quote:Original post by lutzy
One day I would like to write a novel...

Well, that''s cool - any particular kind of novel?

O_o is it just me, or are these posts approaching novel-length all by themselves?

quote:Original post by adventuredesign
Literary theory is well documented for very long, creativity is rife with myth, misnomer and paraded expertice that fails the validity theory test. There are thousands of literary experts, and perhaps a couple dozen experts in creativity on this planet, simply because everyone looks outward most of the time.

Hmm, I was thinking that literary theory included the part of creativity theory that studies how and why people write, which would naturally make both rife with myth and misnomer, etc.

quote:
It''s not that I''ve never been hiking or camping or on a giant rollercoster or to a great museam or in a big blackout or icestorm... these are things you would classify as ''great experiences'' right?

quote:
Not really, cause they are kind''ve subjective and quantifiable. A part of it has to be unknown, part of it has to be complete surprise, part of it has to call upon your immediate action, your personal self-leadership, kind''ve like putting out a fire that surprisingly sprang up and was potentially quite deadly where you only had seconds to make critical, if not life determining, just minus the hazard.
(snip navigation record story)

Hmm. Had you given me a bunch of anecdotes and asked me to pick the one that was the grestest experience, I would not have picked that one. I''m going to continue to argue that great moments in life are relative. Had I been participating in something like that I am almost certain I would not have found it great. Of course, since I have mild asthma I find it difficult to imagine enjoying anything involving lots of running. ^_~ But seriously, I think that you and I have different sorts of brain chemistry. Take adrenaline, for example, and it''s relationship with the fight or flight instinct, which you mention somewhere. (I''ve lost track...) Now, I find adrenaline rushes physically unpleasant. It would be hard for me to describe exactly how it feels - kind of like having an upset stomach I suppose. But the point is that I''m pavlovianly conditioned, as it were, to avoid things that give me advenaline rushes. This is why I, normally a very calm sweet-tempered person, will go instantly bitchy if somebody sneaks up behind me and yells ''boo!''. My roommate, being slightly a sadist, loves to find various ways to harass me, but even he know not to scare me because I''ll be pissed off at him for the rest of the day. Note that I don''t watch horror movies, and I prefer psychological thrillers to action movies.

Also, I hate being in a hurry. That''s kind of a continuous low-level adrenaline surge, and it puts me in a bad mood just as effectively.

Continuing on to the fight or flight instinct - I studied this in an intro to psych course, and one of the interesting things that came out in the discussion is that ''fight or flight'' is a misnomer - it should actually be ''fight, flight, or freeze''. I am the type who freezes. Which is why when I think of a physically exhilirating contest thing similar to your example, the closest I come up with is when I played hide-and-go-seek with a bunch of teenagers in a huge building. I hid behind a cabinet for more than an hour, yet I wasn''t bored, I was excited and I enjoyed it, even in spite of the sweat and the spiderwebs. I''ve always loved hide-and-go-seek and assassins and those sort of games. And similarly, being a sniper in hiding, guarding the goal, when I played paintball. I don''t think I would count either of those as being as profound of experiences as the great blackout, or this one time when I went to the lake in the middle of winter and everything looked completely alien, with the waves being frozen and the sand mixed with snow, no colors anywhere and the wind moaning.

quote:
I''m not really certain, given your information, whether you''ve actually experienced a peak experience. It''s isn''t emotionally intense, although intense emotion can be present, it is something that happens on all cognitive levels at once; peak understanding, peak awe, peak feeling, peak relief, and even more.

How about alienation? Looking over my experiences it seems that several of them have been based on alienation or it''s converse, being the center of some social activity. Plus of course the epiphany/eureka pattern-discovery I mentioned before.

quote:
How can I say this, it''s something that happens where you find out that you are more than you are and realize that there is a part of you that you didn''t even know, and you thought you knew yourself pretty well. I kind''ve had that happen when this big, tough ex marine surrendered his whole self to love once, but that was only a emotional/primitive peak, and a huge matrimonial mistake LOL.

quote:
You say humans are naturally explorers. I would argue that about 1/3 of humans are naturally explorers, and the other 2/3 are naturally not. If you read about life in an aboriginal tribe (before money entered the picture), you will note that most of it consists of people huddling together trying to make a nutritional and reproductive profit.

quote:
That is true for aboriginals, but other branches of human and homind from whom we evolved were nomadic for tens of thousands of years before the aboriginals. Hunter wanderer is about ninety percent of our evolutionary track whereas settler/gatherer/agrarian/domesticant is about ten percent of our evolutionary time on this planet for the species and it''s ancestors.

The same applies to nomads - there are people who have the instinct to always stay close to home, whether home is a physical place or a group of people on the move. Perhaps you know about xenophilia and xenophobia? Xenophilia is the motivating force behind physical exploration and exploration-play, all sorts of sexual preferances e.g. furries and fetishes for a race other than one''s own, much writing of science fiction and fantasy, real and armchair anthropologists, people who wear clothes from or decorate their houses in the style of another culture, and the aesthetic movements of romanticism and gothicism. Xenophobia on the other hand is why people who live in little villages are suspicious of foreigners, why people long for the way things used to be, revere tradition and cultural heroes, and the political/aesthetic movements of isolationism, nationalism, and ''county fair'' or ''country'' art. My theory is that about 2/3s of people are more xenophobic while 1/3 are more xenophilic, and that this evolved as the best way to keep most primitive humans doing things the traditional, efficient way that worked and living in communities where they understood the geography and local food chain, while some wandered around discovering new techniques and places, and stirring up the gene pool by breeding with people who weren''t their cousins (if they didn''t get killed off first). Life would be a big mess if everybody wanted to be an explorer - who would farm and take care of babies and sick people and etc.?

quote:
You don''t know until you try. It''s just like you don''t really know it unless you can write it down, but in a living life kind of sense. Just the fact you are toying with adventure is awakening primitive genetic predispositions in you that were always there, and it may be wise in a wholeness and full awareness sense to do a little more of this toying until you are ready to play.

No awakening - I have always played at exploring since I was a child, and I recall even when I was only 8 or so, being specifically aware that I was ''playing'' at it, and that trying to do it for real would be unpleasant and impractical.

quote:
If I had been born instead of Columbus the Native Americans would have had a few more hundred years of peace. If The army was made out of copies of me we would surrender. That''s just who I am, whether because of my gender, my brain chemistry, or what I was taught as a child, it''s who I am now.

Wait a minute, you aren''t fooling me. You would bash the crap out of the big hairy ape that laid one finger on your child and you know you would. You would whack the back of the head of an intruder with the bottom of a lamp base with the swing of Willy Mays if he or she were about to extinguish the lifelight lamp of you mare. Pish tush. I took a rich socialite aerobics instructor out for a weekend in the high desert this past summer on a dare. For a avowed vegitarian, she couldn''t have sunk her teeth any deeper into barbequed snake, and drank with relish like a great jungle cat at a watering hole cut from the base of cacti. Had she not hated me more for being right, we probably would have bred.

quote:
Lol. It''s true that if someone threatened a child under my care (I''m thinking of my little brother) I would be furious. I probably wouldn''t physically try to attack them though - my first instinct would be to get the child physically out of harm''s way, and my second would be to either call for help or try to guilt trip or bribe the attacker into leaving, whichever seemed more likely to work. If that didn''t work, I would try to retreat, and if I couldn''t do that _then_ I would consider trying to kill the attacker.

quote:
I have absolutely no desire to be the sort of person who climbs mountains.

quote:
Have you seen the view from up there? Can you really know before the fact?

I have been to the top of a mountain, yes. Not a particularly tall mountain, but we did hike and climb to the top and look at the view. I liked looking at Niagra falls as part of a tour better.

quote:
If I could change who I am in only one way I would make myself more charming/attractive, because it is the social world that inspires me, not the physical world.

What more modern jungle is there? I love that too? Doors open everywhere when you can be observed as one who knows the lay of the land anywhere there''s land. You could learn a lot about society in the wild, simply because of the distance and perspective it affords you. Don''t you know that the most dangerous creature on earth is a beautiful woman? Sunandshadow, by your very gender, you are already beautiful. It''s just a natural fact. One mountain waterfall, and you will know it where it counts. We aren''t even talking yet about the beauty of your art or mind. That''s later.


