Category: writing

The Voice

“Who is that?” Handley asked.

I paused from typing. I didn’t know what she was talking about. That wasn’t part of the planned scene.

“Listen,” Handley said. “I hear someone.”

“As do I,” her therapist, Endura said.

Grutte Piers was nodding. “And I hear him, too.” His mild accent bothered me.

None of that matched the dialogue I’d been chasing as part of the scene. Sitting up, I gave heed to my characters’ comments and listened.

“He died when I was eight. My memories of him is of an overweight man who always drank, who was always smoking cigars. He was always in a wheel chair. Quite frankly, I was always a little scared of him.”

So the voice goes on across the room, issuing from a woman. Her voice has the quality to slash through my writing shields. It’s a rare phenomena. I can usually block everyone out. Not her. What is it about her tone, frequency or volume that lacerates my concentration and focus?

She’s fallen silent but the characters are all restlessly shifting. “Okay, where were we?” Handley asked. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Grutte Piers said. Looking up and out at me from his place on the page embedded on the computer screen, he continued, “Why don’t you go back and see what you’ve written so you can remind us where we were going?”

“Okay,” I answered. “In a moment.” The world was too much with me. Music was playing. Others were speaking. “I need to collect myself first.” Sipping coffee, I looked out at the rain.

The voice began again….

Ah, she’s leaving….

2

Today’s Theme Music

Ah, a simple offering today. I’ve not known this song long but it’s taken a place in my virtual jukebox.

The song is ‘The Blues Don’t Care’ by Frank Bang and the Cook County Kings. I’ve added writing verses:

The blues don’t care how many words you wrote

The blues don’t care if you’re published or not

The blues don’t care if you’ve written all month

The blues don’t care if can’t write at all

I need to amuse myself somehow.

 

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A Beautiful Thing

Writers, poets, musicians and artists all know this, I think, but I write to express my feelings to and for myself. I share it on the blog to find some validation and to give others encouragement, so I’ll share this today.

I’m riding the wave. The wave is when the work in progress is fully comprehended and effortlessly reached, providing a calming high. I’m buoyant and yet introspective, but I don’t mind being like that because I’m happy. Writing is going great. It’s constantly with me but I see that as a beautiful, wonderful state.

My friends probably wonder about my absence. I haven’t been out for beers for over a week. My wife probably thinks I’m losing some cognitive functions because I drive to the wrong place. I can’t and don’t explain that I’m still writing in my head. The story is so rich and real, I don’t want to disturb it, but just write and write. I also know that my enthusiastic descriptions of what I’m doing, what’s going on with me, and what’s happening in the novel tends to create an EGO state for her – eyes glazing over. Only other creative people, involved in their own realms of endeavor, can truly understand. I get that. It shades my existence with loneliness because I can’t share with all these others, these non-writers, non-musicians, non-artists and non-poets. They just don’t seem to get it. But then, I’m not social, so I don’t hunger with the urge to socialize, and it amuses me to watch others engage in that drive.

There are other drives I don’t have that others display. Hunting, dancing, hobbies, making money. Thinking about them and striving to gather insights into those activities and their influences on the people and societies is part of my writing enjoyment.

It’s been a long ride on this wave. I wonder when it’s going to break, so I’ve resisted writing about it, fearful my mentioning it will jinx it. Even as I finished writing this and I read it again, I think, do I really want to put this out there? This wave is so strong, I’m still with Handley on the bridge, peering over her shoulder and spying on her thoughts and actions, and contemplating what’s happening with Pram, Richard and Brett. This wave is strong.

Oh, the coffee is drained. Two thousand words have been written and edited, and ninety minutes have elapsed. A weather storm is approaching so there are real existence matters to attend. Selfishly, I hope we don’t have a power outage, that the storm isn’t strong, because I don’t want the wave to break. I know how shallow that seems, that in this world of life and death, I’m thinking of myself and my writing. I laugh at myself, mocking my priorities.

