Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!
Morphemes! Lexicon! Gobbledegook! Flow!
What fun. Can there be any higher form of beauty?
I like (what is to me) beautiful, just-the-right-rhythm writing. I like make-believe stories and clever plots and actiony characterization and magnalium ideas. I like Stefan Zweig. I like David Wallace. I like what words can make us see. I like the worlds that they plop us in, s.t. each of us is (still) the center of the universe, but a different universe, the author’s machinations helping us slip through the portal of imagination that is a book, erecting a dingy, peeling house around us where we can observe from above or around or from the safety of shoes the haze of Hazel as Mack shouts.
Why did I create this site in the first place? To write stories. From my youth, I wanted to be a writer. I spent half my life in narratives, not only reading and playing through them but dreaming them up too. And what I discovered is that writing makes me love the world. Certainly love is the feeling that comes from doing research for a new chapter, chipping through the encyclopedic surface of what we’ve effected as a people: each experience contained in a deformed little snow globe, a diorama calling to us to communicate through a medium slash channel that’s not here, but there, growing up and around us so that we’re in the globes, in there saying what they say and feeling what they feel. There’s so much more excitement in those simulations than in our boring old real lives. We’re actors in a play, able to do anything we want and say anything we want and set it up so that other people will share our memories too, for how else would people like me communicate those thoughts? How else would people like me communicate imagination?
It’s songlike, the words sometimes. Nice-sounding words. Silky and ethereal and effervescent. We catch on to their tailplanes and “understand” and fly with them, artists of written works piloting expressions like artists of paint mold viscous fluid into the image of anything that damn well comes to mind. They set the pace, they change the mood, they give people chills and shock and happiness and fear. They make us think whatever they want us to think, create feelings, kill feelings, exchange them for others…
“Commercial fiction puts the reader first.
Literature puts the artistry first.” (Taylor Follett.)
These days, I am writing some nice, simple commercial fiction. Let’s go readers. ;) I have a lot of ideas. Some may end up as short stories, some may end up as shorter stories, and most will probably and sadly remain in writing purgatory (as unfinished drafts) for the remainder of time. But no matter the result, it’s looking like a slow process – I only feel comfortable giving myself a small amount of writing time each day. When I finish any of my stories, I’ll let you guys know.