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 5856 days ago.
—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 5859 days ago.
This book has its beginnings in an image and some scraps of dialogue that presented themselves to my mind rather abruptly one day. There were two figures on a road. Men, women? Age, nationality? Hard to tell. The light was poor, their cloaks were wrapped around them, they were hurrying along. What language were they speaking? I don’t know, but I seemed to understand them perfectly, the way we understand talk in dreams. I also knew, without being told, that they were traveling to consult an oracle.
One of the figures said, “What if it doesn’t say anything?” The other said, “It won’t say anything; it won’t just give us simple instructions.” The wind rose; clouds scuttled across the moon. The first figure said, “What if it says just what we want to hear?” The other said, “What do we want to hear?”
Much later, when the night was almost completely dark, and only shifting shadows were to be seen, a voice said, “What if it’s closed when we get there?” Another voice said, “Closed? You mean like a museum or a library or a shop?” The first voice said, “Yes. Or like a ruin or an abandoned house.” The second voice said, “Well, I suppose we would have to tell the story of our journey, what we saw on the way there and the way back, and why we came.”
Posted 5880 days ago.
The student who is generally superficial may, for a special reason, read some one thing well. Scholars who are as superficial as the rest of us in most of their reading often do a careful job when the text is in their own narrow field, especially if their reputations hang on what they say. On cases relevant to his practice, a lawyer is likely to read analytically. A physician may similarly read clinical reports which describe symptoms he is currently concerned with. But both these learned men may make no similar effort in other fields or at other times. Even business assumes the air of a learned profession when its devotees are called upon to examine financial statements or contracts, though I have heard it said that many businessmen cannot read these documents intelligently even when their fortunes are at stake.
If we consider men and women generally, and apart from their professions and occupations, there is only one situation I can think of in which they almost pull themselves up by their bootstraps, making an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth. They read every word three ways; they read between the lines and in the margins; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and implication; they perceive the color of words, the odor of phrases, and the weight of sentences. They may even take punctuation into account. Then, if never before or after, they read.
Posted 5894 days ago.
In its written form the f--ry tale tends to be a prose narrative about the fortunes of a protagonist who, having experienced various adventures of a more or less supernatural kind, lives happily ever after. Magic, charms, disguise and spells are major ingredients of such stories.
—A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory
Posted 5898 days ago.
“Beauty” is done I’m afraid, and so we’re once more lying fallow as I write the next little bit. —Perhaps these sneak peeks at the months ahead will help to tide you over?
No. 9: Giust
No. 10: Surveilling
No. 11: Rounds
No. 12: Innocency
—Perhaps not. Ah, well.
Posted 5901 days ago.
Welcome, Oregonian readers!
Here’s how it all works: as each issue’s completed, it’s printed as a 36-page zine and made available to the fine local establishments noted in the article, and then it’s serialized online in its entirety over the course of two weeks, with new bits appearing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. —So no. 8, “Beauty,” begins to appear here Monday the 2nd and ends Friday the 13th.
Or, if you’d rather not wait that long, you may order paper copies directly; they will also be hitting the shelves starting this very afternoon. Hie thee to Reading Frenzy, Guapo, or Cosmic Monkey.
Meanwhile, everything you need to get caught up is available through the Table of Contents. If you’d like to see some of the photos used as zine covers and some renditions of some of the characters by some of the best cartoonists in the Western Hemisphere, you may peruse the Gallery. And please don’t hesitate to drop your humble author a line! We do so love to hear from folks.
And thanks for stopping by!
Posted 5919 days ago.
Oh what the hell, right? Let’s haul out the calendar, throw a dart, pick a date:
Ladies, gentlemen, readers gentle beyond the telling of it: I am more pleased than you could possibly know to announce that no. 8, “Beauty,” will have its online première Monday, November 2nd, and appear Monday – Wednesday – Friday through November 13th. Its paper première will be less certain, as there’s no exposition or symposium to mark the occasion. Rest assured, I’ll let you all know the moment it’s available for order.
This, by the way, is by far the shortest amount of time between chapters. —Might I break the record again with no. 9?
Posted 5936 days ago.
Shing went and made me a monster. —This is why, children, you should always answer internet questionnaires.
Posted 5939 days ago.
It’s been quiet since the end of no. 7. It usually gets quiet here, after a chapter (or a fit, or an episode, or—), but not this quiet.
I’ve been meaning to write something here, honest. I just—I start to think about what I’d say, and I get distracted and write some more on no. 8 instead. Which is good for the story, but not so much for the audience, maybe. (The audience cries from the peanut gallery: we just want the story!) —Is it enough, just to put out the chapters to sink or swim? Is it enough just to show up every now and then and read what’s here? Not that I’d ask anything more of anyone. And the last thing I’d want is to open my mouth and get in the way of whatever it is you think is the story.
Hey, any fanservice requests out there?
—Honestly, some days I think I just won’t be happy till ship-to-ship combat breaks out over City of Roses characters.
Posted 5940 days ago.
