What to do?

What do you do when you wake in the night and face the harsh truth that you cannot write?  Do you take solace in the fact that often bad writers make piles of money?  I know I can write histories with a bit of a flourish and I know too that one in ten of my poems are not horrid. So my attempt at fiction is filled with holes I will soldier on and someday finish but for now I think I will put it aside until I can hold my nose long enough to end it. Who knows I might join the ranks of bad writers who make a fortune!

In the light of morning I continued thinking about this.  I expect that the final product of this foray into standard fiction will be ok.  And, this morning, I reminded myself that this was an experiment. I didn't think I could write straight fiction - plot, characters, etc. I can, but not well. I chose to write an erotic romance as a female friend once commented on a snippet of erotica I had written and told me I should write for women.  Well, each draft of this experiment has been met with a list of problems - which I fix, then comes the next list.  This is usual of course in writing as writing is rewriting.  But I now realize that straight fiction is not for me.  I had difficulty coming up with a 'beginning-middle-end plot; I have had my greatest difficulty in constructing lifelike characters. The writing itself was fun - I am very good, if not excellent at a turn of the phrase, of making people feel physicality through writing.  I suppose that is why I am better at poetry and that form I prefer, the prose/poem, in multimedia.  And of course, histories supply me with the plot and the characters ready made!

So, I will do the final draft but stop the changes there, and get it up on Smashwords or the iBook Store in the next week or so. And that will be that for straight fiction for me.

Writing death

Often in the morning as I slowly wake I contemplate I meditate on death.  How, I wonder, do you write this effectively?  I was suicidal once but now I am in my 60s death will come soon enough without my urging it on.  I can relax and wait the coming of my final lover. Imagining death, however, is like watching a good movie or listening to great music without being in the movie or making the music yourself. So I lay here this morning writing a little story of death and death came to life in two ways: one in this blog post and the second in this poem.

Cold beauty

In my mouth tantalizing hard cold steel

I hold you there with trembling eager hands

Not daring to pull your delicious curving trigger

But longing for that tender release 

I run my tongue along and taste the closeness and bitter tang

That I hold so dear in my hands

the new media

Well the new media is not so new, of course.  But this blog post by Mike Shatzkin, along with this CBC News article and my discovery of Daniela Andrade and the whole indie/online music scene got me thinking about the rumbling, rolling ongoing earthquake in the creative world.

Firstly, here is Mike Shatzkin's blog post: No the Big Five are not a Cartel by Mike Shatzkin
Secondly, the CBC article:   Indie Music labels and streaming music
Thirdly:  Daniela Andrade:  Daniela Andrade on YouTube

Mike Shatzkin, for those who do not know of him, has been reading books on mobile devices since the days of the Palm Pilot, but  his working life over five decades has been and is spent in various capacities, mostly advising,  for large publishers - usually as an expert on sales and marketing though his first job was working in a book store. He argues in this blog post that the big five publishing companies are innovative and reactive to new technological realities and more importantly do have the author in mind. Probably true,  as true as it can be for a large company heavily invested in old technology (print).  Where my eyebrows went up, was where he admitted that the acquisitions editors for big publishing companies, and their various imprints had no interest in books that would only sell a few thousand. They are, he admitted, mass market book factories (my term, not his).  I suppose this is his way of explaining why so many subsequent best sellers had a very hard time finding anyone to publish their first novel. This is a very long list.  Today, self-publishing in the eBook world, or even as print books for Amazon or Lulu, means none of these potentially classic books are missed or overlooked.  But, my point is that he admits his clients, the big 5, are interested only in mega sellers.  They are thus leaving out the vast majority of authors - probably the 99%.  This tells me they have yet to figure out this new world.  and 'they' in this sentence include the big name authors as well as their publishers. Anyone today can be both author and publisher all rolled into one and the big authors and big companies do not like this.

