Writing fiction is inherently godlike.You build worlds! Populate them! Move the creatures about! And if you want to get all meta you can talk to them as Author, a booming voice from the narrative heavens. It rocks.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Can you dig the sound of creative fury? I can. Sometimes. Other times it's just the hollowness of my head.
Or, to put it another way, if I happen to be feeling somewhat okay about a project I will occasionally indulge myself with such illusions of mastery. Other days the words pop off the screen and come after me. They go for the eyes, like hook-mouthed maggots leaping from casu marzu. They're not happy with me and my ham-fisted attempts to pummel them into something that doesn't suck. Those are bad days.
I've plastered the wall I face when at my desk with nine photos of a certain cathedral, interior and exterior views. Big honking 11x17 color printouts, thankyouverymuch Google Image Search with your ability to filter for the Big Big Photos. Then, I busted out the iPod and put on something REALLY LOUD while I stared into the sanctuary depicted in the photos. In this way, I approximate a key scene in The Book.1 I would have been better served by visiting the cathedral in question with my iPod, but there was a lot of puking and a certain inability to move that prevented me from doing so. Which is just as well: when I was in the neighborhood I didn't yet have the particular loud music I'm listening to, so the experience would have lacked a necessary tinge of the profane.
At the moment I'm also experiencing a considerable niacin flush. I take the stuff for various superstitious and practical reasons, and its behavior is totally unpredictable. Full stomach, empty stomach, morning, afternoon, there seems to be no pattern to the manifestation of its red-faced side effect. So now I'm in a two-dimensional cathedral with music booming in my skull and feeling the first warming glow of a pill I've popped, which is a nice touch.
It's an interesting experiment. What happens to the tale if I do this or that, or think in a certain fashion, or write in a particularly unfettered way? Does it progress? Improve? Produce bits worth saving or building upon? Yes! No! Make it stop! Or go go go.
Eventually, if you've committed yourself, the work makes its own mania.
1Should I just start doing that, with the capitalization and the portension? I mean, at this point, it's become clear that that's what this place is all about, right? Sure, I'll throw a link out if I come across something in my perusings that's interesting, but doing that too frequently that would defeat the inherent solipsism of the blog,2 wouldn't it?
2I wonder if I should make a habit of footnotes like this. It could be fun.3
3Of course I should. Footnotes rule. Like tacos.
