The Opposite of Limber is Limburger
May. 22nd, 2008 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueYesterday, I got stuck on set with no book and nothing to do, so I started to jot down a story in my notebook. I would like to tell you it began as auspiciously as "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit," but, alas, no such thing is true. The fact is, I haven't written any prose fiction (adult or youth oriented) since 2002 - not even fanfic - and any skills I had in that area have atrophied. I write essays; I write scripts; I write poems; I write monologues. I have done the worldbuilding for six universes in which I have not gotten around to writing novels. None of it transfers.
I have said before (at the very least in a poem from last August) that I sometimes go to poetry open mics in order to deliberately hear bad poems; I find it helps me write. By the same token, I have a well-worn book of truly awful and unarousing erotica shelved not far from the aforementioned Lord of the Rings. Sometimes I write because I experience something deeply inspiring; more often, I write because I read something terrible, am appalled, think "I could do so much better," and then need to prove it. It's a gratifying way to remember one's talent, in place of competing with the very best things created throughout all history.
On that note, here is what I wrote. If you wish, you may read it as a public service, so that you can feel better about yourself as a writer. I should say that it's not really a story, so much as the beginnings of a premise - so if you have a plot, you are already doing better than I am.
Will I continue with it? Perhaps, sort of like the push-ups, because there is a freedom in letting myself be this awful until I get up to fighting strength.
Diamond Rudy turned up in the middle of my peanut butter sandwich, wearing shoes with two red stripes. He said he'd cracked the Yeti - had hacked his way through cryptozoological dendrites.
"Ladders," he said. "Or stilts. We've been wrong all this time about the mountains."
Rudy looked like he had slept for days, an unusual method of investigation which shows to what lengths he'd been driven. His hair still held the shape of the pillow, down to the pillowcase wrinkles.
As for me, I had a mouth full of peanut butter.
My name is Phineas Madrigal Bloom, and I am interested in electricity. In particular, I am interested in the way senstation can be recorded and transmitted by electrical signal. I am interested in cable television, in telephone land lines, in semi-conductor computers. More than that, I am interested in the brain itself, in the way neurons are said to fire. I am looking for a way to show pictures without a screen, a way to bypass the eyes themselves. I am looking for the seat of consciousness. I am looking for ways to transfer consciousness. I am looking, in short, for immortality.
Diamond Rudy believes my necessary first step is talking to an immortal, and he is training himself to chase gods by first chasing mythical creatures.
[That's all there is. I should note the cryptozoology reference is entirely due to a lecture I attended by The Centre for Fortean Zoology, which is outstanding and which deserves your support.]
[Something that interests me about this premise is the idea of someone searching for immortality, so today I decided to take an alternative stab at the same premise, with the same point of view, but in a literary rather than genre style, just to see what happened.]
It wasn't until I turned 26 that I decided I didn't want to die. Prior to that, I'd been pragmatic about mortality - either there would be a life after death, which would be interesting, or I'd be dead and wouldn't care. I was also fairly certain that time was not strictly linear, because I occasionally remembered things before they happened - and if non-linearity were true, if all of time always existed in a sort of matrix, then the idea of ends became irrelevant: I would always be and had always been alive, albeit in a discrete temporal location which did not intersect all other events.
When I was 26, I fell in love, and I realized it was vastly important that my partner and I remain together. Forever.
[I realize now that the two intros could be merged - the first could lead into the second - but at present I will continue to keep them seperate, because I want to keep Phineas Madrigal's primary relationship Diamond Rudy, who is not a romantic counterpart so much as a sidekick. Whereas the other "I" is much closer to me and Decidedly Has A Partner. Not that I expect either intro to lead anywhere, but, you know. Exercise.]
I have said before (at the very least in a poem from last August) that I sometimes go to poetry open mics in order to deliberately hear bad poems; I find it helps me write. By the same token, I have a well-worn book of truly awful and unarousing erotica shelved not far from the aforementioned Lord of the Rings. Sometimes I write because I experience something deeply inspiring; more often, I write because I read something terrible, am appalled, think "I could do so much better," and then need to prove it. It's a gratifying way to remember one's talent, in place of competing with the very best things created throughout all history.
On that note, here is what I wrote. If you wish, you may read it as a public service, so that you can feel better about yourself as a writer. I should say that it's not really a story, so much as the beginnings of a premise - so if you have a plot, you are already doing better than I am.
Will I continue with it? Perhaps, sort of like the push-ups, because there is a freedom in letting myself be this awful until I get up to fighting strength.
Diamond Rudy turned up in the middle of my peanut butter sandwich, wearing shoes with two red stripes. He said he'd cracked the Yeti - had hacked his way through cryptozoological dendrites.
"Ladders," he said. "Or stilts. We've been wrong all this time about the mountains."
Rudy looked like he had slept for days, an unusual method of investigation which shows to what lengths he'd been driven. His hair still held the shape of the pillow, down to the pillowcase wrinkles.
As for me, I had a mouth full of peanut butter.
My name is Phineas Madrigal Bloom, and I am interested in electricity. In particular, I am interested in the way senstation can be recorded and transmitted by electrical signal. I am interested in cable television, in telephone land lines, in semi-conductor computers. More than that, I am interested in the brain itself, in the way neurons are said to fire. I am looking for a way to show pictures without a screen, a way to bypass the eyes themselves. I am looking for the seat of consciousness. I am looking for ways to transfer consciousness. I am looking, in short, for immortality.
Diamond Rudy believes my necessary first step is talking to an immortal, and he is training himself to chase gods by first chasing mythical creatures.
[That's all there is. I should note the cryptozoology reference is entirely due to a lecture I attended by The Centre for Fortean Zoology, which is outstanding and which deserves your support.]
[Something that interests me about this premise is the idea of someone searching for immortality, so today I decided to take an alternative stab at the same premise, with the same point of view, but in a literary rather than genre style, just to see what happened.]
It wasn't until I turned 26 that I decided I didn't want to die. Prior to that, I'd been pragmatic about mortality - either there would be a life after death, which would be interesting, or I'd be dead and wouldn't care. I was also fairly certain that time was not strictly linear, because I occasionally remembered things before they happened - and if non-linearity were true, if all of time always existed in a sort of matrix, then the idea of ends became irrelevant: I would always be and had always been alive, albeit in a discrete temporal location which did not intersect all other events.
When I was 26, I fell in love, and I realized it was vastly important that my partner and I remain together. Forever.
[I realize now that the two intros could be merged - the first could lead into the second - but at present I will continue to keep them seperate, because I want to keep Phineas Madrigal's primary relationship Diamond Rudy, who is not a romantic counterpart so much as a sidekick. Whereas the other "I" is much closer to me and Decidedly Has A Partner. Not that I expect either intro to lead anywhere, but, you know. Exercise.]