But of course I hope others safely survive, that the damages aren’t too great, that when they are great, people are able to rebuild and continue on. And of course, I understand, death is a natural part of life. Yet, even in those wishes, hopes, and acceptance, the writer within thinks of the scenes, emotions and dialogue, and imagines the emerging stories….

Writing really is a sickness.

But it’s such a beautiful thing.

Cheers

9

Greetings from a Sexagenarian

Back when my mother was in her late seventies, she went dancing on Friday nights. She often mentioned how much she enjoyed it, and enthused about the old people and their dancing skills and energy.

That always drew my laughter. “The old people? Mom, you’re old.”

Impatience snapped through her response. “I mean the really old people, you know, in their nineties.”

While I understood her point, it amused me that she didn’t think of herself as old. Now, at sixty, I understand better.

My wife was in a conversation with a man in his mid-eighties. She’s a few years younger than me and mentioned to him that she was middle-aged.

He seemed amused. “Middle-aged? Isn’t that well behind you?”

I was taken back when she told me. If she’s younger than me and she’s not middle-aged, than what am I? What constitutes middle-age?

Does it matter?

Not really, and yes, and no. Middle-aged, as already demonstrated, is a vague, inaccurate term. Definitions by psychologists and institutions vary, as it does by era and culture.

Part of it, which disturbed Mom, and bothers me, are the connotations associated by these terms, young, middle-aged, and elderly. Think ‘young’ and contemplate the images and ideas springing to mind. Substitute ‘elderly’ and ‘middle-aged’.

Yet, in most of the advanced world, these labels mean less and less. So I’m taking up the Latin route. I’m sixty, so call me a sexagenarian. I like it. Easy to spell, and it has sex embedded right in it. Mom, in her eighties, is an octogenarian.

I mean, what does middle-age conspire to mean? I’ve been accused of being immature, old beyond my years, and an old man before his time. I’ve also been deemed young at heart by some, immature, or young in spirit by others. My older friends – in their late sixties to upper eighties – call me their young friend.

It’s all context and impressions. Like everything else, a spectrum of behavior, expectations and impressions establishes others’ perceptions and judgement. Yet this can change by day. Give me a short night of sleep and I can appear as a cranky old man. Pour a little beer in me and I can be as immature as a two-year old. Mostly, I’m somewhere in between.

I don’t dress ‘old’ but nor I dress ‘young’. I adopt dress that is neat without calling attention to me. My hair is thinning and retreating as fast as antarctic ice (but with less alarm), and when the sun gets its rays on it, it goes silver and white. Do I care?

Hell, yes.

And hell, no.

See, I’m trapped on that spectrum. I logically understand aging and its impact. I also appreciate the freedom of aging, and its limitations. I know I can’t do anything about it, nor influence others’ impressions of my age and their labels, so why care? But then someone says, “Isn’t middle-age behind you?” and I’m newly irked.

In the future setting of my novels, ‘Returnee’ and ‘Long Summer’, you can bet it’s addressed, because we’re driven by advertising, perception and self-image, themes that sharpen in that future setting. You can bet that a civilization that has developed a technological work-around to dying has done the same with aging’s impact and their appearance.

It becomes an exercise for the characters and their thinking. Many embrace genetic sculpting to develop a look which they like and others appreciate. It’s just like hair, mustache and beard styles and colors, or even jewelry. Some take up the approach, how do I want to look today? What color should my skin, eyes, and hair be? Others emulate famous people, but more establish a look and keep it. A few chose to resemble cats, dogs, dragons, centaurs, and other creatures. It’s almost free and relatively easy.

The 4G in my future (the fourth generation of space colonists) have taken it to an extreme, part of their statement about who they are and their stand. Their leaders look prepubescent. That fad is spreading. They think it’s a meaningful statement of who they are and represent, but others who have lived longer and done more, mostly understand how little that appearance really means. There are some who are more easily swayed, or want to be included in the new youth movement. It’s fun to think about and one of the great joys of writing fiction.

