Fizz! Bang! Whamo! Honey Pot!

So, after a recent chat with artist friend B-- over at frogfeetproductions, a new idea has popped up. Graphic novels! No, serious. Yeah, this probably sounds like other ideas I've popped out: writing for the Nugget, hacking out that novel, producing a coupla short stories--but it's different, see, because it involves a partnership, another person depending on your work so that you've got to get your end of the deal done in time. I'm good at that! I don't like conflict; don't like letting people down.

Of course, there's the downside that I don't actually know anything about the graphic novel written form--the script format or how much you're supposed to impose on the artist. (B--'s the artist, obviously. I can barely manage stickmen, as you can see to the left here. Me, MS Paint, and a touchpad: yay! Though I do hope to learn how to draw someday--at least, to draw better. Though my latest whiteboard drawing--Clucky the R.E. chicken--has become the offical mascot of my year seven R.E. class. I should commission a proper drawing of that damn chicken--he's a funky mascot. And he's religious!

To be honest, it's not the first time I thought about it. (Writing a graphic novel, that is, not non-denominational chickens.) After reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, yeah, I was suddenly big on the idea of the graphic novel. And I think I've got a coupla ideas floating about in the back of my head. So who knows... something else to play with (or feel like a loser about if I don't get it done). But B--'s really good, and I think between the two of us--I mean I honestly think we could come up with something of genuine quality!

Guess we'll see...

Revising a poem; the past keeps you humble

I think I've decided to stick with yesterday's poem.

Is it good? Nah, not really, but considering how little poetry I've actually written--I think I've got something to learn by working it over, polishing it into something a tad better. I'll ditch those middle stanzas and rework 'em a bit. Kinda fun, really.

But nothing new and original to post tonight, despite my intentions to get some writing done. But wait! What's this? Rather than something new, how about a blast from the past, a relic drawn up from the deepest, darkest recesses of my hard drive? This little gem was hacked out on an 8086 (!) and has been transfered from floppy to hard drive to cd and back so often it's a miracle it's still intact--let's give it up for digital!

So here we go, the opening paragraphs of The Guardian, introducing the world to Dav (formely known as Dave), rescuer of princesses!

***
With a mighty battle-cry the shimmering blade slashed downwards once again, and dug deep into putrid flesh. The horrid, misshapen creature let out a pathetic scream, till Dav's mystical blade ended its existence by removing its skull-head with a single swing. Steaming, acidic blood splashed outward, hissing as it struck the warrior's armor.

He turned, oblivious to the melting scum that was all that remained of the chaos-spawned monstrosity. Dav, also known as the Crusader, looked around, searching for more enemies. Small skirmishes continued around him as his valiant army repressed the last of the demon-hordes that had been recently pouring out of the chaotic Hellands.

***

Not bad, I'd like to think, for a 15 year old. It's readible, at least. Ah, but just wait for some of the scintillating dialogue!

***

"Prepare to die, foolish mortal! None can stand against the hordes of Rakash, Demonlord of the third Pale, servant to none but Histhanar and those of the fourth and greater, and his minions!" His voice was terrible to hear, and a loathsome smell poured from his nostrils.

Even as Dav looked, other creatures, similar to Rakash, but seemingly lesser in status, rose from the ground, emerging next or in the midst of his armies. He raised himself to his full height, and turned to face to vile Demonlord.

"Rakash!" he thundered out in his most commanding voice. "Know one thing, before you attack! I am Lord Roberts, Duke of Shaminé, defender of this land, protector of its people. I am also known as the Crusader, savior of Kulmon, defeater of Chaos, rescuer of princesses. Furthermore, I am known as Dav, the demonslayer. And know that I wield Sekaon, blade of Power, wear the enchanted armor of Khavin, and bear the great shield Arkadiov. And I fear neither you, nor did I fear your superiors, as they fell to my Chaos-slaying weapons and magic!"

For a second, the great Demon seemed to hesitate, doubt creeping through its loathsome eyes....

***

Oh... my... God.

Stars Are Many and the Dark Is Deep

Hardly fair to ask my year nine students to write poetry and not give it a go myself. Distracted myself from necessary corrections and wrote a villanelle for myself. For those not familiar, the villanelle is a very structured form of French poetry that fell out of favour and was often dismissed as pretty but essentially pointless--until Dylan Thomas came along and wrote one of the greatest poems of the 20th century in that style: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.

