Dumpster diving

I feel a need to throw a myriad of miscellanea out there to anyone willing to give it a read. This is your classic dumper dive post, where you might find something interesting, maybe even valuable, but what you find might have an equal chance of just being junk. Read at your own risk. No refunds.

Anniversaries

One thing that occurred to me as I was responding to a private conversation that kind of surprised me when it came up. The question was: Have you ever had a DUI or DWI? The answer for that is “no”, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t more than once that I should have just stayed put instead of trying to drive home. But the interesting part was not the question, or my response, but that it occurred to me that in the next few days I will have reached another anniversary of sobriety — sixteen years now.

SIXTEEN.

The fact that such a thing had slipped my mind must mean that my recovery is going well. I am still an alcoholic, that will not change in this lifetime. But the fact that booze isn’t on my mind even so much as to not recognize an anniversary of sobriety until someone mentions a DWI? That’s progress, if you ask me.

Along the same lines, however, there are few days that I don’t wish I had a smoke, although it has been close to fifteen years since I last had a cig between my fingers. I am clearly still addicted to the habit. One day at a time, as they say.

Writing

Writing Scarlet a few days ago got me thinking about what prompted that piece and about writing in general. I liked the feel of the piece and, evidently, so did some of you.

You may have noticed that one of the styles I am exploring is this poetic-prose feel that doesn’t follow conventions when it comes to storytelling, whether it was in that piece, some of my other flash or, even, my campfire sessions. It is not always easy to avoid standard tropes and conventions. There is a good reason why both exist but I’ve largely wanted to avoid falling into those patterns over these recent years. It isn’t to be different for the sake of being different, to be outre… It is because my goal as a writer has always been to find unexplored, latent themes and patterns of words in the hopes that there are some untapped treasures waiting to be borne of such exploration.

Scarlet is a story that is about six years old, but an iterative one with only a handful of constants: the character is dressed in red or wears a red scarf, she is relatively young and perhaps a wee bit on the oblivious side (not to be confused with being dumb or naive; her mind is just on other things), she has a companion who is always more alert and the world she lives in tends to be post-apocalyptic or verging on being crapsack. I’m finally starting to get a feel for how to approach her story after all this time and I’m seriously considering where it will take her.

The story was inspired by a bit of artwork from someone online. The artist and I think alike in some ways when it comes to the character. Art produced since has an eerily similar theme as what I was imagining in early variants of the story, but I have since migrated away from the more fantasy-oriented themes that the artist continued to explore in the years that followed my seeing the original ort piece.

That said, one of my goals with my migration from sceadugenga.com to ravensweald.com was to have the option to post serialized fiction as a subdomain to this site, and I am thinking of using her story to explore writing more prose (again).

I just found a great theme for WP for such things, but it is one that will take more TLC than a standard theme, as it is not on the repository. While public and open source, it wasn’t intended to function as a public theme. Still, if you want to see how it might work out, check out the demo site. To use it, you’ll need to be able to install a theme the old-fashioned way, so WP.com sites are out and WP-hosted sites might be out as well (see: walled garden). It seems like the perfect theme, however, to showcase prose, something that is severely lacking in blog themes. I may need to do the hard work of modifying a child theme from a more official theme to emulate it if I can’t get it to work on my subdomain, but it looks and feels great in my opinion.

Music

Do you fancy yourself an aspiring lyricist and have you checked out my post Experiments in Stereo? I’m asking folks to imagine that they are Andrew Eldritch from Sisters of Mercy and pretending that they still have a new song in them (although Andy has said that he sees no need to write any more lyrics ever again). All you know about the premise is that it is inspired by a handful of songs, but probably doesn’t sound like any of them and that you don’t need to sing, but let me embarrass myself instead. If your lyrics are selected (not having an idea of the actual sound, by design), I’ll feature them and ask for your permission to use them. Of course, I’ll give you credit and, should I make a million dollars, you can have no more than 50% of it.

Too stressful not knowing what the music might sound like to come up with lyrics?!?!? Maybe I’ll share a partial very short snippet sometime next week. No definite date for deciding which lyrics to use aside from before the end of June so I can record my yowling while everyone is out of the house later in the month.

Just for fun, throw some words into the comments of that post and call them lyrics, okay?

That’s it for now. I’m needing a nap and there is only so much refuse you should be expected to sift through on a given day.