Archive for the 'General Writing' Category
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
Halfway Mark
It’s just past the middle of the month, and I’m slightly ahead on the National Novel Writing Month project. I started out with only a vague idea, and it has thrashed around and become something else during this process. it isn’t what I wanted to have on the other end of the tunnel, but I’m not disappointed. I didn’t know what I wanted, I just put my foot on the gas, and gave ‘er.
Now, 30,000 words through the book, I’ve come to find other meaning in the events I wrote, and the places I have to go to close the loop of the story. I was talking with Axe about it the other day, and he had some great ideas that the book could evolve into on the next draft; ideas that outline my controlling idea clearer, and conceptional smarter.
So that’s the take away from this event for me so far, and I’m sure there will be more when it’s all said and done. This has been torture, but it’s also been a lot of fun, and it’s made me feel something. I can do this with consistency, I can write for a deadline.
It isn’t as high quality as I want it to be on my first passes, but that comes with time. I still have a road to follow though, and a lot of work to complete before I can raise my hands in victory. So I’ll quit writing blather in this little window, and go blather in another, far more important window.
Enjoy every sandwich.
Saturday, November 1st, 2008
NaNoWriMo
The National Novel Writing Month has begun, and this time I’m taking no prisoners.
Last year I had started off well, but right in the middle of the month I shit the bed. I didn’t give myself enough time, and I hadn’t committed to the story, which left me high and dry with two weeks remaining to complete the story. I had taken time off for the last week, but it made little sense to try and rush to finish it in a week of being locked in my home. I wanted to have a novel done, but the whole point of the exercise had been to cultivate consistency in my work; to commit to a schedule and keep it. Frantically trying to complete it last minute felt like junior high, when I tried to do my homework on the bus ride to school.
This year I’ve actually plotted some point prior to starting, which isn’t quite as good as building a full structure, but at the same time I don’t expect to get to the end of the month with a manuscript I intend to mail out to people; I just want a first draft that I can work from. I want to cultivate consistency.
I want to write.
Monday, October 20th, 2008
The Loser Generation.
It would be unfair to say that after watching “The Rocker”, I needed a long pull from an oxygen tank in order to re-start my brain.
It would be unfair, but it would also be very near the truth.
I grew up in a time when our heroes were beyond extraordinary. They were over-muscled titans, wielding automatic weapons, driving a humvee with their feet, and egregiously killing hordes of off-sale army fatigued bad guys. They were stronger than any mortal could possibly be; capable of crushing red hot briquettes of charcoal in their bare fist, gun down entire platoons of soldiers with a single box of bullets, and battle entire Armada’s in a single Star Fighter. Our heroes were empowered to the point of being Gods.
And now there seems to be a backlash. Our heroes are clad in goofy clothing, armed with an endless list of portmanteau’d phrases, derivative of an empty culture, lacquered with folkish guitar musings. And I accepted it.
I watched Napoleon dance, and smiled benignly, because I believed it to be a reaction; the ridiculous heights we pushed our heroes to in the age of Titans had fallen, and now we were pushing the other direction. It was only natural.
But we have a problem. We’ve gone too far, again.
Just as the notion of Rambo, savagely murdering half the russian army by his lonesome, the line of believability in the Loser kingdom is starting to move towards dangerously ridiculous levels.
have you seen a Will Ferrell movie lately? They’re not that good. They’ve had some moments, but the failures tend to outweigh the successes at this point. And when I watched the Rocker, I was confronted with a terrible vision: Someone was trying to be Jack Black, who was not Jack Black.
And the seas boiled, and dead rose from their graves…
We need to get back to a place where our stories are not remarkable because they lack remarkability, or because the heroes is a social outcast to such a degree that they could NOT exist in the real world. There are people who reach these heights: they’re cat people. They live in homes filled entirely with garbage.
I do not want to watch that. I’m actually a little terrified that I even KNOW about it.
Watching someone who has similarily terrifying, social neuroses is something we ALL gravitate to, in order to rationalize our seperate insanities, and come to a place where we can feel connected to the whole of humanity. It says “hey, I’m a freak too, we’re all freaks”, and then we don’t feel disconnected.
But right now, in this moment of time, the zeigeist…we aspire to be losers.
Mediocrity is the new success.
That’s terrifying.
Monday, September 15th, 2008
Comics? Comics.
