Noise in the Attic

Based on PBW’s recommendation, I bought a copy of Marjorie M. Liu’s Iron Hunt a couple of weeks ago. I started reading it last night and … and … damn!

This is writing that transcends the mere words. The beauty and rhythm and imagery turns plain prose into song. It is as rich and creamy as fine cheesecake, as wild and fierce as the Arctic wind. It’s not a book I can read in large chunks. I’m having to ration it, savor it.

This is writing that I dream about. When I read something like this, I despair of ever being so good. It’s really hard to keep going when the bar is this high. I know that practice makes perfect, but damn! Just damn!

Even if you don’t like dark fantasy, you should at least stop into your local book store and read the first chapter. The power and beauty of Liu’s poetic writing will knock your boots clean off. This is definitely one for my keeper shelf.

Bless me bloggers, for I have sinned. It’s been two weeks since my last post.

The truth is that I am living in grayscale right now. No colors, just drab and fading slowly toward the Fall. This is the really fun time for me. I’m not depressed (yet), but neither am I anywhere near wherever normal is. Not even the blues. Just gray. It is literally all I can do to get up and go to work every day. I’m not going to start staying home, though. That would be a defeat of the worst kind for me.

The good news is that I have made some progress on Washed in the Blood. I think I have finally got the opening in shape. Now there is an immediate sense of menace, and Thomas is revealed as the monster from the first scene. That is followed by a couple of scenes in which Thomas is urbane and charming and quite unmonsterlike. That takes a little of the edge off of the axe when it falls shortly thereafter, but I think that is drowned out by the horror of what he does then.

I have one more scene to flesh out (so to speak, heh heh), and Chapter 1 will be pretty much complete at 6000 words. That may be a little short, but a lot goes on, and I think the reader needs a break at this point. The revision should pick up some steam after this, because I won’t be so distracted by that opening. Not that it’s likely to survive the next revision, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

BTW, I found this book at B&N last weekend:

Break the Bipolar Cycle: a Day-by-Day Guide to Living With Bipolar Disorder
Elizabeth Brandolo and Xavier Amador
ISBN: 978-0-07-148153-3

I STRONGLY recommend this book to anyone living with Bipolar Disorder or their loved ones and caregivers. It’s full of workshops and forms to help you cope and to help you talk to your doctor about what is happening. It has also helped me understand some things I had thought were just symptoms of craziness. Ever wonder why I never call? The answer is in Chapter 10.

Just a reminder of why we celebrate this day. It’s good to remind ourselves occasionally.

Hope everybody has a great weekend.

The Summer Solstice has come and gone, and darkness creeps closer every day.

Even in these days of light, the darkness rules my life. Those who have followed this blog for very long understand that I am bipolar, originally diagnosed as having unipolar depression. I live with darkness every day. Some days are darker than others.

This has been my whole life. When I was growing up, such disorders were not allowed, not even to be thought about, shameful. I spent over forty years living in a Hell I could not understand. I simply could not comprehend why I felt so damned bad all the time. Only a close encounter with suicide finally brought home to me that there was something seriously wrong.

I recently celebrated my first anniversary of feeling pretty much worth a shit most of the time. A good psychiatrist who stuck with me through those bad times and never gave up on me made all the difference in my life. I wish everyone could be so lucky. Some of my friends don’t have that luxury and suffer the tortures of the damned sometimes because of it.

Neither do I have the luxury anymore. My doctor, my friend, the man who saved my life, moved away. My new doctor is not so good. That is unfortunate, but not unrecoverable. I could change doctors, shop around to see what else is out there, but I won’t, at least not yet.

The best thing my former doctor did for me was to arm me, or armor me, to give me the tools I need to understand what is happening to me and to know that I can survive the bad times and that good times will come around again.

Bipolar Disorder is all about cycles. Light follows dark as surely as day follows night. Maybe the dark times last longer than the light, but that just means that I can enjoy the good times more, knowing that they will fade, as well.

Days of sunlight, nights of storms. Weeks of darkness, weeks of light. I will survive. I’m too damned stubborn to do anything else.

My wife and I ate our supper outside on the deck this evening. This is quite remarkable when you consider that this is June 3O in the Deep South. This is literally Mid-Summer down here.

