Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Dreamtime


 
 
I remember one dream I had as I child very vividly. I rarely remember dreams, as a child or even now as an adult, but this dream still lingers in my mind as fresh as the night it happened. Spider legs. I can see spider legs towering over me. I'm not sure if I'm the size of a tiny speck or if the spider is huge. I guess that's really irrelevant. All I can see are the legs. My eyes never look to the body and it is unfocused in my peripheral. I remember a large, dark splotch as the body, nothing more. But those legs. They are spiny with hairs peeling off like thorny daggers. A wet, mucus like substance coats them from the tips to the prosoma. I stand, looking up, eyes darting between the eight massive things surrounding me.

I've read that dreams of large, oversized objects means that you feel overwhelmed or stressed. I don't recall having any feeling like that at the time. So I am assuming that's bullshit. What I did feel was happiness. I felt like I was part of something. Like there is more out there then what revolves around me and my daily life. I felt like I was the smallest part in all of it and that made me joyful.

When I woke up I was upset. I tried to will myself back to sleep and back into that dream. I think I did fall back to sleep, but I never found my way back to that dream. It was gone. Lost forever. But the memory stuck with me. It's been over twenty years since that dream but I can still see the spider legs as clearly now as I did in the then. And I still remember that feeling I had while staring up at the huge, spiny legs. I want to find it again. I want to revisit that place and see what else is there. What other feelings arrive when I stay longer. When I stay forever.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Misunderstanding My Rhythm




When I first started writing I mostly wrote poems and songs.  Back then everything I did focused on the rhythm of sentences and sounds of the words.  I could care less about whether the sentences made any sense.  That didn't interest me.  All I wanted was sentences that were beautiful to my ears.  That incoherent, rambling of random words made little sense to anyone but me.  Over the years I continued to use that style, even when it came to writing short stories and novellas, mixing in storytelling a little at a time.  As you can imagine, very few people enjoyed reading anything I wrote.  Some did.  Some people got it.  But not many. 

It took a while for me to find a balance between building rhythmic sentence structure and storytelling.  If there was too much straight story I became bored.  If it was too much random words, my readers would become bored.  Over the years I began to evolve the balance.  If you read my first two novels you can see the progression changing.  Eventually though, I realized that I was never going to have a steady readership if I didn't lose the random worded sentences. 

It took me a while to get to that point.  But I finally did make the realization.  I pushed myself and focused on storytelling and growing as a writer.  Now, I can write full novels without falling back on my random sentences.  Sometimes I miss that style.  If I read my old stuff I still smile and laugh.  I love it.  But I can see now that my new stuff is so much better.    

Here is a quick example of my old style.  I love this paragraph.


 There once was a place that missiles became lovely ideas of change and sticks for arms was gravitational arthritis. When the extremities of nighttime really meant to shovel out someone’s head. Blood only tastes good in your mouth. My decisive orphans cut their veins with tiny versions of knives and kiss boys by the wishing well. Reducible pox intoxicated scapegoats mansion twins for necessary near-beer phobias, then twist my wrist she hated hypnotics. Filtered wife epiphany vanquished graver bellyaches to natterjack partnerships by stepladders or cellars. The julian floorwalkers mustard rhinestone sod worms infecting woozy aviation equivalents to congregate gunboat. I endorse stabbed gullets.