VIDEO

If Nick's going to add a video, so am I. (double-click it to make it start)

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This is a True Story: Writing fiction vs. writing about fiction vs. writing around fiction vs. writing about friction

I like writing fiction. A heap. A ton. A lot. I've been trying to be a little more organized about how I write - try to write a little every day, that sort of thing - but there's nothing better than the random moment in the canned veggies aisle at the supermarket or at the car wash when an idea suddenly appears - like a winning lottery ticket, unexpected but highly desired - and demands to be explored. Sometimes I enjoy being told what to write, and sometimes I find it constricting, but no matter how I feel about a story, once I really get started I always - ALWAYS - find myself writing things I didn't expect. There is nothing quite as wonderful or scary as telling a story and not knowing what will happen next, of knowing that I will be the first person in the world to discover where this story leads.
I'm not as big of a fan of writing about fiction. I find it gets more difficult as the piece gets longer. I love a good two page story, really enjoy work that's around thirty pages long, and struggle with anything longer. With short works, the author is forced to leave a lot of breathing room, a lot of space for analysis and interpretation. As a work gets longer it becomes more refined, more defined. The space for interpretation shrinks. The only way I can find significant subjects for discussion in longer works is by fracturing them into smaller segments, sifting through the broken bits to find subtext. It's not that I can't read a novel- I like reading novels - but I almost always lose the sense of the novel as a single cohesive unit. Instead, it becomes a series of interrelated vignettes, sort of like taking a long movie and converting it to a mini-series. The trick is finding a book that can be fractured and have each section stand on its own as interesting/valuable while still connecting to the other sections of the story.

Writing around fiction: Yeah, there's usually some around.
Writing about friction: Don't most stories contain friction?

Final Exit

At this time tomorrow, I'll be giving my exit interview.

Roshni Didn't Want to Have Her Picture Taken

Roshni Didn't Want to Have Her Picture Taken, originally uploaded by dogwelder.

I took it anyway.

From my recent trip to Tatooine

From my recent trip to Tatooine
Originally uploaded by dogwelder

A gift from Mo!

Myth Myth Myth

Here's my magic myth of magic: Iimo and the World Web

Sara is ready to WHOMP IT!

Sara is ready to WHOMP IT!
Originally uploaded by dogwelder

Making a Myth / Breaking a Myth

Here's the thing about myths. Classic myths, for the most part, were made up by thousands of people. As the stories were told, retold, and re-retold, parts were created, modified, and eliminated through years of the greatest text editor ever written, the oral tradition. They've had a lot of time to get refined and polished. All the rough patches are worn smooth by centuries of rewrites. The ultimate editor was the audience- if something didn't work, the audience discarded it.

Unfortunately, I don't have centuries to create my myth (at least I don't think I do. As me again in 2208), and despite what Walt Whitman claims, I don't seem to contain multitudes. Generating the a complete, internally coherent mythology in a few weeks all by myself is pretty difficult. I was only able to complete it by accepting that my myth will never compete with any of Ovid's (unless you tell it to all of your friends, and they tell all of their friends, and so on, and so on....)

That said: I had a lot of fun creating my myth, and trying to apply the mythic formula to modern problems. I don't know how effective my myth is, but I think it's cohesive.

I'm not going to be teaching at the high school level - I don't plan to right away, any way - so I think that I would not have my students generate a myth out of whole cloth- at least, not as their first assignment. I would probably first have them construct myths using characters we've studied, then move on to creating mythological characters of their design. I could see it as a great group project. Every group could be instructed to create a canon of mythological beings, discuss the features of each being, and explain how they interact. It would be an easy way to overlap classroom standards, combining writing, reading and even artistic skills (they could draw the beings, and a map of the mythological worlds they inhabit). My main goal, as with any creative assignment, would be to convince my students that creative works don't always have to be perfect, that the act of creation is sometimes more important that the work itself. My wife is in an improv class, and one of the things they sometimes say is "dare to suck." It doesn't mean you should try to suck- it means you should try new things, even though they may not work.

So, in that spirit: I dare to let my myth suck.

Sound

Testing Gabcast, tindeck and embed.

If you want to be lazy and use your phone, this is the way to go.
Gabcast! Lizards of doom! #1



If you want to record fancier stuff, you can use Tindeck:


But the coolest looking (and therefore most difficult) method is to use the embed tag. It looks cool, but blogger's editor won't let me properly post the sample code. still, it looks like this:


Embed is also really good for adding annoying repeated sounds that can't be turned off to a page.