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 5422 days ago
That is one HELL of a resolution, hoss. Fortitude and godspeed to yer, and happy new year.
