God only knows...

This weekend was interesting... I spent the vast majority of my Sunday at work writing, or trying to write. I had a 600-700 word piece due today, and it was a bitch.

The longest I was able to make it was almost 600, even after I went back and stretched each sentence.

Long story short, I was supposed to write a profile/ description of this guy, his product and his company, trying to focus on the product, and if shit got tight, use him and the company...

I talked to him, did a little BS-kind-of interview, because originally, it was going to be a brief note, kind of a hey-check-this-out thing, and all I was able to get was about 150 words. These were a good 150 words, though. Nice, short and sweet.

**fuck the "Harvard Comma"**
"That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far."~ Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark

Then I found out I had to stretch it. Exhausting. Bah.

begin/

No matter now many times you sit down to write, you always face the same dilemma. Or at least, the same one for me. Come to think of it, it's a little worse now that paper isn't around anymore. The only place you can really find it is on the shelves of really rich people, or in the treasure chests of the rest of us, under our pillows, hoping dearly that one day we'll be able to hold the physical form of our work, hold it in our hands and say "this! all of this! it's mine! you cannot take it from me! you can take my body! my clothes, my family, my future! but you can never take away the fact that this is mine! for ever and ever, in my mind and now, once if never again, it exists in form, to be handed off from person to person like back when I was a child!"

Things are so different now. I remember when I was young, I was fortunate enough to live next to a thrift-shop. People were always coming by, dropping books and clothes and broken toasters (but they looked like new!) in front of the door, even though they had a sign in the window that said "closed Sunday." Things were different then, right?

You could even think things were getting better. People weren't dying against their will (as much anyway), and they were living on and longer and longer, but this was still before that got to be a problem.

Where did all of this start? I think it started with paper.

With paper, you kind of have a limit. On a screen, however, you really don't; it doesn't work the same. You can have the approximation of what used to be the standard, back before stories were called "books" in honor only, and give a guess as to how many words you could fit on a page, and most of the word-processors will give you a barely-visible dotted line to show you, you've make a dent.

Dent in what, though, that's the issue. With screens, there really is no end. The only clear end occurs when the power run

/end

Not very long ago, 5 days, actually, I started reading THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It's odd to me... Only done the alternate history thing knowingly a few times before...

In the immortal words of The West Wing, "What's Next?"

Only 28?

Blogger says I've only got 28 (soon to be 29) posts. This feels wrong. I feel like I must have written more than that. by the by, firefox sucks ass on mac's.

So, now that I'm using safari (much better, minus the copy/paste problem) back to talking. 

Just finished reading REQUIEM. It's good. I like it because of the way it uses language, more than the story. There's no way for the book to be not-sad; it's not about that. It feels like a decent into human depravity, more like the different holes that people dig for themselves. 

That aside, the language, the way it's written is much much MUCH more interesting than what happens. I'd need to take a very close look to see if Aronofsky managed to portray the speed and crushed-together-ness of the words in the book onto the screen. I know that part of it is achieved through his so-called "hip-hop" cut sequences, but that's really a cop-out. 

The language is one long strung-together scene, and if a carriage-return is finally used, it's a scene change/the camera cuts from one place to the next, instead of a black/white-out, or something to that degree. 

The full carriage-return is used in the following way: two-line, not one-line separation to indicate that there is a significant change in scene. not just characters, or time,  but location location location! back in real estate, which actually matters in book design. 

The breaks in the way words look in a page, called "rivers" if i remember correctly, are something that, in general, are to be avoided. My friend Em showed me a book where the author uses these "rivers" to make, you guessed it, rivers, white/negative space throughout the page. Interesting. 

Another real estate thing (more graphics-oriented): it's difficult to keep visual attention when turning pages, so the last image (in the bottom right corner, if you read left-to-right) and the first image on the next page (top-left) are crucial to maintaining a sense of coherence and cohesive-ness. The situations need to be kept either constant, or deliberately kept inconsistent, depending on what effect one's attempting to achieve. 

