Hey Get This Heat!
Well, it's been quite close lately. Much of the weekend was spent drinking fluids and being unconscious, although I did get a little further in Banana Yoshimoto's N.P., a novel about a short story, the translators of which kill themselves. Very Georges Perec, and I hardly ever read women writers, so an ideal way of redressing the balance a little. I went up to the park and read under a tree. Inadvertently I'd picked a tree pretty much at the centre of the park, keeping the traffic noise at a suitable distance.
It also seems that my computer can't handle the heat. This only comes into play when gaming, so presumably the graphics card can't cope with any hard work. Either that or the RAM upgrade has somehow dickied it, which is a lot more serious. I'm hoping it is just the heat - the computer has trouble starting on very cold days too, failing to identify the boot hard drive.
I've decided to try and get some writing done on the days when I get up at the crack of sparrows. I've got roughest of rough drafts for most of Chapter 2 now, in which an office worker has a very bad day. There's been a fair amount of off the cuff invention, which is always fun. He sneaks off to go to a job interview, and I needed the interview to be disastrous for him. I'd initially thought about long drawn-out pauses, the heightened discomfort and social awkwardness of it all, but in the end went for something a little more dramatic. The chapter's got quite a fragmented chronology, so I need to be careful with the pacing of events. The quiet slow periods I need to reserve for the character's inner-reflection, and the way the world deals with him needs to be a series of short, sharp shocks.
The project as a whole has shifted somewhat. I was getting far too deep into David Mitchell waters for my own liking, and also felt pressurised into creating long narratives for each chapter, when in fact the narratives ought to be the length they need and no longer (obvious, I know). I've decided, then, to work on the project more as a series of short stories, along the lines of Fucking Martin by Dale Peck. This will also allow me to strike a balance between showing and telling; I tend to do far too much of the latter, and not enough of the former. I'll need to create more stories than I'd initially intended, but I find I'm coming up with lots of fragments that I can put to good use.
Yoshimoto's been a help. It's a very Japanese kind of thing, I assume, but she will have these odd little paragraphs where she describes an image, the sky framed between two buildings, say, and they won't necessarily have anything literal to do with the narrative, but will inform it in discreet ways. I used to look on my own writing as a kind of fractal form. My stories would be decked out with little moments that were microcosmic versions of the story as a whole. I suppose I have become incredibly out of practice, because I'm only now finding my way back to this method. What has struck me that didn't beforehand, has been the way in which a variety of themes that currently interest me - notions of consciousness as illusory, paradox, dehumanisation, circular logic, &c - all interrelate, or at least can be allowed to relate to each other within the stories I'm writing. I might post some bits up at some stage - if I'm proud enough of them...
The Martin Scott-Tumbling documentary I appeared in was broadcast on Resonance FM last Thursday. Quite forgot to post about it on the day! The end product, which I'd not heard in full before, was incredibly well finished, and the cliches of radio music documentary really shone through. Tim Worthington did a fantastic turn as an embittered muso, and Ian's John Peel impression wasn't as bad as he thought it was. There's been some positive feedback on the forums, mainly focusing on the half hour of fill that followed the show proper. This involved Mike and Jo doing lots of Resonance parody stuff, and a ten year old Gurmliss interview featuring the comedy talent of Evans. There may be more planned, apparently. MST took over a year (if memory serves) to get done, but hopefully any lessons learnt will make the next one a quicker job.
Lawks! Didn't mean to make such a colossal post. So it goes.
It also seems that my computer can't handle the heat. This only comes into play when gaming, so presumably the graphics card can't cope with any hard work. Either that or the RAM upgrade has somehow dickied it, which is a lot more serious. I'm hoping it is just the heat - the computer has trouble starting on very cold days too, failing to identify the boot hard drive.
I've decided to try and get some writing done on the days when I get up at the crack of sparrows. I've got roughest of rough drafts for most of Chapter 2 now, in which an office worker has a very bad day. There's been a fair amount of off the cuff invention, which is always fun. He sneaks off to go to a job interview, and I needed the interview to be disastrous for him. I'd initially thought about long drawn-out pauses, the heightened discomfort and social awkwardness of it all, but in the end went for something a little more dramatic. The chapter's got quite a fragmented chronology, so I need to be careful with the pacing of events. The quiet slow periods I need to reserve for the character's inner-reflection, and the way the world deals with him needs to be a series of short, sharp shocks.
The project as a whole has shifted somewhat. I was getting far too deep into David Mitchell waters for my own liking, and also felt pressurised into creating long narratives for each chapter, when in fact the narratives ought to be the length they need and no longer (obvious, I know). I've decided, then, to work on the project more as a series of short stories, along the lines of Fucking Martin by Dale Peck. This will also allow me to strike a balance between showing and telling; I tend to do far too much of the latter, and not enough of the former. I'll need to create more stories than I'd initially intended, but I find I'm coming up with lots of fragments that I can put to good use.
Yoshimoto's been a help. It's a very Japanese kind of thing, I assume, but she will have these odd little paragraphs where she describes an image, the sky framed between two buildings, say, and they won't necessarily have anything literal to do with the narrative, but will inform it in discreet ways. I used to look on my own writing as a kind of fractal form. My stories would be decked out with little moments that were microcosmic versions of the story as a whole. I suppose I have become incredibly out of practice, because I'm only now finding my way back to this method. What has struck me that didn't beforehand, has been the way in which a variety of themes that currently interest me - notions of consciousness as illusory, paradox, dehumanisation, circular logic, &c - all interrelate, or at least can be allowed to relate to each other within the stories I'm writing. I might post some bits up at some stage - if I'm proud enough of them...
The Martin Scott-Tumbling documentary I appeared in was broadcast on Resonance FM last Thursday. Quite forgot to post about it on the day! The end product, which I'd not heard in full before, was incredibly well finished, and the cliches of radio music documentary really shone through. Tim Worthington did a fantastic turn as an embittered muso, and Ian's John Peel impression wasn't as bad as he thought it was. There's been some positive feedback on the forums, mainly focusing on the half hour of fill that followed the show proper. This involved Mike and Jo doing lots of Resonance parody stuff, and a ten year old Gurmliss interview featuring the comedy talent of Evans. There may be more planned, apparently. MST took over a year (if memory serves) to get done, but hopefully any lessons learnt will make the next one a quicker job.
Lawks! Didn't mean to make such a colossal post. So it goes.
posted by Hamilton's Brain | 10:02 am
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