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Ugh, cramping HARD. It's not usually this bad, even on the first day, and it came sort of without warning, since (probably due to consistent working out) my PMS was otherwise minimal. OTOH, perhaps this is why I found myself trying to push something as yet still unfinished to its "conclusion" yesterday, one of those things I can't possibly afford to talk about directly in a semi-public forum.
So yeah, no details. But it does make me wonder (yet again) why it is that I seem so desperately to seek out conflict, to draw lines in the sand; it's not like I enjoy it, exactly, this saddening process of realizing former friends are/have always been enemies. I just want an end to ambiguity, an understanding of inherent insult, a recognition that there's such a thing as going too far with me, a realization that for my own mental health, I must make sure that people never have power over me simply because I agree to give it to them. As previous episodes of a similar sort have very firmly taught me, the world is just too complicated and life too short for that sort of game-playing.
And on a related note: What the hell is this growing trend of most venues not wanting anything longer than 3,000 to 5,000 words? Who even writes stuff that's that short, besides (apparently) everyone else in the world but me? OTOH, if I needed yet another clear reason to write books instead of stories, this is pretty much a doozy.
At any rate. I'm trying to get Cal to take a nap at the same time Bella usually does, but going by his yelling, it doesn't seem to be working. So I'll confine myself to something I should have done quite a while ago: Providing the good and patient![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cesario with her long-promised explanation of why/how I came to write "The Emperor's Old Bones".
I was still teaching at the Trebas Institute, an amazingly unprofessional place (as I left, for example, one of my former "peers" told me that John Foote--my new boss--had just gotten fired from the IAODT, basically in order to fuck with me and make me think I'd just exchanged a crap job for no job). One Friday, between classes, I was idly thinking about how much I really did/do like Spielberg's adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, which I'd just caught on TV the night before--the first time I'd watched it all the way through for maybe eight years, but the experience had rocketed me back to my memories of my initial viewing, all the offhand cruelty and odd beauty of it, plus Christian Bale and John Malkovich's towering tandem performances as Jim and Baisie.
Over the intervening time, I'd finally read Crash and several other Ballard books, as well as doing research on his actual life; I held to my interpretation of avatar-Jim as being bruised into virtual sociopathry by the movie's end, seemingly deciding to stay with his parents because A) it's better than being in a camp and B) although he can't recognize him mother, at least she has dark hair and red lipstick, so what the hell...it might be either the person he so vaguely remembers or an acceptable facsimilie, and he certainly know he can always learn to love her later, while faking loving her now in order to get what he needs: Clothes, food, hugs and school. Because that's what he's good at.
The real relationship of that movie, though, is between Jim and Baisie. I thought about slashing them, but it seemed...problematic, obviously, because of the age/power-disparity issues. Then again, there was something about it that seemed sort of weirdly easy, uninteresting--the movie existed, worked as it was. I started thinking about building new people from their seeds. Ellis and Tim began to spin themselves, pearls formed on grit; Ellis being a woman completed a circle of exploitation theme, explored how victims become victimizers. Similarly, just as Tim the old man--a dash of Ballard as I'd seen him in his Rolling Stone profile, crossbred with Laurence Olivier in his latter years--would be a shell over his vulnerable child-self, so the best revenge and most awful secret would be for Ellis too to assume the mask of retroactive-"innocent" age. She would be his longest, truest, only love, and that would become the tragedy for them both, especially since part of her allure would be that she had literally become too callused by experience to even simulate love at all, except as a lie for profit.
So there I was, thinking about love and exploitation, about survival--how far would you go to get what you want, whatever that is? Does yearning redeem desire?--and then, unbidden, an image came into my head. I'd been watching some documentary show about China, possibly on the Discover Channel, and they'd walked us through the making of a dish called the Emperor's Old Bones, in which (as we know) a Thousand-Year carp is basically filletted and eaten alive, so that its virtue of longevity will be transferred to the Emperor or wannabe Imperial who eats it. Since black magic principles have informed my world-view since I was a child, I then thought: Well, what if it wasn't a carp?
I wrote furiously that night, corrected it during Friday's lunch-break, re-wrote and wrote even more furiously over that weekend. By Monday, I had an intact draft. It was a pure creative fever, and I looked at the product with amazement afterwards, as though it had come from outside myself: A gift, a cancer. It passed through me, I was delivered, it remained. It still remains.
From me, it passed on to Don Hutchinson at Northern Frights 4, who asked for and got certain minor changes. From him, it passed on to Ellen Datlow at The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 13. It reached the International Horror Guild, and got me the 1999 award for Best Short Fiction (beating out, I only realized later on, both Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman). The ripple keeps on going, continues to impress (or, as in the case of Renfield, not). Tim and Ellis live yet, sufficient unto themselves, fully separate (I truly believe) from Baisie, Jim, Bale, Malkovich, Ballard, Spielberg, me. And that, folks, is exactly how it should be; it keeps me going, even when cramps are bad and I act like an ass.