Okay now _you''re_ being silly. Women are not inherently beautiful, unless you want to say that human beings are inherently beautiful, which is possibly true for a more metaphorical sense of the word beauty, but then you said you aren''t talking about the beauty of art or mind.

Now, don''t get me wrong. I would be the first to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; or rather, in the genes of the beholder, and everybody know genes have no sense of ethics or justice. I would be the first to say that my own opinion of what makes a beautiful person is both atypical (e.g. I tend to prefer feminine males, this is almost certainly related somehow to the hormone imbalance that makes me bisexual) and overly-picky (I''m particularly picky about all visual aesthetic things for some reason). But as someone with a trained artist''s eye, the concept of physical beauty is rather inescapable. I''ve never been able to decide whether it is actively unethical that people are nicer to pretty people; but what I did decide is that there''s nothing I can do to be more ethical about it, so there''s no point in worrying about it. Mostly it just ticks me off that I don''t get hit on more often. ^_~ But there''s no point about angsting about there being no justice in the universe, so the rest of the time I try to think about something more useful.

quote:
Actually I really do disagree. I think that everyone''s life has moments that are supremely meaningful to them - I think that true greatness is subjective and relative to the individual experiencing it, and wouldn''t be great if it happened to someone else. One of the reasons I consider character the most important element of fiction - you can have the coolest plot in the world, but who cares if it doesn''t _feel_ important to your cardboard characters?

quote:
When something is truly great, everyone knows, it''s an objective experience. Great in the subjective sense, uhm, sounds more like personal high points and not actually truly great experiences. I can do something ''great'' for you that would thrill you to the moon and back, but if it was actually great, it would be painted on the moon in big letters everyone would understand. I do agree that characters should draw the reader into their own emotional construct to produce empathy and eventually a major driver for catharsis.

Nice illustration ^_~ but I still disagree. If something was painted on the moon with big letters so everyone could see it, that wouldn''t make it great, just universally surprising until the novelty wore off, and after that it would be normal and taken for granted. I would argue that to be great, something cannot be commonplace. I would argue that any experience that had an obvious significance to all people would already written about or somehow commercially available, thus commonplace, at least to a degree. Therefore something with an obvious significance that isn''t commonplace must have a personal significance rather than a universal one.

quote:
I don''t feel that my culture significantly limits my individuality, although it''s certainly true that mass marketing and capitalist economics make it much easier to follow some paths than others.

quote:
Then why does political correctness and taboo influence ninety seven decisions a day for the vast majority of citizens?

Because people have the instinct that they want to be approved of and praised by the other members of their community. This would be the opposite of thanatos, that suicidal instinct usually inspired by a person feeling that nobody likes them or that their existince harms their community. Also why criminals sometimes feel guilty and turn themselves in even if they would have gotten away scott-free.

Anyway I''m not the vast majority of citizens anyway, I don''t worry about taboos except as objects for psychological or sociological study, (try dying your hair bright green and see how people suddenly react differently to you), or possible political/legal repurcussions of my actions, which is really more a strategic concern than a personal one. And speaking of taboos and fashion, have you seen the preview of the new John Galliano spring/summer 04 ready-to-wear? This year he went for the theme of ''whore'' and found or invented this translucent yellow fabric that is supposed to look like a condom... I have a url here somewhere if you want. I love John Galliano''s designs. ^_^ If only someone would hire me to do that.

quote:
I can wear pleasingly dramatic goth clothes because someone makes them in a factory and hot topic rents a store in a mall near me and pays employees to sell them to me, etc. I''m perfectly capable of designing a piece of gothic clothing myself, with a bit of work I could probably figure out how to sew it together, but the cost in materials, time, and effort is prohibitive, so I don''t.

quote:
True, but Goth went through the gauntlet before it became ''acceptable fashion''. There are so many unspoken rules, that when you get to the ''other'' rules out there in nature, you all of a sudden realized just how repressed life can be.

Oh, I certainly realize how repressed life can be. I''m just also very aware of how even in the most regimented system creativity finds a way. I was studying Japanese school girl uniforms for an anime project and I was astonished to read about all the tiny little ways the girls modify their uniforms, trying to look a little better and be individual without getting caught.

quote:
One of the great things about writing is it''s a pretty cheap artform to practice. But I am always aware of the possibility of creating truly original fashions, and it is my choice not to do so, I am not forced to be a conformist of any sort.

quote:
Yeah, who can afford filmmaking? Aware of the possibility of creating truly original fashions tells me you have interest in it, but does cost prohibition have anything to do with the choice not to do so? It''s expensive to set up fashion design, I know because I visit bridal shops who do fashion on the side for cast off material and throw away mannequins to create my game design fashions. Gosh help me if I could ever find a patternmaker and prototype stitcher. The best I can do is paper patterns cut to form laid down on graph paper to make the form, and it''s so daunting. But, it''s more revenue for the enterprise than just units shipped, so I snip on...

That''s interesting - I don''t bother with fabric prototypes anymore, but when I did I always had more success getting fabric by buying remnants at a fabric store or pieces of clothing at the salvation army store or garage sales. I wouldn''t think a bridal place would have very interesting fabrics. I tried getting upholstery sample books from furniture places, but the samples were''nt big enough to be useful for much. This was all back when I still played with plastic horses - my mom taught my sister and I to sew and embroider by getting us to make clothes and rugs and pillows for the horses. It''s nice working that small because you don''t need to bother with patterns or even a sewing machine, but on the other hand details can be a problem.

I''ve made clothes for myself a few times and that was a totally different experience. My general verdict is that it''s too much work, largely because it''s impossible to fit clothes to yourself unless you know a lot more about patternmaking than I do. I had fun making clothes for my brother though, because I could just tell him to stand there while I pinned and chalked. I''m holding out for a computer driven sewing machine that can make whole articles of clothing, and a design program to run it with. Meanwhile I''ll just draw my fashion ideas on anime characters.

BTW do you have any fashion design sketches hanging around the net somewhere? I would be curious to see them - I haven''t seen them before in the art forum, have I? I remember I put some of my own there a long time ago, and I saw some of Sage13''s there recently, but I don''t recall seeing yours.

quote:
I believe that ritual, manufactured social events can be deeply meaningful if the people involved feel them to be so.

quote:
Or they are conditioned and taught that they are to be so. Like the fairy tale wedding, where the father of the bride has to take out a second mortgage for one event? This is highway robbery by archetype, and is likely responsible for the dramatic rise in the price or khaki over the last twenty years.

quote:
I know it would be a huge moment in my life if I ever married or handfasted somebody.

quote:
Sure, that is a huge meaningful mating ritual, and one of the biggest events a man and woman can have, but does the ten thousand dollar wedding dress, the three thousand dollar cake, the fifty dollar a plate catering, the hundred dollar an hour wedding coordinator, do any of these things really do anything to upgrade the experience in the absence of the media and the several billion dollar a year June Bride industry telling you you''ve ''simply got to have it?''

Just because people are conditioned to find something emotionally moving does not mean that the emotion they feel is fake. Certainly weddings are absurdly expensive. I personally hate diamonds because they''re a boring color, and would never want a ring with one, but then again I would probably pick an opal which is almost as expensive. ^_~ Since weddings are supposed to be imprinted on the minds of the participants and audience as a socially unifying ritual and notice of status change, and also as a reward/celebration for parents seeing their children reach full adulthood, it makes sense that weddings should be theatrical. I''ve seen some photos of medieval-themed weddings that were absolutely gorgeous. Absurdly expensive? Absolutely. But wort it for the memory? Maybe, if you don''t need the money for something more pressing. Personally I live on room, board, and $200 a month, so I can''t imagine what I''d do if I was one of these people with an income of $60,000 a year, but spending it on a wedding wouldn''t be any sillier than any other idea.

quote:
And good theater, the motivating force behing ritualizing and manufacturing events, is often essential to making an important moment strike an observer or participant as truly profound. Isn''t that what we are doing in trying to design games and fiction? Manufacturing experiences for others and trying to make these experiences feel profound?

Good theatre motivates emotional and empathic response (pathos). It was done for centuries with simple masks and dramaturgy in scene, in action. The purpose for pathos was, like communication, to create understanding about us, our world around us, and the unseen forces (the gods in the old days) that influence and direct man.

