on writing (and getting lost along the way)
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: saer's watching dora the explorer a dozen feet away
ashcroft's replacement seems like he might be worse than ashcroft, but i'm not in the mood to talk politics right now...

so, i'll ramble about writing. more specifically, i'll cover what keeps me from writing lately: namely, i've got too many big ideas in my head at once. so, how about a list?

artistry. the confusingly-titled future-set epic about where are society is going and setting up a specific way for it to end, involving violent revolution, alien attacks, religious leaders taking over the world, police impounded the unhomed and the destruction of stars. i've got a bible of terminology and technology for this one that expands regularly. i see the whole thing as a twelve part story, to be written in screenplay format, though i'm not sure if it would be twelve one-hour episodes or twelve two-hour movies. needless to say, i haven't put too much effort into writing the actual content of this one beyond my bible and and outline cause it would take the publication of one or more of the rest of my stuff before i had the clout to even suggest this effects-laden thing get optioned, let alone produced

wannabeheroes. there's an outline 48 issues long for this comic and scripts for seventeen of them. but, as far as the artwork goes, i completed two different versions of issue one, with my simplistic art style fitting nicely enough with the dense text and dialogue, and i've drawn some of issue two. but, ultimately, i can't draw this thing fast enough to make it work. if i could guarantee a page a day, i could get the schedule i want. interestingly, if i had kept that schedule from when i originally got to drawing it, i'd be three fourths of the way done now. and, the idea and outline are even older than those early pages. i've toyed with rewriting the thing from the beginning as a half hour format tv series, but i don't have the clout or the fame or anything to get it made, so there doesn't seem much point. this story--four teens setting out to be superheroes in the real world, with densely worded bits about social issues and politics and revolution and life--is stuck in my head though, which makes sense since it covers just about all my usual themes

clubhouse blues. a short novel (i'm figuring on somewhere about two hundred pages when it's done) that is at a pivotal half way point. just last week, i did a read through and edit and got back into it just in time to be rather sick this past weekend, so now i have to get into it again, presumably next week. there's an important scene coming that should make or break the story as something shallow or relatively important and good. the story, by the way, follows four teens (focusing primarily on just two of them) in the last days of summer after the discovery of an abandoned clubhouse in the woods. there is no clear plot, just a series of events that are headed to a very specific climax. the story was suggested by the title, which i came up with for my screenplay, paper song (about a hostage situation in a radio studio, though really about pedophilia, molestation, rape and sex, with a hell of a lot of dialogue), the title of which was suggested by a title i came up with in passing in one of my completed novels a few years back, grazers (or into the mouth of the river of time)

gardia stories. three completed so far, the short stories, the escalor and master caker and the novel the empress of time. set in the fantasy world of gardia which connects here and there with our world. i've got a map, a bible of terminology plus an ever expanding ancient language (including an ancient alphabet) for background material, and lately i've been amassing a lot of new entries for the bible on this one to ready for the second novel, lion, horse, tree, a two-branched plot starting with the abduction of the infant princess flea. i think i'm ready for this one but i want to finish clubhouse blues first. i've got too many unfinished works and false starts in recent years

and, there's my mortician screenplay, for which i've done a lot of reading and research, but i wasn't ready to write when my schedule opened up for it. there's my demonangel cycle of stories, which connect all of my novels and screenplays tangentially if not overtly (numerous unpublished novels and short stories and unproduced screenplays completed so far, too many to list here, though it might be an interesting exercise to put all my titles together to get an idea of how i name these things). there's my vikariad (an online comic, a good chunk of which has been finished and can be read on my website at lemmingdrops.com) about the last ditch efforts by some vikings to fight off christianity. and, there's many many more. if i took the time to talk about them all, i'd probably never get around to writing about them all. of course, that brings me to my point. if i spend too much time planning for them all, i tend to avoid, inadvertantly most of the time but purposely sometimes too, actually writing them. it's easy to skip right past doing what i want to do because life these days supplies way too much to do, way too much busy work and surface entertainment, and the political climate of our nation is a little distracting as well. life gets in the way of life sometimes. not that i'm complaining about my life. there just aren't enough hours in the day to live all of the life you want sometimes, you know. and, it's easy to get bogged down in the details, running errands and keeping up with pop culture, fighting a losing battle with the publishing industry, looking after and enjoying a family, fantasizing about changing the world and anything else that comes along

and i didn't even mention my recent attempts at doing a regular comic strip or my hobby of building rather complicated things with lego blocks or my recent interest in cooking or my love for movies or books or comics

anyway, no watchlist for tonight. gotta go to blockbuster in a bit to exchange the two dvds i've had now since saturday (arrested development disk three and last house on the left). i think i'll try to squeeze in the latest episode of the wire and the latest episodes of the simpsons and arrested development, and there will be jeopardy and the daily show and whatever i get at blockbuster. as for now, well, it's laundry day, so i'm off to launderland soon

maybe we'll talk politics tomorrow