I write, and go on writing, on some level because I dream that if I only work hard enough, something like this palpable burst of unforseen wonder may--eventually--happen to me again.;)
So yeah, no details. But it does make me wonder (yet again) why it is that I seem so desperately to seek out conflict, to draw lines in the sand; it's not like I enjoy it, exactly, this saddening process of realizing former friends are/have always been enemies. I just want an end to ambiguity, an understanding of inherent insult, a recognition that there's such a thing as going too far with me, a realization that for my own mental health, I must make sure that people never have power over me simply because I agree to give it to them. As previous episodes of a similar sort have very firmly taught me, the world is just too complicated and life too short for that sort of game-playing.
And on a related note: What the hell is this growing trend of most venues not wanting anything longer than 3,000 to 5,000 words? Who even writes stuff that's that short, besides (apparently) everyone else in the world but me? OTOH, if I needed yet another clear reason to write books instead of stories, this is pretty much a doozy.
At any rate. I'm trying to get Cal to take a nap at the same time Bella usually does, but going by his yelling, it doesn't seem to be working. So I'll confine myself to something I should have done quite a while ago: Providing the good and patient
cesario with her long-promised explanation of why/how I came to write "The Emperor's Old Bones".I was still teaching at the Trebas Institute, an amazingly unprofessional place (as I left, for example, one of my former "peers" told me that John Foote--my new boss--had just gotten fired from the IAODT, basically in order to fuck with me and make me think I'd just exchanged a crap job for no job). One Friday, between classes, I was idly thinking about how much I really did/do like Spielberg's adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, which I'd just caught on TV the night before--the first time I'd watched it all the way through for maybe eight years, but the experience had rocketed me back to my memories of my initial viewing, all the offhand cruelty and odd beauty of it, plus Christian Bale and John Malkovich's towering tandem performances as Jim and Baisie.
Over the intervening time, I'd finally read Crash and several other Ballard books, as well as doing research on his actual life; I held to my interpretation of avatar-Jim as being bruised into virtual sociopathry by the movie's end, seemingly deciding to stay with his parents because A) it's better than being in a camp and B) although he can't recognize him mother, at least she has dark hair and red lipstick, so what the hell...it might be either the person he so vaguely remembers or an acceptable facsimilie, and he certainly know he can always learn to love her later, while faking loving her now in order to get what he needs: Clothes, food, hugs and school. Because that's what he's good at.
The real relationship of that movie, though, is between Jim and Baisie. I thought about slashing them, but it seemed...problematic, obviously, because of the age/power-disparity issues. Then again, there was something about it that seemed sort of weirdly easy, uninteresting--the movie existed, worked as it was. I started thinking about building new people from their seeds. Ellis and Tim began to spin themselves, pearls formed on grit; Ellis being a woman completed a circle of exploitation theme, explored how victims become victimizers. Similarly, just as Tim the old man--a dash of Ballard as I'd seen him in his Rolling Stone profile, crossbred with Laurence Olivier in his latter years--would be a shell over his vulnerable child-self, so the best revenge and most awful secret would be for Ellis too to assume the mask of retroactive-"innocent" age. She would be his longest, truest, only love, and that would become the tragedy for them both, especially since part of her allure would be that she had literally become too callused by experience to even simulate love at all, except as a lie for profit.
So there I was, thinking about love and exploitation, about survival--how far would you go to get what you want, whatever that is? Does yearning redeem desire?--and then, unbidden, an image came into my head. I'd been watching some documentary show about China, possibly on the Discover Channel, and they'd walked us through the making of a dish called the Emperor's Old Bones, in which (as we know) a Thousand-Year carp is basically filletted and eaten alive, so that its virtue of longevity will be transferred to the Emperor or wannabe Imperial who eats it. Since black magic principles have informed my world-view since I was a child, I then thought: Well, what if it wasn't a carp?
I wrote furiously that night, corrected it during Friday's lunch-break, re-wrote and wrote even more furiously over that weekend. By Monday, I had an intact draft. It was a pure creative fever, and I looked at the product with amazement afterwards, as though it had come from outside myself: A gift, a cancer. It passed through me, I was delivered, it remained. It still remains.
From me, it passed on to Don Hutchinson at Northern Frights 4, who asked for and got certain minor changes. From him, it passed on to Ellen Datlow at The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 13. It reached the International Horror Guild, and got me the 1999 award for Best Short Fiction (beating out, I only realized later on, both Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman). The ripple keeps on going, continues to impress (or, as in the case of Renfield, not). Tim and Ellis live yet, sufficient unto themselves, fully separate (I truly believe) from Baisie, Jim, Bale, Malkovich, Ballard, Spielberg, me. And that, folks, is exactly how it should be; it keeps me going, even when cramps are bad and I act like an ass.
I write, and go on writing, on some level because I dream that if I only work hard enough, something like this palpable burst of unforseen wonder may--eventually--happen to me again.;)
