Heroic Apology and Virol vs Doctor part 2

Well this post is at some point going to contain an embedding of the video I have on my phone but can't figure out how to post from mobile. So while I'm waiting on that I figure I'll do that other thing I said I would do.
First, a text version of the apology:
It came out late and wasn't even done
My next apology should use a pun

Edit: here's the video

Now. When I left off Virol and the Doctor were both established as being very old and very clever. Smart fogeys. They also both happen to appear young. Or at least not nearly as old as they really are.
This could look bad, but there are several reasons no one is going to make a stink about it.
The first reason is that it is highly unlikely than Virol will ever be a character known to more than one hundred people and so there will be no exposure. The second, tiny reason is that I came up with him long before I had ever encountered Doctor Who.
That second ties into the third reason, which is the one I'm aiming this week's blog for. Most people are aware that two people can think of one creative idea separately and without influencing each other. It's a fairly common occurrence as coincidences go. This is because of archetypes, symbols embedded in our cultural makeup. The Doctor is himself made up of a few archetypes sort of spliced together.
One of these is the wise elder. There's a reason that one exists. Old people have seen more than you have, and it's good stuff to know about (not always pleasant mind you). There are some characters that take this archetype straighter than Virol or the Doctor. Gandalf and Merlin are prime examples. These elders are both wise and powerful, and just a little eccentric.
What the Doctor adds to this is the old-as-dirt pipe dream of eternal youth. Of course in his early incarnations he appeared as an old man, but in this day and age he's young and active. There's also a bit of rebirth thematics to it since he gets a new face every time he regenerates from death/near-death. These are key features of his character but don't get quite as much play as the central tenets (almost wrote Tennants there) I introduced him with.
Virol also plays into the ideas of the wise elder and eternal. Like the Doctor, he also has a jocular facade covering a much darker center. However, Virol never changes his face, and he has to live in cycles of youth and decrepit old age, prolonged over centuries.
It might also be good to note that Virol, like the Doctor, is close to the last of his kind. The difference there is he knows there are more out there somewhere, where the Doctor believes there are none. It is also pretty explicitly not much of a hang-up for Virol. He has lived most of his millennium-long life in this state. The Doctor, in the New series, recently cam into his bereavement. He hides it well considering, but you know.
One of the larger differences between the characters is that the Doctor is from science fiction, and Virol is entrenched deeply in fantasy. He's closer to a snarky well-dressed Merlin than to the Doctor.
The other important difference is that Virol is no time traveler. His power doesn't come from a space ship. It's just him for the most part. And the stuff he knows.
At this point it's pretty easy to see how different the characters are, but without the full context it looks a little sketch. But maybe it shouldn't. The Eternally Young but Ancient Wiseguy serves a certain purpose. The idea fascinates people. Of course the Doctor is the more well known and better executed, but I made Virol because I thought it would be interesting to see him interact with the rest of the world my cousin and I created.
I think that's enough for now. Talk to you on Monday with something else.

Virol and the Doctor part 1

So for my first(ish) post back  I wanted to talk about character archetypes. I had an idea in mind and it was just waiting for me to write it. Then I spent the weekend visiting family because my niece was born and Monday I squandered in typical first world internetian behavior. So. There's gonna be a poetry video. Also, I might post a more truncated post before Monday officially ends if I can.

So about character archetypes, I am going to be talking about two circumstantially similar characters. This may be an exercise I have performed before but it's happening nevertheless.

The more recognizable character is of course the Doctor of Doctor Who.   The other is a man called Virol, my own creation whose public existence only perpetuates in my self-published novella Ashes of Silver.

For those people who aren't familiar with the Doctor (and they do exist) there are two basic aspects of his character you need to know about him. One, that he is very clever. Two, that he is very old. It gets more complicated than that obviously, but that is a boiling down of things that make the Doctor the Doctor, more so than his face for sure.

Just so happens these are the two same important things to know about Virol. That he is both brilliant and ancient.

Now that I've established that I have to go. Next half goes up tomorrow or else very soon.

Pax.

A Restart But Not a Hard Boot.

I am never going to post on this blog again if I don't re-establish some parameters. I can't even blog about why I'm not blogging, it seems.

So first things first, an update schedule, and a fitting punishment. I am going to tentatively claim that Monday will be blog day, starting next week. If I don't post on Monday I must share a video of myself apologizing in iambic pentameter by the end of the week. A heroic couplet. If I don't post it the line requirement doubles. And so on.

