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Nov. 7th, 2021 11:06 pm Writer's Night Inside!
Type the page and Tap the brain!
Spirits Flow and Fly! =
That my friends was a Haiku. Seventeen syllables divided neatly into three lines. Written in honour of National Drunk Writing Night, or NaDruWriNi, which, for this audience, will require no further explanation from me.
Here is a limmerick:
My Mother once went to Mt. Sinai.
Her photos were thrilling to mine eye
She wrote it all down,
In a Journal I found,
Which I now plagerize for DruWriNi.,
Rather clever if you ask me!
Granted, it is not a true story: my mother has never been anywhere near Mt. Sinai, and it will not figure any further in this post. But you try to find something to rhyme with "DruWriNi"!
Anyway, I do eagerly greet the occasion, as an externally sanctioned incentive to put other activities aside and get something done for a change. The possibility of communal participation is a further inducement. I even bought a Mechanical Gaming Keyboard for the occasion. A great big old school 486 affair with giant block keys that light up and go clicketyclicketyclick. Perfect for big clumsy fingers like mine. It makes every letter a character with a presence in the real world, and writing a physical activity again. Like these ridiculous swipy keyboards of modern laptops, delicate and dainty as soap bubbles. It makes typing a joy.
(And there's no fucking touchpad to "accidentally" wipe out your text!!!)
All that said, I can't help feeling a little annoyed with myself for needing all these external coercions to do what I ought to be doing anyway. I'm also a bit skeptical of the muse-like powers of booze. It may have worked for Edgar Allan Poe, but I can't say with any certainty it's ever worked for me. I'm anything but a tea totaler, but my best work has historically been done on the straight. But if people are going to gather together and drink anyway, they may as well try to hack out some words. It's no worse than gossiping or watching football. I for one would love to see writing become a communal activity; then I wouldn't have to choose between fictional friends and real ones.
Typically, I broke the rules somewhat by writing on other platforms and neglected to post any of it until a full twenty four-hours after the event. Such is life. A great deal of it was finishing up old pieces started long long ago, the initial inspiration forgotten. Some just needed concluding sentences, while others were less than half done. In each case, I'm pleased to finally have them ready.
One was a review of Alex Winter's Frank Zappa documentary:
https://stevedylan.blogspot.com/2021/11/so-on-weekend-i-watched-zappa-2020.html
The next were some musings on the latest (as of writing) episode of Doctor Who:
https://stevedylan.blogspot.com/2021/11/doctor-doctor-in-which-author-damns.html
Followed by two book reviews, one on Stalin's Scribe by Brian J. Boek
https://stevedylan.blogspot.com/2021/11/stal-ins-scribe-literature-ambition-and.html
And another of Two Eerie Tales by Paul Torday.
https://stevedylan.blogspot.com/2021/11/once-in-while-i-will-grab-book-off.html
Four blogs in a day aren't bad, but the crowning glory was a thousand pages of fiction. It starts like this:
" To whom it may concern _ to you specifically:
I am writing this because you are probably the only one in the universe who knows what truly happened. I don’t know how you’ll find this manuscript, but as you know far more about me than I do about you, I suspect you’ll have no trouble.
Why am I bothering? Because someone, somewhere has to know. It may as well be you. If no one knows about something, does it actually happen? I believe it does, but I want someone to know all the same. Again, it may as well be you. Make what you will of that knowledge. Remember though, that only you have it. It’s one more thing that makes you unique in the universe.
That’s why I’m writing to you . ."
The working title is To the Nexus, though I will almost definitely have to change it. It is a piece of Doctor Who fan fiction, and it was inspired by a dream.
Two main thoughts:
a) The problem with writing from dreams is that while they may have seemed brilliant in the world of Morpheus, they quickly become nonsensical when transferred to the page. Things that were quite intuitive in the dream become absurdly incongruous in the waking world. Things that needed no explanation suddenly do.
One way around this is to make the whole thing a dream sequence, which always struck me as a cop-out. The other is to render it as some kind of fantastical or magic realist outing, which I'm not interested in. That's not where my head is at. So I struggle to make it logical, and hope it will work. I'll let you know if I manage it.
b) One of the problems with fan fiction is that one's chances of publishing are negligible. Especially where the copywrites are rigorously guarded. Another is that one is constrained by other people's characters. Arguably this is a self imposed leash on one's imagination. Why then does one bother?
Mainly because it's fun. And writing ought to be fun at least once in a while (whatever the Modernists claim). Otherwise why bother doing that?
