Galavant

Not many people can go from Pillowman to Galavant in a span of a week. Yikes. It's like a lifetime of listening to Chopin and going to a Norwegian Death Metal concert. ... Or the other way around, really.

Not from books.

It's okay to quote smart people if it isn't from book you haven't read. I'm going through some of these, about writing, and i love them. my favorite will of course always be by Adams: I love deadlines - I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by...

Here's one by Vonnegut: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”

Twain: “Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

Saul Bellow: “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”

H. S. Thompson: “Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over.”

King, obviously: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

 Camus: “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”

London: “You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

Melville: “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.”

Somerset M. : “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

Hawthorne: “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

The Atwood woman, interesting: “The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

Bukowski, the dick: “Great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. If you read this after I am dead it means I made it.”

Nabokov: “Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”

James Baldwin, only black dude I could find on the list: “Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success."

Spending most of my day (and nights, for that matter), writing or editing the first chapter of Goose. I'm thinking it an idea to simply send the first bit to the agents and let them scout for potential publication while I polish up the rest? Dunno. It's a thought. It's easy at this stage, because I'm mostly just enjoying the stories. I skipped past the 'Killing the Goblin' story and went through the three times Kay and Murphy meet - before the hammerfall. The trick is to build absolutely everything that's happened, and because it's happened, because Kay made the decisions she made in defiance of Powers That Be, to the moment when she finally gets it. When it finally hits. It's a massive moment in the ploy and luckily the second chapter is strong enough to maintain the altitude until the organic decline in the last bit. I'm getting more and more ideas for the style every day. I'm on a roll.

Have dyed my hair dark brown. My winter color. I probably should have given the hair more time to rest, but since I noticed it's growing just fine, it's just breaking up awfully at the ends, I'm thinking I should also try and stop binding it into a ponytail - because coincidentally that's also the point at which it sort of dries up and dies. Dying has made it summat thinner, but the color neatly accentuates the green in my eyes.

I've stopped watching amazingly depressing things and switched to dumb humor or just fancy fun - like Galavant and Agent Carter. By the next wave of horror, I will finish the sad chapters, but for now, weaving in the lore, toning down the sex (I cut actual sex out of every single one of the stories, even maintaining Kay's unusually persistent chastity, considering she's undressed fairly everything that she's met since returning from Gorgo.) and making it tilted and unusual just as a dream should be. Individual stories spun mostly around romance, which has now been melted into either angst or suspense. No worries. there are only two really angsty stories in a grand total of about thirty. I even unintentionally started conjuring Spotter's Sufi story - an element of the last chapter. I wonder if all this will make my head swell? :D

First climbing training of the season. Hello, Carpi Ulnaris. Goodbye, fingerprints. ..

(Jup. Still scared shitless of heights. Still totally ignoring it.)

The second out of three 'kill chapters' over

I think I'm out of the deep dark forest. I told the entire plot of Pillowman to Drej in detail and already it seemed less overwhelming and more far away. I saw to the end of the Titan and it didn't really do anything for me - they left the ending totally open. I haven't done the death scene of the ice giant Farbauti in a too elaborate manner, I can always do that later, but the general narrative is set. Which is also the absolute low for Kay. After this, when she enters the third 'kill', she has already gotten some of her humor back and she already pulls her own weight.

Simultaneously, I can now read happier thing, watch happier movies and certainly happier shows. And, consequently, I can get to work on happier thing: I am working on apple juice labels, which was paused for the time being, because the contractor asked for anything but grotesque and I was in the utter most grotesque chapter-field yet. You really can't have children dying in apple juice labels, is all I'm saying.

Okay, why the bloody fuck is Gaiman writing the Sandman comics about how Murphy comes back to dethrone Daniel?

How the fuck is that not universally skullfucking my entire novel?? HOW can people have the EXACT same stories as my half finished books??!

I swear, if I run into a muse, any muse, I'm going to bitchslap the ink out of her.

But of course if anyone can, I can weave that to my advantage. It's not over, muses! Mwahahahaha!

