Now With More Buds

I haven't blogged in a week, almost exactly.  That's not conspicuous at all, is it?  Don't worry, I might start blogging more frequently again soon.  I start orientation next week.  The pressing concern for the moment is this:

I'm standing in a wedding on Sunday.  I'm excited, but it's in Ohio, and my wife has to work, so that means I'll be apart from my wife for the better part of three days, and as jazzed as I am I'm going to be exhausted, because I know like... three people who are gonna be in the wedding?  I don't know how many Houghtonites will be at the wedding, and that's really the only group of people I know of the bride's, and I know even fewer of the grooms.

Still I'm honored to stand and witness the marriage of two good friends whose distance from me is yet another prod making me yearn to invent teleporters.

Graduating from college seems to have been a subtle shift in anxieties.  Some would say the stakes are higher now than they were, though monetarily I would say no way in heck are they actually.  Except that the high stakes from college have rolled over in the form of student loans looming over my head, demanding to be paid.

But I feel less like there's a single pressing project I need to finish to determine the course of my future, and more like every choice I make throughout every day contributes to the life I'm leading.

It's terrifying, but in the same way as a dull ache is agonizing.

Subtle, and always there, applying pressure.

I'm slowly making my way through The Hunger Games, to the pleasure of my family members who think it is quite good.  I have personal taste qualms about the first person present storytelling, though I think Collins executes it fairly well.  I am most impressed by the wells that go unmentioned in the story, one of things so often overlooked in first person stories.  The narrator is not always a stand-in for the author, and his/her flaws are rarely explicit, since it's hard to be fully conscious of your own failings.  The first person narrator in an active story is never (if the story is well done and the character well-fleshed-out) the unequivocal voice of truth.

Honestly, my personal voice choices have edged towards the third person omniscient, with the narrator having verisimilitude with the author.  It's an old-fashioned preference, but there it is.

At the same time as I wade into the strange coincidental cousin of the film Battle Royale, my wife is finishing up with The Wise Man's Fear, which means I can nerd out with her over a lot of stuff and we equally anticipate the third installment of the Kingkiller Chronicle.  I had some small ambition to review The Name of the Wind myself after reading a particularly aggravating review written by a professional.  I have since procrastinated and haven't done much that could be considered creative in the last week or so.

But I have played Guild Wars 2 like its servers are shutting down.  That's what you do when an MMO releases, right?  Play it eight hours a day for the first week?  That's pretty much what I did.

Now I sit and scoff at my own buffoonery and resist the urge to play the game.  It's hard, okay?  I love that game.  It's a mild obsession, and I'm doing my best to be an adult about it.

It's not going anywhere.

Time marches forward and more cool stuff is on the horizon.  Homestuck continues to be fantastic, a new season of Doctor Who approacheth, The Hobbit comes out this winter, and people have finally stopped harping on the "end of the world" that's supposed to happen before the year's over.  I probably jinxed it by saying that out loud on a blog that gets broadcast to... ten people?  I don't even know who all reads this blog, though you're awesome if you do, whether you agree with most of it or not.

One thing I've noticed about my life now is I don't feel like I'm in an environment where I can say, "All right, now I have to work on this" and have that be accepted.  That's probably just my bogus feelings, but it's true.  I feel like, since I don't have a grade waiting for the work that I do where the value of that grade is a condition of my earning honors that can get me hired better, any work I do is just frivolous head-in-the-clouds creative stuff.  I'm not saying my family doesn't support my art, but...

I need an art space.  A place to sit down that is the place where the ideas and the words are blended in an alchemical concoction meant to be administered to as many individuals as possible.  Okay, that got away from me.

-shrugs-

That's it for now.  Bye guys.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

So my last two blog posts were a little longer.  This one won't be.

Today, I stood and watched my cousin (one of my best friends) get married, and almost cried because I'm maybe a little happy for them I guess?  And it was an awesome ceremony, a great reception, and a wonderful time.

Now those kids are off somewhere having an adventure, and I'm home after about three hours or more of riding in a car.  It's super late, and I'm tired, but not tired enough to just let a face-punch penance happen.

Though I might have, if my wife hadn't reminded me.

Tomorrow starts a new week with the foreseeable future dedicated to figuring this life out.  A little over a week till I get my proof to verify, and less than that till a GW2 BETA WEEKEND WOO!!!!  In the mean time, more writing projects to agonize over, more job applications (and similar activities) to fill out/send, and some exercise to work into my (hopefully not too) busy routine.

I leave you with this:  Nate and Christine Hunter, I know you might not read this right away (you'll be busy, I know how honeymoons are), but God bless you and your marriage.  I pray it be as much a blessing to you as the last ten months have been for me.  All my best wishes.  I love you.  Seriously.