Now that that's out of the way, I can ramble a bit and you can ignore me or hang on my every word or somewhere along that continuum while I do so.

I have entered a funk, which happens to me a lot. I moved in the middle of spring and I haven't been in any positive sort of groove ever since.

This is because I feel like I need to be home to be comfortable. In typical male fashion, I think this entails essentially space over which I have dominion. Maybe it's not so oppressive as that, but I certainly don't feel like I am in an environment where I can expect any level of control over my sensory input. Wearing headphones to block out tv noise is not, in my estimation, a legitimate form of control.

Part of it also includes responsibility. If a space is "mine," then I feel it is my responsibility to care for it. And I don't feel that where I am. Thus I cannot get comfortable and my focus levels are at an all time low.

Couple this with drastically different waking hours than I am accustomed to and you have a formula for anti-productivity.

Even that attempt at personal analysis feels like an excuse. Everything feels like an excuse.

I am also frustrated by the circumstances keeping me in this position. Originally Rachael and I were going to find a place to live within the first month or so of living in Ann Arbor, but we discovered that we wouldn't get the hours we had been before moving and so the funds weren't there. It doesn't help that Ann Arbor is a pretty expensive region to live in. We keep waiting for a change, keep poking at possibilities, but nothing seems to be panning out and it's taking its toll on both of us.

Part of the reason we're locked into this region is because I want to go to school here and it doesn't make sense to sign a lease somewhere else only to get in. So bottom line is we're in A2 until March at the earliest when I find out the results of my second round of applications.

I have to learn to overcome my discontent or nothing is going to change. Thus this blog post. Because just ramming my will against my emotions because I think it'll be good for me will be nowhere near as effective as setting some concrete goals. Like updating my blog consistently again. And putting real effort into my writing. All while keeping up with my poetry and short story assignments which have the perk of colleagues to whom I am beholden.

Obviously this a step, but as humans we tend to break everything down into processes to understand them. The next step is setting aside a solid time and place for my work.

And prayer. God knows I need to be doing far more of that than I am.

I can think of a dozen different segues into other posts I have thought about making but for now I am going to end this here. It's good to be back, such as this is. If you read this all the way through, I want you to bug me about this. Hold me to my schedule. To my iambic sorries. And pray for me.

I'm not sick. I am not in trouble. But I need to be better than I am, because right now I'm not what I could be. And I want to live up to my potential.

Not just for me. For you. For God. For everything.

Good Writing: Efficiency part 2

I didn't discuss everything I wanted to in my last post concerning efficiency. There's one aspect of the quality that's fairly universal in writing, and that's word economy.

It's generally considered better writing to describe a concept or other subject in as few words as possible. Of course if you take this too far you can wind up being too vague to communicate anything. A description of the universe and its workings could be "there's stuff," but that does very little to establish anything of importance about the realm of our experience. This doesn't diminish the tedium of an exhaustive list of traits the observable universe possesses. That may be useful for science, but not for an answer.

I don't have the confidence to provide you with what I think a good description of everything looks like.

I suspect I should provide some good examples of the merit of word economy. Take poetry. Especially today, with the prevalence of free verse, there is an emphasis on making every single word in the poem belong and carry as much weight as possible. The conventions of English grammar are loosened in this pursuit. Incidentally I find this to be part of the reason many people find poetry inaccessible. It is language abstracted, reduced and elevated by a presentation much unlike what you experience in spoken word or in prose.

But word economy applies to prose just as well. The word "that" is often extraneous, and can be omitted from many sentences without any sacrifice in meaning. Word processors and writing professors alike discourage the use of phrases that take more words to say the same thing as "like" or "but."

I guess what we're striving for is an utterance that comes as close as possible to meaning what it says. That's not to imply it says what it means. Buried meaning, that can be read into the diction or syntax or tone of what is written, is of high value in today's writing environment. It's probably why literature studies in school stress a search for symbolism in works. It is an effective way to encourage deeper reading, which is valued because of reasons I won't get into in this blog post.

Honestly word economy can be as hairy as any other aspect of efficiency. Fantasy descriptions can be florid with adjectives and compound sentences and adverbs, and plenty of people love it that way. I return to my question that ended the last blog post: is their preference indicative of a lack of culture via delight in archaic and "inferior" means of discourse?

I would say that aesthetics play a large part in the value placed on words, and there is a great deal of differing opinion over what is valued aesthetically and to what degree.

Just be careful when you're writing, because if it takes too ling to say what it's saying then people will tl;dr you right in the face.

