Deadlines; bygones.
Oh! It was Douglas Adams. Who said, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
That’s been bugging me.
It’s going to be late, is the thing. Next Monday will not see the longed-for première of a new episode of City of Roses. (If you’ve been noting the lack of cryptically numeric updates on the Twitter, you might already have sussed this was coming.)
I need another month. At least? —But there will still be two episodes, nos. 10 and 11, appearing back-to-back when it does kick off. So there’s that, at least.
9,747.
—posted 5306 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of constellating.
The idea behind constellating is that the human brain finds patterns everywhere, whether they are real or not. It’s just what it’s good at, so it likes to do it all the time. As a game developer, Moriarty says that putting details in your game—details that don’t actually mean anything, but details nonetheless—will allow the players to find their own patterns and meanings quite easily, and make the game itself seem “deeper”—but it is really the player’s own mind that is making it deep. He explicitly suggests towards the end of this talk putting in details that are completely random. The players of the game will create their own narrative from those random elements.
—posted 5312 days ago
City of Stumps.
This weekend is the seventh annual Stumptown Comics Fest, and I’ll be there, despite the fact that this enterprise n’est pas une comic. —Barry Deutsch of Hereville fame has graciously allowed as how I could plant some roses on a corner of his table, which is number 104 on the map. (Mostly I think he wants to hang out with the Offspring.)
Anyway, if you’re in town, swing by. I’ll have chapbooks and buttons and the like. Stumptown Underground is also in the house, so you can pick up a copy of “City Folk”—though I should warn you, the City of Roses piece in there isn’t the opening to no. 10 anymore. It’s now the opening of no. 11.
(Word counts? Progress? Look, just don’t ask—)
—posted 5337 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of exposition.
Fuck the exposition. Just be. The exposition can come later. If I can make you curious enough, there’s this thing called Google. If you’re curious about the New Orleans Indians, or “second-line” musicians—you can look it up.
—posted 5338 days ago
“City Folk.”
Stumptown Underground is a monthly collaborative zine put out by the Stumptown Underground collective; each issue has a theme, and open invitations are sent to everyone who writes or draws or otherwise makes things throughout the City of Stumps or elsewhere. (No. 8, on robots, will be next. There’s still time to get in contributions for family and mythology, f--ry tales, and folktales.)
But no. 7! (Their) no. 7 is being released this Friday, tomorrow, and is called “City Folk,” and if you’ll turn to the table of contents for a moment you’ll notice there’s four pages titled “Whistling tunelessly – He can’t Complain – Up that Hill – Sunrise in the City,” which, I’m pleased to tell you, is the opening scene of (my) no. 10.
There’s a release party at City Hall in the mayor’s office, tomorrow from 5 – 7. I’ll be there, and you can pick up copies for $5 each. (If you’re not able to make it, keep an eye on their Etsy shop.)
Otherwise? You know. Writing. Such as it is. Further bulletins etc.
—posted 5363 days ago
My ears, they burn.
Brenna’s said some lovely things about how she sees the city now, and while I’m feeling a little guilty about how her brain’s been colonized, it’s only a little; I’ve been walking around with these people in my head for quite some time, and isn’t the ultimate point of writing these things down to share that sort of wealth? —Also, I am inordinately pleased to learn that there were bets to have been settled.
Barry, meanwhile, was apparently paying attention when I went off a while back on Twitter about how much I hate all homiletic encomia for clear transparent glassy prose, because he went and wrote some lovely things and set them in a frame that I immediately went and glowered over at some jangly spangled and obfuscatory length, because I am rude and not fit company for polite society. My only excuse is that I was (and still am) chuffed and verklempt, all at the same time, which state is enough to cloud anyone’s judgment.
While talking about those who’ve done me the great good favor of Talking About Me, I’d be remiss not to point to Nick’s didread tag, where he’s posted his responses to this chapbook or that in times past. I must admit I’m curious to hear what he might say about the end of no. 9.
—I mean, I haven’t gotten any hate mail yet at all. Not sure whether that’s a good sign or what.
—posted 5371 days ago
The State of the City of
City of Roses.
So that’s another one done and down. On to the next. —My plan to write and release six chapbooks this year means they ought to be appearing every two months or so, but nos. 10 and 11, for reasons which I trust will eventually become apparent, need to be written together. Which means it’ll be four months before the next episode begins. And though I could I suppose stick to the every-two-months rule anyway between no. 10 and no. 11 and buy a little room to breathe, I think or at least I’d like to think after what just happened and what’s coming up that such a plan might not prove too terribly endearing.
