A War in Heaven

As I have been reading Paradise Lost for my lit class instead of grabbing interesting bits and pieces to store in my brain for the paper I have to write about it I keep fixating on the interesting ways it meshes and adds to my own mythology that I have created for The City 'verse.  I don't want to go into specifics, but have to say that I really appreciate Milton's vision of Hell.  I don't know if I will ever need to write a description of "my" Hell in one of my novels, but I do have Angels and Fallen Angels, and the War of Heaven is a crucial part of this world's secret history.  Having a picture in my head of both Hell and Heaven is probably a good idea, even if it is backstory that never makes it into a published draft of anything.

So, I feel like I have been talking and talking about writing, and not showing anything, so I am going to give you an excerpt of something I wrote.  Since we were talking about Angels and Demons, I will give you the prologue from a novel I have tentatively called To the Edge of the Earth.  Written during National Novel Month 2010, it isn't finished, which frustrates me, but I did get over fifty thousand words of it done.

Fiction and Reality

I have been flexing my writing muscles a lot in the last few months and I think they are getting tired. I don't want them to be tired. And I also can't afford for them to be tired. I feel like I am at a crucial crossroads in the planning of the serial killer story, only I can't see anything else in front of me. Probably I just need to start writing it. And I might if I didn't need to reserve writing time for other things. Like school. So I just keep making notes in my moleskine.
Speaking of my moleskine, I had a revelation the other day. I keep a notebook. I always keep a pen with me and I jot down things that come to mind, but I don't keep a notebook the way Joan didion does. When I read through old notebooks real life is peripheral. What I am reading is a progression of the way my ideas have formed and developed. This is fascinating, at least to me, and potentially to others if I chose to share. And this is where my revelation comes in. If I develop alzheimer or dementia in my old age, not unlikely given family history, I am going to be well and truly effed in the head. I already have what I call a reality crisis and I have a (mostly) sound mind. I can't imagine what it will be like when I don’t.
Reality crisis. It makes me sound crazy. There are occasions when my brain will momentarily be convinced that fiction is reality. On the flip side of this are the moments when I am convinced that if I believe hard enough fiction will be reality. That magic will be real and superheroes will exist. And I am always a little disappointed when they don't.

You want to know one of my deepest fears?

That I am a muggle.

(this got super personal, but here goes)

A Serial Killer in The City

I am feeling overwhelmed by this story idea that has been building in me.  It has, as most new ideas do, consumed my brain.  I have been taking notes and dreaming and imagining almost constantly.  Which doesn't do wonders for my homework, let me tell you.  However, it is different than pretty much anything I have written before, and I am realizing--well, not just now--I have been building to this realization for a while now--I don't write my characters with the devotion to individuality that each of them deserves.  A lot of what they end up doing in my stories is going through the motions.  I am pretty good at plot, and getting better all the time, and I feel I am damn good at world building (you should see the places that exist only in my head!), I am okay with dialogue (I can write fairly natural sounding speech, but it doesn't always do anything, which is important).  I have mixed feelings about action.  I feel like I do it well at times, other times not so much.  I think it is a case of sometimes being able to see it in my head, and sometimes not.

Anyway.  Character building isn't too difficult for me.  I like to know where they have been and what they have done before the first scene breaks.  The hard part is writing personality without each character sounding like they are me, or each other.  The last two NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month--look it up if you don't know what it is...or I guess you could wait until I decide to talk about it) challenges I have participated in have ended up with rather similar characters.  NaNoWriMo is a hard time to judge, because the words are coming out of your brain so fast you don't have time to think, which is kind the point, but as other characters, both written and still living in my head, flit through my mind, I am realizing that so many of them share similar qualities.  I have to wonder if I am writing myself, or if I am writing what I want to be.  In the end who I am writing doesn't matter.  What matters is that I can make them different enough to be interesting.  What is important is that I let them act on their own, rather than simply have them do what the outline (well, if I used one generally) dictates.  They need personality, and that is something that I have a lot of trouble with.

