Better Than Dead

Random quote of the day:

“Ideas are poison. The more you reason, the less you create.”

—Raymond Chandler, letter to Charles Morton, 28 October 1947

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

—Richard Feynman, on his blackboard at the time of death in 1988, as quoted in The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

The lovely and talented mnfaure recently posted these trigger words: read, crusade, kiss, beauty, back, us. They were part of a technique she and her husband use to spur on their creativity. I wrote the words down on a piece of paper and left work for the day. When I came in this morning and saw the words, this tumbled out, I know not from where:

I am on perpetual crusade
to return us to those first moments
when your battlements fell,
the beauty of that first kiss,
the way your eyes read my face,
the way my mouth crumbled
your defenses, our breath
intertwined, our skin’s
burning velvet embrace.
Can we fight our way back
to that fire of long ago
after so many years of comfort
and knowing? Or is it instead
a children’s adventure to try?
The contentment of our lives
is its own crusade, a gentle
battle against the world’s
harsh ways, a bulwark
against its fires of destruction.

Random quote of the day:

 

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy.  The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

—Niels Bohr to Wolfgang Pauli regarding the Heisenberg-Pauli nonlinear theory of elementary particles, quoted in Symposisum on Basic Research by Dael Lee Wolfle

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

 

“Inspiration has never really factored in the creative process for me.  It’s been about work, and it’s been about sitting down and rather doggedly trying to achieve a certain kind of idea.”

—Nick Cave, interview, LA Weekly, September 12-18, 2008

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Okay, so the plot of that novel is nothing like any of my vampire novels (all 3-1/2 of them), but there are certain elements in the worldbuilding which really sounded familiar:

• A 1500-year-old vampire
• A group of powerful supernatural being overlords called the Congregation (mine was the Covenant)
• Vampires who can eat normal food but don’t, mostly because the smell is abhorrent (especially garlic)
• Vampire growth spurts, in which the vampire gets larger and more of an apex predator after being “changed” from mortal
• Other piddling things that slip my mind at the moment

Now, none of these elements are earth-shatteringly similar, but chances are that if any of my vamp novels sees some form of publication someone will surely think I’ve ripped off Ms. Harkness, even though I did this worldbuilding twenty years ago now. It no longer depresses me when this sort of stuff happens, no longer even irks me especially hard, because I have been through this same thing so many times before. Seriously, click on the “simultaneous invention” tag if you want to listen to more hardcore whining on this subject. No? Can’t say as I blame you.

The thing is, the concept of simultaneous invention is quite well-known in science. And if it’s true for the tech fields, it’s also true for creative fields. It happens all the time—to me, to my friends, to writers and artists of all sorts. It’s just the way the zeitgeist operates, propagating certain ideas into the culture when their time has arrived. Some individuals are quick to pick up on them and “get them to market,” while others (like me) are painfully slow about the whole thing or otherwise blocked from getting their version before the public eye time. As with Ms. Harkness and I, nothing sinister is involved, no one has stolen anything.

Most of the time. Ideas do get stolen. It’s happened (verifiably) to friends of mine, it’s happened to me—which is one of the reasons I decided I didn’t want to be involved with Hollywood anymore. But most of the time, I firmly believe it’s just a case of that ol’ zeitgeist playing with folks, hoping somebody will take the idea ball and run with it.

The strangest example of this for me happened about a year before Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out. I started working on this idea about a guy name Roy who was a state trooper. One night when he’s out on patrol on a lonely stretch of highway, he has a close encounter with a bunch of UFOs that radically changes his life. He loses his job, his marriage breaks up, and he spends the rest of his time obsessing about and trying to solve the mystery of these strange alien craft. Sounds familiar, huh? I never heard a word about the movie in production until I was about six months into the worldbuilding on my own idea. The thing that is really freaky to me is that both my character and the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters had the name of Roy. The zeitgeist was working overtime on that one.

So, onward. If I do publish any of the old vampire stuff, I’m sure there are many elements in my books that have been used in other (and many) books since I first came up with the concepts. They can’t help but be labeled “derivative.” I guess the answer is to just keep writing new things, to keep moving forward.

Oh, and what did I think of A Discovery of Witches? I quite loved it, despite the cliffhanger ending. Which is all I’ll say about that ending—but you have been forewarned.

Today’s quote from Isak Dinesen—”I write a little every day, without hope, without despair”—strikes me as great advice. Not just for writing, but for living. I can see why Raymond Carver liked quoting it so much.

The thing is, though, it’s extremely difficult advice to follow. Much of the time life seems to take us—creative people as well as “normals”—on a crazy seesaw of hopes and disappointments. Our expectations and wants get us muddled as we try to do the tasks before us, and when we can’t meet all those desires and self-imposed goals, we fall into fits of despondency, think ourselves failures. The inner harpies of self-criticism kick in big time then. They rend and claw without mercy.

