Paris Hotel Room, 4 a.m.

I was going through some stuff I had saved on my phone and was a little surprised to find something I had written while In Paris that I had forgotten about. It was either just before I left, or possibly by e-mail while I was there, that my friend Carly told me that while I was in Paris I should totally write something. In fact, she may have even said that I would be stupid to not at least make the attempt. A reasonable idea and expectation, sure, but with all the things that I was trying to cram into the single week I was there I didn't have a lot of time to sit in a café with my notebook and just write.

God knows I would have liked to. Especially when I was standing by, and could have grabbed a table at, Le Select, where Fitzgerald and Hemingway and their ilk all used to hang their hats and grab a drink. I was passing the place on the way to the Eiffel Tower. I had decided to walk there instead of using any public transportation and, though I knew Le Select was somewhere out there in Paris, had no idea that it would be on the way.

Something to do on the next trip, perchance.

Anyway, one night while lying in bed in my hotel room I was having a tremendous amount of trouble sleeping. It was well after three in the morning and I grabbed my phone which was nearby and started typing away some ideas into my ColorNote app. The goal was to write a poem capturing the moment, perhaps reign in some of the things swirling in my head and commit them to 'paper'. Once everything had been evacuated from my head onto the digital page I tried to muster a bit more and, failing that, found my way to sleep.

I've pretty much ignored that small piece of writing since returning figuring that there might be an idea or two that I can cannibalize for something else down the line, but looking at it again it actually holds up as its own thing. I might be projecting my own experience on it and giving it more body or meaning than it perhaps actually has, but maybe not. I'll probably vet the thing with a couple of people I trust and see what they think. There's an element of...it has a roughness to it that may work in its favour but leaves me uncertain.

What I do know is if I start to try and refine and manhandle what I write it loses all immediacy and starts feeling kind of disingenuous, so I don't really want to tinker with it beyond what it is.

I haven't really done any writing for a while, particularly poetry, and have been trying to step it up a little in these past few weeks. I have gone back to working on a short story that I set aside and have been trying to blog here whenever I have something I think is remotely bloggable. I am hoping that the discovery of this Paris poem may bring some of those inclinations back, as well.

Surprises

I've been writing a short story this past few weeks which I have more-or-less titled "Surprise Me". The title is fitting for the story itself, but it's also been an experience full of surprises throughout the whole writing process so it's kind of doubly apropos. The most surprising aspect of the whole thing is that I wrote a short story at all. I have started many but finished none in all the years that I've been writing and this one wasn't even planned. It just sort of spilled out whole cloth a couple of weeks ago and I've been massaging it ever since. Maybe that's the point. Maybe that's why it works. Had I set out to do it deliberately it might not have worked at all.

Having said that, the last few days have been a bit rough in terms of getting the work done.

I sat down last night like I've sat down many nights before that and just didn't get much writing done. I'm trying to do it on the computer now so that I can change things quickly and with less scribbling but I'm finding the process cold and...inefficient, weirdly enough. I've been scribbling in my Moleskine and just pounding the stuff out having a gay old time but you can't print that off or e-mail your notebook pages to someone to preview or proof. I do still want a handwritten copy of it in there (yeah, that's the romantic in me) but I need that digital copy.I also have a deadline of today to clean up a section which I promised to send to someone and I'm pulling my hair out trying to get that done in a timely manner.

The poetry I usually write is so immediate and rarely goes through this kind of rewriting process. Maybe a second draft to clean up an idea or two but, ultimately, if I rework a poem too much it breaks. Falls apart under its own weight. Feels manufactured and loses all immediacy and just feels...disingenuous.

This story is in its fourth and a half draft and it's only about 10 pages long. I really expected less, but maybe that's a fault of mine. Not having done a lot of prose work (as in so little it should be considered none) I guess I didn't anticipate what it would take. The need to back away from it for a while to let the dust settle before going in again, the major and minor tweaks that just keep coming every time I sit down with it.

Then, to top it off, there's my own overriding insecurity of whether or not it's any good. To put all this work into it and have it be absolute shite would be pretty heartbreaking. It's not, by any means, a great piece of fiction. I mean, call it what it is. It's a short erotica story. A blip of an encounter between two people done in such a way as to be provocative and sexy. But I still want it to be good, obviously.

So, I continue to toil away at it when I'm not fighting off sleep or dealing with the evil and weirdness in my everyday life.

Hopefully I'll be able to get a grasp on it today and work through the obstacles to get to a satisfactory endpoint.

Wish me luck.

BOOKTRYST: Original F. Scott Fitzgerald Manuscript Poems Discovered

BOOKTRYST: Original F. Scott Fitzgerald Manuscript Poems Discovered

Meeting 'Abby'

A week and a half ago I was in a small village in the south of Saskatchewan called Val Marie. I was there to serve as a chauffeur for one of the participants in a workshop that was going on there since he needed to catch a plane on the Saturday which was departing from the Regina airport four hours away. Jen volunteered me and I agreed. I figured, three days of kicking back in the middle of nowhere, reading and listening to podcasts on my iPhone might be a nice change of pace.

While there, we stayed in this converted convent. It was run by this couple who pretty much did everything from room service to cooking and serving all of the meals. Both nights we ate supper there they had a girl helping them with the service. A different one for each night. I don't know where they came from or who they were, but both were pleasant company and provided good service during the meal.

I found out later that the second girl was a Masters student working as a writer-in-residence there. She was writing poetry, or something, and chillin' at the convent in their sitting room upstairs, I think.