I'm no Dylan Thomas. I don't even pretend to be a hack poet. But here you go: Mike's Untitled Villanelle! This bloody thing took me over an hour to write (maybe two!), can you believe it?

***
Untitled

At night across my heart I feel it creep
Empty spaces nearer home catch the sky:
Yet stars are many and the dark seems deep

Solitude and angry thoughts deny me sleep,
Double bed with a single pillow: why?
At night across my heart I feel it creep.

Against the glass those cold distant lights sweep,
The answer must lie with a woman’s thigh.
Yet stars are many and the dark seems deep.

Cheerful pub glow, and company we keep,
To then return home and try not to cry.
At night across my heart I feel it creep.

Whatsoever a man sows shall he reap,
I observed the winds and the clouds that fly.
Yet stars are many and the dark seems deep.

And I am deeper yet; I will not weep.
To those empty spaces I turn my eye.
At night across my heart I feel it creep,
Yet stars are many and the dark seems deep.

***

Yes, I cribbed from both Robert Frost (Desert Places) and the Bible. Rough as this thing is... any comments? (And no, please, don't read too deeply into it, eh?)

Not sure what I was trying to get at. I think I began intending it as a bit of a lark and half-way through tried to take it seriously. Started by looking at possible rhymes, actually--a villanelle requires an awful lot of them (7 for your 'a' and 6 for your 'b')--and maybe was thinking of my recent posts on my main blog and words like 'dark', 'lonely', 'night' came to mind... which I admit is very, very cheesy. You'd think I'm an angsty 14 year old. A 14 year old _girl_ for chrissake! But the difference between a 14 year old and an adult (that would be me, I think) is, I hope, that I can at least try for something a bit deeper. (Trying in no way assures actually achieving any depth.) So I wanted to start with some of that depressing, lonely stuff--which immediately made me think of Robert Frost, for some reason, even though I haven't read or studied his stuff in years, but with that whole star and depth thing suggest that there's always more to it--an infinity of options, alternatives; and since it all only 'seems' deep, I figure that'd be my backdoor in case someone accused me of bullshit.

Meh, it's not all bad, I'd like to think. The biblical reference is a bit obscure... not the sowing and reaping ("whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap"--Galatians (ch. VI, v. 7)), but the wind and clouds ("He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap"--Ecclesiastes (ch. XI, v. 4)), which is to say... I haven't sown a thing, and therefore I'll reap nothing as well.

Not sure if the ending is optimistic or not. Am I turning my eye towards those deeper spaces I'd like imagine are within myself? Or turning away from them? Eh, who knows?

I wish I had rhythm. Sigh. I'd hate to drop a whoop-ass can of scansion on this thing. Not that I quite know how, that is.

Enough beating up my own work. Maybe with some revision and serious thought I could salvage it into something mediocre. But, you know: "Double bed with a single pillow: why?" I mean... c'mon! And how seriously can you possibly take any poem that mentions a woman's thigh?

Clapham Junction to Waterloo

A random piece of writing, written on the South-West Line from... well, you know.

***
Riding on the train
September, 11, 2005

Self-absorbed girl, riding on the train. Her eyes look inwards; when they glance aside it’s to check her reflection in the windowpane. Made-up and pretty, but the lack of a smile is a blemish—is she that inured to men looking back at her? Sitting across from her and excusing myself for forcing her to move her legs, she studiously avoids eye-contact. Were I female, would it have been different? Is she that removed from the flow of human contact around her? Or am I spinning a fiction about her drawn from my own frustrations?

Dressed as she is, on a Sunday night… where is she headed? Simple jeans and simple, slipper-like shoes, pink—casual; but her low-cut top and blazer suggest sexiness, an effort to dress-up, as does her careful makeup and the constant fiddling with her appearance. A hint of cleavage shows, eyes drawn there by the claw-like necklace she wears, the point leaning towards the curve of the right breast. Casual, but made-up… maybe a night in with a new boyfriend?

Drawing into the station I ask her, “Is this Waterloo?”

“Yes,” she answers, and her smile is pretty.

***
Had fun riding that above bit, in a quick little flurry while sitting across from that girl, still secretly pleased in a very geeky way at the liberty enjoyed by ownership of a laptop. I felt tempted to lean across the distance between us and let her know that she was the subject of my writing. Creepy, huh? Though I might give it as a writing assignment to my students: over the weekend, write a quick character sketch of someone you observe while on the bus, in a taxi, waiting for a ride, hanging around at the mall. Stalking as education!

