Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
I was out of the writing slot this past ten days, venturing in but once. Life business demanded my attention.
As I traveled, I read The Watchers (Jon Steele, first book in the Angelis Trilogy) and Ready Player One (Ernst Cline). While writing, I often reflected on how my style and material compared to the two books, and what I liked and disliked about each novel.
Then I required a purge. Are you familiar with this? The purge is needed when others’ fiction is enjoyed, and I begin thinking that I need to do things in my novel to make it more like them.
Bad idea? No, terrible idea, worse idea in the bloody world. Almost inevitable, too. I’ve gone through this before. In early years, I tried changing my stories to be more like something just read.
The results sucked, but they were helpful. I learned, and I know, trying to write my book with inflections and concepts found in something recently read ends up torturing my story lines and prose, and dilutes my concept and originality.
That’s why the purge is needed.
Several steps are required for me to purge. I’ve been through this before. I know what to do. One, I need to recognize that I’m about to throw untested code to what I’m writing. Two, I need to understand why it’s so damn tempting.
The latter point is easier to cope with, and best for me to first approach, because the first point is so nebulous, harder to grasp, and is a challenge and affront to my confidence as a writer. Basically all of my writing is untested code. I’m an organic writer. I write it, modify it, and test it until it fits. So, naturally, I think, well, damn, can’t I make other things fit, too?
Yes, probably, but it’s pricey. I may end up muddying my developed story lines, something dangerous to do twelve hundred words and four books into a series, right?
This is why understanding why I want to change my books to incorporate what I’ve read is important. What I read entertained me. I admired their talent and skill. They’d developed concepts, characters, plots and sub-plots, and story lines in novel manners. Their books allowed me to escape.
That’s what I’m shooting to do, too: write stuff that entertains others and lets them escape. Steele and Cline’s books “win” over mine because I still offer a work-in-progress. It’s harder to pick my novel up to compare with their books. But once I stopped to review my WIP, I was surprised anew how entertaining it is. Yes, similarities with other novels and my novels exist, and will be spotted when mine are done, no matter what and how I write. I try to minimize these things but it’ll happen because I’m a product of my environment. Books and other authors fill that environment. Hell, they’re the foundation of what prompts my desire to write and publish.
With that thinking processed, the purge was completed.
Another day of writing like crazy done. Time for other things, like, umm…lunch.
Well thought-out words bring this experience to life, becoming touching, beautiful, and intimate.
My train home wasn’t due for another half hour and I strolled up the platform, looking for something to snack on. There wasn’t anything particularly appetising left at that time of the afternoon at the small town station, and I was suddenly tempted by a bag of cheese and onion crisps. Crisps in general are my guilty pleasure, although I prefer plain ones, and I probably hadn’t had cheese and onion ones since my student days. College food was so genuinely revolting that, more frequently than I care to remember, all it would take was one mouthful to consign the contents of the entire tray to the rubbish before heading to the tuck shop, buying four packets of crisps, and then dining on them in my room.
And so, in memory of my undergraduate former self, I pulled the packet open and the pungent smell of chemical cheese and lab…
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Cats know the snow, and these four aren’t impressed.
Quinn mews at the open door, “I don’t like the snow, please don’t make me go.”
Boo comments from the bed, “I don’t know if it’s snow, but that white stuff really blows.”
Tucker goes, “I know that’s snow, and it’s too cold for my toes.”
While Papi puts his tail down and says, “Snow and I don’t go.”
You ever go to a restaurant, and find it quiet and with few customers, and then sit and order, and witness a sudden influx of people entering the restaurant and filling up the chairs, the noise level rising with their conversation and laughter?
Or maybe you reach the cashier in a store to make your purchases, and have no line, and then long lines form at all the registers?
These situations cause us to say, “Wow, we timed that right. We beat the rush.”
Traveling, we made it back home on Sunday. The weather served plunging temperatures and several inches of snow that night. “We made it home just in time.”
That thought, that somehow, you beat the crowds, the odds, the norms, the system, by just a little, fires a warm glow of satisfaction. It’s a little less satisfying when you fly home and see someone, and then they die the next day. Sure, there’s still some solace as we tell ourselves, “At least we saw them one more time before they died,” but the glow isn’t as warm nor satisfying.
Floofish (catfinition) – 1. awkwardly playful, and with a short attention span, like a kitten; 2. slang for catfish.
In use: “Joyful at graduating high school, the students became floofish, chasing one another and setting up ambushes.”
I like songs about change. This particular song, “Change,” by Blind Melon, has lyrics that cling to my dreamer’s mind.
So I want to write my words on the face of today.
And then they’ll paint it
And oh as I fade away,
Hey look at him and where he is these days.
When life is hard, you have to change.
I dreamed my mother was sitting at a table and telling me of her dream, in which I was telling her of my dream, in which I dreamed she was saying, “Michael is gathering his energy and purging his disciplines.”
Don’t know what it means, but I dreamed it before. I recall thinking, what an unusual nesting dream. What are the Russian dolls called? Matryoshka dolls?
That stream triggered a search of old dreams, and there it was, December 7, 2016. I didn’t share the bit about Mom in the post, but posting about other dreams (which used the title “Matryoshka Dreams”) enabled me to do a search of my dream entries, where I found it.
I dreamed Mom and I were sitting at a table. She was telling me about her dream, which was a dream about me telling her about my dream. In my dream, she said, I told her, “Michael is gathering his energy and purging his disciplines.”
I don’t know what she/I meant about ‘purging my disciplines’. That doesn’t make sense to me.
I don’t know what Mom was wearing in that first dream, but in this dream, she wore a light blue shirt and was thirty years younger. She was the only person seen or heard in the dream, but I knew she was talking to me.
After I meditated about the dream’s meaning while traveling, I decided this was about thinking deeper and drawing deeper energy. It’s an intuitive leap. I can’t explain the intuition, except that it’s because the dream is about layers, and about both male and female energy, and mother and son energy. Now, writing that, I think, it’s also about balancing deep thinking and drawing deeper energy. Purging disciplines is about re-shaping paradigms vis–à–vis effort and expectations.
Or maybe I’m just tired.
Michael Seidel, writer 