Axe is busy on the outline for our movie, and new Treatment, I’ve been tasked with making some new Axe and Crom comics so we can relaunch the site in the new year.
I’ve spent most of the last hour reading online comics, supplementing my weekend of Calvin & Hobbes gorging. I remember a conversation I had once with a director at the Pump House Theater (I was doing a bit part in Raggedy Ann&Andy, ya ya, fuck you) and he said that the hardest thing to do on stage was 2 minutes of something meaningful. He was trying to impart the idea of Fidelity of Thought to me. At least in regard to stage production…which may seem narrow minded, but I assure you it is not. Skits, comics, these things require you deliver a single concept quickly, and clearly. Calvin&Hobbes is a study in this ability, since Watterson usually had 3 panels to say something witty, and he did the job with disturbing consistency. I’m trying to crack open his skull and feast on the gooey insides…
Metaphorically.
I wrote a review for Chris Gheran & The Graveyard Gang over at r4nt.com which should be going up pretty quick, just need to polish it up, I’ll keep everyone posted…I dunno why though….
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Bullshit Quotient
I read a lot of webcomics.
Like…a lot. I used to work in an office where my job consisted, mainly, of filling in a number of colored blocks on an excel spreadsheet, and making sure that within a given time, I spread the needed amount of work to be done, evenly with those blocks. Simultaneously, I was supposed to make sure that I didn’t use the same blocks too often.
I know, this sounds oddly like one of the original games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It also sounds like…Scheduling. It WAS scheduling. The relevance to my point, is that filling in the colored blocks required very little of my time. In fact, in a given day I could fill in the blocks in approx. 15 minutes. Now if you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that with that kind of …alacrity, I was left with 7 some-odd hours of time each day to sit at my desk and stare into nothing like a malfunctioning robot.
So I started reading webcomics.
I had Penny Arcade on the radar for a long time, but having read it as often as I did, there wasn’t much in the archives to rely on to maintain my sanity. I started reading PvP, Dominic Deegan, Scary-Go-Round, Goats, Wigu.com, VG Cats, and an endless list that could take up the rest of this post, but whatever. There’s shitloads of webcomics out there, and I read many of them.
And a lot of them suck balls.
Like…genuinely awful work. The art in a lot of them is half-assed, but that’s something that I can get past pretty easily. What amazes me, as a writer, is how fucking shitty the story in a lot of these are. And to top it off, is something even more insidious, and I’ve even DONE it.
Referencing OTHER comics and pop culture.
Oh god. I feel dirty every time I do it, but there are more than a few comics that make it their exclusive demesne.
I’ve been an advocate for a long time of referential dialogue. I believe that referencing popular cultural moments from television, film and music, have the capacity to raise the bandwidth of our communication. Not only can I convey the circumstances of an event, but I can also place you in a specific emotional context, all through referential dialogue. That’s powerful stuff.
My issue with webcomics, and in the greater sense all creative endeavours, that rely solely on referential dialogue, is that they lose the thrust of their own message in the act of co-opting the referent. Using these symbols isn’t a bad thing, until your own intent is lost. At that point we’re simply engaging in emotional masturbation.
So I don’t want to name any names, but god damn it Kurtz, sometimes your work chafes my friggin’ nuts.
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Under the influence
A little while back, or probably more like 3 years ago, somebody asked me who my writing influences were.
At the time I didn’t really have an answer that made any sense. I sort of muttered a number of non-committal things, made a strange and possibly incorrect reference to the works of William Burroughs, and then chugged the rest of my Rye & Coke. I’m not sure if I have a better answer now, but people have asked me again, so the issue is moving to the forefront once again.
When I was 15 I would have told you that I wanted to be Robert Heinlein. BE HIM. Not be LIKE him, I mean scoop his brain out, remove my own, and place it into my meat-shield. I would have been pretty happy with that…well…for like 20 seconds or something. I loved Heinlein. He represented a stream of thought that was so free, and in line with my own hearts desires. He was a writer who had actually thought about the Taboo’s, Laws, Emotions, and Failures of humanity, and had drawn conclusions of his own. He had thought of things that transcended the canalizing effect of apron string knowledge, and try to think in a way reconcilable with logic and compassion.
Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, but he played the game his own way.
But life is a slow release from ignorance, and the fact is, I’m not Robert Heinlein. And more importantly, if I valued the idea of thinking for myself, and breaking free from the indoctrination I received in my formative years, than my final lesson had to be overcoming those same things from my mentor. The student surpasses.
