…And we’re back!

Sorry about the delay, everyone. It’s been a weird and rough (…mostly rough) few months. But as I got finished with the last of my nightly rituals (such that they can be called ‘rituals’), while I was talking to a couple of different friends about a couple of different things each – and then upon reviewing my previous entry – I got to thinking…..

….not only is Magical Realism my preferred genre….

…..I think it’s the genre I’m supposed to write.

The only genre.

MR has its history in political and social tension, but it can also be a highly personal experience. Something like Beloved, a novel that was written in as singular a voice as can be in the inimitable Toni Morrison, is rooted in an experience that only a select number of people still alive even then, in 1987, could understand. And, of course, by extension, the readers of her transformative novel which is, on the surface, about a young woman who appears sopping wet on the doorstep of one Sethe. The woman, called Beloved, is believed to be the child that Sethe murdered sometime before.

But of course, as all great novels, this one is about a great many things. And while I believe that is a key element of what does a great novel make, and I always have, I was not always positive that this would be the way for me to launch a career in writing that would be something I could call fruitful, even profitable. Of course, I never wanted that to be the focus of my endeavor, any endeavor that was rooted in art or passion (and certainly I would not be at fault to say that one of my major passions–at least for awhile–garnered an intense yet divergent force in opposition to the fate of great prosperity). But I did try desperately to see myself in a position where I would be able to keep the light on and my belly reasonably full, and figured that to do so in writing, I would have to make a few sacrifices. It took me ages to realize, the sacrifice I was willing to make, well…

But I eventually came to realize that I need to course correct. (This actually has happened a number of times, but sometimes you have to wait for the moment in which this truth finally sinks in, so that you can actually make an actionable plan to put forth some meaningful amount of effort, especially one as large as the one I’ve been tending to. Double-especially when you’ve been contending with your own mind. Triply-especially when you come to a snag so great that it rocks the entire foundation of your creative-headed psychology, snapping you out of what you came to realize in that moment was actually me just screwing around, getting nowhere, not being serious.)

I’m still working on that course-correcting. In that aforementioned pseudo-ritual, I brainstormed a couple of possible scenes, and resolved to enact a style of writing I’ve been resisting–saying I’m okay with exploring it, and yet never truly going for it fully–for years, in fear of not achieving my aforementioned goal of fortune and/or fame, since that’s hardly the most popular or lucrative genre today, as I understand. They’re violent scenes. Not necessarily bloody, or gruesome, but they are heavy thoughts, informed by the news, life experiences, and those of friends of mine. Some truly dark shit has come to the forefront of my mind by way of said friends sharing their troubles with me.

I’ve always been that kind of person, and it’s gotten me in trouble, and indeed that is partly what I want to write about. But along with other topics and themes, I want to write about this sort of thing behind that veil of Magical Realism, because that can make for some truly extraordinary stuff. It can be as colorful and vibrant, or as dingy and dark, as my imagination can (and should) muster.

But first I have to write it.

Well, alright. Let’s get to it, then.

‘Til next time (in hopefully less than half a year).

Reconciling Magical Realism with Fantasy

I like Magical Realism. A lot. At times it can be difficult to grasp, but basically the lowdown on Magical Realism is this, according to Wikipedia: magical realism “expresses a primarily realistic view of the real world while also adding or revealing magical elements”. But that’s only a very vague, grossly underwhelming explanation. And my goal is not to talk at you about what it is, because no one–least of me–has done a very good job of explaining it. Even the godfather of Magical Realism himself, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, only scratches the surface, because 50 years ago, in the time it really began to take flight, it has meant many things to many people. Today, it means many more things in addition. So that’s not my forte, nor is that the concern of today’s post. (And if you don’t know what either of these are, just look them up on Wikipedia, then come back; otherwise, you’ll just be so confused you won’t be able to partake in this one.)

Today I want to talk about how I’ve been thinking a lot about Magical Realism in relationship to Fantasy. Now, I have a lot of thinky-thoughts on this one; and that ought to be expected: this is a conversation about two HUGE topics. Take, for instance, the fact that Brandon Sanderson has an entire lecture series, which has been refined and polished over the last 10 years or so, all about the various elements of Fantasy; on the other end, there’s a lecture series of about 10 videos or so, all about the different flavors and nuances of Magical Realism.

So. Big topic. There’s likely to be multiple posts coming down the pike on this one. And it’s likely impossible to do this thing any justice, having never published anything very big at all. Here, then, is my first (and it is a doozy; as I said: lots of thinky-thoughts, and each one is pretty big, almost convoluted, but I’ll try my best):

What if I were to combine them?

That’s right. Combine Magical Realism with Fantasy.