The Pillow Man

I offed to see an amateur play, because there's a kid I like and heard great things about him on stage - and i chose a good play to see him in, because layered with the things I am writing these days and things I am seeing (Attack on Titan, hello), this was by far the most fucked up thing I've seen all week. It takes place on a police station, where two detectives are (rather totalitaristically) interrogating a young writer about his short stories. Each of the short stories is pretty darn messed up and most include children getting either awfully hurt or worse. Problem is, someone has hurt children following up his stories and the police is sure it was either him or his mentally challenged brother - whose brain damage was the result of their parents savagely mistreating him in order to support the younger's talent for story-writing.
All the stories are actually really good

- in one a man is in a cage at a crossroads - this one is called 'unsolvable riddle' - one of three cages. Each cage has a plaque on it and in one there's an old man and the plaque says 'murderer'. In one there's a skeleton and the plague says 'rapist'. The problem is, the man can't see what his plaque says. He asks a passer-by what it says and the man just spits in his face. Three nuns come and say a prayer for the skeleton, a prayer for the murderer, but when they read the plaque of the third man, the leave, crying. Finally a  criminal passes and lets the murdered go, but the third man he shoots in disgust.

- another story is of a poor boy with no shoes and almost no food and nasty parents, who sits alone on the bridge, eating a sorry dinner of a small sandwich. A cart comes and he, though chilled by the sight, offers half a sandwich to the cart man. They eat and talk and when the boy looks at the cart, he sees lots of small, filthy and smelly cages. He wants to ask what's in them, but right then the cart man tells him he will give him a gift as thanks for the kid's goodness. A gift he man not understand for a while. He proceeds to chopping off the kid's foot at the toes. It later turns out the man was a Pied Piper, delivering the rats on his own and years later all the kids but the lame one will be doomed.

- The most fucked up is the title story - the story of the cushy Pillow Man. This is a very nice looking pillow creature, soft and comforting, because he has an important mission in life: he come up to people who are about to commit suicide and instead of it, he goes back in time to when they were small children and offers them to get into terrible accidents instead - so as to spare them a lifetime of misery. Problem s, he suffers awful grief for it. And one day he meets his younger self and proposed the same - that the young pillow self, fully aware of the situation, just pours gasoline on itself and that is what happens. They both vanish, but the last thing they hear are the screams of horror of people they thus failed to save from their lives of pain and suffering.

and so on. Like I said. They're all good, just really friggin' messed up. I took mostly just shots of Nejc, because the director of the theater once treated me like shit and wasn't interested in the event as a whole, but all in all, it was a cool play. I just wouldn't recommend it on happy people. Unless they have no imagination, then it's okay, then they won't feel a thing.

This one is badly taken, but i like it anyway, right because it makes him look even more unhinged..

Attack on Titan(s)

Though it will probably give me wicket nightmares (watching people being eaten alive is so not good for my psycho-karma), I have started watching the first season upon recommendation a few hours ago, it's nearing midnight and I can't stop. I'll probably watch for a couple more hours to come. Holy shit. This is a messed up anime :D

It's almost midnight. The house sleeps. The cats, the dog, the man, the street, the wind, the machines, everything sleeps. everything is gently breathing. I've written enough for the day; there is going to be another day in a few minutes. My stories have been full of Frost Giants and Odin's sons and lustful schemes of surprisingly fleshy gods. Goodnight Farbauti; you will die some other day. Goodnight Monday. Goodnight, the keyboard and my fingertips. Always a pleasure.

That nasty feeling again

Although I look down on both the book and the film Wild as a depressing fucking whine-fest, I wikied the PCT and this photo came up:

 
And BAM!!... Fuck. There comes that nasty feeling again.... Shit. Now is not a good time.

I am not an addict.
I am not an addict.
I am not an addict...

W Imie

Though my Polish works only in retrograde (I understand it if I think back on what was said), they really don't talk much in this flick and still it is oddly compelling. Beautifully filmed. And quiet. I like that. (Don't like noisy films.) I can't say I understood most of it, at least past the "pretty boys touching" bit - it follows the similar predicament that The Priest (1994) did, adding another layer. In the Priest, Linus Roache's characters falls in lust with Carlyle's character and they're caught and that's a whole scandal. But in the early nineties priests being gay was some terrible truth, whereas meanwhile, twenty years later, a far more terrible truth is not that many were gay but that many were pedophile rapists. So, now we have a movie with the same storyline, only the poor sod not only falls in lust with another man, that man is a boy in his 'troubled youths' workshop. It really doesn't get any less comfortable than that. Nobody rapes anyone, but it's still nasty.

Let me work out some pros and cons on the subject of a priest porking a teen.

CONS

First of all, troubled youths - youths in general - are very impressionable. They lust after authority. There is a reason why an adult shouldn't take advantage of that, no matter how adorable they are.

Troubled youths will go for their 'rescuers', social workers, counselors, etc... all the time. Also, they hump one another all the time. Someone should really tell them that being a teenager simply means you're going to (try to) hump everything that throws a shadow and that is hardly a reason to kill yourself. They're called hormones. It's how a species perseveres.