As I got older, I found myself drawn to a lot of separate sources. In the end, my own twisted mechanism fell in with a writer that many of us aspire to be as crazy as: Hunter S Thompson. So much so, that I found I emulated his writing. For a time I was content to think of the world as a Mechanism that had no respect for the Process. A harsh playground, populated with cold-hearted pimp/bullies, who shook their fists in the air, and bellowed at me for control. A piss filled crevice, lorded over by cheap, fuck-off politico’s with gilded whores on their arms, pumping our wallets to feed their appetites, and leaving the Common Man, raped and worthless on the street corner.
But that was always a little too hardcore. I still feel amazed when I read Thompson. He was a high-powered scientist, with a jeweler’s eye for politics and the theater of life, capable of distilling complexities with precision, while consuming that which was distilled. Those who envy him, often envy the hard line he walked, and assume that to achieve the same Gonzo Power, you need to be as twisted as Hunter was. Sadly, they are wrong, and I’ve mentioned it before. Hunter was a journalist of immense talent, and his daily grind and snort was the past-time that helped him endure his tour of duty in the emotional hurricane of Journalism in the time of Agnew, Nixon, and the Powers That Be.
Now I feel like I’ve actually started to touch my own voice, and it contains within it some of the elements of those mentioned above, and others that have crossed my path. I love reading, and I love to feel the skein’s of thought that authors and ‘wrights take us all on. Writing Panda Girls, and working on the novels I’ve been chewing up for the last few years (Two of them, and they are whores who do not love me), I’m searching now for the joy of writing, and trying not to worry too much about changing anybody’s life.
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
Ninja Script
A lot of writing pundits suggest setting aside time to write. I agree, it’s really handy to have a specific block of time each week/day/whatever to work. That’s great if you’re a pro, and writing is the only job you have. Sadly I started out my working life in a slightly different path, and now I’m working towards the professional writing gig. So… a lot of the time I have to sneak writing into my work day.
When I worked in an office, it was easy. I’m sitting at my computer typing anyways, I just got really fast with alt-tab, and could shift in between my work and my writing easily. Hell, my job was so simple that I often could just blatantly be writing and nobody would say anything. I could do 5 hours of writing in a given day and have no qualms.
Now I work in a bikeshop. And while it’s my brothers, and he’s fine with me writing during down time, there isn’t a lot of down time to be had. Now my window for writing at work is a lot smaller. Sometimes it may be a few minutes, sometimes a single minute. So I ninja in some of my work during the day, slipping into my gdocs and dropping little word-shuriken whenever I can. It would be great to write as my day job, so I could have the time to seriously work on a topic or project, or storyline. But I may suck at this, the determination has yet to be made.
So if there’s any advice I could ever give about transitioning from Dog Catcher to Writer, it’s to cherish the small times you have to write. If you do have the opportunity to set aside a block of time, do it, it goes a long way. If you don’t, well, that can be even better sometimes. When you have 5 hours to write something amazing, you spend 4hrs 34mins trying to work it out.
When you have a single minute, procrastination has no foothold. You become like a revengeful ghost.
“If a samurai’s head were to be suddenly cut off, he should still be able to perform one more action, with certainty. If one becomes like a revengeful ghost, and shows great determination, though his head is cut off, he will not die” - Hagakure
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Holy Blogtastical Blogging, Batman!
Holy fuck.
I haven’t written anything here in too long. I apologize. Axe and I have come up with a new plan to actually get anything done at all, the Production Hour. It’s a clever name that isn’t that clever, for something that everybody does already. I honestly think that the world at large should consider this concept for all office style business.
When I worked in an office, I probably managed the Peter Gibbons level of work each day. The fact was, that after sitting in my tiny cubicle for about 30 minutes, I was no longer able to think. The process literally halted. I don’t know if there’s some alchemical effect from the stuffy air, constant murmur of voices, and brain crushing fluorescent lights, but it felt like they combined in a mental version of Devastator and rampaged through my psyche, leaving a swath of destruction. By 1pm everyday I was useless. Utterly.
I couldn’t even summon the power to overcome the thought-miasma that hung in the air. If I was asked a question, I would honestly deflect it with verbal jujitsu. Or, I would claim ignorance, which didn’t really work, because I was well known for my bizarre memory.