Bed time.

More Notes on Diction and a Bit of Pontificating

Here I am at the inn, having a little downtime between rehearsal and the bachelor's party tonight.  To be honest I'm a little distracted.  There's stuff happening and it's been a busy and chaotic day so far.

I gave a lesson about diction/word choice, but I should clarify that the two things are not equal.  Diction is all about "how" you say things (a difficult conveyance for writing) and so overlaps with word choice.  That's why I used them fairly interchangeably in my last blog post.

I mentioned that I don't write much contemporary fiction.  That's because I'm not comfortable with my knowledge of how real-world people actually talk.  I don't think I quite have my finger on the pulse of the down-to-earth and the down-and-out, nor can I spin out realistically elitist phrases like I think I should if I'm going to portray the melting pot (or garden salad, if you prefer that metaphor) of diversity that is the modern world.  I'm not spot on with rhetoric and jargon used by different political camps or even the nuances of dialect differences between a popular jock and a band geek in high school.

Some of this is just me selling myself short.  I'm afraid to try, to be honest.  There's higher stakes in writing contemporary fiction, because if you paint an inaccurate picture, people get offended (for the wrong reasons) or confused, or both.  There's also my lacking sense of tact, in that if I get talking too much about what's going on in the real world all my innate prejudices and beliefs all get born out pretty quickly, and I don't even tend to believe in all the things I have guttural reactions to.

For these reasons I've largely relegated myself to the abstracted spaces of fantasy and poetry, where I can create the whole universe and the reader has to learn from me what the words mean—what the world means.  In some ways it's lazy, and it's for that reason that I hope to do more contemporary fiction writing, but so far my fear of research and mistakes has kept me from accomplishing that.

I'm also much more versed in what makes good fantasy good than the ethereal, academia-defined notions (hey look, prejudices!) of what makes good "literary" fiction.  So what I strive for is literary fantasy, which leads me to harken back towards Tolkien, Lewis, White, Graham, LeGuin, and others rather than try to pull the popular (and perhaps less substantive) work of Salvatore, Jordan, Brooks, and Martin.  Yes, I included A Song of Ice and Fire and The Wheel of Time under "less substantive" despite their being epics long enough to kill their writers before they're finished. Arguably, these extensive come from the very fact that these works are popular, but just realize I'm not knocking these guys.  I just want to do something a little different.

I aspire to write fantasy that gets put in the mainstream literary canon.  Yeah, that's a big order to fill.  To do that, I have to be twice as good as someone writing ordinary literary work, because I have to catch the eye of the mainstream audience (incidentally not the majority of readers) from my spot out in left field.  People used to do this all the time.  In my estimation some of the best writers in the last century wrote speculative fiction (fantasy or sci-fi).  Now, some of my fellow recent batch of degree-ified writers may strongly disagree with me.  But they can continue to call fantasy useless and crap and I'll continue to call Hemingway a twit who offed himself because he was too arrogant to age and die with dignity.

So yeah, there's stuff.  By the way, phrases like that one I just used are an instance of diction.  I do it because I want to relate to people, and because I like irony.  I'm a writer, and some say a rather eloquent one, but I know when you just need to relate on a vague level and not get into the boring details with people.  Sometimes I let myself go (like this blog post for example) but that's because I feel comfortable and appreciated.  And yes, I miscalculate.  My own sister checks out on me when I start talking about the fascinating etymologies of words.

I'm a language nerd.  I realize this.  No, I don't need help.  Thanks for trying.

Hearthstead, by the way, isn't one of my more "literary" attempts at fantasy fiction.  It's a bit of a superhero story wrapped in a fantasy shell, which I think makes it super awesome.  Of course, it's also not going to be intentionally subpar writing because of that.  But its themes are a little less esoteric, maybe, than "The Fairies' Game" that I wrote this spring.  Honestly I like it better.  It goes places.  To find out where it goes, of course, you'll have to read it.

Patience, young grasshopper.  Come with time, it will.  Yes, I'm aware that may have been excruciating.  Just move on with me.

By the way, the novel that I hope will be available by the end of this month is called "Ashes of Silver."  I put it in quotes because it's not published yet.  As always, I'll talk more about the book when the time is right.  Yes, I can't shut up about it.  It's my first freaking book ever that's going to come out, and I have a blog where I say whatever I want.  Of course I'm going to gush.  A little bit.  Around the finger I've got plugged in the dam for your sake.

I think that's all I have to say today.  As I said yesterday, circumstances may prevent me from blogging tomorrow, but we'll see how it goes.  Hope your weekend's chugging along nicely.

For now, though?  -shrugs-

(seriously need to think of a better ending thing)