I could find, I had my parents rent ad nauseum (bear in mind that these were the days before home Internet access, so it wasn't like I was looking these up on IMDB. I just scoured every video store I could find). My father taped a few versions off television, and I watched the tapes so much that today, they're just about broken. I started piano lessons when I was seven, and hated playing (except for classical music, which I had by then learned was also music), but when I got the Phantom piano book for Christmas, I knew them all after a day or two. I started singing by reading the libretto at the back of the Complete Phantom of the Opera. I bloody well talked to Erik. That is not an exaggeration, I constantly spoke aloud to a fictional character. I was a very lonely only child. That, and there's a lot of syphillis on my father's side***.
Phantom as a focused obsession faded into the background eventually, though I still watched the movies often, but the aesthetics, musically and artistically, never did. I loved darkness.
So that night as I sat on the bus and found myself besieged by several of my younger selves to go back to Phantom for inspiration, that commercial, and the montage of images that started it all beckoned first.
I am proud to say that I never even considered the idea of a straight-up fanfic.
I retrieved that body of knowledge from where it had been collecting dust in my memory, and began to turn it over, and look at it from different angles. I kept coming back to the movies. So many movies. All of them had one thing in common: the title. All of them had one thing in common with the original novel: the title. Aside from the first silent film and a very short, cheaply made children's animation in the 80s, all the Phantom movies had pretty much junked the original novel, and just used the basic concept of a crazy man who may or may not be deformed being obsessed with a beautiful young girl who may or may not be a very talented singer. I tried to picture what a truly faithful Phantom movie would look like. It would be tough to do without looking like a prat. There were so many clichés intertwined with Phantom by now that had served a purpose in the original work, but had been relentlessly abused by filmmakers since. The depth of the characters had been stripped away layer by layer, until they could have been convincingly played by cardboard cutouts (I refer you once again to the animated version of the 80s. And the Dario Argento version of the 90s, ba-zing). If someone who truly loved the story, the original story, were to take the reins of yet another remake, what would the result be?
And that's when I first met Telly.
* I should point out that I've since developed a tolerance for rock and roll, a cautious affection for ragtime, and like a whole bunch of other music as well. Classical still kicks your ass though.
** Who's the pervert now, pervert?
*** Just kidding, or am I****?
**** I am.
One of my first memories is of being in our basement when I was four-years-old, eating dinner with my parents and watching TV, when suddenly I heard the most beautiful music.
And this was high praise from me: I HATED music. Hated the songs we sang in Sunday school, hated the silly rock and roll my parents listened to, hated the ragtime my mother played on the piano. What I did like was classical music, but I considered it such a separate entity from the normal garbage I heard referred to as "music" that I didn't even classify it as such. It was a pretty sound, but not music, to my young mind. Music was crap*.
But this, this was something I'd never heard before, and that deep, spooky voiceover (anyone else remember it?) was calling it music. The images on the screen were also like nothing I'd ever seen before: hundreds of candles on elaborate iron stands in a black room, swirling red velvet drapes, a beautiful woman in a fragile-looking white dress, and then there was the man.
It was his profile, and his hands, he had beautiful hands. I was in love, though I didn't know that. I wanted to sit next to him and listen to him play his organ** and sing forever.
So sprouted the seeds of obsession.
Phantom was all consuming from that point onward, and I didn't even get to see the musical until I was seven, three years after seeing that first commercial. Every film version of the Phantom I could find, I had my parents rent ad nauseum (bear in mind that these were the days before home Internet access, so it wasn't like I was looking these up on IMDB. I just scoured every video store I could find). My father taped a few versions off television, and I watched the tapes so much that today, they're just about broken. I started piano lessons when I was seven, and hated playing (except for classical music, which I had by then learned was also music), but when I got the Phantom piano book for Christmas, I knew them all after a day or two. I started singing by reading the libretto at the back of the Complete Phantom of the Opera. I bloody well talked to Erik. That is not an exaggeration, I constantly spoke aloud to a fictional character. I was a very lonely only child. That, and there's a lot of syphillis on my father's side***.
Phantom as a focused obsession faded into the background eventually, though I still watched the movies often, but the aesthetics, musically and artistically, never did. I loved darkness.
So that night as I sat on the bus and found myself besieged by several of my younger selves to go back to Phantom for inspiration, that commercial, and the montage of images that started it all beckoned first.
I am proud to say that I never even considered the idea of a straight-up fanfic.
I retrieved that body of knowledge from where it had been collecting dust in my memory, and began to turn it over, and look at it from different angles. I kept coming back to the movies. So many movies. All of them had one thing in common: the title. All of them had one thing in common with the original novel: the title. Aside from the first silent film and a very short, cheaply made children's animation in the 80s, all the Phantom movies had pretty much junked the original novel, and just used the basic concept of a crazy man who may or may not be deformed being obsessed with a beautiful young girl who may or may not be a very talented singer. I tried to picture what a truly faithful Phantom movie would look like. It would be tough to do without looking like a prat. There were so many clichés intertwined with Phantom by now that had served a purpose in the original work, but had been relentlessly abused by filmmakers since. The depth of the characters had been stripped away layer by layer, until they could have been convincingly played by cardboard cutouts (I refer you once again to the animated version of the 80s. And the Dario Argento version of the 90s, ba-zing). If someone who truly loved the story, the original story, were to take the reins of yet another remake, what would the result be?
And that's when I first met Telly.
* I should point out that I've since developed a tolerance for rock and roll, a cautious affection for ragtime, and like a whole bunch of other music as well. Classical still kicks your ass though.
** Who's the pervert now, pervert?
*** Just kidding, or am I****?
**** I am.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
