Hello Kitty Notes: thinking about word order

I wrote a small scrap thinking about tomorrow's scene and my characters went beyond it onto a philosophical tangent; I don't know if I'll go into that digression in the actual story, but I still found it interesting, particularly in light of Obama's State of the Union and Mitch Daniels' State of the Absurd.

The extraneous scrap I wrote was, in part:

"What if I didn't show up?"

"But you did. If you didn't I might have needed it. But you did and I didn’t; and also I didn't and you did."

"And also? Didn't you just say the same thing again?"

"No, I switched the words around."

"But it was around an and, making them equal."

"You're thinking math. Language doesn't have reciprocal properties. Where the words are placed always matters."

Language never is just the words with static definitions. Where they are placed in a given sentence can affect their meaning. Further, the surrounding sentences, paragraphs, pages can all affect it. Further further the whole baggage of environment brought to the reading continues to revise the work long after the writer is done.

I currently hear a lot of dangerous rhetoric in politics, where I have to wonder: are they fully cognizant of their use and being wickedly crafty or are they just being stupidly irresponsible?

The solution for us as citizens is the same either way: we need to be fully engaged and critically thinking consumers of the plethora of information being fed to us, regardless of the source.

For a blog that does an excellent job of that, check out The Russell Report.

Hello Kitty (a novella) Thoughts

From my daily writing log:

This story seems to be shaping up as one of my most explicitly moral stories, though I don't know if anyone will see it like that . But that's how I'm intending it. The power of love, the power of virtue, to win in the end.

I just use boys and boysex to tell it :-)

The story in question is a short story (now more a novella) that I would describe as a boy-meets-boy supernatuaral horror romance. Since it is a romance, sex and potential for having sex (and not having sex) are there. However, having and not having sex are not the morality I am referencing.

Sex in itself has no morality in my eyes; rather the morality is that of how sex plays out between the persons involved: is it an equal share of power, of respect, of giving/taking for example.

It amazes me to no end that my country seems to get all up in arms over things of a sexual nature, even allowing words to describe the act to be considered vulgar, such as fuck and suck and jackoff, while we have a vast societal tolerance for words like KILL and HURT and HATE.

Are we so afraid of our bodies that we find maiming each other much more agreeable than loving each other?

The AFA, FOF and other hate groups seem to think so with their constant anti-gay rhetoric. But a boy loving another boy isn't immoral. What is immoral is man or boy's inhumanity to man or boy. This inhumanity can involve sex but it is not sex itself.

The world would be better off with more people reaching for condoms rather than guns and using whole hands full of tenderness rather than just a pointed finger.

A Right to (my) Work

"Are you working?"

I get asked that a lot, whether in the form of that specific question or one of its many variations. Sometimes the wording is roundabout: "What are you up to?" Sometimes it is more blunt: "Do you have a job yet?"

However it is asked, I feel a sense of American shame flowing from my philosophy-with-distinction-graduate head down to my supporting-Homo-Erectus-life-for-43-years feet. My eyes go to the floor, forced down by my overwhelming sense of failure. I have no choice but to answer; the question compels me to answer.

And being indoctrinated as I am in good capitalist citizen dogma, I answer it in the only way that I know how: I lie about it.

"Not at this time" is my most frequent lie. And it is a lie.

For I am working all the time.

I am obsessive-compulsive about my work; that is, about my art. I usually write seven days a week and days that I don't I'm a wreck: there are just too many damn stories pushing against my skull for me to move a day closer to death without creating some pages.

Gary has severe health problems, so I've taken on the bulk of our household responsibilities. I don't begrudge this, as that's what spouses do for one another. Oh, wait, our government doesn't think of us as spouses, so I guess I should say instead that that's what people in loving relationships do for one another. I spend a goodly chunk of time working on daily to-do's.

My own health isn't great. It's better than Gary's, but it still frustrates me, there being so much in life I want to accomplish before I fertilize the ground. I work hard to do what I can when I can. If idle hands are the Devil's workshop, then my hands are the Divine's playground.

