The Night Owl

"I work at night. I don't just mean I write at night - I am writing this at 1.53am, as it happens - I mean I function at night. After sunset, I think as clearly as I ever will. I want to walk about, play the banjo and wear hats. I want to enjoy being alive in an uninterrupted and possibly creative way. Left to my own devices, I would always keep my office hours between 10pm and 4 or 5am. Sadly, the rest of the world fails to understand this and tends to telephone me most mornings. Traffic noise, hammering next door, unforgiving travel schedules, the necessity of meeting daytime people and purchasing food; they all conspire to drive me from my bed and disturb my natural order, so I spend my life jolting from one kind of jetlag to another."

A L Kennedy

Read the rest.

the narrative

It has been a while. In the silence of the past week I was more able to reconnect with the story, to think and imagine the narrative which drives it, to develop it more. To fine tune my mind to focus less on my own solipsistic narration (twitter on crack) and exist outside of myself in a world that, while driven by my experiences and views, stands on its own merit. To hear the characters speak and advance. To see a plot unfold in its own natural way. Its all a little staggering. And reason to be quite for a little while more.

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

--Reynolds Price

The Dreams are Killer

My dream life has been rather interesting. I'd been trying to think of the context in which to write about it, but honestly, they need no context. They're a little insane and a little unstable and make only a little sense. (I try to avoid writing about dreams because well, usually they're quite boring for someone else to read about, but this one was quite interesting in the oedipal sense...and the fact that I dream greek mythology):

I dreamt of a boy, I'd never met. Dark and small and african and the beginning of the dream he was told "you will kill your father by the nights end." And it was a joke that no one believed. A smallish man that resembled the boy, except for his expansive chest and his wrinkled face. His wide flat nose and his strong demeanor. I dreamt of a trip that we all took by bus. The greyhound variety with grey seats and a pattern sewn into the strip down the middle that hearkened back to the tetris days. People who were familiar to a life that I am no longer leading, I was surrounded by them. Faces and names that my subconscious recall, but I, in my waking life, do not. The place we went was uneventful. Everything was bright and lit up (this I recall from a recent event).

Skip the uninteresting details. The what we did in between or who we spoke to or why. Skip to the hotel room, which is most important. Again, I can't recall why I was placed in a hotel room with a father and son, I think I thought it odd and questionable. But there were no other rooms and nothing to be done, so I went. We sat the father and I, face to face. He on the bed looking down to me on the floor (the boy sat in the corner on a chair, a single lampshade illuminated his dark face and was the only light...shadows crept up like vignetting, around the edges of the room). He seemed upset, and he talked and talked. We fought and fought, to varying degrees of intensity, for what seemed like hours. In the end, he was convinced that I should marry his son. It seemed ludicrous. I might have said so. He continued on and the boy looked on his face set into a grim stare. His face a mask, two white eyes bobbing in the darkness. Pulsating. You could nearly see his neck tha-thumping which each beat. Quickly. I wish I could recall what made him so angry. But only the lounge from the chair to the bed was memorable. Only that he was on his father before I could firmly grasp the situation. Seeing someone strangle another person in their dreams is still unnerving. Even if the man had never lived and there for couldn't really die, I can still see it when I close my eyes. Something so passion filled and heartless, even imagined, stays with you.

The man jerked and jiggled. He twisted alarmed and batted at his son, but the boy stayed fixed like a 500 lb weight on the mans chest. Impenetrable.

And then it was over, almost as quickly as it had begun. He stood up. He wiped his brow. He looked at me as though I had stumbled into the room mistakenly while he committed his crime. We stared like that for a beat, unsure of what to do.

"You have to leave," He told me. And just like that he began to move around the room, tidying things up. Wrapping his father in a blanket as though the man had never lived. It felt like he had done it in my honor, even though I can't recall why, killed his own father just like that. He hurried around as I stood there in shock.

Sirens began to wail...nothing is ever easily explained in dreams. But there they were, officers, the entire party of our trip standing in anticipation. He pushed me toward a door that separated our room from the next. His face again impenetrable and I felt a tenderness sweep over me. For what he'd done for me, for what he'd lost, for what he'd been told would happen and could not avoid. Maybe for all the things we can't avoid. And he pushed me through...and moments later I walked into the light where everyone stood waiting. Police looked with fire arms held. Someone wrapped me in a blanket and I watched and waited for him to turn himself over.

Awake.