It was a way of explaining and contextualizing to ease our confused minds about larger questions even way back in Greece when life was simple. It began to become manufactured events during the Rennaisance, when everyone who could afford it couldn''t wear enough silk and wigs and powder, and acted so even if they didn''t, and we were off to the mask races we carry on our unmade faces today. During the period of chekov and other great writers who rebelled and retrorevolutionized the theatre by making sets simple, questions clear yet lofty, that we got to places like tennessee williams and O''Niell and Arthur Miller.

The rest is just window dressing in proper golden means proportions, with lighting and sound arts added to round out the experience, but one performance experienced in theatre in the round will show you how little lighting, sound and set one needs to move an audience to thunderous applause at it''s feet.


Certainly you don''t think that''s the only purpose of theater, to motivate pathos. Theater, like fiction, had so many purposes that if I tried to list them offhand I would inevitably forget some. Religious ritual is all about behavioral programming - the original point of having a big dramatic wedding was to convince participants and audience alike that "what god has brought together let no man put asunder", in other words to discourage adultery.

quote:
I dislike capitalism (wage slavery), and actually happen to be a socialist, but I don''t think that capitalism and mass-marketing (or organized religion for that matter) create sheep people, they just cater to the 2/3s of the population that have the instincts to be conformists.

quote:
Instincts or conditioning? We can''t hide from the fact we are all manipulated into consumption fever because of greed. Obesity now outpacing smoking as the leading cause of disease and death is ample evidence. I think, over some greek brandy, we could really get OT. LOL Greek brandy at the mountaintop, now that would be some serious literary time.

lol, yes, very very off topic. For example I am tempted to argue that obesity is not primarily caused by greed, but instead by laziness/desire for efficiency...

quote:
Absurd according to who?

Samuel Clemens? Benjamin Disraeli? Ben Franklin? Vaclav Havel? Ovid? Homer?

quote:
Say we take a survey and find that people judge the highest quality writing to be that which comes from the people who have read tha most books, with logarythmic progression such that mediocre writing requires reading, oh, 3,000 books, good writing requires reading 4,000 books, and great writing requires reading more than 4,500 books.

quote:
Wait a minute, you''re claiming the results of the survey before the survey is tabulated for summary analysis. Cart before the horse here.

I''m saying that the survey results are what I wanted you to assume, and based upon that consider whether it is possible for something that is a fact to truly be absurd. But nevermind, it doesn''t really matter.

quote:
Or do you think that proverbs are empty of communication?

quote:
Proverbs in the Bible, or Proverbs as a literary device pre-monotheism? In either case, both are useful, poignant teaching devices comprised of word constructs. I''m not sure how that connects to to unoriginal or abberative.

Proverbs as literary device, and my point was that you''ve heard a proverb lots of times before, you''re not learning anything new when someone says it to you, but they''re still communicating in reciting the provarb. They''re communicating that they thing your situation fits the pattern refrenced by the problem, and presumably the moral of the proverb applies to your situation too.

This was getting absurdly long, so I''ll reply to the rest in another post.

quote:
What about contentment?

quote:
Contentment is good for sheep and cattle. But the world belongs to the discontent. Not my words.

You don''t think contentment is natural to philosophers? And that some writers and other artists are philosophers?

quote:
There are large parts of my day when I desire nothing.

quote:
I think you are fortunate, probably likely to do with following your star. One does not need arrive at a destination to derive satisfaction from the realization one is getting there. I on the other hand, desire the world to be my oyster, and believe the path there lies through self mastery.

Interesting. I would never make self-mastery one of my own life goals. Self-understanding yes, which is good because it allows you to wield yourself in a masterful way, but I always favor adaptability over self-discipline, and I really do think the two are opposing approaches to life that can''t be mixed well. Since my goal is not to get the most out of the world, but instead to be the most pleased and comfortable and entertained within the world, flexibility is the better choice for me.

quote:
Of the things I do desire I rarely desire any of them passionately, and of the things I do desire passionately (e.g. to write a great novel, to fall passionately in love) there is usually no path by which to strive towards the satisfaction of these desires.

quote:
Except perhaps through exploration, discovery and going where you have not gone before? The novel you seek and the love you seek clearly do not lie where you have been or where you are. I don''t have all the answers, but I do know I spring up out of bed each day realizing that carpe diem is more than half carpe selfum. If only I could get across that I have been places and have done things that no book, no record or fiction could ever show me with near the poignancy and import really doing it does, and that has made me a better writer than a three Phd''s could do, why then you would know why people who have that level of knowledge seek my council. Sometimes, even for pay. LOL

What does seizing the self mean to you in terms of writing?

quote:
This is one reason why I read books and play games in the first place, so that I can vicariously experience passionately desiring and then achieving something. Never happens in my real life.

quote:
Perhaps if it did, would you fear change?

Nonono, I crave change. That''s actually one of the originating ideas of my novel - if I were dropped into an alien world, how would I go about adapting to it and learning all the new things?

quote:
So how do you get an unflawed idea?

quote:
By rewriting, of course, and reworking the idea over and over in your mind like a person who looks at all the angle before taking the shot. This is not the same as waiting for all the information before making the decision, because that was an initial implementation step.

Well that''s what I''ve been trying to do. Outlining is my way of putting the idea on paper in some sort of organized form so I can rework it. Doesn''t seem to be working terribly well (but then, I''m having one of my pessimistic days).

quote:
How do you _know_ it''s an unflawed idea and your passion won''t flag?

quote:
Well, I am honestly never sure it''s perfectly unflawed, I just go over it (rewrite it) enough to eliminate the probability, then most of the possibilities that flaws exist. It''s rather like engineering or bug hunting, I would imagine. Perfection is a process, not a destination as the old saying goes, and, if you comb out a manuscript enough times, you will get to a point where you realize you cannot make it any better, and you then have to run the professional writer''s risk that they will buy it to somebody else who will take to it with a meat cleaver, because that next writer is getting paid to troubleshoot it, and at a cheap cost considering the risk of production greenlighting in the producer''s eyes.

(snip)

I believe that is where you want to get; where you need to get, to the place where you personally have done the best job you can and you couldn''t make it any better if you tried. This does not mean you don''t use professional methods and put the thing down for three weeks after you are done and then pick it up and read it again and make sure that is the case.

Yeah, forgetting about it and then looking at it again is an essential editing technique. Works for paintings too, actually. So the question is, how much reworking is enough to make flaws sufficiently improbable? Is it proportional to the length of what you''re trying to write? Probably this is a silly question since I imagine I''ll be able to feel it when the idea is good - one of those ''you just know it'' things.

quote:
This is just the part of the deal with writing, and you, as the originator, are the great secret in show business, and you must never forget that, even if you only ever write novels and never try scriptwright''s work. Joseph Waumbaugh takes ten years to write a book, but he''s still a multimillionaire and immensely respected. Immensely. I think you just need to relax and see the context in which you create, and lay that template into how writers in general create, and you will be serving yourself, your legacy and our profession with absolutely honorable nobility. Really, besides the money and the fame, what possibly more could you ask for?

And then again there''s Donald Kingsbury (author of _Courtship Rite_) who takes 8 years to write a book and they''re the same level of quality as other authors produce in a year or 2. But I''m just quibbling. I think that phrase ''the contex in which I create'' is interesting. What might that be? Or maybe only I can answer that since I know which writers I mentally compare myself with and what books I keep on my shelf as models of what I want to write. But what did you have in mind?

quote:
So what''s the difference between a master concept and a superconcept again?

quote:
Master concepts are complete concepts that stand whole and self machinating. Feeding cattle makes beef grow well marbled. Watering plants grown in the sun makes flavorful vegetables.

Superconcept: beef and vegetables and a wok will feed the world, and could end hunger forever if wisely applied.

Rough examples, but the point is, if you write ten separate stories, each complete with every arc intact and vitally communicating. Somewhere down the road, the sum of what these complete ten concepts taught you is going to form the foundation for a superconcept that makes you realize those master concepts were just weighstations on the road that got to a destination so marvelous, complex and vivid, you will need everything you''ve honed as skills that you''ve got just to capture it in a way which the articulation faithfully transcribed so that anybody for the rest of time could read your book and stop hunger for as far as their influence could personally reach.

Well, here are some concepts I want to put in my novel. You tall me if you think any of them are master or super.

- There is no such thing as an inappropriate love, or an indecent one. Love, by connecting us deeply to another person (or people) is what makes life meaningful.