Think I've finally found more a purpose for this blog. I haven't dedicated much time to any 'rea' writing--that novel I keep dreaming about--but I still manage lots of little bits here and there, beyond the usual drivel that I call my blog. So I'll start posting those little blurbs here. Artists have their sketchblogs, why shouldn't I do the same? Little fragments of characterization, descriptive passages, random scrawlings, things I like, and my exemplars of all the various works I ask my students to do, too....

So: more to come, soon!

I'm a Girl!

No, I'm not, really, but that's the title of something I wrote up quickly today. See, as an exercise in creative writing and differing perspective (kinda) I gave my year ten class the following activity:

You go home tonight. You go to bed. Tomorrow morning you wake up and—gasp!—you changed sex overnight! Now you’re a boy—what happens? Write 2 or 3 short scenes showing what happens… a conversation with your mum, or a change in your morning routine, for example.

Well, like I said, I figure a teacher should demonstrate every now and then the same skills demanded from the students, and that goes beyond answering 'how do you spell...' questions in the classroom. So I wrote this thing up in about twenty minutes or so. (Always hard to tell how much time flows by when writing, actually.

***

Back to Work

For several long moments the woman stood outside the classroom, gripping the door frame so tightly that her otherwise delicate-seeming fingers turned white. The red nail polish seemed all the brighter in contrast. She could hear the happy morning chatter of the girls. Why shouldn’t they be happy? the woman thought. It was just another school day for them. After a few, deep steadying breaths she stepped into the room.

They didn’t recognize her at first. How could they? She stood there in front of form 10T, one hand alternately twisting in the fold of her skirt and then smoothing the wrinkles away. Her friend Amber had brought her on an emergency shopping trip the night before. Standing wobbly in two inch heels that her friend had assured her were ‘sensible’ but that nevertheless cruelly pinched her feet; in a skirt that felt too short and tight and with a shirt—a blouse!—that felt cut too low and exposed too much; in stockings that seemed comfortable on the walk to work but that now felt scratchy and sweaty in the stifling hot room; and otherwise dressed like any other professional woman in the workplace, she wondered what strange, surreal nightmare she’d stepped into. The colours of the clothes seemed all wrong, bright and painfully feminine. A cloying floral cloud enveloped her, her friend’s choice of perfume. The tickle of longer hair across the back of her neck was a constant distraction. The taste of lipstick was thick and strange and wrong on her lips. Everything felt wrong and surreal and she suddenly wondered what the hell she’d been thinking, coming to work like this, she should’ve taken another sick day no matter what the headmistress had said . . . .

The class fell silent as all eleven girls suddenly turned wide-eyed to this sudden feminine intrusion into their class. They somehow all seemed taller and larger than a few days ago. The woman realized that it was she who had changed, lost height and mass, her body twisted into a shape and odd proportions she’d hardly recognized when she woke up a yesterday morning.

It must have been the ever-present laptop case, held in her right hand, which confirmed her identity.

“Mis . . . ter N--?”

“Miss N--,” she answered dryly. “For now.”

***

Nothing spectacular, but gets the point across. Actually, even if not a stellar display of writing ability, it does use a number of skills that are easily taken for granted. For example--well, you can't tell because of formating issues with blogger--indenting new paragraphs. Amazing how many students don't know about that. Actually, paragraphing full-stop is a tricky skill. There's some loose skills governing when and why to start a new paragraph, but I have to admit I just kinda picked it up through practice and lots of reading. Students who don't read? You have to teach 'em how.

And, well... so much other stuff. The format of dialogue: quotation marks, commas, starting a new paragraph when a new speaker begins, or how to split a single speaker's dialogue across a single paragraph.

Or how to get information across implicitely rather than explicitly--showing nervousness or anxiety rather than just writing something like she stood nervously by the open door.... I overdo it, of course, in the above bit but I'd like to think it's to prove a point. Though I really do overdo it in my own writing.

Or use of semi-colons, something else I also abuse in my own writing, though far less now than I used to. Sentences of varying length, and the effect such variation has... something done more by instinct than intention, which makes it particularly difficult to teach. The taste of lipstick was thick and strange and wrong on her lips, I write, and I'd say the repeated use of 'and' is to capture an equal weight to each adjective as well as some of the mental confusion, or at least captured attention, of that mind. The taste of lipstick was thick, strange and wrong on her lips, reads slightly differently, no? Or maybe it's all in my own mind. Any opinions?

