The blog goes live. The blog goes dark. The blog goes live again.
It should surprise all one of you that I have mental problems. Not least of which is feeling coherent, or explicable. I do not feel like a Complicated person, or a particularly difficult mind, yet-- ego being what it is, a cockleburr (poisonous, clingy, and a staining agent) --it pains me to feel misperceived. Often I feel as though my manner of speech, or the ways in which I express myself, annoy others, despite their (seeming) annoyance being completely beside the point. The "point" being, well, conversation. With the ones who get annoyed. And if they get annoyed, I just stop talking to them. I do try to keep it simple.
Which is to say, it shouldn't matter how people respond to my existence, as I don't really try to press my points. Being neurotic is my problem, nobody else's. When I say "I'm not a writer" it's honestly felt-- I write as expression, not profession; from compulsion, not financial motive. Writing is something of an agony, to be honest. I don't feel particularly creative or innovative even at my best. But it's a trellis, isn't it? Hang the words in the correct order and a Scene emerges from a sentence; Dialogue unveils itself as a cadence of call-and-response establishes itself. I have to write to know what I'm going to draw, you see.
TL:DR is something I've been hearing people say for decades. It's like "wall of text", or a therapist who's asked for a sample of writing responding with "You wrote a lot." It's leading with a preference. The preference being brevity. Commendable, certainly. But it isn't as though reading takes all that much time or effort, and there's a distinct sneer to the majority opinion that A Lot is Always Too Much.
When reading my own work, I sneer rather constantly.
All that said, it's been a hard time in my skull this week. Upshot is, after straining to complete the script for THE KILL HOUSE for months, the whole thing arrived in two easy parts, across two mornings. It's only the final chapter, and it's only eight-ish pages, but it took some struggle. Partly because the whole book isn't contiguous-- all the chapters kind of hang on their own. There are no straight lines or clear joins between sections. It's the first time I've really tried to work this way with a piece of fiction.
And as with all the sections, it wrote itself. I don't say this sarcastically, or as a handwave toward Process. It's fair to suggest I am the editor and the final authority on whether the writing Is What I Wish It To Be, but as to creation it's dodgy where some of the bits emerge from. The Bill Moseley lines lifted from 'Psychoreal', off OhGr's 'Devil In My Details' were in my notebook for months, waiting for ideal placement-- but where did the Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas riff, or the Keith Giffen-esque / Dave Sim page-of-word-balloons interior monologue emerge from? Why did those impulses emerge where they did? Why was this, 56 page, 8 chapter script, the final incarnation of all the impulses & snits of "inspiration" that clutter my notekeeping?
And why was THIS version the superior? Superior to its initial "skit" form, or its abbreviated middle draught? Why did it expand itself into this? And why--
Why this ending? Why not (any of!) the other endings?
THE KILL HOUSE is built of endings. Some chapters contain more than one. The whole damned book is Ending things, themes, characters. As to why it worked out this way, I cannot clearly say. Each ending is its own tune. All the tunes, whistled together, end-to-end, forms the libretto.
Why? Why? Why? I keep asking. The answer, insufficient as it seems, is sometimes it's the art that calls the shots. Not the shootist.
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