- Happiness is working with the ones you love to accomplish something great together that you couldn''t have done separately. This may be raising a well-loved child, creating a work of art, or founding a university.

- If you aren''t loyal to your loved ones with all your heart, you aren''t loyal to yourself; and any system that won''t let you be loyal to yourself doesn''t deserve to have you be loyal to it.

- Caring is about being nice. Passion is _not_ about being nice. Love must be made out of both, like salad dressing made out of oil and water.

- You are only a slave if you think you are a slave; but you are an animal until you can communicate that you aren''t. Being a free, human adult is about living an examined, introspective life while also being careful and caring of those around you.

- Someone must lead and someone must follow and each needs the other and neither is better, you must be whichever one suits your nature (hmm, sounds like a poem idea...)

o_O you can see why it has to be a romance novel - have you ever seen the word love so many times in so few sentences? lol

quote:
But I''m saying that lucid dreams often substitute realism for the meaningful symbols of regular dreams. There''s actually a lack of symbols to interpret when you do the dream analysis, and the same symbols tend to recur with the same interpretation, e.g. I often get malls, greyhound busses, and one particular block of downtown State College.

quote:
Then you could be hunting the second animal behind the tiger as they say in Africa. This is usually the buzzard or hyena. Perhaps it is not the symbol you should be analyzing, but the impression or reaction you have to it immediately after presentation in the theatre of the mind. Trust for certain that one way or another, something is being communicated, and that it is there for you to find, using one method or another, most of which are recognizeable and not infinite in array.

A good example might be to go to a museum and find a painting you like and look at it a long time. Then, move all the way up to the canvas if you can and start to back up slowly. At a certain point, you are going to stop and suddenly realize you are standing exactly where the original painter stood when he or she took a step back from the work and looked at where the composition was going as a whole.

You might find that you have been to that painting a dozen times, and was always standing where you thought interpretation was, and then all of a sudden find that what the original artist intended was in a different places altogether, and the meaning of the picture changes for you instantly and entirely, even though you have looked and enjoyed that painting many times before, but from your point of view and your method of interpretation.

Detectives will tell you sometimes it''s about standing not in other people''s shoes, but in other people places and trying to see with their eyes that gives them the profile they seek to determine behaviors that are as of yet undiscovered.

Hmm maybe. I was very puzzled by my (non-lucid) dream this morning - ''ask and you shall receive'', I suppose. The dream started off with a library in which I was being treated like a second class citizen, then there was a juvenile delinquent qirl. She had three objects (I think one was a nerf football, but I don''t really remember, except that they didn''ty seem to go together) with which she was doing something, but she lost interest and carelessly left them on the ground. I picked them up and put them in the library mailbox where they were supposed to go, but I had to cram them to get them in there. Then, because I had stayed to take care of things while the girl had gone, her butch female parole officer came by and was asking me accusingly if I had done whatever crime the girl had. A storm was starting, and I knew it was going to be an electrical storm, so I warned her and we went to take shelter in the building behind us (which had in the mean time changed from a library to a resturant, a Hoss''s specifically). We got zapped by ball lightning on the way in. Members of my family were in there with a big buffet with lots of desert, and when I came in I was the last in line for the buffet, but everyone was waiting for something, not eating. I got the feeling that it had something to do with a church event; once I knew that I wanted to leave, but I couldn''t because of the lightning. I both didn''t want to eat the food because I didn''t want to even pretend to be going along with the religious stuff (I''m an athiest), yet wanted to eat the food to spite them by having it go to someone it wasn''t supposed to. But mostly I was frustrated and disgusted to be stuck in there. Then I woke up.

My interpretation: The librarian is treating me like a second class citizen because I''m not getting my novel written. The three objects are the three main characters (the football would be Attranath I suppose ), and putting them in the library mailbox is like using them properly, or maybe like sending them to the publisher. The bad girl was (I think) a writer of crappy pornographic romance novels. The parole officer was public opinion. I''m really not sure about the lightning, except that it really felt like it did when I got electrically shocked once, and scared me. The Hoss''s probably symbolized ''living a normal life'' (Hoss''s is the resturant my parents always took us to.) This is probably related to the fact that I was unenthusiastically considering applying for a job at the Outback resturant near me because I''m sick of being broke. The deserts on the buffet = the niceness of having money. They''re waiting because no one I know who has a job seems to get any enjoyment out of the money they make, they always need more.

So the only thing I''m not sure about is what the lightning was, why it suddenly appeared, and why it was keeping me trapped. Usually in my dreams I''m immune to that sort of restricting phenomenon or can find a way around it, but this time I was just stuck. Possibly the being trapped had something to do with the reading public not wanting to read what I want to write, but that doesn''t make a lot of sense since none of the relatives I saw there are big readers. Or maybe it had to do with my religious relatives not being proud of me when they considered my art to be pornography, but I didn''t feel like I was being judged - actually I felt like I was being deliberately charitably misjudged, as a ''strayed-sheep'' just because I was one of the family. I had the impression that they didn''t (yet) have any idea what I had created. That was what was so stifling, that they didn''t see me as an artist of hear what I had to say. But still, why lightning?

quote:
If I do get something useful out of a dream it''s usually a piece of character dynamic, and the problem is that these ideas usually overlap or occupy the same story ''slot'' so they can''t be combined to form plot. The general unhelpfulness of my dreams annoys me.

quote:
Hmm. One night, when you are tired, try to go to sleep someplace noisy or busy, and see what some creative provocation does for your dream interpretation. I know screenwriters who make a hundred thousand dollars a week half to a dozen times a year. They go the wierdest places and do peculiar things simply to try not to see things as they always do, so originality and freshness are not lost upon their highly honed interpretive and expressive faculties.

That''s one of the good things about living in an apartment or a dorm - the background noise is good for dreaming. Where I live now I can even choose whether to sleep on the futon and hear the neighbors, or on the bed and hear the front parking lot. Plus we have an airport and a firestation right next to us...

quote:
The difference is, a symbol is a specific object with definite appearance and characteristics that can be written about directly, while an archetype is an idea that I must find an object or arrangement of objects to clothe it in before I can write about it.

quote:
I am not sure I see the difference still, but let me try. That may be my limitation here. What I think you are saying is that when you are "finding an object or arrangement of objects to clothe it in before you can write about it" (and correct me if I am wrong or do not understand) is the method by which you construct archetypes. This implies you are creating new archetypes beyond the classic archetypes, am I correct here?

If that is the case, then when you are searching for the object or array or arrangement of objects to clothe the archetype in, why don''t you simply construct a grid, and place all possible relative objects in the grid, with the center of the grid reserved for the archetype to yet be born left blank, in the grid around the center of the matrix and begin to test for strengths and weakness of the relationships and relevancies of the array symbologies, prioritize and weight them, and then fill in the center and test the new archetypal construct.

Um. My instinct is to say that wouldn''t work, but I''m not sure exactly why. I mean the grid is a problem because the space in which symbols exist is more than 2D, but I''ve dealt with that problem before in other areas. Let me give an example of a symbol and an archetype. The archetype is the powerful object keyed to the hero by blood or other identifier, which the hero uses in his adventures to get closer to his goal. The symbol is a sword with a ruby in the hilt and runes carved into the blade passed from father to son for generations; or it is a harp with three stars inset in the wood which can only be used by the boy with three stars on his forehead; or it is the dragon which can only be mind-spoken too by the owner who has the right kind of soul to Impresses it on the day of its birth. Anyway I''ll play with this grid thing and tell you how it goes.

quote:
Writing is a lot like engineering, I think. Sooner or later, a complete archetype will emerge, and then you have to test it against the plot. Sometimes it will mesh, othertimes you going to have to cut or paste or hem. That''s what rewriting is. This is really just conceptual components tikertoy with a relevancy matrix overlayed.

Generally the problem comes in finding a thorough array of components to play tinkertoy with.

quote:
The problem with clothing an archetype is that there is no good way to select the details of the symbolic version of it to put in your story.

quote:
That is why you have to exhaustively list all possible details and test for relevance, pertinence, viability, dynamic capability (is it action or setting dressing), plausibility -- trust me, it may sound lenthy, but like a long book, it''s still finite.

