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I find I have my most artistic thoughts early in the morning. I figured the reason some years ago. It’s because I am not fully awake, not hemmed in by the fences of logic and ideas born of others, too drowsy to limit my ideas with the rules. That is art, my friends, each brushstroke your own, the color your own, the way it sets against the canvas of reality, even its smell – just you. And I don’t want to touch the you that someone told you, you ought to be. Although I will if that’s the closest I can get to you, just to know you as much as I can, to get a glimpse of your art, of what you could be. Why else am I alive!
Who are the gods of the art of writing anyway? Did they evolve? I suppose they must have, survival of the fittest – for money and market. Darwin would be proud to see his model sped up, to look so real in a mans lifetime. Editors and publishers and agents flooded with entries into the race for recognition and success, to be a demigod, a semi god with a voice to consider above the others or, lord have mercy, even respect and admire as they pose on the red carpet and ignore media mics beneath their ego. But Darwin knew that could never work. By definition alone, how many top dogs could you have? So evolution stepped in to save the day before the publishing industry sank to the bottom of the tar pits of six billion un-requested manuscripts and became eternally extinct. Gone, lost, perhaps one day in a distant future a robot archeologist will find a form reject letter entombed in amber and dream electronically of the ancient world in which this shard of the past thrived and flew through the postal system like an onslaught of Egyptian arrows raining down on a hapless enemy. A sad scene indeed, so much death and destruction, so many keyboards worn faint with use for naught. All the late night editing, the lost lovemaking, the back stiffening, Visine stock inflating effort for a dream that was never to be. You can hear your lover watching the academy awards in the background and you slump just a little lower in the best leather chair they had at Costco. So here are the rules, rigid as newly set fence posts. We’ll paint them white here so they’re easier to see, help keep everyone on the cold gray concrete path and out of the garden. Don’t step into the shrubs and flowers, knocking dew and pollen, disturbing Gods oldest and subtlest keys to continued life, the bees. You might be allergic to nature, your evolutionary advance too great to be at one with what was long ago left behind. You stand upright now, your path hardened and flat for ease of step, your advance beyond soft soil inevitable. Watch your shoulder on the fence posts, we haven’t put up the slats yet but they’re coming. You can still see the garden but we’ll soon fix that, it just takes time – and money, don’t forget the money.
Someone once said that the problem with the publishing industry today is that too many people with half a mind to write a book, do. Ah, you laugh but do you think that things have become better with the advent of the computer, the all-forgiving even prompting, word processor. I submit that ninety nine percent of the manuscripts that choke the industry are written by dreamers far, far too lazy to have written anything forty years ago. Back in prehistoric times when the Clarks and the Dicks and the Bliss’s and the Bradbury’s freely roamed the earth, unfettered and wild, the fence would have been stomped. No box for these scaly skinned predators whose imaginative appetite knew no bounds. The first thirteen would have been shredded by teeth sharp and round, as big as coke bottles. And with that brute regarding you, you read the first two chapters without question. Its not hard to trust talent when its deep rumbling breath dampens your hair as you patiently read on to find the answers to the first questions the text raises.
Who the hell made the client so damned impatient anyway? Was it Spielberg? Or maybe that son of a bitch Kubrick! No no no, not Kubrick, he didn’t believe in the first thirteen, my mother was sound asleep, her warm arm slipping off my boyish shoulder by the time the monolith touching ape’s gained the water hole. No it was definitely Spielberg, Spielberg and that nitwit Lucus slamming me in the face with bright flashing action before my three second pop tart was done in the microwave. And surround sound, five point one and everything in between, gees Louise, how do you compete with that?
Don’t you smile at me Darwin, you deathbed recanting jackass. I hope God read your book. It would just serve you right you big ape!
Fade off to music. “No time left for you…. no time left for you…”
[This message has been edited by tnwilz (edited February 28, 2007).]
[This message has been edited by tnwilz (edited March 01, 2007).]
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Whatever drugs you are taking where can I get them and how much will they cost? Rommel Fenrir Wolf II Posts: 856 | Registered: Nov 2006
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I do a lot of thinking out of stories while I'm lying in bed, either just before I fall asleep, or while I can't sleep and just want to stay in bed.
Just, oh, three weeks ago now, I spent my entire day in bed (eight-thirty AM to nine PM) from a bout of exhaustion (working nights is really draining). For about three hours in the afternoon, I ran through a few possibilities, and had my current work-in-progress ready to go. (Thought it up Thursday, wrote up an outline Friday and Saturday, started writing it Sunday---finished the first 23,000 word draft yesterday.)
Sometimes something filters through my mind in these moments for years, sometimes even after I've written them up (or written them down). They do tend to the lurid, though...