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March Writing Challenge: What Price Happiness?

Well, another month has come and gone, and that means that it’s time to post another writing challenge entry for Sonia M’s monthly challenges. I missed last month’s, due to my travels and being cut off from the internet for a while, but I’m back. Our topic this time around was “Make a Wish.” With that in mind, I decided to write this for you. I hope you enjoy it. Here’s “What Price Happiness?”

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Did it really count as a wish? Maybe so. I always thought of it as more of a foolish kid’s dream, but hey, what else do kids do? We dream, and we make wishes. We hope against hope that things will turn out better for us. We don’t think about consequences when we’re young, and some of us don’t think about them even when we get older. And if the joy we wanted turns out to only come at the cost of misery for those we love? If we’re lucky, maybe we stop depending on wishes, and start trying to make changes for ourselves. Sadly, all too frequently I have found that I have been scrambling to undo the damage that I felt I had caused.

Does trying to fix things count as learning a lesson? I don’t really know. I’m still trying to figure out when this went all “Monkey’s Paw” on me. I’ve lived my life trying to avoid regrets, ever since the day that I met her. Even now, years later, her words still echo in my head. “I said I knew that it was a mistake. I never said I was sorry I made it.”

Am I happy now? Honestly? No, I’m not. I should’ve known I wasn’t going to be the one paying the price for a wish that I never even intended to make. I guess it’s too late now, the words are probably meaningless, but I can at least say that I’m sorry.

In the Queue

“Leave this to me. I’m British. I know how to queue.” 

One of the best things about my library is the fact that I can put things on hold, and they’ll be delivered promptly for pickup whenever they become available. It’s like Netflix for books. Even new releases can be placed on hold before they physically arrive in the library system. This means that I can track the upcoming books, order them, and get in a queue for things before they’re in stores. Now, granted, everyone in the library system has this ability, but few people utilize it to the fullest. I like to use it to keep up with some of my favorite new manga series. I’m also around fifth in line for a DVD copy of Game of Thrones, and I am thrilled. I didn’t watch any of the episodes when they aired, for two reasons. One, I’m too cheap to pay for HBO, and two, I wanted to finish reading all of the available books before I started the show. Now I can sit down and watch the whole thing.

Speaking of television, has anyone seen the BBC series Sherlock yet? It’s in my instant queue, and as soon as I can dedicate a few hours to it, I’m going to power through. It’s three episodes, each about an hour and a half long, and from all of the reviews I’ve heard/read, it’s absolutely genius. I’ll let you know my verdict, but I can only imagine the power of a show about a modern version of Sherlock Holmes starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. I absolutely love Sherlock Holmes anyway, and I’m quite happy to see that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work is getting so much attention right now.

Since getting back from my trip, I have started a new schedule at work. This has several benefits, most notably the fact that I am now earning partial benefits. I have more hours each week, a slight pay raise, and the same awesome people to work with. Yet another advantage: I’ve got the same schedule every week, instead of my old alternating schedule. My girlfriend and I can carpool three out of my five work days, saving both of us a lot of wear and tear on cars, and money on gas. All in all, it’s a very good thing. Things are looking up. I’m still hunting for a second part-time job, but I’m also starting to be brave and send out emails to the big publishers and submitting short stories to various publications. Needless to say, there’s a lot to do in the near future. Good thing I have plenty of new TV and books to read, and things to write. Look forward to a new writing challenge entry, coming soon to a blog near you.

The Sun Also Rises

I’m rereading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises today, and I blame Woody Allen. Actually, I blame Corey Stoll and his incredible performance as Ernest Hemingway in Allen’s latest film, which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Stoll’s performance was only one of the many constant bright points in the film, but it was this moment that really won me over. I knew then that I was going to have to return to one of my favorite books of all time. It’s quite the change of pace from the other story that I’ve been reading lately, and it’s always good to return to familiar territory.