We sure won’t complain, The relief from day after day after day of temperatures in the mid- to high-nineties, even into the low hundreds, and sixty-plus percent humidity is welcome. I wish it would last, but it won’t. We have plenty more heat before things turn around for good. Small reliefs make life richer.

At the same time we tried out out our new Vivitar binoculars/digital camera. Very cool. They only cost about $30US, and are definitely not high-end anything, but they give us a leg up on our amateur birdwatching. Since we can now get pictures (we hope!), that will help make identification easier.

All in all, today was a good day. I like good days.

One of the things I like best about my AlphaSmart Neo is that I can work on a document without naming it. There is real power in a name. Naming something gives it a concrete reality in my mind, gives it a form of life. Not having to name a document means that I am free to change it or kill it on a whim. This is a peculiarity of mine that often works against me. Named documents acquire an air of sacredness that sometimes hinders my attempts to do the necessary things to turn a story into something publishable.

Names do indeed have power. Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?* Would a character named James Sweet have the same personality as one named Harville Scumpit? Of course not. And everyone knows the power of a story’s title. The associations between words and ideas in our minds is real and unavoidable.

Paradoxically, my stories are sometimes inspired by a title. When that happens, the title becomes an integral part of the story and informs the plot and characters to a large extent. Other times, I have to struggle to find a title that fits the story. Sometimes I never do.

Character names give me fits. Finding a name that refelcts something about the character, that has meaning within the story, is often a major battle. I often despair of my creativity at those times.

Names have meaning. Names have power. Names matter. Sometimes it helps to remain nameless.

*Please pardon the allusions. We caught the last 3 acts of Franco Zefirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey) on television a couple of nights ago. Damn that’s a good movie!

I received my 97th rejection letter today. I am officially starting the countdown to 100. I anticipate reaching that goal around the end of the month.

100 rejections is a true milestone. Everybody who is anybody has amassed triple-digit rejections. Three I know of off the top of my head are Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Harlan Ellison. High cotton indeed.

I am looking at this as a time to reflect on the value of persistence and as evidence of my commitment to writing. A celebration will be in order when the big day comes. Maybe I’ll break down and eat a piece of chocolate cake.

I’ve been getting feedback on one of my current favorite stories from my crit-group partners, and I have come to a painful realization. One of my favorite scenes has to die. It’s beautifully written and emotionally wrenching, but…

but.

It does not advance the story. It’s a tea party in a graveyard, a wonderful set-piece vignette that goes nowhere and does nothing. I hate this. I love this scene (or whatever it is), and sending it to the Elephant’s Graveyard is killing me. I know the story will be better without it. I know that. It still hurts.

Damn.

I purposely refrained from working on Washed in the Blood for a couple of months now. I really felt I had to let it get out of my mind for a little while so I could think clearly about it. That turns out to have been a really good idea.

The real problem is that opening scene. Still. But I now know how to fix it, in general. the specifics are still driving me to distraction. I have not been able to get a firm grasp on a good, story-driven scene that will grab a reader’s attention and raise the story questions that I need to raise up front.

I am taking my annual mini-retreat the weekend of June 20, and that is Number One on my list of things to work on. I am optimistic that I can get this worked out to my satisfaction and start moving forward on the revision.

I still love this story and believe in it, in spite of all the horrors it has inflicted upon my psyche. I think it’s a story that needs telling, not just told by me but told for the rest of the world. That may be the kiss of death: the proverbial Book of the Heart that brings shudders to the soul and tears to the eyes of every agent and editor. We’ll see. Even if it winds up in my desk drawer, it will at least have been writtten.

I’m not going to make my goal of ten stories for the Story-a-Day Challenge at Forward Motion. I only got five done and uploaded. I do have two more underway, but I won’t have time to finish them.

BUT

I’m okay with that. Of the five uploaded stories and two unfinished, five of them contain the seeds of compelling stories, and one more niggles at my imagination in a way that tells me I’ll see it again some day, probably in disguise.

At the same time, I joined a crit group at FM that has already pushed me to finish a story that has been hanging fire forever (”What Dreams May Come”). A couple more are waving from the wings. Doing crits has possibly helped me more than anything else to learn about craft. Studying others’ work is an excellent way to get to know my own. I have missed that over the past couple of years.

All things considered, I am quite pleased with the Merry Month of May.