I heart Dark Room

I began using Dark Room this morning and I am converted. I've always been lacking a bit in the attention span department, which you might know if you've ever had a real live conversation with me. I switch subjects faster than a race car driver switches lanes. Writing had become the chore of trying to ignore my sms, my roommate, my email (3 accounts), gtalk, aim, facebook, flickr, tumblr, myspace, google reader and manage my musical selections. While its logically simple to close out of these programs one look at the little firefox icon at the corner of my screen and I'm sucked right back into the vortex of internet hell. I think to myself, I'll just quickly check my email. Suddenly an hour has been wasted looking at only God knows what and before I know it the entire morning, afternoon, evening is missing. Nothing has been written.

Dark room is created to solve the problem of distraction. Its a full blacked out screen. Surprisingly effective. Just you and the words. (The original program Write Room was developed for macs)

The above is what I've completed in the past twenty minutes or so. I'm excited. I've got a soundtrack and a little forward momentum.

Happy Saturday.

Descriptions, Descriptions, Descriptions.

I've been thinking a lot in terms of the descriptive lately with a heavy focus on people. Living in New York gives you the opportunity to be inspired again and again by the hundreds of people you pass daily. I watched the old man sitting across from me on my way into work and I imagined what I would describe about him if he were to be a character in a story of mine.

Would it be his newish brown coat with the plaid lining that looked all at once trendy yet tradition. His fresh ironed and starched pants blue work pants that could have been part of a suit or a work uniform, leading me to wonder about his blue or white collar status. Would it be the way that he sat, slightly overweight and hunched in his seat that reminded me of an adolescent. The way that his large jowly cheeks hung around his mouth, as if in anticipation of the many expressions that passed through his face over the seventy odd years of his life. His elongated nose, that somehow drew attention to the sleepy eyes on either side of them. The white hair of his eyebrows. Or simply the girlishly long and extraordinary immaculately clean nails at the end of his yellow -grayish skinned fingers, that cleared up the earlier speculation of his status in life. They were not the nails of someone who had labored all their lives.

I passed a description of one of the main characters, Rahel, in The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy which I found particularly pleasing a few days ago and I had no context until now in which to write about it:

He first noticed Rahel in the school library and then again, a few days later in Khan Market. She was in jeans and a white T-shirt. Part of an old patchwork bedspread was buttoned around her neck and trailed behind her like a cape. Her wild hair was tied back to look straight, though it wasn't. A tiny diamond gleamed in one nostril. She had absurdly beautiful collarbones and a nice athletic run.
There goes a jazz tune, Larry McClaslin though to himself, and followed her into a bookshop, where neither of them looked at books.

What I found particularly striking about the description are the way these details, tied into the context of the story and say so much about Rahel without saying anything at all and how it also gives you a glimpse into Larry who finds this strange and chaotic woman attractive.

These are the talents I hope to somehow absorb and translate into my work over the coming months. Descriptions that add to the bigger picture of the narrative in just a few short sentences, revealing enough to give the reader an idea into the psyche of the character but not to ruin the imagination.

Writing: My Elusive Short Story.

Having been thinking about the things I want this next year and trying to set a few goals for writing since it seems that I've always wrote and never done anything with it, I had a revelation. I kept thinking how I'd like to write more short stories and submit more in the next coming year, but what I realized this morning is that my short story tools are rusty. Though I have completed some pieces of short fiction over the past year I hardly remember reading any collections of short stories save one (not including the ones I hadn't completed). If the key to learning the art of writing is reading, then the key to learning the art of short stories is obvious.

Ah, why is it that epiphanies are often so obvious after we have them?

The Eve

On the eve of things I have not known,
A quarter past the first of confusion.
I draw things beautifully in the sand
and wait for them to come to fruition.

(I wake this morning with words on the tip of my tongues and creeping stealthy out of my closed eyelids. Some days I conduct a little chase and am lucky if I get a few back. I think its imitation, but I'm sure someone is very flattered.)

We hold these truths

Sitting here thinking of all the things I know
and all the things I do not know.

The impossibility of ever knowing-
and the fact that we try endlessly anyway.