As an aside, I posted the update to Choices on FF.net a week or two back, and response has been mostly good, and has brought a huge jump in the number of hits to that story, which is good. The number of reviews finally breached 100, although that's not what's important. (Of course.) The writing's been kind of held up because of the demands of work, but hopefully I'll get back to it soon. In the meantime I've got other peoples' writing to look through, my students' assignments, and corrections to make and advice to offer. Wow, I sound like a real prat, don't I? What the hell do I know about writing? Just finished Death of a Salesman. You want some good writing? That's good writing. Characterization? Dialogue. Fuck. Way out of my league, painfully so.

First Person

Well, much to my own surprise the writing continues largely unabated!

Which isn't to say I'm hacking out page after page, but I am managing to get a little bit of writing done every day... a couple hundred words here, a page or two there... and it's remaining interesting to me. Perhaps it's a method of procrastination (as it has often been), a way to avoid the work I've got to get done in preparation for school; either way, I'm creeping closer to the end of the chapter.

I'd forgotten how much I actually _like_ writing, as difficult and frustrating as it can be, sometimes. The current stuff is new for me as well. I've never tried writing from a first-person perspective before, and though I'm sure I'm doing a mediocre-at-best job of it, it's a nice change.

I shouldn't consider it wasted/procrastinated time, though. I'll be teaching two units in creative writing come... well, tomorrow... so it's good practice for me. I firmly believe a teacher should practice what he or she teaches. If I insist that the students write a creative piece from the perspective of, I dunno, the pair of shoes that Stanley throws over the bridge in the novel Holes, then I damn well better be able to write from an original perspective as well. So, yeah... writing fanfiction is research!

The most recent update was posted to Fanfiction.net yesterday, and hopefully it'll update soon. I won't post anything to the ML until I've done the whole chapter. Wonder if anyone'll care, after a two-year gap between posts?

An in-flight entry about Choices

So I finally got back into writing Choices.

I’m not sure why the story has languished for so long. In fact, I’ve come very, very close to abandoning it completely several times now. Why? Well, the most obvious reason is that I’m just not that into anime in general anymore, and Ranma specifically. Fanfiction itself has lost some of it’s allure… I used to read loads of it, and now hardly read any. And finally I’ve been increasingly wanting to write a ‘real’ story—that is, something that I could publish and possibly, in my most optimistic dreams, even make money off of. Fanfiction will never be that. I can’t publish Choices. It’s not my world, not my characters, no matter how much I try to make them my own. Increasingly, my fanfiction stories have felt more like a burden than a hobby.

Strangely enough, though, I’ve gotten back into writing Choices for the same reason that I started writing it in the first place: practice. I started writing fanfiction so very long ago because I hadn’t written any form of fiction since high school and wanted to practice. Well, now I might want to write something ‘real;, but I was faced with the harsh reality that I hadn’t actually written anything in years. The words simply weren’t coming. Writing’s just like sex, or riding a bike: maybe you’ll never forget how to do it, but you sure can lose that refined edge through disuse.

But returning to Choices was difficult. I looked at where I left off and realized that I had absolutely no clue what was going on, who there people were and what they were up to. So I reread the whole thing, from The Party through to Decision, part one. And you know… I still like it! Strange to say. Don’t get me wrong: lots of it is painful to read. I have no idea what I was thinking with that whole dream sequence, and sometimes I’m amazed that readers of the story have shown such patience… it does go on in places, doesn’t it?

At the same time, there’s a real story there, I like to think, and I still feel commited to finishing it. I got hung up for ages at the conversation between Ranma and Akane. For some reason I felt the need to switch to Hiroshi at that point, but for ages had no idea what to do with him. It finally came to me, after rereading everything. I think I’d originally intended for him to dump Sayuri there… instead, they went off and had sex. Funny how these things happen.

The blockage broke during the flight from London to Ottawa, and now on the flight back I hope to get a bit more done. Maybe I’ll finally get this chapter done. I’m leading into the interesting stuff, finally, that I’ve been wanting to write out since starting ‘Decision’… I’ve finally made it to the bit where Ranma actually talks about the decision he’s got to make. Hopefully readers’ll like it to. I’m switching over to first-person perspective (-ish; it’s really 3rd, but comes off as 1st), and that’s new for me so the practice’ll be good.

I wonder if I’ll remember his ‘voice’ at all.