New Pages

Today I added a couple of pages about "Monsters of Utopia." One page is a description and notes and the other pages is three selections from the book.

Below I have added the notes section for those who want to take a quick look at them.

Notes:

I was working on one project, a story that started in a South American jungle (ayahuasca, shamanism, giant snakes, etc.) then moved north into the U.S., when I came up with the idea of a specific type of VR device. The more I wrote scenes with the VR device, the more my thoughting and plotting turned from the that project to what became Monsters. I ended up mixing in the concept of "Imaginal Creatures," a touch of the "third man" phenomena experienced by mountain climbers and other people who find themselves alone in very hazardous conditions and a twist or two from various fairytales. What came out of that literary fricassee is Monsters.

I'd been playing around with writing a "modern day fairy tale" for a while by then and Monsters took on that flair to such an extent that I ended up subtitling it "a fairy tale manifesto." Perhaps the most obvious (to me, at least) fairy tale aspect in Monsters is the character of Sebastian. He doesn't arrive until later in the story but when he does make his appearance, it's hard to ignore. I named the main character of my next book, "The Far Shores of Saucerland (not yet published)," Sebastian as I so loved writing his speeches/diatribes. His tone and word choice inspired me to push my limits even further with Saucerland which is written in a loose free verse.

When people ask me (it happens sometimes) what I enjoy most about writing, I tell them about how it fascinates me the way these characters which nominally I've created start to take on lives of their own. The surprising changes they insist on me making even though I started out with an entirely different plan in mind are both inspiring and maddening. As I write this, I've just realized my resisting this dynamic is what has been causing me such difficulty with Time Swerve Terminal (see previous blog posts for more info). I need to go back to those characters and let them tell me what I should do with that story.