The man is a priest. As far as I can tell, not The Church of England. So, no sex. Stick with one fucking vow, man. Isn't it supposed to be like marriage?

Having such a relationship really unsettles the community, especially if it's half closeted. 

PROS

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being gay.

Two (more or less) adult men have the right to do anything they may ever want together, because 90% of a relationship is a lot more interesting than humping.

Not all love is based on fucking. Sometimes you can truly love a bunch of non-relatives, just because you're a nice person and want to help them. You can feel protective and possessive over several people you happen not to want to hump.

Just because something is tempting, doesn't mean it's evil. It also doesn't mean it will ever be anything more than a pleasant fantasy. People like pretty things. Everyone likes several things. It is not a reason to destroy everything else. People are allowed some sense of privacy.

Bottom line ... Being very good at being a priest and helping troubled young men, but at the same time being lonely is the mother of all bitches. 

I have no idea how to get out of that one. As far as I could tell, it ended with the young mute scarred pyromaniac also becoming a priest, though I don't understand what reason he had for that logic. Wouldn't it make more sense for the other guy to step out of the cloth, live with his lover and establish a community center as an openly gay man? In a relationship?

Friday night's wild time

As per usual, my Maja hailed me over for a wild night out on the town, which generally consists of: food or in this case coffee smoothie with chunkcs of mango and pineapple to nibble on, then a sweep through a shopping mall, frottaging expensive watercolor brushes, meeting Nea, getting advice on summer perfume and cream samples, and ogling cool products I may want to own at some point (Burt's Bees handcreme, yummy...). Lastly, a movie (Blackhat, which was visually adorable, like Miami Vice twice overdone, Viola Davis' makeup was amazing, but story-wise I didn't get it... Tin mines what? Acer comps for hackers? With no pre-charging time? FBI professionals driving right into a gunfight with no vests on? Cash machines giving out 5000 Euros? Picking a public festival for a certain gunfire orgy? ... Still. Everything makes sense with enough popcorn and popcakes. All in all, my ideal night out :D And still, the movie really was a visual treat. Trailers, too. I may actually watch the American Sniper. Am also looking forward to Selma.

Wish you could smell this. It's addictive. <3

Dark chocolate with pollen ...

I've spent the last few days writing (right off the previous chapter of meeting Marowit) about king Nuada Silverhand, working from the notes I wrote down ages ago, years ago, from a dream. This is the first character Paper kills in Goose (more accurately, assists the suicide of or proves to be the method – something that later helps her figure out how to save Marowit, ironically.) There was a lot of dialogue in the original chapter, but since having seen Only Lovers Left Alive, it kind of makes more sense for the two to just drive around at night, in silence, or just stay in the same room, curtains drawn, talking about the past, talking about life, about being responsible for your own legend, until they decide on it. It is supposed to be Paper's low point: she has just returned from Gorgonaut, her world is a mess, her husband is far away, she has taken on her first lover, but he's away, too, and her friends are scattered. She is without Zurnizip banner, banned from her profession and her abilities – she's just a normal woman, asked to talk to a man who wishes to die. I am thinking I want to add a twist to their scene, something like: at the last moment he threatens her to do him in or he will do her and she contemplates letting him kill her, until his final gift to humanity is returning her lust for life…

Dunno. I don’t want to get sucked into all of this too much. It’s a little too dark for my taste. Then again of course if that’s how I was feeling, I wouldn’t be able to write it.

A page from 'Goose' - how Marowit and Kay first meet (when he is sent to rid of her)

“Which one?”

“What?”

“Which of the souls? It’s an old fable Lord Morphei had three souls, three dream faces. Which one of the three fathered you? Was it his centre? Or was it Phantasos? No, wait. I get it. The screams and the rapes. You’re the nightmare. Phoebetor’s boy.”

During the confrontation, the world around us became more solid and gradually bright. In the middle of the shapes and shadows, he became more substantial. For a moment I thought he doesn’t look so ugly at all. Now as he was leaning in closer (as he dared so), I could also see the texture of his skin and the veins on his wrists, the earrings and the needlework on his clothes and the shape of his toenails. A handsome little thing, to be sure, but he didn’t worry me. Not even when he grabbed me and threw me on the ground, nor when he choked me and shook me and hissed he will show me how a woman is handled, before she is ended. He sounded rehearsed.

“Is this how you killed lord Morphei’s wife?” I croaked. It was difficult to talk, because his grip on my throat was hard, but he heard me. He’s stopped trying to rape me altogether.