Late Holiday Greetings (my oddest and most liked greeting)

"you have received this, because you are in my life for a
reason...S(anta) does not need to know if you are good or if you are bad...your
"presence" in my life, has been a gift that i could never haveasked forwhat we
have shared, opened, and/or returned, with or without areceipt...doesn't
matter..."presence" is not a material thing...nor is there a return/exchange
policy...no credit is givenone size does not fit all


but, it is weather-proofit is sustenanceit will quench
your longings and desires..
your presence i am thankful
for...


enjoy the rest of this year, as if it were your
first...because next year will really bring you more understanding
andaccomplishment


trust me...S(anta) knows
Peace and
Tranquility11-11"

Airplane Sunrise

It was as if someone had taken a wildly orange paint and swiped it across the horizon of the still dark blue sky and the clouds were an ocean rising up to engulf us. There was never anything so beautiful, so tranquil, so fearful and terrible even as the moment the plane tipped its wing drastically and descended into the hazy yellow dream of the clouds. Once we'd come through the other side, daybreak was not even yet noticeable. All the city lights still burned as bright as ever. Yet somehow through some trick of the light (it may have been my window pane or my sleepy imagination taking hold) I thought I detected a rainbow in the cloud.

Resolutions for Writers

I'm tired, its late, and I've not much to say (it seems that no one really does much on the internet on Sunday anyhow). What I do have, after going through my weekly Sunday evening Google reader clean out is a few things that I found, that I'd like to share or direct you to. From Work in Progress' Suggested Resolutions for Writers.

7. Give yourself a break. Writing is hard. Yes, we all know it’s not like digging ditches…but it’s taxing nevertheless, and it’s hard to keep up morale when your wonderful story has just been rejected by some literary journal intern via a terse, form rejection printed on a scrap of paper the size of a gum wrapper. Don’t constantly beat yourself up for not being good enough/hard-working enough/brilliant enough/lucky enough/connected enough. One of my favorite teachers used to say that for a writer, there is only one question to ask: “Did you write today?” If you did, you’re golden. Doesn’t matter if it’s crap—that’s what revision is for. Just get your words on the page.

More from The Times, Love Letters

The letter from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is my favorites so far. It read like an actual love letter with the sensibilities of a writer. Here is an excerpt discussing the importance of liking:

Yesterday, too, I realised that I have never told you how much I like you - this before your text, by the way. Love is different. Love is ridiculous. Love can just happen, as it did to you when you saw me and asked Ifeanyi to introduce us (exactly seventeen months and three days ago) and to me as you tried to charm me with your watery knowledge of Achebe's work, but like requires reason. And yesterday I marvelled at how much I have come to like you. I like that you know when to leave and quietly shut my door and that when you do I never worry that you are not coming back. I like your cooking (I have never complimented you because I keep imagining those silly women who over-praise men for cooking, and those silly mothers who like to say, 'My son can cook-oh, so no woman will use food to tempt him'). I like the way your butt looks in your jeans, that flat elegance that you don't like me to point out, and I like that you make futile attempts at the gym to grow muscles we both know you never will and I like that you underline sentences in books to show me. I like that you like me and that your liking me makes me like myself.

I will, by the way, never write anything like this to you again. So smile all you want now, atulu

Between me, you and the blank page.

I've a new journal

New Poetry Added

I've added poetry to my writing site, or rather made what already existed on the site live and linked in.

Again, Enjoy.

Why Write?

I'm finally getting through some of my google reader blogs, now that its up to 1,000+ (yes and it is actually 6am in the morning). I cam across an post from Neil Gaiman (yes THAT Neil Gaiman) about writing that I instantly loved:

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ("but of course that's why he was doing that, and that means that...") and it's magic and wonderful and strange.

You don't live there always when you write. Mostly it's a long hard walk. Sometimes it's a trudge through fog and you're scared you've lost your way and can't remember why you set out in the first place.

But sometimes you fly, and that pays for everything.

Check out his blog here.

PS, if you've never seen Mirror Mask it is an absolutely stunning and breathtaking film.

I'm so fast

It's up, its still being tweaked, but its up. I'm linking now before I lose my nerve.

Enjoy.

I've finally decided to put my writing on-line.

I hadn't previously thought of it, but suddenly today I had the inspiration and so I've decided to load a few of my stories, even in all their glorious imperfections on the interweb. I've spent years being ultra selective about who I allowed to read my work due to my constant paranoia about the quality or due to the fear of judgment, but its time. If I don't open myself up now, I could possibly carry allow this to stand in the way of achieving my dreams.

Also if I blow hugish monkey chunks, I'd sort of like to know before I get my hopes all high and dedicate all my time to writing.

I'm going to be publishing it onto my wordpress blog which I previously used as personal journal of sorts (I'm taking down the old post). Hopefully, it'll be all working and linked in by the end of the weekend.

Check back for links.