Rambling over now. 

What will I pick up next, you ask? I don't know. I really don't. Tell you what though: you will when I do. 

Brief thoughts on sentences

Been thinking recently about the way Selby Jr. (REQUIEM) and Mitchell (NUMBER9DREAM) use words to make sentences.

The most remarkable thing about the way that both of them write is the way they use adjectives.

I don't have Mitchell on hand, but I do have Selby.
"...grinding with their laughter..."

Both of these authors combine words to make descriptions that are not antithetical, so much as unexpected, but perfectly correct. Marion and Harry are "grinding with their laughter," and in retrospect it seems like there's nothing else they should be doing at that exact moment besides grinding with laughter.

Not really sure if this makes sense to anyone that isn't in my head. Bah.

Selby is a slow read for me. I started it nearly four days ago, and I've only read forty pages. Part of this is due to the way that Selby writes (no shit), but literally, the way he forms the text. He doesn't use apostrophes and uses carriage returns as little as humanly possible. I know that part of it comes from the mechanics of the typewriter, but this irks me regardless. I'm a bit of a stickler when it comes to grammar things like that, but with him it does not seem unreasonable.

All of this aside, I'm not sure what I have to work through in order to get a re-start on the script-thing...

Reading and Religion

I've just finished reading ARCHANGEL, and I enjoyed it.

Religion, in so far as Shinn deals with it, works in (what seems to me) an odd fashion. Basically, there is a god, more like there is THE god, but it's never God, it's always god. Huh.

More interesting than this, at least at this moment, is that it was published by Ace Science Fiction. The most advanced technology available to any of the characters in the novel is precious-metal-working...

This book contains nothing scientific, uses all the god as an explanation for why those around are struck down, and that's kind of it...

Does it follow, then, that religion is not fantastic, but scientific? What kind of sense does that make?

It amuses me to no end that this text which, in my eyes, has nothing to do with science is classified as science fiction; the alternative is labeling it as... fantasy. And that cannot be done, or can it? Can the world of publishing put forth into the continuum (that can't be spelled right, but it checks out with firefox) a mind-blowing industry based on the equitable distribution of knowledge really call a fantasic (in the literal sense) fiction "science fiction"?

I don't know. Went a tidbit off the deep end in that last paragraph.

What's next on the list? REQUIEM FOR A DREAM by Hubert Selby Jr. Seen the movie, dig the movie, now it's time for the book. I've never read anything by Selby before.

But first, my comics from yesterday:
LOGAN #1 (Vaughan and Rizzo)
PAX ROMANA #2 (Brian Hickman)
ZOMBIES VS. ROBOTS #2 (Ashley Wood and Chris Ryall)

Good night.

Working Product

I don't know what this is, and that's all I have to say about that for now.

/BEGIN/

Somehow, I've got to start using my sleep. Every now and then, things don't clock correctly and I end up crashing instead of doing real work. What that means doesn't matter; what does is that crashing is entirely useless.

It came to me that if, instead of ignoring my body (as I have been very prone to do on many occasions) and crashing, I could set myself up to an audiobook, or the new album from Whatever-They're-Called-Today, then crashing would start to be productive and therefore, so too could I (hopefully) be.

Sounded great. Still does, when I say it to myself at night — all jacked-in before I shut down for an entirely arbitrary amount of time — it was good. It was better than good, it was brilliant.

Then I started to see information.

