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This morning I decided to grip The Noise of Endless Wars by its scrawny little throat and shake vigorously, and managed to hork up enough words to get me to the end of the first half of chapter 12. One more hurdle cleared, one crisis resolved, and the words were coming more easily than they have been since somewhere around chapter 7. Second half is already falling into place in my head, so wish me luck. No, I haven't killed anyone off. (Yet.)
I also ventured into the dubious waters of the Lagoon of Failed Novels Past by excavating the few existing scraps of Ordinary Talismans, my aborted NaNoWriMo project from...2006, was it? It's wedged in the odd little crack where it has enough good aspects to keep me from using it for kindling, but not enough to extract a full novel from. It doesn't help that I was neck-deep in my John Crowley phase, which is wonderful if you're John Crowley, emphatically not if you're prone to excessive verbiage even on your good days. I hate letting it go, since I have a fondness for the characters, but I'm releasing it into the wild to die in its natural habitat. Whatever that means.
Still. There are bits and pieces I think I'll be taking with me:
Every movie about photographers, from Blow Up to Passion Fish, features a scene staged in a darkroom, earnest faces swathed in red like an afterimage, light and shadow emerging from blank paper like mad science. That was the part I never tired of, that slow reveal; it was the closest I would ever come to true creation. [...] I once told Christian that every repeated task, however menial, becomes ritualized if we are truly connected to it, be it in art, cooking, or what have you. It occurred to me then that photography is a layman's transubstantiation, turning paper and chemistry into tangible memory instead of bread and wine into body and blood of Christ.
And now I miss working in a darkroom. It's one thing I mourn about the digital age.
I also ventured into the dubious waters of the Lagoon of Failed Novels Past by excavating the few existing scraps of Ordinary Talismans, my aborted NaNoWriMo project from...2006, was it? It's wedged in the odd little crack where it has enough good aspects to keep me from using it for kindling, but not enough to extract a full novel from. It doesn't help that I was neck-deep in my John Crowley phase, which is wonderful if you're John Crowley, emphatically not if you're prone to excessive verbiage even on your good days. I hate letting it go, since I have a fondness for the characters, but I'm releasing it into the wild to die in its natural habitat. Whatever that means.
Still. There are bits and pieces I think I'll be taking with me:
Every movie about photographers, from Blow Up to Passion Fish, features a scene staged in a darkroom, earnest faces swathed in red like an afterimage, light and shadow emerging from blank paper like mad science. That was the part I never tired of, that slow reveal; it was the closest I would ever come to true creation. [...] I once told Christian that every repeated task, however menial, becomes ritualized if we are truly connected to it, be it in art, cooking, or what have you. It occurred to me then that photography is a layman's transubstantiation, turning paper and chemistry into tangible memory instead of bread and wine into body and blood of Christ.
And now I miss working in a darkroom. It's one thing I mourn about the digital age.
