re-reading / up a tree

a good sign, when re-reading & you no longer see things to fix.  all the gaping wounds & obtrusive scar tissue have been elided and there is now a flow whereas before it was ALL roadwork, to my weary eyes

edits are coming to an end

i have of late been doing a lot of my editing in a tree.  this isn't gonna be one of those posts.  it feels good to climb a tree and sit and think.  i feel like i've re-discovered something.  i've always done a bit of climbing & perching, but it's been years time since i've felt confident enough to really Climb.  apparently i have the upper body strength for it, whereas in my youth-as-a-squirrel my arms were flabby & tremulous

also i have no fear.  which i keep noticing and wondering at--  it should bother me, or there should be some leeriness, some anxiety over imbalance, but i just look down with unarticulated certainty that i'm secure.  you'd think i haven't been afraid of climbing stairs or taking a tumble...  which i have, rather significantly, since cracking my skull.  i've had a veritble case of the Mortals ever since the skullcrack.  a stair without a banister spooks me.  and since my right knee started giving me grief i've been rather reliant on banisters.  but this tree climbing thing is instinctual, apparently, and does not strain the joints, somehow

maybe tree climbing reverses aging.  what's the harm in believing that?  don't answer

anyroad.  a photographer noticed me the other day and asked "why" and i didn't have an answer since it was an impulse.  but...  it's nice to be in a public place and people simply either take you for granted because you're not at eye level, ergo you're out of mind's reach, or when they do notice you, it's with a pleasurable envy.  that look that says "fuck, i wish i'd thought to climb up there".  it's a nice perch.  good shade.  great spot to think & read.  reading in a tree is the fuckin' best

my favourite tree at the moment, to be completely honest:  my editing suite

writing around death

As with every time a script hits the Finished pile, the ritual resets.

Mornings begin with the commute.  I'm on day four of a twelve-day stretch at work, so an essential element in the morning ritual is recharging.  Find a space to Be In, a place to walk, pace, think, sit, stretch, do yoga, listen and focus.  Focus is precious.  There's not much else one can do at my job BUT focus on the immediate.  So I need a recharge space.  There are several--  what I refer to as --'woods offices' along the way to my gig.  The current preferred favourite is beneath a major bridge, where cliff swallows nest.

Yesterday, sheltering there from the rain, as I observed heron and river otters and, yes, beaver, I went through the scripts, from most recent (THE KILL HOUSE) to secondmost recently completed (AZURE PANTRY / DENIZEN) and that put me in mind of the first to be completed in the pile (PAINLESS).  Looking for...  not similarities, so much as resonances?  Because I wanted to reassure myself that they aren't all The Same Book.

And they aren't.  But they aren't unrelated, either.  It's occurred to me that four of the seven major projects on my desk are about Dying.  At least in part.  It never occurred to me before that I'd turn into the kind of writer who writes the same book, essentially, time after time.  First off, I'm Not A Writer.  Secondly, I didn't think not-dying had been that big of a knock.  But, faced with the facts?  It's obvious that I'm trying to work through something.

Because all these books are about one's relation to mortality.  One's proximity, if nothing else.

A couple years ago, one morning in a burst of basic arithmetic, I tallied up the number of times death buzzed my ass.  It came to three, officially.  Surviving the murder attempt.  Surviving the suicide attempt.  And surviving the accident.  I'm sure there were other close calls, or at the very least WAKE UP calls, but of the times death was close enough for hugs:  three.

I have not done therapy for that.  Unless one counts four scripts.  Do these count as therapy?  Clearly I wrote them for that purpose.  Technically they were written because the OCD demanded their invention.  I don't write because I want to, I write because crazybrain commands.  Anyway, they're all plainly of a piece.  They're very different (or at least arguably different) approaches to the High Seriousness of that practical jester, mortality.

Maybe that's why the next book is just about sex.

cue the endless edits & amendments & revisions

This phase of things shouldn't be too bad.  Usually, after completely scripting a book (Painless, Denizen, Azure Pantry), I'll go into reread & edit line by line; testing the rhythms of dialogue, the pace of exchange, and fix all the Real Obvious Fuckups.  Chop.  Fill in.  Until the thing has defined itself satisfactorily, when I really Hear the words spoken, without reading them aloud.  The persistent problem with this stage, I've found, is the abundance of really obvious mistakes spellcheck doesn't get-- where there's an automatic linefill, some kind of substitution situation where you didn't mangle the word, you just mistyped so the processor can't hang any red lace on it...  A completely nonsensical sentence will sit there for weeks of revision with a Bad Error which I can't see because my brain's glazed over with all the other work that must be attended to.  It's embarrassing and a real argument for having an independent editorial voice, a reader who isn't the author, but at this phase in my professional personality as an Artist I'm no longer interested in sharing unfinished work with others, and I certainly don't want to hear "I'm going to read it, I swear" used as an excuse by ANYone, let along a friend, so why put people through it?  I'm not using fucking AI to read my scripts, so it's down to me and my OCD to find all the goofs and fine-tune the troofs I wrote while wearing my SmArt Faggot hat.  I don't think this one's gonna be too much of a problem because if I fuck up continuity between chapters it's only going to enhance the final effect THE KILL HOUSE is going for.  Art house is where it's at, and aggressive unconcern with a reader's comfort only becomes more attractive to me as I grow ever further estranged from John & Karen Q. Public.  I like Refn movies with no dialogue, and 800-plus page books about imaginary cities written with the structural conceit of a geometrical puzzle, whose primary Plot is fucking and who does who where.  So this book shouldn't be any surprise to anyone familiar with my psyche.  It's more cluttered & up its own ass with theory than this blog.

writing an ending / writing ONE ending

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.