When I was in college, I read Hemingway for the first time. I had read his work before, when I was in high school, but that was before I truly read Hemingway. Now I feel as though I am reading some of my favorite works for the first time, and so it is that The Sun Also Rises has made its way back into my hands. It feels right to be reading classic literature. I’m not trying to be a book snob or anything, because I’ll read pretty much anything and give any author a chance at least once, but it’s good to come back to perennial favorites. There is something almost indescribable about Hemingway’s storytelling that pulls you in. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you do so. He’s really not that intimidating of an author. Personally, I feel that he’s the easiest of the Lost Generation to really understand.

On the other side of the reading coin, there is the Lovecraft collection that I’ve been borrowing from a friend. Now, I own a copy of the Necronomicon, quite possibly the most thorough (and best titled) collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s work ever published, but it’s sadly hidden away in a storage unit for now. Despite the presence of perhaps only a third of the more well-known titles that exist within the pages of the Necronomicon, this collection does a phenomenal job of presenting some of the best work (albeit the shorter pieces) that he ever wrote, including “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” within its pages. I read the former story while on an airplane over the Pacific Ocean, and I think that the only better way to experience it would be to read it on a ship in the Atlantic. You can’t beat reading a story where it takes place. This reminds me, I’m working on a piece at the moment that is set in a building not unlike my hometown library, with a few creative twists. I’ve never been in a building that is more suited for a horror story. I’m drawing on influences of Poe, Lovecraft, and King, masters of the genre, and injecting just a little bit of truth. We’ll see how it turns out.

 

Getting My Groove Back

The biggest downside to returning from a vacation is trying to get back into your everyday rhythm. Case in point: starting to blog again after nearly two weeks without writing anything other than my travelogue aboard the Stennis. I kept a journal during the entirety of the trip, logging my experiences as my father and I traveled across the country together, but now I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing things for you. Fifty plus pages of journal about a ride across the ocean on an aircraft carrier? Totally doable. Five hundred words about what’s going on in my life and the literary world this week? That’s a little bit trickier. Nevertheless, I’m here to try.

Let’s see. I want these, first of all. Something about being surrounded by officers in their dress uniforms just makes military fashion seem right, even if the Nintendo version is a little silly.  Second, there’s this thing right here, one of many places I’m going to be submitting a short story. Got a microfiction piece that’s n0t been published elsewhere? Send it in. They’d be happy to see it. V tipped me off about it a few weeks ago, and I am quite grateful. On a related note, has anyone ever heard of The Rag? I’d not, at least until recently. It’s worth a shot, I suppose.

One of the things that I did miss while I was gone: Sonia M’s February challenge. I intend to make up for that with the March challenge, which seems far more targeted toward writers like me than the February challenge did. It’s the first one I’ve missed since I started doing them, and I’m a little sad that I didn’t get an entry written, but there has been a lot of progress elsewhere that more than makes up for it, at least as far as I’m concerned.

So, yeah, my writing projects continue. One of the best things about my recent trip was the opportunity to have a LOT of time to myself, for my writing. See, Arsus and Rime have been pretty quiet lately, so the progress on my working title, “Swords of the Ancients” has been stalled. As such, I have been venturing into the darker side of my imagination, contrary to the advice I got from my father last week. Dad told me that I should write a wholesome story, and be more of a Tolkien than a Stieg Larsson, for example. That’s all fine and dandy from the outside perspective, and I really do appreciate his concern for my writing, but if you pretend that the shadows never exist, you’ll never see what hides in them. The things that hide in the shadows of my own mind are what I find fascinating. Human nature isn’t as clear cut and good as we would like it to be, for whatever reason, but those bits of darkness are so compelling… Just imagine the stories we might learn from the things that go unseen in our world.

I dunno. Maybe it’s just the stories of the great writers of the past, but I feel like there’s got to be something more than just heartwarming tales of puppies and stuff to write about. Even Tolkien had to embrace a little of the darkness to create the depth of the villains in Middle Earth. I guess I’m just talking about not just a casual embrace, but making passionate love to the darkness and getting into a committed relationship with it, and maybe even moving in together, and getting a joint bank account, or at least a two-seater bicycle. Yeah. It’s exactly like that.

