riotthill

Write like the plague is gnawing at your heels. Find the words that nurse each sentence, be careful not to breath too heavily upon your paragraphs, and dispose of your dead as soon as the body carts arrive at the door.

Does this sound extreme? Perhaps, but when one puts away the ‘art and science‘ of writing, and just writes, the results might very well be a healthy survival rate.

Which brings me to a point that is only slightly related. What to publish, where and how. I have been giving much though to the current transition, growing pains if you will, of the state of the publishing industry.

There is much talk about self-publishing. Write up your story, sign up for a blog and post it. Or sign on to one of the sites that will publish your story in e-book format for others to download. Or explore the possibility of print-on-demand for hard copy… the real deal of a book with covers and perhaps even a number someone might put in a library somewhere — good traditional bones.

Oh boy, what about quality? What about the editing process, the melding of minds to polish the thing to its most appealing form. Well, what about it?

The best, the healthiest may very well survive to attract the attention of serious readers, those types who eat words for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They know a good story when they see one. They see the worth of good editing, polished plot, character development, an underlying message of universal appeal. Something with staying power. A classic. A story to embrace like an old friend arriving for a good long visit.

Then again, there is always the self-satisfaction of simply writing. Perhaps you’ve written something no one should ever see. Perhaps it just needs to be said, without care that it will ever be read. Perhaps that’s the state at which inhibitions slough off like an old skin, words dance and sing themselves into existence, immune to the plague of doubt, of judgement — both internal and external — to survive and thrive, to live healthy, wondrous lives, whether in print or in the clouds.

cross published at Red Room

First thing on my mind when I woke up was dreams, but those illusive little critters, whatever, whoever, wherever they are, slipped right through my thoughts and escaped. I know they are around somewhere, floating through the dust, probably hovering at the corners… you know, something you see at the corner of your vision, but when you turn your head, it’s gone. You wonder if your eyes play tricks, your imagination.

And now I am here, in total, wondering what to write, why I can’t when my hands are itching across the keyboard, my eyes guarding each word as it appears upon the screen.

Read a beautiful blog today — it contains fish, montages of life and a hoard of wonderful stories of faded pictures and sketches and songs whose translations are obscene.

It is called, appropriately enough, Excavations linked to my Ca’ancartti notebook — if you rifle through the pages, you will find it.

It’s a self-mindf**k, I think, wanting to write down everything, but saying nothing, just ramblings and outlines that go nowhere and self-doubt that catches on the edge of a deep well, stumbles, falls and falls and falls. There is no splash because there is no bottom.

If I became an acrobat on the way down, I could twist and turn and open my eyes. It is very light at the top, a tiny circle of brightness. My arms swing upward without direction, my hands grasping desperately; the light is energy, it stings my hands like burning rope, but I claw at it, hoist myself upward — remember, I have become an acrobat on the way down. I have used the safety net and bounced myself up, high, through the circle of light and into the open air.

I can breath.

I can think.

I can feel the dark silence around me, warm, but I refuse to leave the light that has captured me. Now I want to dream of flying. I want to re-visit my old dreams, remake them, tell them who I am… to write them into life.

(cross-posted at Redroom)

A curious incident yesterday… several of the iBooks I was following on eBay, all listed by one seller, disappeared from my ‘watched’ list when I refreshed the page.

‘What the deuce is going on here,’ I yelled to no one in particular.

I thought in rapid succession:  I’ve done something wrong; eBay has done something wrong; I’ve lost my membership; the world has come to an end.  None was true.

As I came to my senses—a rare occasion indeed—it occurred to me to check out the seller’s page.  Sure enough, the seller was no longer registered at eBay.  Mysterious-er and mysterious-er.

A few minutes later, when I checked my email, a notice of one of the products came to my attention.  Clicking on the link took me back to eBay, to a page where the product was ‘no longer listed’, with helpful advice to ‘check my links or the product number assigned by eBay’, as if I had somehow made a mistake in clicking the link sent by them.

All this happened over the course of an hour or less.  I, the spectator, was left trying to create a story, an explanation of what happened to the seller and his/her products.  I considered all kinds of calamities before finally arriving at an explanation that rattles one’s faith in humanity yet again.

The goods were hot as baked potatoes newly steaming from the oven.

Stolen.  Fenced.  Lifted.  Pawned off on an unsuspecting public.

The seller listed his goods for a week or more, a new iBook offered daily or more often, to the tune of a dozen or more identical items.

A number of people bid, some sales had already concluded.  I can only hope, whatever happened, that those who won the early bids did not lose their money, but it’s likely they did.  As for me, a happy ending:  I had not yet placed any bids, merely lurking in the shadows watching the dollars climb as other eBay-ers offered beyond what I was willing to, or considered a 6-year-old laptop was worth.

As a side-note to this cautionary tale, all of the above took place amidst the hoopla of Apple’s newest entry into the wonderland of electronic doodads, the iPad™.  It’s not likely that anyone noticed besides me and a handful of other bidders who thought they might have a new old laptop.