On the one hand, the two are something of distant cousins, which means they’re not that unrelated. On the other, they’re just close enough to be in the same family, but not the same thing. And the nature of their not being the same thing is such that much conventional wisdom regarding MR is that Fantasy CAN’T be Magical Realism, since a major element of MR is that it has to be rooted in reality: the Realism is the key focus. You write about the world in which you live, and you add a few bits of magic things here and there throughout the story. Again, a crude interpretation, a dollar store version with almost zero of the DLC nuances available for purchase in this version.

It’s just that there are rules in Fantasy that often describe the limitations within a magic system. With Magical Realism, magic just happens. But here’s the thing: the imagery in Magical Realism, by necessity, is far more rooted in the real. So that means there are familiar things happening to other familiar things. Fantasy doesn’t lend itself well to those kinds of occurrences (there are no magic wands that exist, no spells you can cast from your fingertips, et al).

Anyway, this is more or less just an outlined version, really, of some of the things I’m grappling with. Let me know in comments what, if anything, you think can be an interesting way to blend the two schools of thought together!

Short (and probably misguided) thing about blogs themselves

Blogs don’t seem that serious to me. Why is that? All I hear, from every direction, is that you need a blog in order to be successful in the digital markets. But it never felt like it rang true to me. It doesn’t seem like much of a money maker. Sure, you can slap up a paypal button (not true here, or at least, not easily), or something like that, but that doesn’t guarantee a steady income by any means. You can do any of the things “they” suggest (or, let’s face it, basically demand you do and tell you that you’ll never be successful if you don’t follow THEIR Very Pristine And Thoroughly Researched Advice), and who knows? 80% of the stuff I read that you should do seem really hard: hard to do, hard to understand (for me).

What happened to just writing in a blog? And that’s where I get tripped up, as well. Because you can write in a blog, and that’s fine, but where is the urgency? Where is the motivation? Look, I write because I love to write, but at some point, you say to yourself, “Why am I doing this if I’m not getting paid?” Well? Why do I do this if I’m not getting paid?

I’m probably way off here, and missing something essential about the whole SEO thing and whatever else. It just seems foreign and, frankly, kinda gross to me. It seems too much to be holding too close to what the market says. Trust me, I understand you have to pay attention to these things if you want to be serious about this. But it feels like almost all the advice I read is coming from slimeballs, or people who are just way beyond my level.

But either way, I guess mostly I write in this thing because I don’t know what else to do with the thing, other than to write (sometimes: apparently I don’t feel so strong of an urge to do this consistently, given that it’s been like 6 months or something since my last post. That is until last night, when I decided at 4am I was going to make a post on FB about writing. That’s to arrive here, sometime soon.)

“Where do your ideas come from?”

I want to apologize to all 4 of you who have looked at this blog at my request. I’ve been a bit under the weather the last week (and I still am, but a working writer has a responsibility to his readers), so this is coming a little bit later than I would’ve liked. I also needed time to properly digest the experience I just had early last week.

Early this past week, I saw the best live show I’ve ever seen. It was a punk band by the name of Pg. 99 (whom I highly recommend, though they’re pretty abrasive and loud, so unless that’s not your thing, I would suggest them to anyone looking for a new experience). They’re not the tightest band in the world, but that isn’t the point. Neither is technically perfect writing. The point is, and has always been, getting across your art in the most profound and emotional, and sincere way possible.

But aside from the sheer, unadulterated energy of the performance and musicians onstage, one thing stood out to me: the lyrics. Oddly enough, with a band whose repertoire consists almost entirely of terrifying shrieks in the vocals, jarring, clashing chords, chaotic drumming and the hectic thrum of multiple bass players, you would think there wouldn’t be enough space in one’s head to consider the lyrics.

But if you take a moment, look online, and seek out the lyrics on any of a variety of websites that has them posted up, you’ll see there’s far more to it than just the frenetic and mangled cacophony of sound that at first sounds like a collection of bodies falling down with instruments in hand.

There’s excellent storytelling there.

I’m not positive of their literary influences, but I have to imagine there’s no loss of some appreciation for the likes of Lovecraft and Poe. Consider these lyrics:

In his nightmare, black rain fell
And clogged their first kiss, now suffocating
She dies in his arms, now their love is a ghost
As she turns into ashes and the wind sends her crumbling
Into the setting sun and her love was a vampire

(Genius.com “In Love with an Apparition” https://genius.com/Pg99-in-love-with-an-apparition-lyrics)

or, a crowd favorite, doubtless in no small part due to the storytelling, a little, 11-minute ditty called “By The Fireplace in White”:

The drifting night
Begets my footsteps
I press this pavement
Until my feet scrape
In the back of my head

I saw you in the back of my head

I found a knife dangling from your face
Looked like a seed
Too many gauges
Our thoughts controlled
My head is much bigger
My claws, my fingers dipped in blood
They’ve been cut too many times be warned
You’ll find I took my head off, I saw you in the back of
What’s in the back of? A knife dangling?
Rub my face, looks like a seed to many gauges
My thoughts controlled, my head my fingers digging around
My fingers drenched in coke and blood to many times
Too many handling
Why? For what? What for?
You’ll find,
Do you remember …

(Songmeanings.net “By The Fireplace in White” http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/129519/)

The lyrics are clearly a Gothic-inspired tale of…. well, I’m not sure. Probably mind control, as there is a sample that further expounds on this at the end of the track that runs for much of the track.