Repetition

Do you ever fear that, as a blogger or a writer, you’re repeating what you, or worse, what others have said? I do, and unlike other things, I consider this to be a perfectly rational fear. Do you ever fear that, as a blogger or a writer, you’re repeating what you, or worse, what others have said? I do, and unlike other things, I consider this to be a perfectly rational fear. Wait… Anyway, the point is that mindless repetition can be a terrible thing. According to Stephen King’s Storm of the Century, hell is repetition. Imagine the worst thing that you can fear happening to you, and it happens to you over and over again, for eternity. That’s hell. That’s part of why we mix things up at my job, switching everyone from one duty-station to another every hour. For one thing, it means that everyone has to be pretty good at everything. For another, it means that we don’t get bored to death and decide that we have to go medieval on the next patron who asks for the location of the very clearly labeled return desk.

We take your questions very, VERY seriously.

When I’m not considering acting out D&D-based fantasies, I just worry that I’m going to run out of things to say on this blog, and my few readers will leave me, and I’ll be left talking to myself. After all, there’s not really a whole lot of structure to what I write about, other than that it’s sometimes writing and other times stories of library work. Honestly, though, I can’t really expect my blog to maintain any sort of rhyme or reason to topics when I can’t keep focused myself. Other times, I think that maybe going crazy would be the best thing that could happen to me. Repetition could be a form of writer’s block, I suppose. Maybe you can’t come up with any new ideas, and so you end up rehashing something that you wrote months  or years ago.

Don't worry, Stephen. I still love you.

I guess my biggest fear as far as repetition goes is that I want to write novels, and as my good friends at a favorite weekly webcomic like to say, “Sooner or later we’re going to have to stop calling them ‘novels.'” Are all the good ideas taken? Yes. No, seriously. They are. Every story is a retelling of an ancient story, when you get right down to it. The difficult task of crafting originality is based in the presentation. It’s the same with food, really. I mean, you can have ramen noodles every meal for a month, to the point where seeing them would make you physically ill (and likely violently so), but if someone hands you a silver platter with an ornate ceramic bowl filled with ramen that’s been topped with a slice or two of pork, some green onions, and whatnot, and you’re probably going to say “Hey, that looks delicious!” Moreso if you’re hungry. The point is, we’re stuck with repetition, whether we like it or not. The question is how we’re going to handle it.

Think back, oh writing ones. Think about your favorite influences, and what they wrote, and who or what inspired them. It’s a vicious circle, but that’s not really a bad thing. Popular stories resurface regularly. Sure, if you don’t want to work too hard, you can just jump on the bandwagon for whatever’s trendy right now. However, if you want to create at least some semblance of actual writing, you’re going to be better off to come up with something that hasn’t been done to death (hahaha, vampires) in the last ten years. Tell your own story. It might be incredibly similar to something someone else has done. Think of the poor bullfighters who tried to right autobiographies after The Sun Also Rises debuted. I’m not saying that writing The Sun Also Rises will get you anywhere now. Repetition, or at least perceived repetition, isn’t always the best thing you can have going for you. Now a modern story of a man wandering a European city and searching for meaning in his life, well, that could be something special.

Good luck, fellow writers. Off to the grand adventure that is life!

100+

A few years back, I took an advanced grammar course at my school. Being who I am, I absolutely loved it, and I found myself digging through old assignments on my computer this morning, and came across this. We were instructed to create a single, grammatically correct sentence that contained at least one hundred words, and I responded with a little character introduction.

“His elegant, beaklike nose and dark black oilskin raincoat dripping furiously, the large man drew the gazes of many as he burst suddenly through the heavy oaken door of the inn; out of the fiercely piercing rain and whipping wind and into the welcoming embrace that was the main dining hall; out of the inky blackness of the night and into the warm glow of the roaring fire; safe at last from the threat of the lurkers in the shadows and secure in the familiar confines of Georg’s tavern; free of the frantic chaos that enveloped the outside world and comforted by the sight of Georg pouring him a foaming tankard of ale.”