Now why did I link to the CBC article on indie music labels being hurt by streaming? Well, again, it is a case of the big names, both musicians and labels against the new technology.  The indie labels are small enough to be flexible and find a new place in this new media - which if you read the article carefully, you find they are doing.  The big labels stick DRM onto their product and the big artists complain publicly about piracy.

The third article presents a truly indie artist - a young, talented woman who has eschewed the old way of making music and becoming known entirely.  She makes her own videos and shows them on YouTube, or puts her music freely on SoundCloud.  She gets tens of thousand and even hundreds of thousands of views and downloads, all free. She then can sell to those who wish to pay.

The point of all this goes back to a discussion I participated on in Linkedin a few years ago. In one eBook group, someone asked:  If you could tell the future and you knew you would never make a living writing, would  you still write. Of the roughly two dozen who replied, only two of us said yes, as we had to write - it was a compulsion, it was part of who we are.  The remainder, the vast majority said, no, we would find some other line of work and stop writing.

It seems to me to be there are two types of creators:  those who must create, whether that be music or writing (or I imagine any sort of art) and those who have an ability but are in it to make big money only. With this new media, there is now a rumbling and a rolling of the earth underneath the feet of the big 5 publishers, the 1% of big name authors, the big recording labels, their main artists, which hides from them  an entirely new world of creativity being presented to the public, under their noses, which sniff disdainfully.

Heaven Borne: from The Man who fell from the Sky

Non-linear Writing

I have a complex life, doing a number of widely different tasks in any given day, some of which are money-making and some of which are necessary maintenance.  I won't bore you with the details, but while engaged in maintenance duties, I have taken to either listening to audio podcasts or watching video podcasts while engaged in these tasks.  One of these is a series from Open Yale on late Roman and early mediaeval history presented by Paul Freedman. I am on the lecture where he introduces Gregory of Tours to his class.  He mentions two translations: one he had  his students read where the editor and translator attempted to group and organize Gregory's writing into a logical and linear fashion. The other follows the original order. That is, it lacks the sort of order many consider to be 'orderly'.  It is non-linear.  That is, Gregory of Tours might be writing about a battle in one section, then in the very next paragraph digress to a discussion of a local saint, then in the next give a pocket travelogue of a city. I have attempted this in a limited form in  a World Religions course I teach as a part time, online instructor  (an Adjunct to Americans; a Sessional Instructor to Canadians) at the University of Guelph.  There I have the usual weeks corresponding to a typical term at my university:  twelve. But I also constructed with a brilliant Instructional Designer (alas now gone from the university) a chart using the stars in the night sky to allow students to surf the course.  That is, there is a star for Bahai, for Christianity, for Islam and so on which they can click and are whisked away to that section.  I also organized these 'stars' in cultural groups. Thus, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are located near to each other, as also Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism are close to one another, and that group is near to Shinto and so on.This is very much like surfing the net. 

 This is also the essence of my long prose/poem The Man who fell from the Sky.  Hmmmm.  I might include something similar for The Man who fell from the Sky.

William Blake

This post is not really about William Blake.  But, in a way it is.  This morning while eating breakfast I began to read some of his poems from Songs of Innocence (I have a free copy on iBooks on my iPhone). His poems worked about the same as mine - that is, I am rarely entirely satisfied with any one of my poems.  I have written hundreds over the past five years, but I would guess that maybe 10 or 20 satisfy me completely.  So, that a recognized classic poet is about the same relieved me.  But, I digress.  I have assiduously avoided reading the poetry of others since I began writing the same.  I have a weak will, and knew or believed, that if I read poetry I would copy the style of each poet as I wrote. With Blake, and other older poets, I decided to take a chance, thinking that their style would be so old and formal that I wouldn't have to worry.  My chief influences from High School days of studying poetry were Leonard Cohen and Catullus - so I avoid these!  But dreary, stilted Victorian poetry carries no such worries for me. 

I read a few, then decided to look at the Wikipedia article on Blake to get an idea of the man.  I found him to be someone who burst the boundaries of convention in his time - the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was a romantic - which I admire.  He was not a producer of standard dreary, stilted Victorian poetry. 