Good Writing: Efficiency

Often times my thoughts about writing manifest as insecurities about my own writing ability. I think about how I might not be stacking up, that the quality of what I write is a failing grade or at least not one that excels, and it brings me back to a fundamental question. For the purpose of this blog post I will choose to phrase it like this, "What is good writing?"

Of course to approach this empirically (as I presume should lead to improved objective results) I must distrust my own instincts when attempting to answer the question. Instead I rely on the answers peers, participants in the field, and educators have given me.

The first answer to the question is often to call the merit of the query itself into uncertainty. I could cite a book whose advice I respect, On Writing, but some may consider Stephen King to "not be a good writer," and if that argument is given its head then the question I suppose devolves into "who are good writers?" The answer to that is of course as subject to personal opinion as others. Is R.A. Salvatore a good writer because his prose for battle is oft gripping? Do my reader even agree with this statement? Do they possess the faculty of experience to judge that assertion true?

In addressing all this I suppose one method is for me to establish criteria, which I intended to do in the first place.

I have been told, have heard told, have told others that one element of good writing is efficiency. A story as humans tell it is a machine, regardless of its organic parts. It is something we fabricate towards a purpose, as opposed to the fellow creatures we encounter during the course of our existence. Those are not of our creation and contain mysteries we have yet to unravel. Yes, the best of stories can contain mysteries that baffle the author as well as the reader, but most if not all of those are parts of the whole lifted from life and rendered into the mechanism of the tale to borrow the effect that mystery has on people who live real lives.

An efficient machine does not have spare pieces hanging from its sprockets. These would interfere with the way the machine runs, slowing it and possibly even rendering its purpose unattainable. This is also true with stories. One memetic explanation of this principle is Chekov's Gun. That is, if you mention a gun hanging over the door it had better be fired before the end of the story.

It isn't that simple, since it would be just as important were the gun to fail to fire at a critical moment, or if the gun were one path for it owner to take in the story but he or she follows another. In the first case the gun as it stands as a literal object in the story is still a direct mechanism whereas the gun is abstracted to a symbol when its purpose is to provide a tight bundle of meanings for the reader.

There is another complication, and this enters some hairy territory. Speculative fiction (which includes fantasy and science  fiction) often includes pieces to the story that serve little purpose but to establish a setting that is compellingly other. In more "literary" examples the same cogs that establish this setting are driving elements of symbolism or of mechanical purpose to the plot of the work, but there are plenty of other works where this does not seem to be the case.

So the question with these arises, "Are the pieces which are essential to the abstract atmosphere of the story, but not the progression of the story itself, meaningful enough to be included in 'good' writing?" And that question is one of the finer points in the dilemma of my existence as a writer. I have friends who feel that the niceties of speculative fiction do not carry enough meaning to allow the genre, especially the more flourish examples of fantasy, to be counted as works that are well-written. I also have friends who, like me, think that fantasy is just the best thing.

What troubles me about this is that I can easily find myself immersed in a fantasy that may in fact be too embellished to still be good writing, granted the extraneous details themselves are interesting enough. Or I find myself liking a story because I see the things which are unnecessary as being there for comic relief or as goofy asides necessary only to preserve the emotions the author(s) seek(s) in the audience without detracting from the story that's being told. And other people have little tolerance for these things.

Does this mean I like bad things, or that more things are good to me than to other people?

There will likely be more where this came from but for tonight that's all I've got.

Christmas Prognostication

So in the interest of continuing my mobile writing experience I received two new portable keyboards for me to use on the go.  I'm using one to type this up now, still on my phone (even though I could be writing on my computer if I had taken it out of its bag).  It's looking more and more to me like I'll be able to do writing on the go.  Merry There are a fare share of hitches that seem to come with this territory, but as I practice with it  some more I think I'll learn to work with them and be fairly proficient after all.  That being said I should stop blogging  and get back to enjoying Christmas with my in-laws.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Thoughts scattered in time

I guess one of the troubles I have with receiving critiques of my own writing is that it has a tendency to dash my hopes. Oftentimes I am trying to elicit a certain emotional response from the reader, but some other details get in the way or the reader first feel invested enough yet.

If I were to try and diagnose the underlying weakness in my writing behind such difficulties, I would point to my high degree of introversion, though the manifestations of it in my writing may be manifold. For instance the surface explanation may be that I simply don't have the same emotional makeup as many if my potential readers and so what causes emotional distress in me is not what arouses the same in them. Crowds of people as small as a score can make me fairy uncomfortable, but some people thrive in such numbers.