But none of the above matters with regard to the holy are you working question. No one cares about my art, my health, or my life.

What the askers really want to know is how well I am circulating In God We Trust paper.

"Not very well right now," I'd have to say to that question, and that wouldn't be a lie. "But I'm working on it," I could add and it still wouldn't be a lie, because I work all the time. But it is only a partial truth, because I know my work won't be considered real work until it makes money.

Until then, I'm just a lazy, no-account bum who does nothing and amounts to nothing.

Whatever Weather

I have a problem with weather.

Oh, I don't mean the real weather. Sometimes I wish a day were nicer, or less gloomy, or less rainy, but in general such wishes are just passing thoughts that do not take up huge amounts of mental fretting.

So little mind is given that I tend to think in simplistic weather terms such as wet, cold, hot, dry, and so on. I don't dwell on shapes of clouds or hues of sunlight or ripples of water and find extended ruminations on such things boring.

This little mind carries over into my writing where I get much more excited about a dialogue between two people than how the sun warmed their skin or how the rain pattered outside their house or how the wind made eerie noises. I mean, ho hum. The sun warms, rain splatters, and wind makes noises. I don't need nor want multiple pages of a national weather broadcast to litter my fiction.

However, I am so disinterested in weather and other ubiquitous but boring to me elements of setting, I sometimes forget to include them at all. I get caught up in the back and forth words and character interaction which is what I'm most passionate about, and most skilled at, and forget details like weather, time of day, and other externals.

Not only can this manifest as poor writing which I'm trying to self-correct, it can also manifest as causing problems with the story itself. For instance, today I had a scene where a character thought back to when he saw something but wasn't sure if it were a trick of the light. It occurred to me when I was remembering it for him:  Trick of sunlight?  Of moonlight? Dusk? What kind of light?

The protagonist  had dropped a kid off home from school, left, then came back some time later where they had a conversation that I was excited about writing (as I said I get about such things). But I had only placed them in this vague and weather-less sometime later temporal space as I typed away their much more interesting to me back and forth exchange.

One of my writing goals is to improve this lacking. I will never be the kind of writer comfortable with long dissertations of atmosphere, but at the same time I don't want my characters to exist as talking heads in dimensionless space.

I don't need a hundred and one words for snow, but I probably should do a better job of solidifying in my work whether or not there is at least the one.

Resolving to be Specific

It's that time of year again when you're supposed to lie to yourself about how perfect you are going to be this year and then forget about it until this year is about to become last year. Then it's By golly, this year is going to be the year for the new and improved me…

For better or worse, though, there is no real new me, just a continuing me, and as for improvement, that word quickly gets dicey. The word improvement implies a comparison of sorts; that is, it attaches itself to something specific. What is the problem with that? It's not so much a problem as this: attached to a specific means necessarily not being attached, or not as attached to some other specific.

 A less awkward (or maybe not) way of saying it might be: an action requires specificity at the detriment of some other specificity.

For example, time spent on Xtube is time not spent on writing (or other endeavors) and time spent on writing is time not spent on Xtube (or other endeavors).

Which time usage is an improvement? It depends… but whatever the decision is, it can only manifest itself in terms of specificity. This requirement is what makes resolutions on the whole often meaningless. I know this, but still I find myself uttering inane proclamations like:

I'm going to exercise more. I'm going to read more. I'm going to do a better job at researching markets to send my stories.

Why are these inane? Because more by itself has no specificity and fails in the same way the word improvement fails.

Resolving to write a Great American novel won't get you any closer to doing so. Resolving to write one page ever day from 7am-8am might still not get you there, but it will get you a lot closer. And that's essentially what I do with my writing, being fairly good at only having the novel as a whole in the back of my mind, while the front of my mind works on getting a 1,000 word a day out seven days a week.

But I need to carry that level of specificity over to other tasks that I do, like reading. Too often I make grandiose goals like I'm going to read Character of Consciousness this week only to find at the end of the week that reading the specific pages somehow got sidestepped.

So my chief resolution for 2012 is to be specific in my resolving and resolving to be specific.