For creative people, this extends to and is magnified by the work we do. All creative work is a risk, a thing considered unnecessary by the larger world. There are so many layers of perceived failure available for us to choose from and beat ourselves up about. Creative people seem inevitably to go there, but it’s never a helpful place. It does us no good, it does our work no good.

So…without hope, without despair. Just you and the work. Just me and the work. A little every day, without expectations and the larger-than-life burdens we pile upon ourselves. Maybe this isn’t a recipe for the “current publishing environment,” but it is a recipe for doing the work when it feels like you just cannot. It’s a method of moving forward, even when the mudslides flow around your knees. It’s a practice that keeps the insanity at bay, the practice of doing the best you can with each day, and cutting yourself some slack about the other stuff.

When the harpies start piercing and biting, as oh ye gods they inevitably will, throw them a scrap of hope to gnaw on. Let them chew on that as much as they like so they stop distracting—because we don’t need it at the moment of creation any more than we need the despair.

Random quote of the day:

 

“For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

—Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

1. I finally got around to watching the taped season finale of Castle and the fourth season premiere. This is what I hate about episodic TV and why I stopped watching it: every season, no matter how dramatic or world-changing the finale, by the end of the premiere episode everything has been reset to square one. There’s no regard for character growth, the hard left turns in the script give you whiplash, but everything goes back to the way things have always been. Even on Castle, which is a better written show than most episodic TV. Yeah, there are hints that things will continue in a slightly altered vein, but the premiere really had to do some unlikely contortions to achieve their reset.

2. We’ve got summer weather this October, as often happens in L.A. in October. I wore short sleeves today, forgetting the fall/stress rash on my forearm which is now on display for all to see. Oh well. It had mostly simmered down so it isn’t too humiliating. Driving back from taking Mom to the clinic, everything was sunny and bright until I got to Santa Monica. Then the fog seeped down the highway and I wished that I’d brought my sweater.

3. Driving to the clinic, my mother and I discussed the weird perception of waking up and not knowing where you are, thinking maybe you’re in some place you lived in two or three moves ago, or whatever. These days that sensation has gone a step further for Mom: she wakes up and although she knows where everything is and everything looks the same, the neighborhood is familiar, she feels as if the house isn’t where it’s supposed to be. Somehow it’s moved, she knows not where. I said, “Maybe we’ve slipped into an alternate reality and you’re the only one who realizes it.” She laughed. “Maybe so.”

4. I sometimes have moments of hope these days—and that scares me. So much is beyond my control. I can concentrate only on the here and now. I have to let go of the rest. Whenever I get caught up in anger or frustration or trying to will my will in situations where my will has no effect, I tell myself, “You haven’t got time for this. Let it go. Save your energy for fights you can win.” This is a very difficult lesson to learn, not just for me, but it’s one the Universe has been trying to teach me for many long years: live this moment, and this moment, and this moment, and this . . .

5. My creative life is stretching taut over my bones, but it’s swimming in my blood. I thought it was dead for a time, but it isn’t dead. It is not dead.

I ran across this passage in Women Who Run With the Wolves the other day:

The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life; hold on, for the promise from the wild nature is this: after winter, spring always comes.

For me, it’s autumn.

I shake my feathers and the dust of the summer doldrums shifts away from them. Soon I’ll step into the cool, crisp waters of Fall and it will be washed away completely. I’ll slap my wings into the bath of autumn winds, dip my head, ruffle my feathers, and be off, on the wing again.

Summer has always been a trial for me. You know that Seasonal Affective Disorder thing? I always knew there was a summertime version of it, long before science tumbled to the fact. Every year, starting about late spring, I’d feel myself sinking. By full summer, I’d be slogging along through hot molasses. Then the seasons turned again and I’d be filled with incredible new energy that lasted through the winter and into early spring. I have always started new novels in the fall. That’s when they burgeoned inside me most naturally.

This year we had a mild summer, but the doldrums came anyway. It’s been a difficult year in other ways and I’ve been so exhausted I have hardly had time for that creative life. I thought many times of quitting altogether—but hey, anyone who’s known me long knows I’ve been down that path before. I spent most of the year doing revisions rather than creating new works. That weighed me down, too. But the spark always refuses to die, no matter how convinced I am that this time it will finally be extinguished. No matter how desperate I feel, how pushed into the earth I feel, that little light remains—and probably will until my bones are pushed into the earth.

I don’t yet know for sure that things will be okay, but I trust that little light. And I’m rising again. The wind may be crisp and cold, but once more it promises sure flight.