The reason that this is coming up is because the story that is brewing right now involves an extremely complex man as homicide detective with some serious trauma built up from his childhood.  And a schizophrenic serial killer.  In a modern city with a hidden magical underworld.  It is better than it sounds, promise!  Or maybe it sounds better than it is.  I'm not the most impartial judge.

This is not the magical underworld you read about in Harry Potter  Or twilight, if you read that one.  This is a city (aptly called The City) that I have been building for several years now.  Think...Anita Blake and Merry Gentry by Laurell K. Hamilton mixed with The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher mixed with the movie Underworld mixed with the movie the Covenant with a healthy dose of myth and fairy tale.  Several not really connected stories are building out of this world.  But I am going to stop there, because I don't want to go on about it, because I could fill several pages (actually, I have a moleskine dedicated to this world) of information about it.

Anyway, as I said earlier, I haven't ever written any sort of murder/police/mystery/crime/psychological thriller before.  And with as complex as both the antagonist and the protagonist are becoming this is going to require a lot of research.  It is probably going to be my summer project.  (when I am graduated!  with an associate's degree!  in english!  and will have nothing to do until I start at BSU in the fall!)  Except I have to finish editing the last draft of the Mad Queen so I can possibly have a thing published.  But that shouldn't take too long, a week of working at it hard should get it done, unless I follow through on my promise to add another thirty thousand words to it...

Anyway, this blog has gotten way too long, and probably boring to everyone but me...so, to reward you for reading, go read this blog by Neil Gaiman, who is much more famous and awesome than I am: thoughts on writing and driving in fog by Neil Gaiman

My Brain Decided to Vomit, and I Saved It For You

I am currently avoiding doing homework.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe because I know it involves writing, and I don't particularly want to write anything but this fantastic new idea that I have floating around in my head.  I figured out backstory for the main character today.  It made me happy.

Another thing that made me happy in the oh-my-god-this-is-actually-going-to-happen kind of way came in the mail today.  The graduation review people reviewed my credits and I am eligible for graduation this semester.  It kinda freaks me the fuck out.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe because it means I have to move on to the next step, and that means making decisions, and I hate making decisions about my life?  Or maybe because I have begun to be comfortable here, and now I can't stay?  Or maybe because I hate change, even though I crave it?

Speaking of cravings, I have been having a weird anti-craving recently.  Yes, I just made that up.  But seriously, I don't want to eat anything.  Obviously, I have been, or else I would be passed out right now from lack of blood sugar, but nothing sounds good, nothing really tastes good.

So, this character that I have been working on.  He is very complex.  I like him a lot, because he is broken, so very broken, and I am hoping that I get to put him back together before the end of his story, but he is so broken, that I may only get to put a couple pieces back together.  But he is interesting enough that he could probably get a sequel.  But that means finishing this one.  And I have no time to write for pleasure, unfortunately.  What I would love to do is take a novel writing class.  Don't get me wrong, I loved writing the short stores in cw: fiction, and I learned more than I could have thought possible.  Okay, so I don't really want to take a novel writing class.  I want to be able to sit down and write my novel, and have someone sitting behind me for moral support and to say every once in a while, that is brilliant, or that is piece of shit, rewrite that scene.

I have gotten out of the habit of using swear words in my for public consumption writing.  My facebook and my twitter are inundated with much younger cousins and other family members who would be all judgy of me.  And I just don't want to deal with that.  So, I keep my mouth clean, and try not to talk about things uber controversial.  Mostly because I despise confrontation.  And also, I have a deep-seated fear of rejection, and even though the most logical part of my brain says, they won't stop loving you if they see more of the real you, the emotional part, which I think I can safely say reigns on high most of the time, is like the lizard brain in the first animorphs book:  runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrun at the first sign of disapproval.  I hate that part of my brain sometimes.