Like I said, I''ll give it a try.

quote:
The details matter just enough that you can''t decide on a whim, but not enough that the answer is obvious or comes to you in a dream. I believe I mentioned this problem several posts up in this thread.

quote:
Yeah, try it as a graphical representation where you can move the symbols and details around like one of those kits with the furniture you can move around the floorspace. Simply by approaching it from a different POV often does the trick. Be aware this is a very powerful concept proofing tool I have never shared with any other writer for competitive reasons, and the real thing to remember is that when you start working with information in this way, better have a legal pad handy, because it is flowsvilleomatica when it starts working.

The main thing to remember is that the details are finite, can be represented spatially rather than linearly, made to work rationally or representatively (more properly) and then simply converted back into linear form and boom, problems solved. Do I get a promotion for this or something? Wait, let''s see if it works for you first.

*Blink* a graphical representation? Hmmmmm. Actually I''ve been having a bit of trouble visualizing things in this story - the characters, who are supposed to be aliens resembling bird dinosaurs, keep turning into humans when I''m not paying attention. ^_~ But lets see, how the heck could I visually represent the various ideas that have to go into this novel? I already tried tarot cards, but I suppose I could try it again now that I have a slightly more concrete idea of the plot. I tried visualizing the plot as a timeline, taming the fourth dimension by rotating it to be a lower dimension, but that didn''t work. I made notecards and arranged them on the floor. I''m still working on that outline of the first 12 chapters. I could take another stab at trying to sketch the characters. I dunno, have any other methods in your bag of tricks? ^_~

quote:
The way I feel is more like you mentioned about wanting to have accomplished something before you die. I have been writing for 9 years, I want to have a novel to show for it, damn it. (Not swearing at you, just to express my frustration.) I feel that ''this has gone on long enough'' and ''if I don''t finish something I have to admit I''m a poser''.

quote:
Well, first of all, let me say I have faith in you. You can do this. The thing you gotta give yourself a break on is time. Remember Joseph Wambaugh example above. Time is not the deciding factor here, completion is. If that story moves you deeply enough to write it, you will by definition complete it sooner or later. It just have to move you. It has to give you feelings you can resonate with. Often more than not, it is an emotional process more than a technical impediment, there are tools for impediments, the primary one being in your ability to change flexibility in your POV and methods/techniques. Remember, when in doubt, play with it. It''s not a snake. I''ve stories about that, but not for now. Pick that story and those archetypes up, give them a good shake, and show them who''s boss.

Thanks. Lol, "give them a good shake and show them who''s boss" huh? If I knew how, I would. I''m definitely looking for that emotional resonance, I suppose I just have to work on it more. I encountered an interesting advice in a book on how to write romance novels the other day. The writer recommended: Imagine throwing your novel away, into a trash can. Now, if you could save only one piece of it, what would it be? The answer might surprise you. Use that piece as the seed for your next revision, rework everything around it.

quote:
lol. What''s a cistine experience?

quote:
It''s an old story about how when the pope visited michaelangelo quite a way into the chapel ceiling painting process, and complained about how much money he was spending on this cieling while he had to pay for a war at the same time, and that while both were quite long endeavors, one could easily become more expensive than the other. Michaelangelo spoke to him about how masterpieces were quite indifferent to matters of time and money (my producer howls at this part, and I''m not even to the punchline), and that the pope couldn''t possibly understand that aspect of art, when the pope shot right back with a interpretive statement about the project from an artistic standpoint that totally nailed michaelangelos artistic intent better than michaelangelo could have expressed it himself. Michaelangelo looked at the pope in utter amazment as if he''d never seen this side of a man he''d known for years, and possibly had misjudged him all along, and the pope read this like a book and said, "What did you expect, I am the pope." He walked away and told Michaelangelo to finish.

Lol, that''s cool. ^_^ That would be a perfect thing for one of those cool egotistic anime villains to say.

quote:
BTW the 9 chapters turned into 12, and I''m still typing up the outline, so maybe tomorrow.

quote:
By gosh, pinch me if I''m not being a little inspirational. :D

Heh, actually in that particular instance I just realized I had forgotten two chapters, and that things had sorted themselves out enough in my head that I knew what had to go in the next chapter. But yes, you''re definitely being inspirational. :D And so I will go work on the outline and archetypes some more until I fall over asleep.

quote:Original post by sunandshadow
O_o is it just me, or are these posts approaching novel-length all by themselves?

Yes, they are, and I have to get back to my novel soon.

quote:
Hmm, I was thinking that literary theory included the part of creativity theory that studies how and why people write, which would naturally make both rife with myth and misnomer, etc.[/quote

Nah, one is involved with the study of tangible, relevant existing literary works, and the other is an area of psychology. There''s not a lot of myth in literary theory except in criticism and editorial opinion. Linking the two does not make them subject to the same criteria or interpretive derivation, it simply links them by their causal relations.

quote:
I''m going to continue to argue that great moments in life are relative.

To one''s experience, agreed. Whether that experience is personal by way of external conditioning, or personal by way of self cogniscence, well the difference is of entire orders of perception. You assume all subjects in the test all share the same background, when I see people of advanced age who have never really lived at all, but just acted out experiences they had been conditioned into by institutional academics and media, one is created, the latter is synthesized.

They are completely different, and the real difference meets the test when you remove the conditioning from the human subject and expose for experience and reaction and the conditioned subject cannot originate, merely react with embedded perception. You really ought to consider the distinction between people who are "made" and people who are evolved.

quote:
But seriously, I think that you and I have different sorts of brain chemistry.

Yes, I am a male, and yes, I lived through the sixties and seventies.

quote:
Now, I find adrenaline rushes physically unpleasant.

As you would the cognitive decision to fight or flee, for which the adrenaline is present for in the first place.

quote:
But the point is that I''m pavlovianly conditioned, as it were, to avoid things that give me advenaline rushes. This is why I, normally a very calm sweet-tempered person, will go instantly bitchy if somebody sneaks up behind me and yells ''boo!''. My roommate, being slightly a sadist, loves to find various ways to harass me, but even he know not to scare me because I''ll be pissed off at him for the rest of the day. Note that I don''t watch horror movies, and I prefer psychological thrillers to action movies.

quote:

Cautiously aware of conscientiously avoiding things that give you adrenaline rushes ok, but if you were pavlovian conditioned against them, you''d be behaviorally modified, not self moderating of behavior. One is scarier than a horror story, however, exposure to stimuli can achieve this subliminally, and marketers and advertisers know this better than anyone, save for the real wierdos and the clinical psychaitric professional.

quote:
Continuing on to the fight or flight instinct - I studied this in an intro to psych course, and one of the interesting things that came out in the discussion is that ''fight or flight'' is a misnomer - it should actually be ''fight, flight, or freeze''. I am the type who freezes. Which is why when I think of a physically exhilirating contest thing similar to your example, the closest I come up with is when I played hide-and-go-seek with a bunch of teenagers in a huge building. I hid behind a cabinet for more than an hour, yet I wasn''t bored, I was excited and I enjoyed it, even in spite of the sweat and the spiderwebs. I''ve always loved hide-and-go-seek and assassins and those sort of games. And similarly, being a sniper in hiding, guarding the goal, when I played paintball. I don''t think I would count either of those as being as profound of experiences as the great blackout, or this one time when I went to the lake in the middle of winter and everything looked completely alien, with the waves being frozen and the sand mixed with snow, no colors anywhere and the wind moaning.

It''s clear you have underlying reasons why those particular things are exciting to you, and I am beginning to see a pattern of experience here that indicates to me I was wrong in my statement you have not had peak experiences, you''ve had them, but not marquis style or blockbuster style of peak experience.

quote:
How about alienation? Looking over my experiences it seems that several of them have been based on alienation or it''s converse, being the center of some social activity. Plus of course the epiphany/eureka pattern-discovery I mentioned before.

Aleination would be more of a socialization type of experience, but everyone gets over that as part of normal sociological development, sooner or later. Now, the epiphany, that can clearly be a peak experience, without doubt.

quote:
The same applies to nomads - there are people who have the instinct to always stay close to home, whether home is a physical place or a group of people on the move.