I firmly believe that this way of working should be removed, and the Production Hour or whatever synonym people use (hour of power, go time, etc.) should replace it. The Production Hour for us is simple: we arrive at a coffee shop with everything in hand that we need to work. The clock starts, and we have one hour to get as much completed as possible. We can bounce ideas off each other, but we absolutely do not stop to talk, debate, brainstorm, or shoot the shit. It’s easy to think you’re getting things done when you brainstorm, but most people don’t know how to do it well. That’s another story.
It’s easy when you’re at home to jerk around, and not get things done. There’s distractions galore, but more than that, it’s the place you WANT TO RELAX. There’s a million distractions, AND you often think about doing things around the house. It sucks. If you do work out of your home, I’ve found that I MUST have a place that I go to in order to work. That’s it. It’s the only thing I do when I go to this place (my pit), and if I feel the need to do something else, I leave. You cannot treat it like a hobby, I have and it’s burned me. Don’t follow my foolish footsteps…alliteration!
The Production Hour could be a ticket to ride, but we’ve only just implemented it, so time will tell on the success rate.
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
Nice review….
Have you read an Anime review online lately? Here’s a sample :
When it comes to clarity and making sense, this volume is kind of a mess, but what a dramatic and beautiful mess it is.
….What?
Let’s talk about something here for a minute. It’s going to seem like a tangent, but I assure you, it is part of this whole mess. We all like shitty movies. Not as a group, but each of us probably has a list of movies, that we KNOW people think are shitty, that we love. We don’t care that they’re shitty, in fact we almost wear it as a badge of honor. This is the movie that’s OURS. In all it’s Shitglory. Whatever, it’s no big deal. Here’s the thing…
Almost all the reviews I’ve seen for anime film and television, have a sentence, similar to, if not almost exactly the same as the one quoted above. Which leads us to conclude something…There’s a lot of shitty anime being made.
Now the people in the peanut gallery are going to be shouting at me “there’s a lot of shitty movies in hollywood made each year fucker!”. And, they would be correct. In 2007, conservative estimates say that about 200 movies received major release from the land of make believe. Of the one’s I saw, maybe two of them weren’t disappointing. (Juno and Hot Rod; Juno was so clever it cut the roof of my mouth like Cap’n Crunch, and Hot Rod was one of those “so retarded it’s funny” kinda deals)
However, the average that Hollywood is running seems to be much better than the Anime crowd is pumping out. The number of seminal Anime films, with I take to mean that anybody who likes Anime agrees they’re awesome, can be counted on one hand. let’s do it kids!
Akira (duh), Ghost in the Shell, Princess Mononoke….my example goes to pieces here, the votes splinter. But they don’t splinter that far.
Is Anime generally shittier? Or, perhaps, do anime fans have lower expectations?
These reviews beg some questions. If something is a mess, it’s a mess. And being “ok” with the fact that it is a mess, strikes me as a lazy approach to pushing for improvement in the art form. Especially if they plan to let us Western Dogs into their playground. We’ll burn it down man…we don’t know any better.
Monday, March 24th, 2008
My evil plans continue…
So I tricked the boys over at The New West into publishing the article I wrote for the Alberta Freeride Awards.
Which surprises the shit out of me by the way. I’m not that good at the journalism thing, I tend to use the word “fuck” too often. All a part of my constant desire to be as racy as J.D. Salinger. Of course having any validity would make that happen faster, and perhaps…at all.
I like the journalism kick, I just can’t seem to get focused on the W5 of whatever it is I’m at. I’m often compelled to fixate on some innocuous part of the whole deal, and write an article about a particular hors d’oeuvre that contained something offensive to my tastes. Like fake crab…or spicy mustard. It’s often construed as an attempt on my part to be quirky, but the secret is out now: I pretty much have ADD. It helps me play Quake well though, so I guess there’s an up side and down side to every schwartz.
I’m still doing the Panda Girls treatment. I think I’ll always be doing it. This is my Sisyphean punishment playing itself out for all those afternoons in English Language Arts in which I stared out the window, and ignored everything that Edgar Allan Poe did with his life. Maybe if they talked about Neal Stephenson I’d give two shits. Maybe we all would have.
Because while the horrible beating of the heart beneath the floor boards may be risque, it doesn’t stand up against Hiro Protagonist, hacker extraordinare and the greatest swordsmen alive.