A brief thought on temporality and musical theater

Watching both Sweeney Todds (that is, the ones with Johnny Depp and George Hearn, respectively), I was surprised to find I preferred the new movie. It's an odd thing, since I liked the 2007 movie inordinately when I first saw it. I was wholly unfamiliar with the Broadway show and had, in fact, not yet had any unambiguously positive interactions with Stephen Sondheim. But as I learned more about the show I found I disliked almost every difference I learned of between the movie and its source.

I started writing at length about my preference of the one over the other, but I realized it was a bit silly of me. First of all, there's no accounting for the 80s. More to the point, it's hardly fair to compare a Hollywood film to a filmed stage production, any more than it would be fair to judge the movie based on a live reenactment by Johnny Depp and friends. I'm comfortable confessing that I will never have a truly informed opinion about live theater performed before I was born.

"Blog grist" is a thing now

Urgh. I'm (re)discovering that it's harder to have something interesting to say every week when you have a regular job which doesn't, itself, furnish material. Unfortunately the creative writing has to slow down a bit to make room for the paid work.

As if I wasn't feeling somewhat uncreative, one of my friends is currently putting the finishing touches on a new human being. Or perhaps... just a first draft? There is a lengthy revision and expansion process which she and her co-author have not begun yet.

Truth be told, I don't really have much to say about this week. Everything of any interest has been either freelance work or politics, neither of which I want to make blog grist.

My personal Skyrim meta-narrative is becoming kind of existential and depressing. Having traveled the length and breadth of the land, from Windhelm to Markarth, and beyond the edge of the world at Winterhold, my hero has found no cause or person worth fighting for.

Forest vs. trees

I had a fun St. Patrick's Day, and woke up not with a hangover, but a fever and a sore throat. Life goes on.

It's been something of an odd transition, working near full-time freelance hours. I've had some realizations that were interesting (to me, anyway).

The first of those is that freelance proofreading, if I can fit it around writing, might be a good thing to keep a hand in even while writing "full-time." It keeps one broadly- (as opposed to merely well-) read, and exposes one to the thoughts of people one would not otherwise meet. A writer needs to maintain human contact, and at least a semblance of varied activity, or else his (or her) stories will inexorably gravitate toward the anti-story: the protagonist, an old writer, living alone, runs out of ideas. (We might perhaps call this genre "anti-fiction," as, while it is not true, it is also paradoxically devoid of imagination or embellishment of reality.)*

Trying to work a real full day on my laptop, I finally got sick of screens. Because my work right now has to be done on my computer, if I want a respite it means doing my creative writing by hand.

Writing longhand is such a different experience. It's easy to forget this, but the writing process actually changes. At least for me. I can't write as fast as I can think. I can't type as fast as I can think either, but I think in fits and starts. When I type the pauses in my thinking are periods of silence and a stationary, blinking cursor. Writing by hand I can do my thinking while I wait for my hand to catch up with my head. There's time to revise while the hand is moving; draft 1.0 is really draft 1.5.

The extra time allows for sprawling, luxuriant sentences of the sort that were more common when everyone wrote like this. Heck, if I had to stop to sharpen my quill after every line, maybe I could make everything rhyme. To a certain extent, the extra time has to be spent embellishing the sentence at hand. You can't just buffer in a chapter of prose over an hour of diligent longhand.

Another thing happened with which I am pleased. I had come to a snag in Nenle (this is not what I was pleased with--the snag, I mean) and decided it might be worthwhile to summarize the whole story in one sitting in longhand. The point of this being that if I would need to keep to the essentials to fit it into one sitting, and if I got bored while writing any part of the summary it would stand to reason that that part would be even more boring fleshed out.

This proved very helpful. I had been getting bogged down, not really able to see more than a scene ahead or behind, wherever I was. The story was meandering and I was beginning to wonder if all of it had a point. This time I was able to answer all the "what happens nexts" while I still remembered what happened at the beginning, and the story that emerged turned coherent again.

I did this with Hengist a while back too, plotting out some emotional arcs that I thought had been lost in the noise of individual scenes. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that I can't do this until I've generated a lot of noise. If I just set out to concisely trace a story arc, I doubt it would be more than occasionally interesting. The story has to emerge from the noise, grow wild (hey, new metaphor), and then be tamed again (and another. Congratulations, you've mixed a metaphor from mineral, vegetable, and animal components--go to bed, Cory).

Good has come of it. I should probably make a point of doing it in the process of everything I write. It is so easy to get lost, or to labor over a sentence through a jeweler's loupe, putting the perfect polish on an idea that's just wrong.

* Yes, that is harsh to the point of pretentiousness. I should talk. Just because my ratio of artistic integrity to published work is a value of infinity doesn't mean the numerator is nontrivial.

Sometimes a title doesn't come to you in time

I completely forgot to spring forward last night. On the other hand, I got to bed early. Somehow I usually find myself awake at the DST changes. One of the consequences of getting to bed on time was that I neglected to get a blog post up by the end of Saturday. My apologies.

The big news this week is that the freelancing has paid off. I use "paid off" in the metaphorical, antithetical sense that it has supplied me with substantial work, not that it has paid me, but the money is forthcoming. I secured a rather large website proofreading gig that will be the equivalent of full-time work for more than a month. Consequently I am relearning some of those adult survival skills, like time-management.

