Saturday, October 27, 2007
on break from writing "How to Catch a Fairy"
My latest short story is going so slowly -- one paragraph at a time -- because of the self-consciousness I am enjoying. Almost more than writing a story, is the fascination watching myself imagine a story. Where those ideas come from and how they interconnect. And who might be saying the sides of a conversation, and who is conversing, and whether my reality is a hallucination that isn’t shared by everyone, so that there might be things called muses with whom authors imagine their stories. Stories which I, as the author, must linearize and conceive in plainly dramatic sequences for recording in my reality, to share with my peers (causing them to appear in my life) and to progress with my creative self-awareness trip. Yeah, man.
Can you imagine what I’m experiencing as these stories shape themselves and I take breaks to write a comment like this one you’re reading now? Can I imagine what readers of my stories will have to imagine to understand and/or enjoy the words I leave behind? I keep feeling that my stories are mind trainers, exercises to progress me, through an entertaining artform we call storytelling, to the point of cognitive flexibility that I would allow myself to consider the discernments of alternate realities, places where exist other minds that I am friends with at the level of kindred spirits. Or unseen friends, guides, muses, daimons, fairies, angels, devas… you have to find the terms that your mind can enjoy, because learning is meant to be fun.
Thus the title How to Catch a Fairy takes on a new meaning: to realize that the story is a narrative framing, and even scooping, of some of that world-bridging energy. Worlds which, both incidentally and importantly, physics is saying exist plentifully and freely in a multiverse of impinging universes. In fact, the majority of our universe consists of an anti-gravitational invisible substance which they’re calling dark matter or dark energy, and this is probably the next universe bumping into our universe. Where is all this invisible stuff? Hard to say, probably all around and inside of us. This other universe could be a place where all those compatriot beings of folklore reside and watch us from, even as we could watch them if we knew how, such as by having mental exercises of some enjoyability to run our minds around in for a while. More people then ever are stretching their minds with unified theories of spiritual realms, and dreams, and out-of-body experiences, and occult planes, and adjacent intersecting membranes in 11 dimensional space. Ways to couch the exercises in entertainment are paramount to reaching large audiences, or even just affecting key genre groups.
And then there comes a point to go back and write more of the story, so I go now, making this a short blog entry.
Can you imagine what I’m experiencing as these stories shape themselves and I take breaks to write a comment like this one you’re reading now? Can I imagine what readers of my stories will have to imagine to understand and/or enjoy the words I leave behind? I keep feeling that my stories are mind trainers, exercises to progress me, through an entertaining artform we call storytelling, to the point of cognitive flexibility that I would allow myself to consider the discernments of alternate realities, places where exist other minds that I am friends with at the level of kindred spirits. Or unseen friends, guides, muses, daimons, fairies, angels, devas… you have to find the terms that your mind can enjoy, because learning is meant to be fun.
Thus the title How to Catch a Fairy takes on a new meaning: to realize that the story is a narrative framing, and even scooping, of some of that world-bridging energy. Worlds which, both incidentally and importantly, physics is saying exist plentifully and freely in a multiverse of impinging universes. In fact, the majority of our universe consists of an anti-gravitational invisible substance which they’re calling dark matter or dark energy, and this is probably the next universe bumping into our universe. Where is all this invisible stuff? Hard to say, probably all around and inside of us. This other universe could be a place where all those compatriot beings of folklore reside and watch us from, even as we could watch them if we knew how, such as by having mental exercises of some enjoyability to run our minds around in for a while. More people then ever are stretching their minds with unified theories of spiritual realms, and dreams, and out-of-body experiences, and occult planes, and adjacent intersecting membranes in 11 dimensional space. Ways to couch the exercises in entertainment are paramount to reaching large audiences, or even just affecting key genre groups.
And then there comes a point to go back and write more of the story, so I go now, making this a short blog entry.
Comments:
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As a fellow short-story writer, I can identify with this posting. Where does that stuff come from? What's interesting is how there are some stories you have to fight with and struggle to get the elements in the right arrangement to be a proper story (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not), and then there are the ones that suddenly pop into your mind in nearly completed form and you just have to write them down. The latter had usually been brewing, or fermenting or whatever in your subconscious for months (years!) before they popped out.
But essentially I agree. We really do need to appreciate the process of creating things in the imagination for the amazing and mysterious (yes! even mystical!) process that it is. Who knows how many worlds we touch while we do it, and who knows what invisible help we are getting?
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But essentially I agree. We really do need to appreciate the process of creating things in the imagination for the amazing and mysterious (yes! even mystical!) process that it is. Who knows how many worlds we touch while we do it, and who knows what invisible help we are getting?
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