Author: Douglas

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Day 78: 1000 One Step Journeys

Often as I sit before the keyboard and the screen I wonder exactly what I am going to write next.  Will it please me or will it suffice.  More frequently than I like it only does the later.  Will it extend the blossoming work I am doing on the Shanty lines?  Will it be something entirely new and intriguing?  Or will it be something more like this?  My brain dumping a few thoughts to barely cover a debt to me of sevety-eight days ago.

I might not always be proud of the content, but I am continually happy that I don’t let myself get away with a fail.

The feeling of not writing tonight or any time is exactly like the craving I get on the penultimate day of a fast.  I’ve done enough.  There’s nothing I prove by going one more day when I’ve already gone this long.

Bargaining with oneself is so odd, so ironic.  If you could video tape a person doing this in their heads and play it back it would be comical, sad, or both.  The audience–even the auto-audience–wouldn’t fall for it.  They wouldn’t understand how either half of the man could.  Yet I do.  Or at least I can.  It’s nice to use that oddity for something constructive.

They–the Chinese ‘they’–say that a journey  of a thousand miles begins with the first step.  What they don’t tell you is that the the journey is made up of first steps.  It’s hard every time.

Word count: 245 

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Day 77: Tacons are Agoraphobic

They protest it’s not like the gentle swaying of a ship more an incessant vibration than a rocking.  I’ve never been to sea, so I politely nod.   Then they complain about the noises.  I nod again.  Ah’Taconschientee possesses a quiver and a clamor of course–I just don’t understand their objection.

I am one of the few Tacons to deboard and only one of three to travel to their capitol city of Dambor.  The month long trip was painfully quiet.  I thought I’d go mad from the vastness of the desert and the emptiness of the silence.  They thought I had gone mad when I asked to be moved to what they called a closet nearest the noisy wheelhouse.

Not much their to go on, but I guess this guy’s agoraphobic.  Probalby ought to read up on that before I get too far into his character.

Word count: 145

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Day 76: On Giant Lizards

I believe I’ve griped elsewhere that I envy artists’ ease concocting the fantastical.  I don’t know that I pinpointed the part that annoys me the most: that they can do it with obvious style, accuracy, and expedience.

There are differences in drawing giant lizards and writing giant lizards.  An artist draws the exact giant lizard she has in mind: the one with baggy skin, porcine snout, but sinuous tail.  Or maybe the one with a thick-veined dorsal fan, tusks, and dainty wren-feet.  Currently, an author expounding anything is to be held in disregard for the sin of ‘info-dumping’.  An author, rather, must become a modeler.  Starting of with giant lizard lump-of-clay then gracefully mentioning excessive rolls of leathery skin when it moves the plot forward, or the piggish facial features when it enhances the theme, and finally the sinuous tale when it increases the conflict.  Or maybe none of this at all–just knowing inside that it was all there despite the literal omission required to novelate commercially.

For author’s these days it’s about the journey and not so much the scenery along the way.  Scenery is fine to be sure as long as we readers don’t have to slow the vehicle to take it all in.  There really is no picture taking and definitely no scrapbooking in novels these days.

Fairness is not a concept I worry too much about when I gripe, but I always wanted to be an artist, so I have decided to find out just how hard it is to craft a giant lizard in a visual language.  I suspect I’ll go for the same 1000 day conceit I’ve been pushing here–though I don’t make as big a deal of it over there.

Maybe some day I’ll have color.

Word count: 291