[Caelum's Scrapbook] Use Your Words.

[Caelum]

Worthy of note – If a character’s Ultimate Goal is achieved or not achieved at any point and you feel their story is over, then maybe it is. However, maybe it isn’t. Goals alter. New goals are born. It might be that what you thought was their Ultimate Plot was, actually, still yet just another smaller plot within an even larger framework than originally imagined.

[Caelum]

Dear Denval, Your DS showed up on your AS’s doorstep last night. Like a boss. If you behave while we’re too busy hanging out to pay you any attention, we will use all of the cool plots we’re discussing versus all of the vengeful ones. Xoxo, K & D.

[Caelum]

I still get asked with appalling regularity “where my ideas come from.” Here’s the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes. Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 3 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you’ve got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you’ve got what’s called “an idea”. And for that brief moment where it’s all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can’t be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation. That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ. From my chair. See, this is the good bit about writing. It’s what keeps you going. It’s the wild rush of “shit, did I think of that?” with all kinds of weird chemicals shunting around your brain and ideas and images and moments and storyforms all opening up snapsnapsnap in your mind, a mass of new and unrealised possibilities. It’s ten past two in the morning, and I’m completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it’s the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare. Faster than the speed of anyone. That’s how it works. (Written by Warren Ellis in 2003 for the Bad Signal mailing list.)

[Gossamer]

I'm glad that was from 2003. I was worried there for a moment because I wasn't feeling any of those rays.

[Caelum]

The sex has worn off in the years since.

[Caelum]

[Caelum]

On Discipline Eleanor Roosevelt said a beautiful young person is an accident of nature, but a beautiful old person is a work of art. This is a statement that has resonated with me a long while. It is, ironically, one of the first things our fellow player, Dani, and I connected on all those dinosaur years ago. I’m a mess. I’m going to put it right out there. When it comes to writing I get disconnected ideas, mad tangents, irrelevant back stories, side character motivations and popping, shining globs of plot flesh that look glorious but are achingly lacking in necessary explanation and detail bones to make them go. My headspace is a disaster zone and the only thing keeping me from toppling right into the smoking tar pit of interminable plot holes is discipline. This is not to say that plot holes don’t happen. They do. Yet if I had not spent damn near the whole of my life trying to beat my sloppy and hungry imagination into shape, there would be more holes than plot in everything I do. These days it is rare that I trip over a plot hole that is gaping and obvious and how-in-all-that-is-holy-did-I-miss-that. Well, at least not when I’m too far in, when it is too late to fix it without unknotting reams of plot and the most hated of all writing things I hate: retconning. (I promise I’m not going to get into a rant about retconning and Mizahar now. I promise. I promise. I promise. This is about something else. However, while we’re on the subject, if you ever need to know the fastest way to piss me off on a writing level, it is to do something that is going to force me to retcon. Knowing is half the battle.) What do I mean when I say discipline? I mean that even of the very few people who are actually born with an innate and incredible writing genius there are even less who can stand forever on that alone. Stephen King is a prime example. The man is a god damned genius. He knows his shit and how to terrify it out of you with a typewriter. He wrote wonderfull chilling tales that displayed his talents. And then he gave them to his editor. And then his editor beat the hell out of them with a structure stick. And then King rewrote the story. And then his editor gave it another beating. And King rewrote it again. And again. Until, one day, it was sent to print. Fastfoward over a decade. Stephen King is Stephen Fucking King. His editor stops eviscerating his stories with a structure machete and they go pretty much straight to shelf. Now, now, his stories suck. They fall apart in the middle. Deus ex machina is brought in to pick them up. Flat rebound characters. Et cetera et alia. King never learned any real discipline. His editor was the whole of his discipline and when she went away or got too scared to tell him, he had not enough of his own to fall back on. His genius had no solid ground to launch from. Structure is discipline for me. I don’t actually enjoy hacking out character diamonds and outlining the acts and plot points and goal motivations and aides and hindrances and so on into infinity. I really don’t. I would much rather spend my time doing the fun part, the actual writing. For years I did just that, silly and not knowing any better, and as a result I have no less than six novels and four of them fell apart somewhere in the middle and would require complete rehaul to fix. Granted, some of those were written with understanding of discipline’s necessity, but I had yet to fully absorb plot structure. I knew what it was. I had done it. But I didn’t get it and because of that I didn’t try hard enough to make the structure come out before getting into the goods. Finally, I’ve reached the point where I do get it, and I still stumble sometimes. I just don’t do so as much or as hard. I want to be a beautiful a old person, damnit. Goal (Take A Break From Deadline Work) + Conflict (Fifty Million Distractions) = Plot (Katie Rambling On Writing In Order to Get To Writing) Goal Achieved Back to work. - k.

[Taln]

[Caelum]

I came across this today while flipping through some old files. This is a performance piece of mine, so maybe if you picture the words standing up and singing it’ll be a little bit better. Enjoy, or so I hope. From Sweet Tea Revolutions. Happy loner, pick up your pen and weep, Sing songs about Love in sobs and ink to ward Love off with every breath you inscribe and pray to the thorn that Love is like roses to wither and die maybe even like Silence as the cracked tale claims that Silence can be broken by the speaking of it’s name. So I begin: Love-LOVE-love. Sing love, love, love between every drop of February rain until it burns in the black of Pasternak’s spring and melts into ashes down the Drain of this age bracket taking media and annulment not quite with it because every silver screen screams Love (love-LOVE-love) through turtle backed heights of plagiarised broken bulb poetry. It IS love that asks along with the soul’s amniotic sands that your hips cup the cusp of civilizations cradle that whispered the truths of addiction long before science ever revealed that the ratio of salt in seawater is the exact same ratio of salt in the bloodstream of man. we had already known when the world was beaten soft by the sun’s white light that those who grow up near the water can never leave not without a hole in them where the miracle of liquid light has been. Surrounding and immersing, it is unlike any other in the world, that light that dances and shines on moving waters like tongues of flame. Love - You’re solely to blame for this, this lack and loss of comprehensible dialects to cry down the consonants and beat back the battology of your ink. I warn you, Happy Loner, Love is not Silence. You will pick up your pen and sing. (love-LOVE-love)

[Caelum]

Today is a good day. An awesome day. I win, I win, I win. This is my song of the morning. That is all. The Avett Brothers, Slight Figure of Speech. They say you've got to lose a couple fights to win It’s hard to tell from where I’m sitting They say that this is where the fun begins I guess it’s time that I was quitting A slight figure of speech I cut my chest wide open They come and watch us bleed Is it all like I was hoping Now They say they hope that you will never change I went and cut my hair They said don't take your business to the big time I bought us tickets there A slight figure of speech I cut my chest wide open They come and watch us bleed Is it all like I was hoping Now