Mountains, The Social Internet, and Characters Who Are Not Monkeys

I wanted to start this entry with I have just come back from a weekend in the mountains, but we returned from the mountain on Sunday and the fact that it’s now Tuesday renders the opening inaccurate. Instead, today’s the day when my brain returned from the mountains, kicking back into gear after three days away to celebrate my beloved’s birthday.

It was pretty, up in the mountains. We woke to a sea of mist every morning, broken by occasional islands where peaks rose through the white. There were cows, and whip-poor-will, and access to a store selling a vast array of flavoured liquors and whiskeys. I drank far more than is usual for me, slept far less, and didn’t think about writing for several days in a row.

A post shared by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Jun 8, 2018 at 2:44pm PDT

Now my beloved is in the next room, watching Kobo and the Two Strings on my recommendation. She is increasingly unimpressed by their insistence on calling one character Monkey when they are patently not a monkey, and the plot is not engrossing her. Which is, admittedly, something I’d been irritated with myself back when I watched it, but I have blocked that out and remembered the gorgeous design work that went into the villains of the piece.

Pizza has been ordered for lunch, and I’m set up in our bedroom working on a short story titled The Black Glove Widow of Helios Ridge that will probably not end up being a story. The current draft just crossed 6,000 words, and I’m hitting the kind of transition point where the story changes gears. The logic of narrative structure tells me I’m looking at something 24,000 words long, or I’m cutting a whole bunch of stuff somewhere along the way.

I’ve found myself going back and looking at blog entries for various writers circa 2002 or so, examining the kinds of engagement that were encouraged back in the early days of the social internet. It’s much like going back and looking at the early films of the Lumière brothers after the invention of the film camera–people feeling out how the form will be used, replicating more familiar models until innovation emerges. You start with a train arriving at a station or people leaving a factory, an in-motion version of a static photograph, and soon someone figures out that you can pan the camera sideways or cut from one shot to the next. Eventually you get special effects and the modern blockbuster.

We have evolved so far away from those modern weblogs, from a writers point of view, but I’m still entranced by those daily glimpses into a working writers life. The list of things done, concerns entertained, words counted. The slow progression where you can see how a book you love developed, some seventeen years after the book was initially drafted.

And now I have to go mark assignments, which is a very 2002 thing for me to be mentioning on my blog, and no more fun than it was all those years ago.