The grip loosened ever so briefly. If he knew what he was doing, he’d be digging thumbs to in to break the oesophagus. This was he was just slowly cutting off the flow of blood to my brain and I was getting warm and fuzzy.

“What did you say?”

“Did you rape her first, too? … Did you rip out her heart and whispered it how her husband and son are dead?”

                “I didn’t kill Amis! What are you talking about?! …”

“Who, then?”

The grip loosened entirely.

“Do you even know?” I pressed on.

The thing moved away from me, kneeling above me. I didn’t try to sit up, I just wiped the tear that ran down my eye due to pain. It was a reflex, not weeping. Perhaps angry weeping. But I felt good otherwise. Extremely so. Valdemar would be proud of me, I was certain. ‘Tis may be how I die, but I wasn’t going to let the little shit farce relish in it.

I could see the rigid upbringing kick in every time the threshold of panic and emotion was growing too much. He snarled aloofly, nostrils flaring: “It is not your wit to know who governs worlds that bleed pity and shadows on the earth you thread! My family is so above you I couldn’t even begin to beat their majesty into you.”

“Oh, so it was your family? We’ve been wondering about that. Why did they do it?”

“Why? Why do suns burn madly when there’s no one watching, why do sons put spears into their eyes for their fathers’ sins?”

“Why does a tiny nightmare inherit the throne of dreams, even when it neither deserves, wants nor handles it? Could it be because he’s but a puppet’?”

He pushed away like I was something frightfully disgusting and stood up. “I am not a nightmare!”

I actually expected him to snarl: I am not a puppet.

“Your job is to murder people in their sleep using night terrors! You were about to rape and murder ME and I’m awake! How are you not a nightmare?”

“It is my honest joy to kill you! All of you. Lord Morphei must never …!”

 “What’s it to you? He is dead. He’s not a king anymore; he’s just some scabs and brittle bones, rattling death from his scratched lips, not poetry. He will never be a God again. Even he doesn’t know if he even wants to be a human. Nobody can argue for him, because his voice is too long lost. We were just a bunch of old fools, trying to right a cosmic wrong. It has nothing to do with you. You go do your job. Blow some sand around. Manage your estates. Try to build some nice buildings in the memory of your cousins that got killed. Write a poem. You needn’t worry about us. We couldn’t threaten you even if we tried. And we won’t try. We used to like your people.”

If he heard any of this and understood half, good, but the time it took to vomit such a speech gave me enough opportunity to shake the strangulation haze and sit up, pushing from my elbows. He frowned a sad, angry child’s frown and hissed, under his breath, without looking at me: “Makes no difference.”

“Course it does. Does to us.”

“You all must perish.”

“Pull your head out of your arse and create something beautiful! I’ve not had a dream for weeks and trust me, little princeling, I know when a dream is void.”

“T’was wasted words on non-existent ears. I cannot let you leave here alive. I will not.”

“We’re in dreamscape, you idiot. My body’s on the floor in a small room in London.”

“Nobody can survive a death in dreams!”

“I’m a trained fantasist, you daft cunt, the first thing they teach you is how to combat a myoclonic twitch! I will just wake up!”

It was actually sad to see how naïve and lost he was. He just stood there, realizing he’s fucked up. He should have done some research at least, his face said. This was all wrong. I should have been a defeated thing by now. But I have gotten on my feet and started to fix my clothes back to where they were supposed to compliment my modesty.

“Just leave me alone and go do whatever it is you are supposed to be doing, reigning,” I muttered, tucking in my shirt. “I’ll go home and go make some breakfast. Not that you’d know what that is.”

He gave me a tired, warning look. “I can make better pancakes than you.”

“Now you’re just being delusional. You can’t even make a better speech. And your kissing is pathetic.”

“I wasn’t trying to kiss you nicely.”

“You weren’t trying to murder me nicely either and you frakked that part up like a pro.”

What do they call your around here, anyway? was my last question to him, before, after an eon of deafness and darkness, I woke up in my bed (where it looks like I’ve been purposefully moved so that I wasn’t in the way of the nurses.) in Notting Hill. Rhyannon checked me, checked the damage and my vitals, then gave me a ‘you certainly can bullshit your way out from underneath the gallows, boss’ look. I needed coffee, though, surprisingly enough, I didn’t feel any particular need for a good cry.

They call me Morpheus, actually, he sighed. But I think that’s their idea of a joke.

General's line of the week

"When you sleep, you sound like an old submarine at 600m depth."
(I pucker my lips and give small 'pings', it seems..)
Better that than him (when he has a cold), sounding like two ents strangling one another.

Thistle :D