In one of my vaguely conceptualized ideas, people who become zombies immediately look young and beautiful, which sways a large segment of weak thinking people, who want to look young and beautiful again. And as zombies, they have no cares about work, taxes, politics, wars, civil rights or the environment.

Which takes me from here to there and back again. Because, after all, weren’t we really talking about mindless zombie thinking about what it means to be old?

 

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‘Speak, Memory’ and Me

‘Speak, Memory’  is a recounting of one person’s creation of a bot based on a friend to cope with their grief. The bot is based on her friend’s emails. It is a fascinating read into how one person turns to clever use of technology and information to bridge her loss.

The tale has meaning to me for my writing. Memory is an enormous aspect of the future in ‘Returnee’ and ‘Long Summer’. While death is conquered through complex machinations involving resurrection, regeneration or cloning (multiple paths exist), and diseases and illnesses are staved off by embedded nano-meds (which use compilers and teleporters to seamlessly import medicines and treat you without pause), memory is a larger problem. First, your pre-death memories must be stored and accurately restored to you when you’re returned to the living. People living longer need to remember more, especially as space exploration and colonization exponentially expands and technology keeps racing ahead. Memory thus becomes augmented with biological drives as well as networks. You’re constantly connected.

As part of this extrapolation of what might be, memories of specific people, such as grandparents, are further developed through big data/social media mining. This creates a far deeper and broader database of their personality. Further, the database is housed in an avatar and AI dedicated to being that person. So, for example, your grandfather can be summoned into your presence as an avatar and converse and interact as your companion, even though he passed away several hundred years ago, or still lives, but is on the galaxy’s far side.

Last, as people struggle to remember specifics, many have created a separate avatar that houses the augmented, expanded personal memory. For Brett, his memory is an attractive tan blonde. He does not name her but calls her ‘memory’. Madison Handley, however, once based her memory on Mal Reynolds from ‘Serenity’ and ‘Firefly’. After out-growing it, she changes her memory’s appearance and disposition several times. By the time of ‘Long Summer’, when she’s become a pirate, her memory has taken on the aspect of Grutte Pier, the Frisian pirate formally known as Piers Gerlofs Donia.

As a further component of memory and extended living, I had to determine what route memory will take. Are future people’s memory perfect? What does it mean to perfectly recall a moment? Recent studies show that our memory is very imperfect, and those imperfections help us cope with existence and survive. Oh, the lies we tell ourselves. As part of that, which version of memory is collected? The perfect, unbiased version, or our personal edition? In the end, both are collected but only law enforcement normally accesses the perfect memory to resolve conflicts and solve crimes.

The rest of us prefer our personal recollections.

2

The Fork

There is a book called ‘The World According to Garp’. 

It’s not an obscure novel so you might know it. Written by a guy named John Irving, who has written and published several pieces of interesting fiction. Some have even been made as movies. I think this one was made into a movie, and had several major actors star in it.

In the book I reference, the main character is TS Garp. TS Garp is an author. His mother, Jenny, a nurse, also becomes a writer. But her process irritates Garp (as I remember it) because she never seems to indulge in the silence of thinking and editing. She’s always hammering the typewriter.

I often think of that because I love that silence, when I drop a still bomb on my existence, cross my arms and stare out the window to think, where do I go today?

That summarizes my situation. I just finished a major piece of the pirates’ tale. Today, I’m thinking, do I continue writing the pirates’ arcs or do I turn to Pram and his team’s activities, or back to Brett and his role? Each have beginnings and middles to further develop in the push toward climax and denouement. The arcs all seem equally easy and difficult to write, that paradox of writing tension where you’re on a peak, trying to capture the lightning. But I’ve been spending so much time with Handley and her captain and crew, I’ve really enjoyed their company and know them so well. I wonder, how important is that? I know Brett very well, too, but he is a more complicated person, in a complex situation, and yet is the novel’s largest cog. But Pram’s POV offers a major twist and I’ve been sitting on the edge of that for several weeks, letting it brew.