Ultimately, the combination of a fun show with what I realized was, really, just outstanding and dark storytelling was probably going to make this my favorite experience at a live gig, but just how true that ended up being, I could not have foreseen that. I feel like, if someone could look into my memories and get a quick dose of the whole breadth of my show-going experience, they’d agree with that.

Lyrics are such an important thing to me, and I realized early on it’s because, at heart, I am a writer. I am a creative person, and it is my desire to write things that I will put out into the world, in the hopes it will spread its wings and fly. Great lyrics have helped to shape not only my worldview, but the interesting ways in which to convey some of the ideas I have had in my head for sometime. I’ve yet to fully put forward those thoughts in a large way, but this blog is my first true, concerted effort to do so.

Writing as a day job

For as long as I’ve known about writing as a day job, It’s always seemed out of reach to me. Specifically, if it’s not fiction stories, people are looking for technical writing. I don’t have any formal training in much of anything. I don’t have expertise. What I have is my experiences. And my experiences have been limited in terms of raw data: in no particular order, I’ve had one “regular” job as an associate at a pet store; one seasonal job in which I worked at a haunted house for two separate seasons; a kiosk job where I was making under-the-table money; an usher in the house of an amphitheater, the same place where I worked at the haunted house. The most recent job I had I left in 2014.

But I had no real world experience to speak of. I’ve had a lot of days where my mental health was at a pretty low point. Indeed, those moments began to blur into one giant blob. It became a theme, I felt, in my life. And then I started to wonder if I just had this thing called depression. Keep in mind, this is not something I’ve ever had a clear-cut diagnosis for. So this is all purely speculation based on experience. Even the therapist I saw could merely make an educated guess.

When you think of a “job”, though, you think of it as mundane. Some of those jobs I held were mundane, yes. One or two, not as much. But they were still jobs. But, as often is the case, those jobs didn’t fulfill me. Cue the idea of Professional Writing as a Job. I’m not here to sell anyone anything. I’m not here to convince you to take up the profession of a technical writer. If you have a bonafide expertise in something, I’d look into it. But I won’t tell you that I want you to go and look it up, and then do it. Make that decision for yourself. I’d heard about it off and on for a long time, but as I said, I didn’t think I was capable of it.

Then a friend turned me onto the idea of copywriting, a specifc element to it that I’d also heard of. This time, however, I had literally no idea what it was. I still find it really difficult to grasp, but basically it seems like freelance work, specifically done for companies. I’m really interested in it, but I have a long way to go before I can say I feel like I’ve learned about it. Again, I’m not trying to sell anyone on the idea, especially since I barely know what to do with the idea. And when I learn more about this, I’ll make a post about it in more detail.

I have known since I was very small that I wanted to be a writer. I wrote in secret, with no real understanding that I wanted to do this for a living. I didn’t begin in earnest until 2005. I’m talking with the determination to actually get published and make a sincere go of it. And I certainly didn’t call myself a Writer until quite recently. My interest never wavered, but my drive and ability all did their fair share of it. It became a slow dive, an Olympic swimmer’s run-through played in super slo-mo, bobbing up and down, up and down. When a swimmer comes up for air for that 1 second, there must be the greatest sense of relief, unconsciously. That was where I was. Moments of great relief dominated by lots of time to sit and ponder, and dread the trajectory of my life.

But writing deserves to be given more credit than the mainstream media gives. You write, usually, with the intention of saying something that you then put out into the world. Ideally, something in the range of thousands of pairs of eyeballs will come across your book, and that will be the start of something beautiful. This is not something to scoff at. It’s a job. It’s a business. Obviously, the ones watching the money feel the same way. So why has the consciousness of America today been allowed to believe it is okay to all but dismiss a person for their talents as a writer? It never made sense to me.

Either way, there are multiple avenues to explore, when it comes to writing. I don’t have an expertise in anything, but I know that this world is a lot more open to people like myself than I had anticipated. This is partly my fault, due to never exploring what this world has to offer. Then my friend made a post on Facebook about it, and since I want to help her out in her endeavors however I can, I told her I would sign up. It turns out there’s a LOT to this. I’m excited, though. And that’s the point. I’m excited about writing again, about its opportunities, doors waiting for me to knock on.

The invention of a thought.