Ironically, because of my contract, being employed doesn't feel all that different from being unemployed. It was a busy unemployed, after all. There is less concern about money. It will be nice to be in the black again.

I gave it a little thought and decided that it wouldn't do to talk about my freelance assignments in extensive detail here. At least, I don't think it would be professional of me to to talk about "their" work (as it becomes when they buy it from me) with the same degree of flippancy with which I talk about "my" work.

I'm re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring for what I'm realizing is the first time. I read most of The Two Towers and Return of the King last year or so, but I realized that I hadn't started from the beginning since the first time back in 2001 or so, which is much longer ago than I realized.

I always maintained that Fellowship was flawed, with issues of tone, pacing, and scope. I don't quite disagree with myself, but keeping in mind some comments of Girlfriend's, and just now having left the house of Tom Bombadil, I see how the book functions better on its own terms--terms we hardly ever engage it on, knowing where the story is going.

The comparison of Robinson Crusoe comes to mind: a novel that felt compelled to tell you about the protagonist's backstory in its entirety before getting into the "plot." The novel was a new thing at the time and you couldn't just dump people into it. I suppose the same was likely true of epic fantasy before LoTR: you didn't take your characters directly from obscurity to world-scale events in an unfamiliar world. Of course now we do that all the time, jaded and genre-savvy as we are. We tend to go too far, I think (or maybe only I do) and regard everything that happens in Emond's Field or the Skywalker homestead as filler. (Do we ever shed a tear for Luke's friends, stood up in Tosche Station with an armload of extra power converters?) Tolkien, at least, begins with a quest that works better in relation to what comes before than what comes after.

Still playing Skyrim. I returned to the main plot and actually met a character who might be interesting, and a plot that might be interesting, too. About where they steal a page from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Then, you see, there are these dragons...

Is it great? No. But so far I've been more excited to see butterflies than dragons, and maybe with some plot that will change. Unless, you know, the butterflies are coming back...

Plans have been made to visit Seattle in June. Or was it July? Plans have been made. It's exciting, and at this moment feels closer than it actually is.

Nor any drop to drink

This morning I spent some time wondering what if anything I could blog about. The absurdity of this becomes apparent when you understand that the basement had already flooded at this point. I suppose I was not yet at the griping stage of the crisis, but I am now. Certainly, the adventure grew over the course of the day.

Why was the basement flooded? Well, I'll tell you. Because this house sits on a funky little slope, the back door is set into a recessed cement alcove, a few feet below ground level. There's a drain in the bottom, which is why it didn't turn into a pond during Hurricane Irene. But what, you may wonder, if the drain were to clog, say with mud? Well last night, amid an intense but not special thunderstorm, we discovered the answer to that question.

There was mud. The back door is next to a closet and, beyond that, the laundry nook. The tile pattern on the floor in the closet has been completely obliterated by mud, to the point that I, who have had little business with that closet, did not realize it was not simply a brown floor. The laundry nook fared better because the water had to seep through a carpet to get there, and the carpet acted as a sort of filtration system. Unfortunately, the nook was strewn with more than a few things which interact badly with water: mostly the flowy things Girlfriend wears as she flounces and flits about. There were losses, some of which I hope are reversible, but I fear some items have flounced their last.

The room, which doubles as Girlfriend's bedroom, had become positively marshy. Interestingly, the water flowed in a mostly straight line from the door once it hit the rug; if it had spread evenly it would have ended up under Girlfriend's bed, but she was spared that. The slight slope of the floor directed the water in riverine fashion.

The situation cried out for a wet vac. Our need to get to Home Depot cried out for a car. As did we, when we got to the empty Zipcar space outside the Metro station. We stood around a while waiting for the car to arrive. We scoured the parking lot in case the last person had parked it in the wrong place. We called Zipcar for help. Eventually we discovered that the Zipcar at the Metro station was not the one we had reserved. That Zipcar was cleverly hidden in an apartment complex next to where they said it would be. The agent we got on the phone could tell us where it was, more or less, but not how to get there. With guesswork and perseverance, we ultimately found the car. It was as close as I have ever come to experiencing Skyrim in real life.

We got to Home Depot. We didn't buy a wet vac per se. Instead we bought a device which claimed to be able to turn a bucket into a wet vac, and also bought a bucket. While Girlfriend was returning the car to its nest, I was home getting a head start on the vacuuming. Sort of.

Someone had stolen the hose from the vacuum box and replaced it with a beef jerky wrapper.

Let me say that again. Someone had stolen the hose from the vacuum box and replaced it with a beef jerky wrapper. Where there should have been a four-foot-long black hose, there was none. Where there should not have been the empty wrapper of a dried meatsnack, there one was. I guess the tube is ventilating a meth lab somewhere.

Home Depot was very good about exchanging our box for one that had not been pillaged. Transportation for that endeavor (since Girlfriend had returned the Zipcar) was provided by Girlfriend's extremely helpful uncle, who had driven over to lend a dehumidifier. In fact he lent another wet vac as well.

With two wet vacs and a dehumidifier we set about reclaiming the wetland in our basement. Because it had been created by human construction, and because only a rudimentary ecosystem had developed, the paperwork was minimal.

On an wholly unrelated note, I acquired and dispatched another freelance gig this week. Hopefully, I can build some sort of momentum.