I wrote a feature for Indiepocalypse: Seeing [With/Like] The Machine: Blink and Hana’s Light. Go read it!
Bristol residents: I’ll be back at PRSC’s Bizarre Bazaar on 6th December, come get some stocking fillers!
I have been hitting a blockage with these logs. They’re easy enough in the months where I’m able to give the majority of my focus to writing and making and heeding the process, but those months are not as common as I’d like. Unrelatedly: I’ve been trying to loosen up. Both in my writing specifically (as I talked about last time), but also just in life. I don’t want to exist in a perfect lock-step march; I want to dance, and dance requires change.
Since these logs go out for free, then, why am I making this so difficult for myself? If the regimented approach isn’t working, why not shift my weight onto the other leg? Here we are, then: trying out a new format. A series of loose, vaguely-connected paragraphs flitting between thoughts.
I’ve been reading Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva, which is written in a very similar way, and it’s giving me a new appreciation for that kind of writing. The book is very concerned with the now of experience – that elusive thing that’s gone or transformed the instant you try to pin it down. Her short, rhythmic paragraphs remind me of Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, which I read way back in undergrad:
'We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself.'
It strikes me that these logs aren’t all that different, as an exercise, so let’s get weird with it.
October was all over the place, but mostly London. Three separate trips in three separate weeks. Whenever I am in London, I think about my novel. A couple of crucial scenes take place there, and I’m still mulling over how to approach them. I wrote two different versions of one recently, as part of Couch to 80k. The second version relocated the action to London Bridge, which my partner and I had wandered up and down on the third of our three visits, as we waited for our friend to come meet us. It was early morning, the city only just stirring from restless dreams – as my inner noir detective might say. I hope I keep visiting London, as I write this book. I hope I find opportunities to visit Cornwall and Scotland – other key settings – as well. I want to keep that channel open: the lived experience bleeding into the fiction, the fiction forever staining the lived experience. Like letting a plant drink from water with food colouring.
I ran a workshop at Peckham Digital on 19th October. Thank you to everyone who attended, and to all the organisers – especially Bea, who loaned me her laptop after mine perished on the morning of the workshop. This meant I didn’t have a chance to memorise my notes as much as I would’ve liked, which in turn meant that I was a ball of panic, but thankfully nobody seemed to notice. The workshop itself was really fulfilling. I learned that I enjoy teaching/facilitating a lot, and that I’m pretty good at it.
I was also reminded that making interactive fiction requires a pretty drastic mental shift. I’m not sure if I can fully articulate it, but you need to be able to keep all those branching paths in your mind, to perceive the interplay between them, to follow each possibility down to its end. You need to see it as a whole but also as a collection of parts, and intuit when you need to make that switch in focus. We aren’t taught to read and write like this, when we’re young.
Unsurprisingly, coding makes you better at that kind of thinking. Perhaps more counter-intuitively, I think literary criticism helps too. Language is a system, a text is a system, culture is a system – doing litcrit requires that you perceive all the connections both within that system and branching out from it. You need to be able to ask ‘what is this specific word choice doing?’ and then ‘how does that word interact with the rest of the line?’ and then ‘how does this relate to the text as a whole?’ It’s the exact same kind of mental telescoping, and I wish people talked about it more!