I started to process information when I was off (though that was the point) but it became unbearable. Even when I was working and moving and fucking and drinking there was always information: glasses with their ingredients scrolling down the side then proceeding to marquee the tale of their origins from sand, what beach they'd come from, what they remembered about the fish, if there really were giant squids after all; the book I was trying to read would tell me about the gentle strokes of the printer as it moved from one side to the next with movements so fluid that it felt like it was the water printed on its pages — some told me about the trees, while others told me how they'd at one point been a chemistry text book, way back when recycled paper did not exist, and how from there they'd been a drug store novel, some graduate student's doctorate, the fifth revision of last year's Webster's — cigarettes would regale me with the lives of tobacco farmers taking them from their families (if leafs had anything closer to blood than sap) and marauders taking the farmer's family apart then selling the leafs to an antiseptic old woman called Aunite-Kay only to be burned, reverse-sky-dive, un-reverse-sky-dive, grow again and eventually live in my chest until the next time I was retro-fitted (neo-fitted is a much better term), speaking —

/END/

What I'm Reading Today...

After another conversation with the friend of mine who continues to hassle me time and again to make use of my blog, I have officially been talked into writing another entry. Subject matter? Books.


I read a lot. By a lot, I mean I read more now than I did while I was in college -- I always felt that I spent so much time reading for class, I never had time to read for myself, so I read as much as I could when I was on vacation, on the train (assuming I was not reading for class then as well), waiting for the train, the bus, the doctor's office, etc.

My friend thinks I read about a book every two weeks or so. I think it takes a little longer, but I digress.

When a creator I respect recommends a book, I'm likely to take a look at it or, sometimes just buy it on pure recommendation alone. That's what I did with this book: Christy Lijewski, a favorite comic creator of mine, mentioned it at one point on her website (lost to me now, will edit when I find the URL) and I figured, as I have done in the past, why not?

Today, I'm reading ARCHANGEL by Sharon Shinn.

ARCHANGEL (also the name of an amazing cut by dubstep genius BURIAL) is about angels. I like my angels much less futz-ed with, more classic; no genitalia because they are not bound by form; more Miltonic than anything else, and maybe even a tad biblical.

But these are not your garden variety angels: they exist after a world, i.e., not in the pre-human sense, they are the product of an explicitly post-human universe, and this intrigues me to no end. In this universe, the angels come from the union of an angel and a mortal, therefore the number of so-called full blood angels is negligible, since they are all long dead at the time this book starts.

Angels in a post-human world... how about that? And humans in a post-human world too! What's up with that? Really, though. What's up?

Angels and humans, the ultimate extremities of the divine spectrum (supposing that the divine itself does not enter into the spectrum) mixing together NOT to form a middle ground, but to propagate either extremity. Ah, the strangeness of bloodlines.

By the by, the angels in this book do not really stick all too close to the judeo-christian standard mythos, so don't let that be a prohibition.

I'm off to read some more, and I have to be up for work in six hours. I'm not tired. Bah humbug.

It's been a while...

Well, let's see:

I have a new computer, a laptop in fact, and it makes me very happy. I'm even using it now! Amazing, no?

small keyboard, so it'll take some getting used to. meh.

fuck caps etc. for the time being.

I have a new job; I now work for Lockwood Publications as the Editorial Assistant for Smoke, Smokeshop and Tobacco International, all magazines. I finally have a real publishing job!

Trying to save enough money to get a place of my own, and by my own I mean a place to share with two of my friends. Money. More like this:

"Business or Pleasure?"
"Business. Always business."
~The Greek

From The Wire, Season 2 Episode 12 (the last one, think it's 12)

Love the show.

This post marks the beginning of a much more personal tone for this blog. I've been catching shit from a friend of mine for not updating, and as such this is going to be a tad more personal. I'll make sure the "whiney-bitchy" garbage is kept to a minimum, because I have a livejournal for crap like that.

Problems that are worth addressing here:
- Writer's block

So:
I have a story that I've been working on since I went to Germany and England during the summer, and I've been poking at it here and there, but not enough to amount to anything significant (or so I feel), and it's irking my nerves.

I know his name, and his basic job, but every time I try to figure out where he's going, shit falls apart.

on a complete side note: the closing to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a peek into the future of rock and roll...

and on another note, i have a math problem to play with, so i'm off to do that.