On the Saturday after I got back from Regina, we had supper and the group all went upstairs to continue their workshop while I prepared to go for a walk and the poet girl (I think her name was Natalie), was going to a movie. Stunned as I was by the fact that Val Marie even had a theatre (or a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile), I was more surprised that the more I spoke with Natalie outside the convent the more she started to remind me of one of my characters from Smitten, my romantic dramady magnum opus. Everything from the way she dressed, to the way she spoke rung true. The fact that she was a writer helped, too, seeing as Abby, while not a poet, is something of a wordsmith. The only thing that was different from how I had always envisioned Abby was Natalie had shorter hair. Suffice to say, I may chop off Abby's locks by story's end, now, as I liked the look. There would also be some relevance to the plot to do such a thing, which is always nice.

As we parted ways, it was all I could do to keep from chasing after her and chatting her up some more. Maybe snapping a few pictures, like that wouldn't be creepy. Instead we said our goodbyes, she went to her movie, I went on my walk, hoping that she would return to hang with the group later that evening. She did come back as most of her stuff was taken from the reading room upstairs by morning, but she did so quietly and retired to wherever she called home in Val Marie.

I never saw her again after that but I'll never forget the weirdness and strange thrill of meeting someone who is, ostensibly, someone I created in my head but a real flesh and blood person I can interact with. It was trippy.

And, as my high school graphic arts teacher would say, "that's my story".

Peace.

mike

Interview Spree

I've been listening to a lot of interviews lately, mostly through iTunes and the various podcasts I've browsed and downloaded through there. I'm not entirely sure what that might say about me or my state of mind lately but, by and large, the interviews I seem to be focused on are primarily with screenwriters talking about current projects, doing a career overview or just talking about the industry as a whole. The Creative Screenwriting podcast, hosted by Jeff Goldsmith, has brought me some chuckles. Personalities under the spotlight there include recent Watchmen writers David Hayter and Alex Tse, Richard Kelly and the hilariously fun Luc Besson. The Zicree-Simkins podcast features the likes of Barbara Nance (script supervisor on The X-Files and a writer in her own right), Battlestar Galactica's Michael Nankin, Robert Hewitt Wolfe (of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Andromeda fame, and Rockne Farscape O'Bannon.

I listen to them mostly while I'm working at the computer. Usually I have music playing but, from time to time, it gets really distracting so I switch to the much quieter interview material. It's a nice change from the music when I grow tired of it.

Anyway, I don't really have anything other than that to say, sad as that may be. I'll try and pep it up for next time.

Cheers!

mike

Stephen King's Multiverse

In the foreword for The Gunslinger, Stephen King talks about writing an epic. He said that he, like so many others of his time, was completely smitten with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and knew that he wanted to create something like it, but different enough that it would be his and not just a copy. To quote the text he says:

...although I read the books in 1966 and 1967, I held off writing. I responded to the sweep of Tolkien's imagination...but I wanted to write my own kind of story, and had I started then, I would have written his. That, as the late tricky Dick Nixon was fond of saying, would have been wrong. Thanks to Mr. Tolkien, the twentieth century had all the elves and wizards it needed.

After re-reading the book, and exploring some of the other works of King (I know, I said I wouldn't, so sue me) I realized that, despite trying his best to not write a Tolkien-esque story with halflings and dwarves, he was, in fact, doing something very similar to another popular fantasy writer of the time, Michael Moorcock.

Moorcock is well known for creating his famous Multiverse and all the myriad characters who inhabit it. From Elric of Melniboné to Jerry Cornelius, Moorcock's characters have weaved in and out of each others stories for the last 40 years, with some characters even sharing a common aspect of a single entity, The Eternal Champion. From the Wikipedia entry:

The Eternal Champion, a Hero who exists in all dimensions, times and worlds, is the one who's chosen by fate to fight for the Balance; however, he often doesn't know of his rôle, or, even worse, he struggles against it, never to succeed.

All the incarnations of the Eternal Champion are facets of each other, and the Champion may also be aided by a companion, who, like himself, exists in various incarnations. Likewise the Champion is often associated with one romantic association that is possibly an aspect of an eternal figure. Other characters in the various books have occassionally crossed over from one universe to another, although it is unclear what their status in the multiverse may be.

From what I've gleaned about The Dark Tower series is that King has created a very similar fictional construct, one in which he is able to explore all sorts of possibilities, including bringing in characters from other books (like Randall Flagg who debuted in The Stand but also appears in The Eyes of the Dragon and The Dark Tower series).

Anyway, I know I'm not the first one to see this, and it's not huge news or anything, but it's the first time I'm thinking of Kings work as a larger piece of interconnecting fiction. As a huge fan of Moorcock and his Multiverse, this appeals to me a great deal.

That's all I have to say on that subject for now. I apparently have a date to read some Prince Caspian to a couple of troublemakers before bed so I'm off to do that.

Later!

mike

Freelance Interviewer Meet Freelance Police

I just sent off a handful of questions to Emily, the PR person over at Telltale Games. She's been liasing with me over the Steve Purcell interview I requested last October but had yet to send in questions for. I'm fantastically late in getting them sent out, I know, but I took advantage of my current situation at work and fired off an e-mail with the eight (maximum) questions requested. If Steve is still interested she'll pass them on to him and, hopefully by the end of January, I'll have my answers back from Steve and I'll be set to put them together and post them on the interview blog I keep talking about but never launching.

I'm trying to stop doing that.

I have a couple more people to track down and we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping for a bi-weekly schedule so 4 names should do me for a bit.

Hmmm...I'm getting funny looks from the Business Manager for my computer activities so I guess I'm off.

Until next time.

Onwards and upwards!

mike

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

From my editor at the local paper where I freelance...

Please take notice that Life in the City has temporarily shut down its
operations until further notice.

You may contact us at the address below, and this e-mail address will no
longer be valid after December 20th 2004.

Sincerely,
Marc Parent
President/CEO

Hmmm...I'm going to take this e-mail as a bad omen.

mike