Listening

My ears are sensitive. Not super-sensitive, like to the point where loud noises cause me pain or anything (thankfully, since I love metal/rock, and my poor girlfriend can’t take the volume at the concerts we’ve attended since we started dating), but just sensitive enough that I can usually hear people from a lot farther away than is expected. So sometimes, I just can’t help listening in on a friend when they’re talking on the phone. This is less common now than it used to be, since most of my friends are more fond of texting than talking, but it still happens from time to time. Every once in a while, when this situation comes up, there’s something said that’s absolutely brilliant. I had a couple of these gems pop up a couple of weeks ago:

“Oh, so it’s totally cool when a cat does that to a person, but when a person does it to a wall it’s creepy.”

“You have more of a passion for shih tzu’s than anyone I know.”

Now, I have no idea what was happening on the other end of the line, and I’m quite content with that. It’s more amusing that way. Sometimes, though, I think that when I’m writing, I’m listening to these one-sided conversations within my own head. It’s, as E.L. Doctorow put it, a “socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” I found this via stumbleupon a few weeks ago, and decided that I had to write something about the concept of the world around you being filled with voices that you can hear, if only you listen carefully enough. There’s something amazing about the writing process, because it lets you have those kind of talks with yourself (and/or your characters, if you so choose), and I love the idea that those voices actually have something behind them. I feel like those whispering voices are the kind of thing that you would hear when you’re wandering around inside this place. Named for a story by Jorge Luis Borges (which is sadly NOT in the copy of The Aleph and Other Stories that I’ve been borrowing from V), this library is reminiscent of things that I’ve been writing about in the past, and it makes me very happy that I’ve been crafting similar stories to those written by Borges, a man who died the year before I was born, and whose writing I’d regrettably never read until last year. I want to visit The Library of Babel, because it sounds like a place where I’d be able to get lots of writing done, as long as I was quiet and didn’t upset the librarian.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go listen to nothing for a while. Cheers!

Non-Euclidean

Yes, I have Lovecraft on the brain. GET IT OFF!

Whew. So, Miss Sonia’s latest writing challenge is this: fifty words from one word. Mine was Euclidean. Enjoy.

Non-Euclidean geometry, they called it. It’s a mind screw. I think that’s kind of the idea. I’m not too sure how long I’ve been here now, and I have no way of knowing if there’s any way out of these damned Escher staircases. Too late. I can hear them coming.

A Smaller Place

Today, I started my first shift as a substitute at one of the smaller branches within the library system here in town. I don’t know if it was just the change in the size of the facility, the massive amount of snow on the ground, or some combination of the two, but it’s been a wonderful change of pace. The work is also a lot more along the lines of my old job at my university’s library. Unlike my current job, I’m not one of twenty or so staff members at work. Tonight, I’m one of three. Everyone does a wider variety of tasks. It reminds me very much of the library in my hometown, which was built in a converted house. There’s something very powerful about the atmosphere of an area of such concentrated imagination and knowledge and creativity.

All libraries and bookstores have this effect to some degree, but I’ve found that the smaller the location, the more powerful it becomes. This would account for my love of bookmobiles… I mean, honestly, a library that comes to you? Brilliant. Almost as good as fresh Guinness draught in a bottle. I suppose I could get the same impact with all the books I’ve got in a storage unit at the moment, but they’re all in boxes, so it’s not quite the same. Conversely, take the Library of Congress. I can’t imagine a more overwhelming building full of books in existence, but when I think about all of those books being condensed into a building that had enough room for just the books and none of the soaring ceilings and wide open areas, well…