I think I have decided that I am willing to turn the assignment in late.  I will try to read the thing when I get up in the morning, and if I have time, I will write about it, too.  If not, oh well...

Miyazaki!

So, I decided to do my paper about the films of Hayao Miyazaki.  Not all of them, though I plan on watching them all within the next week, to make sure I know which ones I want to write about.  I am almost definitely planning on My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo, though that might change.  I think i want to do Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind as well.  I watched it last night, and it is fantastic, and as the first film from his Studio Ghibli I can see a lot of the seeds for his later films.

(also, can I just say that the newly redubbed English version of My Neighbor Totoro with the Fanning sisters really kinda drives me nuts...I don't know why)

I think that it is going to be a good and interesting paper.  Still a little worried about the interview requirement, though.  Hmmm, maybe I could interview Sesson Sensei...I don't know what kind of insights she would have though, she did her Mission in Japan quite some time ago.  She does like Totoro, so maybe she would be able to give me an idea about how that kind of film represents something in Japanese culture, though I don't really want to go that direction in my paper, it might be a good introduction topic.  Or I could get in touch with the other Japanese professors at CWI or BSU.

The Gap

Not much to say, but I wanted to share this:

I don't know what you are talking about

So, I may have mentioned that I am in multiple reading and writing classes this semester.  As in all of them except for yoga.  No, I am not taking all the reading and writing classes (nor is yoga a writing class), all of the classes I am taking (except for yoga) are reading and writing classes.  One should probably be considered more reading, one more writing, and the third is pretty balanced between reading and writing.  But they all decided to have essays due the same week.  Within a couple days of each other, actually.

I am going to stop, because that isn't what this post was going to be about.  I will save it for posterity, but you may ignore the above paragraph.

I have another essay that was assigned.  I have several weeks to work on it, but it is a heavily researched essay, rather than the light to no research required for the ones that were due this week.

I want to do something fun.  Which is not as difficult as it might sound to some people.  I honestly love writing.  I don't always love academic style writing, but I can get behind it if the topic can hold me.  Hence the need for something fun.  I had initially thought about doing a sort of research project on a book.  Maybe American Gods by Neil Gaiman or The Dark Tower series by Stephen King.  Both would be fascinating topics to delve into the mythology and the lack thereof of America or "The Child Roland to the Dark Tower came" or is it went?  I can't remember now, it has been a while since I read it.  That reminds me, that poem/epic thing is on my kindle and I need to read it.  I don't think it is very long, relatively speaking.  But I got House of Leaves today, and that is going to be my next read.  It got put at the top of the list, replacing Miss Peregrine's House for(of?) Unusual Children.  I find that my stack of "to read" books never gets smaller, and often has the same books in it for along time.  The problem is that I often read from the top, which are the books that I have purchased/collected most recently, instead of reading from the bottom, and getting out the ones that have been there longest.

Anyway, back to the essay topic.  I haven't completely ruled a book out, but because my other two classes are a lit class and a literary analysis class, I think that I shouldn't overwhelm myself with that kind of a project.  Then I thought about maybe doing something along the lines of the merits (or insert some other word there) of speculative fiction.  It sounds vague, but I could narrow it down with some research, I think.

Then I thought about doing a movie.  The first one that popped into my head (probably because I have a stack of his movies on the bookshelf in front of my desk) is some sort of study on the themes of Miyazaki's films (My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, etc.).  It could be fun.  The other movie that could be amazing would be Donnie Darko.  One of the greatest movies ever.

Oh, or an idea that just popped into my head could be some sort of thing about fan fiction and published works, fan fic writers vs "real" authors, and maybe include something about how so many published authors began writing fan fiction, whether it was something that they shared with others, or did simply for themselves.  Also the negative and positive views of publishers, authors, and other fans.  That one could be really interesting, if I wanted to take the time to do it, and would it start to get boring after a while.  Essentially I am  just thinking with my fingers now...

There is a part of me that really wants to write about writing.  Simply because I love meta.