My point precisely. We are all descended from nomadics. This is how life spread, and geneological preferences rose. Despite civilizations best attempts to condition us into settler gatherer behaviors, and they have done a great job of it, no doubt, we were genetically and culturally nomads for dozens of times longer in our history that since civilization arose. That powerful a genetic predisposition simply does not lie around dormant, unless it''s recessive in your generation, then, you are going to have a child named Roald Ahmanhson, or Christopher Columbus.

quote:
Perhaps you know about xenophilia and xenophobia? Xenophilia is the motivating force behind physical exploration and exploration-play, all sorts of sexual preferances e.g. furries and fetishes for a race other than one''s own, much writing of science fiction and fantasy, real and armchair anthropologists, people who wear clothes from or decorate their houses in the style of another culture, and the aesthetic movements of romanticism and gothicism. Xenophobia on the other hand is why people who live in little villages are suspicious of foreigners, why people long for the way things used to be, revere tradition and cultural heroes, and the political/aesthetic movements of isolationism, nationalism, and ''county fair'' or ''country'' art. My theory is that about 2/3s of people are more xenophobic while 1/3 are more xenophilic, and that this evolved as the best way to keep most primitive humans doing things the traditional, efficient way that worked and living in communities where they understood the geography and local food chain, while some wandered around discovering new techniques and places, and stirring up the gene pool by breeding with people who weren''t their cousins (if they didn''t get killed off first). Life would be a big mess if everybody wanted to be an explorer - who would farm and take care of babies and sick people and etc.?

It''s not about wanting to be an explorer, it''s about we already are genetically predispositioned, and historically reliant to be. Machines can do a great job of farming and medicine. Childrearing would most likely stay a naturalistic, humanistic function. And I would add, it''s not an either/or proposition, and your two phobias might suggest, but rather, that things are incredibly disproportionate, and the explorer that is real and part of us all is nicely getting hacked away at, and stripped away at, mostly for the sake of profit, some for the sake of ease, as if that is a cure for dis-ease. Human organisms live longer and healthier starving themselves slightly. That is not just a physical sense I am trying to convey.

quote:
No awakening - I have always played at exploring since I was a child, and I recall even when I was only 8 or so, being specifically aware that I was ''playing'' at it, and that trying to do it for real would be unpleasant and impractical.

I suspect you feel that from an intellectual and lifestyle predisposition, however, it is still true it is part of you, and if all things pleasant and practical were yanked out from underneath you against your will, you would marvel at, and be greatful for, the instincts and abilities you would have to summon to survive such a challenge, and would completely have a new perspective on who and what you were if you had to do it. I''m saying baby steps can''t reproduce the sense of the experience to result in the cognitive gain.

quote:
Lol. It''s true that if someone threatened a child under my care (I''m thinking of my little brother) I would be furious. I probably wouldn''t physically try to attack them though - my first instinct would be to get the child physically out of harm''s way, and my second would be to either call for help or try to guilt trip or bribe the attacker into leaving, whichever seemed more likely to work. If that didn''t work, I would try to retreat, and if I couldn''t do that _then_ I would consider trying to kill the attacker.

/me hums the ad jingle for chevrolet trucks, "The Hearbeat of America."

quote:
I liked looking at Niagra falls as part of a tour better./quote]

/me throws himself down a steep ravine, screaming his last words, "She''s aaaahhh bourgiousiEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!! in socialist Roooooooooobbbbbbbbbbbbessssssssssss!!!!"

quote:
Okay now _you''re_ being silly. Women are not inherently beautiful, unless you want to say that human beings are inherently beautiful, which is possibly true for a more metaphorical sense of the word beauty, but then you said you aren''t talking about the beauty of art or mind.

Thank you. Like I said, you are beautiful. Life, dear is beautiful. Females have the power to create life. They have a corner of the market of beauty. You''re telling me you don''t know this. Are you shy or something?

quote:
Mostly it just ticks me off that I don''t get hit on more often. ^_~

Well, there''s a lot of ways to fix that. I date women your age all the time. It''s mental most of the time, attraction. The unknown draws us inexorably. You''re just one of those people who is probably really, really clear. That can often be misdiagnosed (and sadly so) as uninteresting. What kinds of things have you done to alleviate this? Besides the obvious that a bisexual''s dilemma naturally is to never have the choice of loving just one person.

quote:
Nice illustration ^_~ but I still disagree. If something was painted on the moon with big letters so everyone could see it, that wouldn''t make it great, just universally surprising until the novelty wore off, and after that it would be normal and taken for granted.

You''re missing my point, when something is truly and legitimately great, everyone knows it, gets it and marvels at it. The fact it''s painted on the moon is merely the result of the recognition of the former fact. Great to you would be rather subjective. Great to all is completely objective.

quote:
I would argue that to be great, something cannot be commonplace. I would argue that any experience that had an obvious significance to all people would already written about or somehow commercially available, thus commonplace, at least to a degree. Therefore something with an obvious significance that isn''t commonplace must have a personal significance rather than a universal one.

The invention of the telephone was great, as was the airplane. The wheel is up there too. Rock and roll is extremely great. I have guitar picks from Eddie Van Halen and Black Sabbath. Oops, that last one does not qualify. It''s great to me, everyone else just thinks it''s cool.

quote:
I don''t feel that my culture significantly limits my individuality, although it''s certainly true that mass marketing and capitalist economics make it much easier to follow some paths than others.

And ease is the bait with which they manipulate you your entire perceptual media exposed overwhemling sell it now life.

quote:

quote:
Then why does political correctness and taboo influence ninety seven decisions a day for the vast majority of citizens?

Because people have the instinct that they want to be approved of and praised by the other members of their community.

No, it is not an instinct, it is a sociological behavior, two entirely different things. Approval and praise are behavioral desires in a tribal and social setting.

quote:
This would be the opposite of thanatos, that suicidal instinct usually inspired by a person feeling that nobody likes them or that their existince harms their community. Also why criminals sometimes feel guilty and turn themselves in even if they would have gotten away scott-free.

Again, this is a sociological or in the latter case, a psychological behavior, not an instinctive one.

quote:
Anyway I''m not the vast majority of citizens anyway, I don''t worry about taboos except as objects for psychological or sociological study, (try dying your hair bright green and see how people suddenly react differently to you), or possible political/legal repurcussions of my actions, which is really more a strategic concern than a personal one. And speaking of taboos and fashion, have you seen the preview of the new John Galliano spring/summer 04 ready-to-wear? This year he went for the theme of ''whore'' and found or invented this translucent yellow fabric that is supposed to look like a condom... I have a url here somewhere if you want. I love John Galliano''s designs. ^_^ If only someone would hire me to do that.

I haven''t seen it. But it sounds fascinating. Wasn''t it Kurt Cobain who said, "Nature is a whore?"

quote:
I can wear pleasingly dramatic goth clothes because someone makes them in a factory and hot topic rents a store in a mall near me and pays employees to sell them to me, etc. I''m perfectly capable of designing a piece of gothic clothing myself, with a bit of work I could probably figure out how to sew it together, but the cost in materials, time, and effort is prohibitive, so I don''t.

Ok, that''s a choice of convenience. Where did you get that? Convenience is such a driver that I think it was behind finding weapons of such massive power in hidden places in the game that a horrifically powerful boss could be melted in a single blast. Player payoff by convenience might also be design flaw, but that is another topic.

quote:
I was studying Japanese school girl uniforms for an anime project and I was astonished to read about all the tiny little ways the girls modify their uniforms, trying to look a little better and be individual without getting caught.

Really? Fight Feudalism through fashion, I always say.

quote:
I wouldn''t think a bridal place would have very interesting fabrics.

It depends on the kind you go to. It''s easier to prototype in silk, satin and lace simply because models will wear it more readily, and, there''s always a bunch of free leftovers they will happily give a man interested in his own designs. They''re all a bunch of dash down the aisle types for pay dirt, but, that''s the tolerance I will exercise to get it for nothing.

quote:
I tried getting upholstery sample books from furniture places, but the samples were''nt big enough to be useful for much. This was all back when I still played with plastic horses - my mom taught my sister and I to sew and embroider by getting us to make clothes and rugs and pillows for the horses. It''s nice working that small because you don''t need to bother with patterns or even a sewing machine, but on the other hand details can be a problem.

Imagine a collection called "IKEA" where everything was vinyl, upholstered and taupe, mauve and beige. What a great protest.

quote:
My general verdict is that it''s too much work

I agree, but my game fashion is important as a revenue center for the entire enterprise, so consistency with the game virtual motif as well as my needs for creative control. There, I said it, I''m a closet director.

quote:
largely because it''s impossible to fit clothes to yourself unless you know a lot more about patternmaking than I do.