I’ve planned a dream home around the presence of a personal library. While I am absolutely of the opinion that books should be shared and available to everyone who wants to read them, I’m a little bit protective when it comes to my own collection. I mean, after I discovered how mind-blowingly awesome Watchmen was (Alan Moore is a genius, if not the wizard that he claims), I went out and promptly bought a second copy so that I could lend that one out to my friends. My original copy stays on my shelf. I did the same thing with Salamandastron (still my favorite of the Redwall series) in the fifth grade after I met Brian Jacques. Despite being a mass-market paperback, it’s signed, and so it has a reserved place of honor, while my new-old hardcover (God bless used bookstores) is my reading copy. OCD? Maybe a little. I never claimed not to be. After all, I want to be able to pass many of them on to whatever children or nieces or nephews I may have. I’d like to take good care of them while they’re still in my possession. To me, a good book is worth its weight in gold.

I love me my physical books. I’m not afraid to retread old anti-eReader ground here. I can’t say it often enough. Yes, I support digitization of physical media for archival backup. If a physical copy cannot survive, then at least a digital copy will be available. Maybe then, in the future, someone could reprint a physical copy from the backup. This is just practical. Do I support a complete conversion to digital? No. Flat out. No. You cannot beat a physical book. I’ll happily listen to any defenses of digital readers. After all, I survived for ten months by convincing people of how great they are. If Barnes & Noble ever hires me, I’ll go right back to it. They’re nice, but they’re not right for me.

That much being said, I’ve got my notebook and pen handy. I’m going to write a little more before diving back into A Wizard of Earthsea.

Writing as Art

This one’s kind of a complicated subject, and was inspired by the latest Penny Arcade comic. How many of you feel that what you do as a writer actually counts as art?

I say yes. I know that some people would disagree with me.  However, I feel that a well written story or poem, regardless of the formal training  behind it, can be just as beautiful as some works of art, and far more impressive than others. I’ve read some pieces that, while incredibly well-written, strongly structured, and clearly organized, did absolutely nothing for me in terms of evoking an emotional response, and I’d consider them almost trash. Are those stories art? Much like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder (along with antimagic, disintegrate, etc., but I digress).

I know that my feelings on certain pieces change based on my age, my own life experiences, and my state of mind when I am reading it. Therefore, there are some books that I pick up on a regular basis. My love for Tolkien remains undiminished throughout the years, no matter how many times I’ve read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Other authors, I attempted to read in junior high or high school, and were totally dismissed at the time. Later on, particularly thanks to my degree, I would read them again, and I found that my tastes had changed. For example, let’s take Willa Cather. When I was a junior in high school, my English teacher taught Cather as a standard in his curriculum because she was his favorite author, and had lived where he had lived. That year, I attempted to read Death Comes for the Archbishop. I found it painful and dull, and questioned the relevance of Cather’s work.

Four years later, now a third-year English major (in part thanks to the influence of said English teacher), I read Willa Cather again, this time tackling The Professor’s House. With far more reading experience under my belt, I dove headlong into the book, and I finally found myself enjoying Cather’s prose. This time, I was fascinated by her characters, and eventually took it upon myself to revisit Death Comes for the Archbishop. Now that I was more accustomed to her writing, I realized that I really liked Cather, and was happy to add her to my list of favorite authors. I went through a nearly identical process when I first encountered Stephen King. Granted, I started with Desperation. Also granted, I was in fifth grade. Still, King’s writing style didn’t appeal to me. A couple of years later, however, I picked up The Green Mile, having seen the film version. It was, I guess, a more mild story, but it allowed me to adapt my mind to King’s writing form and characterization. Now I find myself hard-pressed to find King books that I’ve not read.

Based on my first impressions of both of these authors, I wouldn’t have called either of them artists. Skilled at their craft, yes, but neither Cather nor King would have kept my attention long enough for me to care. For whatever reason, I decided to give them another look, and that’s when I found the art. Now I feel that I’m able to see it far more often. In my own work, I’m trying to find the balance between craft and art. There’s only so far that formal training and technical approaches can take you. If you’re not putting feeling into what you’re writing, then you might as well quit now.