So: no. 10, “Surveilling,” is currently (very) tentatively scheduled to begin Monday, May 24th, and run through Friday, June 4th; no. 11, “Rounds,” would begin immediately thereafter on Monday, June 7th, and run through Friday, June 18th. All offers subject to change and void where prohibited by law.
Until then—
Well, until then I’ll be writing like a sonofabitch, or at least a sonofabitch with a day job and a one-year-old, but It’s not just City of Roses I need to worry about, but the City of City of Roses: everything else, you know?
You, reading this, you’re a member of an elite group right now; a group I’d like to try and make a little less elite. (Sorry.) —And it’s your help I’m seeking in this development scheme: while I’m writing the next couple of chapbooks, while you’re waiting for me to damn well write the next couple of chapbooks, you could, if you were so moved, well, talk about City of Roses. (Which sounds so crass. But word of mouth is still where it’s at, and a happy reader is always the best advocate a book can have.)
You could for instance rate and maybe even review it at a site like the Web Fiction Guide, or Muse’s Success, or write.blog.fiction. You could mention it in a forum somewhere, or on Twitter, or in your own blog or journal, which would be swell. It would all be swell. —You could even leave a comment here, or over to the Facebook group, or even just in an email; this writing is a lonely business, after all, and it’s more important that the words get out than that the audience get grown, and a little feedback has always gone a long way.
In return for which—well. I don’t have a specific compensation package of gold stars and green stamps, but in addition to trying to get a chapbook written every two months I’ll be working on some additional additions: trying to get ePub versions of the chapbooks formatted in such a way that I don’t tear my hair out to look at them; trying to get hardware and software issues solved to the point I can put together podcast versions; maybe trying for some T-shirts to go along with the badges… (Would you maybe be interested in one of Guthrie’s T-shirts?)
But for now I think I’ll just get back to the writing, so.
—posted 5408 days ago
“ – the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight – ”
—but it bends, my friends, toward jousting.
Ten weeks after “Beauty” came to an end, no. 9, “Giust,” will have its online première. Look for it to begin on Monday, January 25th, and to run Monday – Wednesday – Friday through February 5th. Chapbooks will be distributed throughout those weeks to those establishments where it might usually be found, including but not limited to Reading Frenzy, Guapo, Cosmic Monkey, the IPRC’s zine library, and the Multnomah County Library zine collection. —I should be able to take pre-orders for chapbooks shortly, for those who’d rather order from online.
So far, so good…
—posted 5437 days ago
The State of the City.
Play with waking and sleeping imagery. Sleepiness. Yawning. Waking up. Awakening to inner potential; wake from sleep; hello, corn-dog city. This is why it’s subtext. You say this sort of stuff out loud, in actual words, and people laugh at you. Words are, in the end, such a slippery way to try and communicate anything. Like democracy, they suck; got anything better?
All this began roughly ten years ago, as a screenplay.
It began as a screenplay because I was working on a screenplay at the time and it seemed like even I might could manage to scoop up enough for a low-budget television pilot from the dot-com money that was thick on the ground in those days. —And also, let’s face it, because Buffy: Whedon & co. were doing things with serial storytelling that raised the wholes of their seasons to giddy heights well above and beyond the sums of individual episodes; I wanted to build a machine that would let me land operatic sucker punches like they could, dammit.
And also, a screenplay because for a writer I have a deeply ingrained distrust of words, almost as great as my love for them (why, even to this day, I quibble and equivocate over whether to call myself a “writer”—is it, essentially, accurate? Just? True? —Which demonstrates perhaps it’s not so much a distrust of words as a distrust of my way with them). —Slippery, what can be said with words, and read from them. “She thrust her sword,” I write, and what a pale and listless thing those words make up, so abstract, so far from the overwhelming specificity within them: the twist to her shoulders as she overbalances and catches herself, the desperate anger loaded into her snarl of effort, the battered bell guard on her second-hand epée, the generic grey leather workglove with the blue-and-red stripes, the almost-black half-zip pullover that says Cubs in reddish-orange letters over a pale blue pawprint—but in prose we have only words, just words, and only so much space and time. —So! A low-budget pilot for a television show, because that’s the best way these days to tell discrete epics: serialized storytelling machines that land operatic punches with far more impact than any individual episode might suggest. Right?
We know—what do we know? That this is about the lengths you’ll go to protect some little magic in your life. That the things we’re told are important in the end aren’t. That you’ll go to the ends of the earth for that spark once you’ve felt it; that the spike in your arm or the smoke in your lungs or the exhaustion in your danced-out feet are but pale ghosts of the real deal, and this is getting dreadfully purple.