I''ve learned some, but I found out there is software that can do this for you, and I am trying the different design and fashion institutes here in SF to see if I can get a look at the software.

quote: I''m holding out for a computer driven sewing machine that can make whole articles of clothing, and a design program to run it with. Meanwhile I''ll just draw my fashion ideas on anime characters.

I feel you.

quote:
BTW do you have any fashion design sketches hanging around the net somewhere? I would be curious to see them - I haven''t seen them before in the art forum, have I? I remember I put some of my own there a long time ago, and I saw some of Sage13''s there recently, but I don''t recall seeing yours.

No, I''m fanatical about IP, and rarely divulge details about what I am currently working on. It comes from my architecture days, when competing in the high end estate markets, spying was commonplace. Since we did things drawn by hand to spec and detail instead of relying on CAD (something you can do mostly only in the high end custom estate market; it''s not cost effective otherwise in mass manufacture cookie cutter development), we were able to have a more artistic set of design documents which seemed to be effective in impression boards of architectural review, whom looked at drawing all day perfectly printed out, but sterile of pochey and other lighting, dimensioning and artistic details one can do by hand to bring a design to life on 2-D graph paper.

Plus, I have actually had to bring suit once over a copyright violation, and I never want to have that experience again, so I am pretty much self restricting in that department. Besides, my designs are integrated, if you saw my game fashion, you''d know something about my gameworld and gameplay by inductive logic. I trust you, of course, but, not the rest of the internet.

quote:
Just because people are conditioned to find something emotionally moving does not mean that the emotion they feel is fake.

Emotional response can be conditioned, and the experiencer will never realize they are being sold a bill of goods, but, emotions are sales, and that is well known.

quote:
I would probably pick an opal which is almost as expensive. ^_~

The Kemper black opal, which I saw upon the finger of a Kemper themselves (disgustingly old money on the super wealthy scale) is in my new script. I trundled her and her Swiss Banker "friend" around Malibu driving a limo while in Screenwriting school. Pick one of those, please. Please.

quote:
Since weddings are supposed to be imprinted on the minds of the participants and audience as a socially unifying ritual and notice of status change, and also as a reward/celebration for parents seeing their children reach full adulthood, it makes sense that weddings should be theatrical.

I agree, in the ceremonial sense, but spectacle is only one of the five elements of dramatic presentation. You can have a zillion dollar set, a zillion dollar ceremony, and somebody will still come away bored. Why? Because a wedding is not entertainment. Making a wedding entertaining takes away from the ceremonial and spiritual aspects, and is as useful as lingerie on aboriginies. There, I used it in a sentence! Woot!

quote:
I''ve seen some photos of medieval-themed weddings that were absolutely gorgeous. Absurdly expensive? Absolutely. But wort it for the memory? Maybe, if you don''t need the money for something more pressing. Personally I live on room, board, and $200 a month, so I can''t imagine what I''d do if I was one of these people with an income of $60,000 a year, but spending it on a wedding wouldn''t be any sillier than any other idea.

What about giving that to the bride and groom so they could spend the first six months to a year of their lives together without having to go back to work in three weeks like the majority of them do, and they end up saying "it wasn''t long enough" like people say about vacations. Were I to dedicate and spend the rest of my life to the love of my life, I would want to start that thing out in terms of human bonding time, not in terms of we have to get back to work and get our lives started socially engineered lives. All of a sudden, you look back on your wedding as a packaged experience, and realize that you are going to work the next twenty years of your life just to get the time you wanted with the significant other back. People see divorce as a less disappointing option.

quote:
Certainly you don''t think that''s the only purpose of theater, to motivate pathos. Theater, like fiction, had so many purposes that if I tried to list them offhand I would inevitably forget some. Religious ritual is all about behavioral programming - the original point of having a big dramatic wedding was to convince participants and audience alike that "what god has brought together let no man put asunder", in other words to discourage adultery.

Every other thing in life is motivated by pathos, whether you recognize it or not. This is why we drown in drama and drama queens. Because our personal papal procession of an existance demands maximum attention to me, me, meeeeee! Or have you be ascetically avoidant, and just not noticed. We are, and have been since the passing of the rennaissance, in a perpetual state of narcissus narcosis on broad socioligical terms.

The purpose of entertainment is to educate, entertain and enlighten. Edwardian gnosis has reduced that to saying on Sundays, "Good sermon, father" followed by, "Who wants Ice Cream!" Guilt and consumption. The profitable circle of sociological control.

Living life is *not* entertainment, nor theatrical, unless you are a, in show business and earn a living perpetuating that on the masses because they will tune in for momentary transferance, b, not enlightening unless you are disciplinistically applying it in your life everyday, but most of us have to get the spreadsheets done, not reflect in contemplation the day away. The fortunate few do this, and they like to keep it that way, and the way to do that is to preserve the status quo at all costs, even at the cost of truth, justice and human tragedy, which is fine as long as power and institution are unassailed. Remember the old sixties counterculture saying, "Tragedy is the meeting of right and the right?" It''s true. At least I will believe it all the days I live and breath.

quote:
I dislike capitalism (wage slavery), and actually happen to be a socialist, but I don''t think that capitalism and mass-marketing (or organized religion for that matter) create sheep people, they just cater to the 2/3s of the population that have the instincts to be conformists.

Conformance *is* a fear based compulsion. What instituted the fear and the compulsive conditioning that results in the conforming behavior. One simple phrase. ''Fear of Wrathful Vengeance.'' Can you really afford to be a socialist in these times, in the USA? Sound like a luxury only afforded the rich.

quote:
For example I am tempted to argue that obesity is not primarily caused by greed, but instead by laziness/desire for efficiency

I think it caused by institutional consumer food and beverage manufacturers who understand the more they can get you to eat, and the less actual cost they can get you to do so with, something chemicals and economies of scale do quite nicely, the more money they make to make commercials showing happy, well behaved children doing homework quietly in front of a TV set that is off with a perfectly suburban neighborhood of happy action in the BG with a giant bowl of blown hydrogen fried flour and food coloring, salt and sugar in front of them. The perfect accompanyment to any setting, the reassuring, slightly authoritative Martha Stewartesque voice over narrator says matter of factly. Can you say, "N-N-N-N-NAAAAAAAAHHH" little billy?

quote:
I''m saying that the survey results are what I wanted you to assume, and based upon that consider whether it is possible for something that is a fact to truly be absurd. But nevermind, it doesn''t really matter.

quote:

Wait, it does. I suspect the methods used in gathering the data of that survey. I want a full congressional fashion committee investigation, and if we even find *one* spec of Vinyl, you will be Donna Karan''d to the fullest extent of your credit limit.

quote:
Proverbs as literary device, and my point was that you''ve heard a proverb lots of times before, you''re not learning anything new when someone says it to you, but they''re still communicating in reciting the provarb.

Right, they are not learning anything new except one thing; the message is reinforced every time it is heard, subsequently, your belief in the message of the proverb. I cite, "put your tooth under the pillow, and the tooth fairy will come in the night and leave you a coin where the tooth used to be when you wake up."

"Santa brings only coal for the stockings of bad boys and girls, but for the good girls and boys who clean their rooms, do their homework, play nicely and brush their teeth twice a day, well, Santa will bring them toys they will love."

"Work hard and rewards will come to you in time." "He whom believeth in me shall never go astray" - oft quoted in confessionals by child rapists, btw.

The point is, there used to be a saying that we actually need so little, that creating demand for what we want is the only way to get rich. Now, the river we are being sold down is wide, placid, in the best cities in the best neighborhoods, perfectly clean water, played in by the cutest of children in perfect little outfits, watched over by mean median income parents. Man, you can''t even avoid this brainwashing by living in a cave for ten years in a national forest. If you do, you''ll get a ticket.

quote:
They''re communicating that they thing your situation fits the pattern refrenced by the problem, and presumably the moral of the proverb applies to your situation too.

But that doesn''t mean it actually does, it just means that it''s the best associate reference they could recall from all the crap they''ve been conditioned into accepting. "Time heals all wounds." Except cancer. "Love conquers all." But greed "Wish for what you want and it will come true." Except for anything worthwhile.

quote:
This was getting absurdly long, so I''ll reply to the rest in another post.