It goes deeper than that, though. Certain situations can render me almost paralyzed with something between fear and anger, and I have rarely if ever handled these times in my life with grace. I have several friends who have expressed confusion (if only with their faces) over my paralysis in these situations. Perhaps it's only my perception but I feel I come across as something more animal than human in those moments.

The time between the above and this paragraph is the space of a few days, and considering I have seven minutes of my break left it's possible there will be another gap before this post is made.

In some of my free time I have been re-envisioning the work of my youth. Most of my free time is sent watching Sword Art Online, playing Guild Wars 2 and Facebook games, or reading Homestuck and theories thereof. There's food consumption in there somewhere but that's more of a part-time job than a way to spend my free time.

And as predicted it has been another few days. Honestly I should just post this before the year ends and this becomes even more of an incoherent mess. So here you go, a post in which I ramble.

More Extended Breaktime Thoughts

The temptation when blogging on a phone during the breaks at work is to complain. Not necessarily to complain about work, but that doesn't excuse it. Instead let's talk about writing.

The books I've read and classes I've taken indicate a writer must most often make time for writing rather than merely discover it or act on inspiration. I am if the opinion that inspiration should be neither ignored nor depended upon. It is too fleeting and too picky. So I guess I agree with my education:  it is best for a writer to arrange for acts of creation to take place. 

The trouble is I am not acting on this sage advice. I spend much if my day gaming or reading articles when I am home from work, and at work I have an hour of time free to do my own bidding. As of yesterday I am trying to spend at least a large chunk of that time blogging, but this doesn't account for my hours if dereliction at home. For that, I think there are a few more hurdles to overcome than simply typing into a phone rather than playing Angry Bird Ninja Jetpack on it.

I have expressed both publicly and privately that I would prefer to stay at home and write rather than tire myself it and punish my joints for fifteen cents an hour more than minimum wage. The self-same poor home habits as I have now wouldn't go away if I quit my job.

So I guess the solution is to man up and type words into a computer whenever I get the chance. Here goes.

Breaktime Thoughts

So this is my first attempt at blogging from my phone, and it is probably not going to be super profound.  Mostly it is an experiment in what I can make work.  Now... What to talk about.

I could talk about my views on sex or alcohol but that would take a while so maybe I'll be more simple. 

November was a hard month for me, and December is passing at an unreasonably quick pace. I haven't been as grumpy as I was afraid I'd be, mostly because I have so much to be thankful for.  Mostly I co tinge to fight a battle with complacency--fueled by my exhaustion from work.  I have only had this phone fir about a week but I am glad I thought to check for a bloggers app because this is a better use of my time than playing silky games like Bad Piggies. Even if they're really fun.

If I am good you should see more mobile blog posts coming out in the next few weeks. Otherwise I'll  just be disappointed in myself.

Anyway have a good one.

Peace.

There Are Halloween-Theme Leaves All Over My Lawn

I've gone almost the whole month of October in silence, at least with regards to the awakening and the subsequent consumption of perennial Asteraceae that this blog proposes to be its subject.  It's a far cry from the business of the early summer, when every day I had something to say, even if it wasn't particularly noteworthy.  I haven't been whiling away in purposelessness.

Not quite.

I've made no secret that I'm working now.  It's full time, and I admit that for the most part I've made vegetative choices with my off-hours.  There's a strong attraction I find for that sort of thing.  Something to take the edge off, to give it a fitting set of connotations.

I've also recently discovered that I need something to take the edge off, because without it I'm kind of a nasty person (fun fact I almost spelled nasty "gnasty").  It may be that I need to hone one edge and dull the other.

A week or two ago I discovered that I'm short on time.  Graduate school applications are coming due around the turn of the year, and I've some ways to go to be prepared.  I keep telling myself and my family that if I'm going to do what "needs to be done" I will need to divest myself of distractions, but I never do it.  I keep the good ones and the bad ones, and my pile of non-job responsibilities just grows on my non-existent desk.  Too much non on the one hand and not enough on the other.

I won't turn this into a memorandum post for myself by listing the aforementioned responsibilities.  Suffice to say I have enough writing to do without writing this blog, but that's probably an excuse.  I'm writing it now, aren't I?

I'm working on some song reviews that may go up in the next weeks, depending on all that.  Should be an interesting diversion.  We'll see.  I like that expression.  Here's the plan guys.  Let's watch and find out if it actually happens that way.

Usually it doesn't.