I have so many small projects going, it’s hard to know where to concentrate effort. One item to complete is Brimmer and Death, a story based on a world created by Neil Gaiman.
Two things to do: freshen up the dramatic pull of the story. It’s still a little dull.
The last is to work on the link structure. The link structure will help with the dramatic pull. The two are intertwined.
Lots of little editing issues too.
Seriously itching for the new novel.
Where are you Wally?
I agree with this entirely, especially on the theme of editing for compressed intensity. The only difference with Sandoval was that the amount of text spaces made editing a several years process. There’s still much to do with novel, too. The editing never ends.
I’d always been bothered by something in Brimmer and Death. Names. I’ve been through many of them and finally hit on a core but nuanced issue: Death herself. There’s a relationship here between a problem with linking in the story and their slow developing syntactical interference (which is a good thing). In the story, links interfere by creating a pause, a sort of breath of suspense: what’s going to come. So I had the notion that each link would have it’s own space.
The link would float between each lexia like a puff of smoke, not quite making meaning . . . yet. However this comes out, I think I have the set concept down finally. Here’s the new stage, the link in bold:
On the first evening of a two-day hike through the desert, Brimmer pushed through a dry stand of bushes and saw Dee seated on a flat-topped stone.
She said, “Hey, the moon’s just coming up. See it.”
Brimmer said, “The sky’s still blue, Dee, but the land’s in shade. Beautiful, right? Like time.”
“You’re still a mystery to me, Brimmer,” she said, hopping off the stone. She wore a plain black bandanna on her head. Silver rivets the size of nickels studded her belt, and she waved the heat away with a bone-handled fan. She wrapped Brimmer in a wrestler’s hug and touched him lightly on the cheek with her lips.
She set a small tape deck down and clicked play. She said, “A little ditty to take away your troubles.” Then she showed Brimmer an ancient dance. Dee circled him. She fluttered her long white fingers. She took his hand and spun him in the sand. The moon’s white edge rose like a scythe blade over the hills.
Deadwood is amazing. But for the background. Dan Dority, for example, played by W. Earl Brown, is totally realized. On screen, his manner, style of speech, habits and shape fit into Deadwood’s world without seam.
Last week we saw Dan streetfight with Captain Turner (Allan Graf). Dan is getting it pretty good. He reaches out, plucks the Captain’s eye out of his head with his fingers, and then finishes the scene with a club. It’s a quick fight, as most are, but the arc lumbers to conclusion: it feels longer than it is, wonderfully edited. The aftermath, the outcome of the scene, never goes away, though. The memory of the act can be seen in Dan throughout and into the next episode like an icon over his shoulder, a shadow cast behind him. He’s not the same. He knows it. We know it.
Sumptuous.
Finding time for Brimmer at this moment is tough even though he keeps tapping me on the shoulder and telling me to clean him up and get him up into reading space.
That photograph at the end and in the middle is important. Julia calls him back after eight hundred years. A thread that runs through time but goes unnoticed until needed. Sometimes things hit you like that and suddenly they become the most important thing in the world.
In Brimmer’s amount of time, space shrinks and a city or a desert can act like a side table or a cupboard. Brimmer could ask: what did I do with my 2455 license and he might go looking for it in London?
I remember that night, that rain, that snow, those years ago. I remember it all. But forgot the thing that was most important.
I’m back into Dreamweaver as my code editor. But I still like hand-coding for some reason, though Dw just makes it easier to figure out why I screwed it up.
We also have somewhat of a bead on a Flash or SVG generated Storyspace file rendering machine. This will take some time though and it will be an interesting thing to try. Flash is getting pretty darned complicated though.
It will be back to Brimmer soon. I want to get a little splash it’s coming soon thing up and will also be working on the story in Literatronic: Brimmer and Death, a Storyspace, Literatronic project. That sounds pretty good. If things look good, this technos collaboration may form the basis for a new novel, titled at the moment Canyon Fall, the story of Wally Rorschach’s chase across the continent, closely followed by his daughter, who’s closely followed by a reporter, and after them, is, of course, the reader.
In the mean time, my schedule is a little daunting.
This imagery is real core stuff. The text box’s contexts are compressed and vivid.
Find the local dealer and walk into the section of choice and you’ll possibly be overwhelmed, unless you’re Charles and Charles has a thing for dusty stacks, the deep and penetrating pains from bumping into the corners of close-drawn furniture, and he enjoys following young men and women. He backs into the shadows and watches them read or guess over which title to pick from the shelves.
Message: there’s a lot to read out there. The output in the last few hundred years has been enormous. How many titles are published in one month? And, of course, there’s Charles.
He’s heard lots over the years and he never forgets.
“Charles, stop staring into the toilet.”
“Charles, what’s that red stuff on your hands?”
“Charles, how long were you in the girl’s restroom?”
“Charles, you’re a fucking maniac.”
“Charles, do you still collect cicada shells?”
Every day the voices add up. He has difficulty suppressing them. In the shadows, he watches people read. He hides behind a volume. But he’s really watching you. He’s watching you read. The store is quiet in those nooks with the soft chairs. However, Charles’ mind is as loud as a train tunnel, voices boiling out of memory. He’s that guy you see reading quietly in a corner. You have no idea.
Get up, Charles. Walk over to the reader. Grab that book and say you want back in. You want back into the world where we walk. Do it, Charles. Get up. Forget about the toilet and the cicadas. Show us how you can square off the sun between your fingers that you raise like a frame to the sky.
Stories haunt the writer.
The rhythm of the language takes over, too, such that the the normal way of observing and expressing an object takes the color of that speed and temperament. Being inside the world is a way to express this metaphorically. Consider writing a large space. “writing a large space” isn’t writing a large space.
The room was large is something to be avoided. You almost have to shout this out and say, stop saying that, will you! It was a large room. Maybe that would be fine. But it’s better to consider a point of observation and to watch someone enter that space from the other end, their outline so obscured by the distance that their identity is unknowable until they come close enough to you to make shouting convenient.
The haunting is a form of mediation.