But, and this is the point of my post here, I realized from learning about his character that I had gone off track with my long prose-poem The Man who fell from the Sky. Yesterday, I published part of it here on this blog, after having rewritten sections and added other parts over the past week or so.  I have lost my way in it.  This work was to be a work of pure inspiration, avoiding - no not avoiding as the word 'avoid' implies deliberation.  The Man who fell from the Sky is to be a work where the voices shouting in my head pop onto the screen without any attention paid to conventions of writing, either prose or poetry.  Instead, over the past week, I have tried to shape it into a narrative, with only a few nods towards the madness I want to see there.  I am writing now a side story, as an experiment - a strictly text based, narrative bit of erotic romance.  An experiment because I didn't think I could write a strict beginning, middle, end narrative tale. I am enjoying the experiment.  But I find it has infected Sky Man.

So back to the drawing board for The Man who fell from the Sky. If someone like William Blake can spend his adult life in near penury because he refused to follow the conventions of his time in  his art, then surely a minor figure such as myself can also in this age.

The Man who fell from the Sky: beginning

He got up again, rooted around in the fridge and found the part bottle of white shoved to the back, and poured it into the glass, the cold white mingling obscenely with the drop of red still there. He went back into his office and sat again, sipping at the wine. He put his head in hands - thinking all the while that no decently skilled writer would dare put such a hackneyed scene to paper. But maybe scenes of despair where the hero puts his head in his hands are hackneyed because they describes a reality. He considered this possibility for a moment. Perhaps with a bit of a rewrite, he could take this and meld it into the novel..... then he considered getting into his old Grand Am, finding a nice, neat, pleasing, loving wall - aiming the car and finally letting it open up - its American engine, all muscle and no nuance, roaring into its last life - exploding into a last beautiful ball of flame, glass, metal, plastic - all shooting and exploding into the sky....
He lay on his back. The rain was soft, misty, comforting. The grass pressed into him, complaining only slightly at his presence. He felt it tickling his back, his arms, his legs, his buttocks. He realised he was naked. Little rivulets flowed off his legs, cascaded around his knees, flowed in eddies around his pubic hair and puddled in his navel. He felt his feet pointing up, but could see nothing except clouds. The rain massaged every bit of him, washing him, soothing him, cleaning him.. Grass, wet pinpoints, tension gone. No thoughts, sensation only.
He moved silently through the streets. The rain still washed him, still placed little pinpricks of pleasure on his skin. The grass still did not protest as his feet brushed along the dark green blades, the beads of rain vibrating slightly as his soles passed over. The water ran in rivulets from his hair down his back, leaping from his buttocks in an organic cascade; it trickled in a torrent of purity over his chest, his stomach, his sex, leaping from his penis and testicles, some managing to cling to his legs most finding rest on the grass below.
He was aware of a discomfort now. Searching. He was searching for something. Something misplaced. He lowered his face for a moment and looked straight ahead, passing grey through branches emerging on the other side.
He glistened in the rain. Although naked, he felt no cold, only pleasure at the small pricks of water bouncing off his skin. He noticed the tree - it seemed to be part of him - he looked up and saw branches rattling in a wind, beating a rhythm matching his heart. He moved beyond and the grass under his feet seemed filled with joy under him. Warmth moved from him inside down his legs to the grass, gratefully received. He turned his face up again, eyes wide open to the rain showering his face in a sensual throb, almost pornographic in its insistent beat.
He turned, hearing human voices approaching and a dog snuffling happily, chatting to itself, doubly happy knowing its people could not, did not understand. Simon did. The dog stopped for a moment, straining against its leash, jerking the man holding the other end to a stop. Simon and the dog - Henry was his human-given name - stared at each other, comprehending, communicating, calm and knowing. The people, the man with the leash and the woman casually holding his arm, looked but saw only grass and a lone tree. Simon stood naked, invisible and silent, then slowly floated up slightly, feeling comfort in the light breeze, fresh after the rain.