On that note, I bid you all a happy DruWriNi!
Type the page and Tap the brain!
Spirits Flow and Fly! =
That my friends was a Haiku. Seventeen syllables divided neatly into three lines. Written in honour of National Drunk Writing Night, or NaDruWriNi, which, for this audience, will require no further explanation from me.
Here is a limmerick:
My Mother once went to Mt. Sinai.
Her photos were thrilling to mine eye
She wrote it all down,
In a Journal I found,
Which I now plagerize for DruWriNi.,
Rather clever if you ask me!
Granted, it is not a true story: my mother has never been anywhere near Mt. Sinai, and it will not figure any further in this post. But you try to find something to rhyme with "DruWriNi"!
Anyway, I do eagerly greet the occasion, as an externally sanctioned incentive to put other activities aside and get something done for a change. The possibility of communal participation is a further inducement. I even bought a Mechanical Gaming Keyboard for the occasion. A great big old school 486 affair with giant block keys that light up and go clicketyclicketyclick. Perfect for big clumsy fingers like mine. It makes every letter a character with a presence in the real world, and writing a physical activity again. Like these ridiculous swipy keyboards of modern laptops, delicate and dainty as soap bubbles. It makes typing a joy.
(And there's no fucking touchpad to "accidentally" wipe out your text!!!)
All that said, I can't help feeling a little annoyed with myself for needing all these external coercions to do what I ought to be doing anyway. I'm also a bit skeptical of the muse-like powers of booze. It may have worked for Edgar Allan Poe, but I can't say with any certainty it's ever worked for me. I'm anything but a tea totaler, but my best work has historically been done on the straight. But if people are going to gather together and drink anyway, they may as well try to hack out some words. It's no worse than gossiping or watching football. I for one would love to see writing become a communal activity; then I wouldn't have to choose between fictional friends and real ones.
Typically, I broke the rules somewhat by writing on other platforms and neglected to post any of it until a full twenty four-hours after the event. Such is life. A great deal of it was finishing up old pieces started long long ago, the initial inspiration forgotten. Some just needed concluding sentences, while others were less than half done. In each case, I'm pleased to finally have them ready.
One was a review of Alex Winter's Frank Zappa documentary:
https://stevedylan.blogspot.com/2021/11/so-on-weekend-i-watched-zappa-2020.html
The next were some musings on the latest (as of writing) episode of Doctor Who:
https://stevedylan.blogspot.com/2021/11/doctor-doctor-in-which-author-damns.html
Followed by two book reviews, one on Stalin's Scribe by Brian J. Boek
https://stevedylan.blogspot.com/2021/11/stal-ins-scribe-literature-ambition-and.html
And another of Two Eerie Tales by Paul Torday.
https://stevedylan.blogspot.com/2021/11/once-in-while-i-will-grab-book-off.html
Four blogs in a day aren't bad, but the crowning glory was a thousand pages of fiction. It starts like this:
" To whom it may concern _ to you specifically:
I am writing this because you are probably the only one in the universe who knows what truly happened. I don’t know how you’ll find this manuscript, but as you know far more about me than I do about you, I suspect you’ll have no trouble.
Why am I bothering? Because someone, somewhere has to know. It may as well be you. If no one knows about something, does it actually happen? I believe it does, but I want someone to know all the same. Again, it may as well be you. Make what you will of that knowledge. Remember though, that only you have it. It’s one more thing that makes you unique in the universe.
That’s why I’m writing to you . ."
The working title is To the Nexus, though I will almost definitely have to change it. It is a piece of Doctor Who fan fiction, and it was inspired by a dream.
Two main thoughts:
a) The problem with writing from dreams is that while they may have seemed brilliant in the world of Morpheus, they quickly become nonsensical when transferred to the page. Things that were quite intuitive in the dream become absurdly incongruous in the waking world. Things that needed no explanation suddenly do.
One way around this is to make the whole thing a dream sequence, which always struck me as a cop-out. The other is to render it as some kind of fantastical or magic realist outing, which I'm not interested in. That's not where my head is at. So I struggle to make it logical, and hope it will work. I'll let you know if I manage it.
b) One of the problems with fan fiction is that one's chances of publishing are negligible. Especially where the copywrites are rigorously guarded. Another is that one is constrained by other people's characters. Arguably this is a self imposed leash on one's imagination. Why then does one bother?
Mainly because it's fun. And writing ought to be fun at least once in a while (whatever the Modernists claim). Otherwise why bother doing that?
On that note, I bid you all a happy DruWriNi!