I want—I want this. And I know you never get anything you really, really want… Ha.
Yeah, so, not so much with the low-budget television series. More with the webfiction zine serial-thing. I can’t say for sure when I put the extravagant dream aside—I can’t say for sure I ever really had it in the first place, as you can maybe tell from the above. But I’d like to think it was some time after the summer of 2002, when a lot of important things happened (at least insofar as defining my own iteration of the past decade is concerned). —By the time of our 2003 trip to San Diego I’d finished the text of “Prolegomenon”; I laid out the paper master on a counter in the back of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and ran off the first-ever print run in a Kinko’s in an arcade by the light-rail lines somewhere up above the Gaslamp; sometime after we got back, I launched the Movable Type version of the website, and published no. 1 and no. 2 and what of no. 3 I’d written before the hard drive crashed in December of ’03. Took me a while to dig out from under that. —In August of ’06 I relaunched (in Textpattern, this time—has it been that long since I redesigned any of this stuff?) and finished no. 4, then no. 5, and then well more than a year went by before no. 6; no. 7 just under a year after that—but then only three months before glory of glories no. 8, and next (and next)—
A webfiction zine serial-thing, yes, but with the bones of that original extravagant dream. Those bones are why there’s four acts to every chapter (and an opener, and a closing stinger); they’re why everything’s so zippy and present-tensey and immediate and visual (well, those bones, and the deeply weird and loving mistrust of words, just words); they’re why certain tropes are being engaged, and how it is I’m going about the engagement. But there’s another structural element those bones have left behind, that’s maybe not so obvious from where you’re sitting:
Much as the Major Arcana has 22 cards, the typical number of episodes bought for a standard Yankee television series is (for the nonce, at least) 22.
Further: the holy grail of Yankee television series was, of course, syndication, and the easy money reruns made; the minimum number of seasons a show had to run to make the math work for the suits, for whatever reason: 5.
And there among the half-formed thoughts and scenes in those embryonic screenplays is the rough-hewn outline of all five seasons of City of Roses.
“Wake up…” In the Days of Good King Lymond. The Green Knight. Restoration. Indra’s Net. Jo. Our Princess, who needs a name: Isabelle; Ysabel; Ysabeau; Ysanne; Annabel; Belle (never Izzy). Roland. Mike. Frankie. Who else? Abby Tinker. Louis Castaigne. The Queen. Who else? The Fencing Master. The Repairer of Reputations. The Yonic Man, to balance the Phallic Woman. The perfect androgyne? The Chymical Wedding? The Griot. Johnny Castaigne. (Whatever happened to him?) Philip Castaigne (bring in later, perhaps, in the squatting phase).
A cause. A community. This is more important than me alone; the ten thousand things and the one true only; what’s worth dying for. Love.
—No wonder I called this file “fibble.”
Five seasons—or we could call them books, to be fair—with 22 episodes, or chapbooks, or chapters each; only eight done to date, averaging less than a chapter a year thus far—I think it’s clear I need to, ah, shall we say, up my game to have a hope in hell of getting anywhere near the finish line. (And I called the low-budget television show an extravagant dream. —There’s a reason they all have rooms full of writers…)
Anyway, a pledge, then, for the new year and the new decade; from me to you, the purpose of this rather long-winded address: I will put out a chapter every two months. Between now, and 365 (and one-quarter) days from now, six chapters will have been done (God willing, and the creek don’t rise).
—Of course, no. 9 will already be a little bit late, pushing closer to the end of the month rather than the beginning. And nos. 10 and 11 will need to be written almost concurrently, and published back-to-back; you’ll see them sometime around May. But no. 12 should be done in time for the 2010 Zine Symposium, no. 13 by my birthday, and no. 14 before the winter…
So that in ten years’ time I’ll have just begun Restoration, and we can all be pleasantly appalled at what’s become of everyone.
—Or, perhaps, even further along..?
But we’ll talk about how to make that maybe happen next.
—posted 5446 days ago
why god say not cut corner of head
—One of the more unusual Google hits to cross the transom recently.
Myself when googling whether it’s “swordfight” or “sword fight” ran across this wikiHow article on winning sword fights; the advice is sound enough, though 74.138.62.58 dismisses it as a “bunch of dojo B.S.” Hardly. As 70.44.173.187 says,
good tips for winning a swordfight and important cus oneday we will run out of bullets cus what do u think we just always have the materials to make them? NO! we will run out of those essential materials and when that day comes only thoses who are prepaired will survive all the looting and the meyhem ppl that swordfight
—No one ever knows what they’ll need to know. Not always. Not for sure. Remember that.
—posted 5449 days ago
