Ongoing

Part one finished. On to part two. To keep the story interesting and lead the reader deeper all the while keeping to the single syllable as much as possible. The challenge continues.

More on quillpill

I can post dialogue now. I just have to post it a line at a time. The software seems incapable of allowing a single word to exist on one line. It would be very hard to write poetry that way. This will cut down on the amount of dialogue, which means more focus. This short, short form requires a great deal of attention to detail. One word, one letter, one punctuation off and it goes wrong. It has a certain zen-like focus that I am attracted to. The precision of the challenge means that the story advances slowly and deliberately. Bugs out, I press on.

Experiments are always tricky

I am writing every day on "Three Sum," a piece of short short fiction and trying to post to quillpill, a new site that allows folks who are on the beta (lucky, I guess,) to post 140 characters or less. I have posted three times out of ten attempts. Twice it was intentional. The other times were frustrating because some sort of glitch is keeping me from posting dialogue, even though it is well under the character count. This is extremely frustrating because short dialogue is one of the things I do a lot of. Here is an example that I keep failing to post:
“Joe,” Lee asked, “Do you think she loves me?”
“No.”
“But, Joe, she slept with me.”
“Slut.”
“She’s not that way.”
“They’re all that way.”
This little exchange advances the plot, tells us Lee is in love and that his confidant, Joe is a cynic. It reveals the state of the love affair and how Lee feels about his lover. I hate to hit this sort of wall so early in the process. I had about a dozen of these little bits and they are all stuck in limbo. I am rethinking how to approach it. I tried different punctuation, substituting < & > for " & " but this created a page where only two words "Lee asked" were shown. That really made the story fall apart and the author look dumb. Part of being "published" that is exposing your creation in "public" is the opportunity for embarrassment. None of us likes to appear stupid. I am wrestling with my eagerness to put more work out in this form because it is both an experiment in progress and an opportunity for failure. I guess everything is.

To Blog or not to blog

“Don’t blog. Write.”
R. Hobb

That is “Robin Hobb’s” advice and in some ways it is very good advice. If you read her essay, missive, open letter, whatchamacallit, (see writer's blogs) you come to the conclusion that this is a smart lady and that much of what she writes makes sense.

But then, I still am bringing her rant (her words not mine) here, to put out on the writing about blogging, blogging about writing kitchen table. I can take a pencil and prod it, turn it over, probe it, put a light on its underbelly and opine using the exact form Ms. Hobb detests. That may be a tough task if you are just starting out in the writer's career path, but I have been on this trail for more than 50 years and have no fear. Although I see have seen some measure of success, poetry and poverty are intimately connected, and success as a academic or a grant writer has never been part of my makeup. But I have been doggedly writing, putting letter after letter, sentence after sentence, since my pre-teens. Whatever Ms. Hobb knows, I see no reason to believe I cannot conduct a thoughtful counterpoint to her conversation, albeit one-sided for the most part, but a dialog about one of the world’s oldest activities. In the beginning, after all, was “the word.” I somethings think that will be the end, too. Perhaps, with a laugh, a good guffaw instead of a hushed silence. I just cannot stifle my wordiness enough and so I have to stand up for blogging, I have to respectfully disagree.

I am not about to get in the rebutting rut. She makes many good points, but most of them seem to be based on the idea that blogging is a sheer waste of time, as opposed to entering the jaws of the book publishing beast, clawing your way down its throat and oozing through its entrails. Blogging has to be mundane because, even though some desk jockey makes the decisions and suits and number-crunchers follow it all the way to remaindering, books are serious, real, literature. Anything you don’t write and rewrite and edit and rewrite again and then hard bind and sell for $45 is pretty much unfinished crap.

I see this more as Ingres vs. Monet argument. If you have ever seen these two painters, you know that the former was a classicist whose paintings are almost photographic in their accuracy and the latter is an impressionist whose paintings can appear casual and sloppy, especially if one gets too close. But standing back, one does not see the fine, single-hair detail of the neo-classical and the sloppy, seemingly careless swirls of the impressionist disappear into the whole impression, one of absolute accuracy. They are two completely different things.

I am not suggesting you read this blog from the back of the room peering at the screen with squinted eyes or binoculars. But, for me, it is about the bigger picture, a reflection on a lifetime of writing, about the idea of writing, the why and wherefore. And I do put real work, labored over work here, published and unpublished, mostly brand new and worked over to the point were I am finished in the sense that Auden said, “A poem is never finished, it is merely abandoned.” It is a big decision to put a poem out in the light and ask any person whose eyes it enters to write back, to let me know what they think, to react. I see it as making the poem "public" of "publishing" and part of the process of my ending my association with a piece of my work. I don’t want to keep it, having come to the conclusion that I am abandoning it. I want to get it out, out there, away from the huge stack of other things that I don’t feel I have put enough effort into yet to claim that honor.

It took me a while to write about Ms. Hobb’s blog. I found it a very pragmatic, intelligent and logical essay; yet olde Gutenberg thought, a very narrow and German sensibility that allowed for all of us to read from paper, from the page and from that technology. From that kind of making public all sorts of new forms grew, the story, the novel, the book of poems and stories, the opus of great classics, not to mention the publishing business. However, that was not the actual primordial writing. Writings had been there in monasteries and libraries all along. The difference was the technology allowed readers to multiply and to become a market. Now, I am watching the technology shrink the number of readers. Amazon is leading the way, as are all the internet texts, to a new way of looking at the page, the process, the experience of reading. Trees are going to stop dying and poisonous inks are going to stop being made. All the fuel in all the trucks that truck those books is going to be saved.

I don’t pretend to know what will happen a hundred or a thousand years from now, but I believe this juncture in history, is the beginning of the end of the book. It is a time, as were all the eras before, when technologies can transform our lives. Just as we are different from the age of Gutenberg, our grandchildren will be different from us. I think there will be new forms of entertainment, new kinds of reading/writing experiences and new forms of literature. I may not be riding that wave then, but I am experiencing the surge of the surf now that feels like change happening and I am part of it. And that vision allows for blogging, encourages it, sees it as the beginnings of something new.

I allow myself to blog, as long as I have spent time working on my non-blog writing. The blog itself lets the writing in and vice versa. I write and react and report on my writing life on my blog. It is one of the best parts of my being. As I create fiction from the reality of my thoughts, I plan to learn from my experiment. To push the paradigm even further, I was thinking of starting a novel about a blogger.

The Death of Gutenberg

The printing press died when the copier was invented. But though we still read, our eyes are focused more and more on a screen and paper is disappearing into the pixels. To think we might one day be able to let go of the page, to stop the holding of the finger between pages, the finger-licking, the turning and turning back again, then folding the corner or placing a bookmark. It is a thought that releases a certain longing and regret in the heart of anyone who has loved a book, who has held one close in the dark, or ruined one’s eyes straining to read in a pool of poor light. The book as an object is an ancient icon and even though the hard copy may disappear, or else be considered rare, they things we read might be changing. The written word, thought still expressed in letters, words and sentences, will change. Literature will change. All reading and writing will change as the web changes how we find what we read and respond to it.