Late last night, I found myself, yet again, deep in the throes of another late-night binge consisting of existential dread and impostor syndrome. A classic combination in the world of a right-brain person. All filler, no substance. It’s almost worse that, when you are desperate, you want to tell anyone, everyone, about what you’re going through. Because, right or wrong, you’re positive that no one really wants to listen, though they will politely give you the floor. (After all, that’s what you’re asking when you write and publish something; this is particularly strengthened when it’s something you feel confident about, something you can be happy with, something for which “putting it out there into the world” can be validated.)

On the other hand, these people are supposed to be your friends. And, right or wrong, their job is to lift you up. They ought to encourage you, even if what you’ve done is flawed, problematic, or in some way not-on-the-right-track. They’re supposed to gently nudge you if you’ve written something that goes along a path that doesn’t ring true to experience, whether yours or someone else’s. Or, if you haven’t thought it through fully, maybe you come at a particular subject in a way that is less than generous, or even is downright unfair. Your friends are supposed to let you in on that. Your friends–if they’re true friends–are supposed to be there for you.

But you have to share your work in order for that to happen.

And in order for that to happen, you have to make the words show up on the page. But your brain doesn’t realize that. Or maybe it has tuned out enough that the stupid thing forgot what a basic fundamental concept like friendship even means. Either way, it can feel like your brain is trying to sabotage you. It understands the drive, the desire, to do something creative. Maybe you’ve lost the plot, that everything has gone so awry that you no longer remember why you decided to start writing. Any one of these, or a combination therein, could be true. I believe a combination has been at work for me. I think it’s been a domino effect, and I wonder that’s often how it goes for those writers who’ve gone so deep as I have down that awful hole, that they can’t even find it within them to do the meaningful work it takes to search for the answer.

Either way, I couldn’t do the work. I felt I had to wait. And perhaps I really did have to wait. What if time was exactly what I needed? Well, time is what I gave myself, if you wanted to think of it as “giving myself something”. Maybe there was no way for me to find what I had been missing until that ephemeral “something” decided to pop up from its hobbit hole, allowing me to revisit the feeling of putting words on the page, the invention of a thought. The way I felt about the very concept of writing when I first started in earnest.

I don’t know if I feel okay with that. I don’t know if I can.

I don’t know if I can accept that time was the only thing that was going to be able to soothe my mind. It feels lazy. It feels like new-age woo. Which means it feels like an excuse. But I tried, for far longer than I am willing to admit, I tried all sorts of things to get myself out of the rut. But nothing worked. I would sometimes write fifty words, sometimes a hundred. Sometimes more. But it never felt like enough. Because it wasn’t enough. You don’t become an author with a successfully budding career by letting the words merely trickle out of you. I had read the advice time and time again, that you can’t wait for inspiration. I believe that, to a degree. Inspiration, for me, comes when I exercise the brain, basically sweet-talk it into developing a seed thought that then turns into a paragraph.

It used to be that I could do this, and I would turn out pages at a time. Soon, though, I began to muster up only a few paragraphs at most. Then I’d call time. Because I think something in me broke. I used to be able to do the proverbial 400-meter dash dash. As I said, I would woo my brain, whisper sweet nothings in its ear, until it produced the subconscious mojo necessary to pour out some wackadoodle phrase or sentence, or even subplot point. But somewhere along the line, I began to question myself.

“This doesn’t seem plausible.”

“This reads like a generic dystopian novel.”

Which morphed into vicious little tales, such classics as:

“You’re a hack”

and

“You’ll just collect and collect and collect, and nothing will ever come of it. Because you can’t bring yourself to finish something. You can’t pull the trigger.”

And I tried to work it out, for years I tried. But finally, I just decided I needed to give myself a break. I needed to have patience with myself. Patience and time. And that’s what I’ve been doing. But even since I started doing that, it’s been a difficult and long journey. I started wondering if that was the right move. But trying to force it stopped working. It felt like I was forcing it. My method* became too taxing, because part of it included forcing it. (I’ve not abandoned my method completely, because I think there are important parts to it. But I simply became impatient, so it wasn’t working the way I wanted it to.)

So I’ve given in, and I’ve decided that everything will work itself out. Not to give this post the old deus ex machina treatment, but I don’t know what else to say about it. Bottom line: I let myself sink too deep, because I thought that was the way to go. Let the subconscious take over. And I still believe that. It’s just that, as in all things, moderation is the key point to remember. Because when I tried to claw myself back out, something in me snapped and realized that I was actually as deep inside my panic and worry as I had been, which I didn’t realize until then. So I had to give in. Which is part of the reason why I’ve been able to finally restart this blog in earnest. I hope you’ll stick with me throughout my journey. I’ll be posting excerpts every so often, as well as updates like these.

 

*I’ll explain what that is in a future post. This thing is already getting too long as it is, so it’ll have to wait.