So I sit in personal silence amid the coffee shop’s music and conversations, meditating to a degree about which story to take up. That’s actually a lame description of the process. I open the book in my mind and return to each arc’s place where I paused. Consideration of where they’re stopped and what’s to happen next is studied. From that process, one aspect gathers a stronger brightness, a sharper focus, a more immediate presence. My mind takes up its mental pen. I begin to see and hear words. Words become sentences. Scenes flower.

Then I know where to go, what to write, and I begin again, to write like crazy, at least one more time. Often it’s the middle of a scene. It may not even be ‘connected’ with what’s already written. I know I can write such bridges later. I’m interesting in writing down the bones. I’ll add verisimilitude and substance in the immediate edit. The immediate edit is the stage I conduct after completing a scene, just part of building continuity and managing pace and story.

In that marvelous way that brains can work, my thought processes are segregated and compartmentalized, and while I’ve been thinking about this post and my process and writing, I’ve been thinking about the novel and the aspects I’ve described. From these ruminations have arisen the next piece to write.

Here I go again. It is such a wonderful high, the sort of moments that you hope will never end….

3

Nobel Prizes

Love the Nobel Prize for Physics this year. You’ve probably heard but I’m a pedantic beast so I’ll tell you that three Brits, working in the US, won the Nobel Prize for their work in exotic matter.

David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane, and J. Michael Kosterlitz are the three awardees. Being a science fiction fan, I love such work that pushes our thinking into new directions and recognizes new potential.

Over in Medicine, Yoshinori Ohsumi won for his work on cells that eat themselves in a process called autophagy. I pay less attention to medicine than physics, so my reaction was…whhaaat?

These discoveries and the explanations behind them unroll reams of imagination and story ideas. I swear my brain began overheating. I’ll never understand this stuff but it’s cool to think about theoretical applications and situations, and how you can take off into new directions. So many ideas and stories, so little time. My mortality and human limitations really limit me.

(Hah, and there’s another kernel of an idea for a story/novel/incident. So many ideas….)

Knowledge! Got to love it.

 

 

4

The Writing High

I’ve been working hard on three separate chapters in ‘Long Summer’, the sequel to ‘Returnee’. These chapters were all about the pirates.

It’s been stressful and challenging. Research and heavy thinking were demanded. I was putting together how the pirates interlock with the larger story. It was like trying to weave with spider webs sometimes.

The first chapter was exposition and interactions aboard the Narwhal as the new crew learned about one another. We were introduced to the main pirate character, Handley, her memory, Grutte Pier, and her parrot, JR. Handley’s background of being shaped by a reboot of ‘Serenity’ was included, and the ongoing debate among this loose confederation about being called pirates versus being called freedom fighters.

My use of ‘we’ in ‘we were introduced’ was deliberate in that last paragraph, as I met her and came to know her through the organic writing process. We’ve become pretty close.

The second chapter was about the pirate ship’s hunt for targets and increasing acrimony and dissatisfaction among the crew with the captain. None of them know him, and he’s a swearing doom and gloom machine. It seems like he’s always pissing on them.

The final chapter was the most satisfying to write and edit as the pirate ship Narwhal encountered the Intrepid and Missouri. Editing, revising, proofing and polishing led to that most glorious of experiences, a writing high. I sit back, so damned pleased with how the scenes were unfolded, meshed and finished. It’s one of hundreds of tasks required toward a finished novel, but it was a big one, and it feels awesome. This is absolutely why I write.

Now, though, wistfulness shrouds me. Half of my coffee remains and I think, what’s next? I’ve only been writing ninety minutes. My rear end isn’t even numb yet but I’ve emerged from the creating fog. Slowly the high drains behind the demands to continue. The novel isn’t finished.

Weeks, maybe months, of writing, editing, et al, remain. For now, I’ll enjoy the high, or more correctly, given my nature, try to enjoy it.

My coffee is cold anyway.

Cheers

3

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