Monday, June 15, 2009
What the hell am I doing?
It's been summer break for me for nearly two months now. This is the time of the year that I usually come up with plans of all of the goals I would love to achieve while the sun blazes over this region of the world. Some plans go unfulfilled, but I've since then learned that I can't end world hunger and bring about world peace in a few measly months... When I think about it, why would I even want to?
This summer is no exception. It will be a pretty introverted one, but hopefully, very prolific. I'm taking a step back to re-educate myself on writing. I've accepted the fact that writing is perpetually a learning process, and that perfect writing - especially in a writer's eyes - is nonexistent. When writing a novel, writing a short story, writing whatever, you are only learning how to write that particular work. It's back to school with the next story. Sometimes, what's attained from writing the previous work translates into a prerequisite for the next, but in many cases, it's like going back for another degree taking on a new major in another faculty.
I decided that I'm going to read Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, and take a few tips from her on what to look for when I read from other authors. While doing that, I've been reading some other novels. Last week I read The Love Curse of The Rumbaughs, a Gothic tale of taxidermy, eugenics, and incest written for young adults. For a children's book, it's rather unrelentingly disturbing and depressing. It makes me want to have a child just to force the brat to read it. I'm currently reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's a dreary affair. I am enjoying it so far, and will more than likely finish it off tonight. I've already studied certain techniques and elements from both books which I can apply to [The Obscure Opus]. This doesn't mean I'm going to pull a Tarantino or Viswanathan and lift scenes, characters, and everything else then call it my own. It's strictly about method and not material.
The campaign will end in August or maybe September with me reading the sprawling epic recommended to me by [D. Cranium]. I'll start with the late Roberto Bolano's Lynchian 2666 then make my way through the late David Foster Wallace's depressingly hilarious tome Inifinite Jest.
I also want to see a lot of movies, though probably not any in theatres this summer since summer movies are mostly super hero movies and/or movies big on explosions, big on special effects, big on embarrassing dialogue, and big on everything else except for story and character development. I've been in search of movies obscure and not-so-obscure which can disturb me beyond bounds. I haven't found too many, except for Taxidermia which slapped me silly and called me stupid. It's pretty much a beautiful movie about ugliness.
I'll dig down in the darkness for more things to disturb me, maybe by the end, I'll be catatonic.
I will continue writing short stories from now until August. I should be able to crank out three, maybe four more. Then by August, I will be performing surgery on [The Obscure Opus].
If I have time along the way, and if I work up the nerve, I may suit up and go to the heart and nerve centre of Gallowmere and give this place an entire redesign. People who travel through this site using Firefox 3, or certain versions of Internet Explorer, or Opera may notice certain things out of place on here, or a gap between the menu and the text portions. Not even The Prince of Darkness, knows what to do about this problem, so I might take a crack at it. Hopefully it doesn't crack me. Time will tell.
See everyone in hell!