Well, we''re clearly co authoring some sort of novel it would seems, but we are engaged in a societally induced circling around the common theme dance.

Sunandshadow wrote:

quote:
You don''t think contentment is natural to philosophers? And that some writers and other artists are philosophers?

Perhaps in a simpler time, when existentialism was an idea and not a force, but the failures of theosophical advance preclude it now. Philosophy questions. Any answer by any method of reason or logic of a contemporaneous question will yield only recognition of necessary change from an unpalatable imbalanced society. There are no easy answers, and if you are asking the right questions, you may be content with the process of discovering answers, but how could one be contented with what one finds if you simply look around?

Philosophical engagement by the artist or writer I think is meant to bring some sense and salve to the chaos around us. But in an utlimately philosophical context, the chaos is still the problem to be solved, and no salve or sense is the solution to the chaos, it is merely something to keep the individual philosopher who is engaged in the questioning and answering process from losing context and experiencing too much discontent.

quote:
Interesting. I would never make self-mastery one of my own life goals. Self-understanding yes, which is good because it allows you to wield yourself in a masterful way, but I always favor adaptability over self-discipline, and I really do think the two are opposing approaches to life that can''t be mixed well.

Dead wrong. Self discipline and adaptablity are the two essential ingredients in self mastery. Self understanding, if you were truly to effectively engage in it, would compet you to be more disciplined by the nature of the process. A real master is both spontaneously creative, but with the tools that are forged by discipline. One cannot be done without the other. So they may not mix well, even though I feel they do for me, but you cannot have one without the other.

quote:
Since my goal is not to get the most out of the world, but instead to be the most pleased and comfortable and entertained within the world, flexibility is the better choice for me.

How can you know without the experience of the aforementioned. How can you really truly know? You cannot be flexible *without* discipline.

quote:
What does seizing the self mean to you in terms of writing?

Writing down what my inner voice of my higher self has to say, without screwing the translation through filtering or unspontaneous reflection, and resultantly knowing pure self, not reflective self.

quote:
Nonono, I crave change. That''s actually one of the originating ideas of my novel - if I were dropped into an alien world, how would I go about adapting to it and learning all the new things?

By relying on your human instincts that would tell you what is basic for all life, and letting that guide your behavior. There was some old sci fi book where a man was stranded or went to the moon, and only amazonian women of a terrible personage ruled. He treated somebody there like a human being, with care, respect, support and their best attempt at understanding, and planted the seeds of destruction for the impirical, domineering queen of the amazons, whom found in herself resultantly the ability to love and surrender, and eventually grew together, life life does.

quote:
Well that''s what I''ve been trying to do. Outlining is my way of putting the idea on paper in some sort of organized form so I can rework it. Doesn''t seem to be working terribly well (but then, I''m having one of my pessimistic days). [/quote}

From what I have been reading, this is receding.

quote:
How do you _know_ it''s an unflawed idea and your passion won''t flag?

quote:
Yeah, forgetting about it and then looking at it again is an essential editing technique. Works for paintings too, actually. So the question is, how much reworking is enough to make flaws sufficiently improbable?

When consistent homogenous results from your best attempts to destabilize, deconstruct, critique and meat cleave your own work compel you to accept the reality that you''ve done the best you can do, and it is up to another set of eyes and another mind to try.

quote:
Is it proportional to the length of what you''re trying to write?

I believe the reason most people go unpublished or unproduced is because they underwrite. A great idea needs to meet more tests than one would readily see to remain truly great, and, while applying those tests, the refinements that come about create the "don''t change a word" value because the objective evaluator can see the desconstruction and critiquing process has already been done, mostly because they cannot find flaw on the first pass, and, on the second read, they smell the strength of the basis of your assumptions (fictional or non), and on the third pass, are reading to really be sure they didn''t make a mistake with the first two impressions they formed about the idea. By the third pass, they can look at somebody up the editorial chaing and say legitimately they gave it three good scrutinies and they couldn''t find fundamental structural errors in plot, char design or narrative flow, and even then, the pros will move it up the chain of command with a caveat such as "there might be a few little things you might be able to pick out, but basically it''s a good story."

quote:
Probably this is a silly question since I imagine I''ll be able to feel it when the idea is good - one of those ''you just know it'' things.

I like the you just know it and the "I tested it for all possible reasons for failure" as well. Just to be sure. It''s your career, after all. Grill it before somebody else will. Catch yourself before somebody else does. After all, you can look at someone and honestly say, "I did the best I could." If the person you are saying that too is a professional editor or producer, you want them to know your calibre for future reliance, because, nobody buys a mystery *before* publication.

quote:
I think that phrase ''the contex in which I create'' is interesting. What might that be?

Your time frame for production. How you develop tools that help you through a manuscript, all the things which contextually constitute an activity you engage in to support and advance your writing. List the things you do, and there''s your context for creation. Tighten it up and you have a faster or more efficient method of producing. All aspects should be analyzed, imo. I generally write nine documents to support a lengthy manuscript. Shorter ones I can do by combing through over and over.

quote:
Well, here are some concepts I want to put in my novel. You tall me if you think any of them are master or super.

I''m at the end of my shift, so I am going to place a marker in the text here to take it up tommorrow. Night.

TO HERE 110803

- There is no such thing as an inappropriate love, or an indecent one. Love, by connecting us deeply to another person (or people) is what makes life meaningful.

- Happiness is working with the ones you love to accomplish something great together that you couldn''t have done separately. This may be raising a well-loved child, creating a work of art, or founding a university.

- If you aren''t loyal to your loved ones with all your heart, you aren''t loyal to yourself; and any system that won''t let you be loyal to yourself doesn''t deserve to have you be loyal to it.

- Caring is about being nice. Passion is _not_ about being nice. Love must be made out of both, like salad dressing made out of oil and water.

- You are only a slave if you think you are a slave; but you are an animal until you can communicate that you aren''t. Being a free, human adult is about living an examined, introspective life while also being careful and caring of those around you.

- Someone must lead and someone must follow and each needs the other and neither is better, you must be whichever one suits your nature (hmm, sounds like a poem idea...)

o_O you can see why it has to be a romance novel - have you ever seen the word love so many times in so few sentences? lol

quote:
But I''m saying that lucid dreams often substitute realism for the meaningful symbols of regular dreams. There''s actually a lack of symbols to interpret when you do the dream analysis, and the same symbols tend to recur with the same interpretation, e.g. I often get malls, greyhound busses, and one particular block of downtown State College.

quote:
Then you could be hunting the second animal behind the tiger as they say in Africa. This is usually the buzzard or hyena. Perhaps it is not the symbol you should be analyzing, but the impression or reaction you have to it immediately after presentation in the theatre of the mind. Trust for certain that one way or another, something is being communicated, and that it is there for you to find, using one method or another, most of which are recognizeable and not infinite in array.

A good example might be to go to a museum and find a painting you like and look at it a long time. Then, move all the way up to the canvas if you can and start to back up slowly. At a certain point, you are going to stop and suddenly realize you are standing exactly where the original painter stood when he or she took a step back from the work and looked at where the composition was going as a whole.

You might find that you have been to that painting a dozen times, and was always standing where you thought interpretation was, and then all of a sudden find that what the original artist intended was in a different places altogether, and the meaning of the picture changes for you instantly and entirely, even though you have looked and enjoyed that painting many times before, but from your point of view and your method of interpretation.

Detectives will tell you sometimes it''s about standing not in other people''s shoes, but in other people places and trying to see with their eyes that gives them the profile they seek to determine behaviors that are as of yet undiscovered.

Hmm maybe. I was very puzzled by my (non-lucid) dream this morning - ''ask and you shall receive'', I suppose. The dream started off with a library in which I was being treated like a second class citizen, then there was a juvenile delinquent qirl. She had three objects (I think one was a nerf football, but I don''t really remember, except that they didn''ty seem to go together) with which she was doing something, but she lost interest and carelessly left them on the ground. I picked them up and put them in the library mailbox where they were supposed to go, but I had to cram them to get them in there. Then, because I had stayed to take care of things while the girl had gone, her butch female parole officer came by and was asking me accusingly if I had done whatever crime the girl had. A storm was starting, and I knew it was going to be an electrical storm, so I warned her and we went to take shelter in the building behind us (which had in the mean time changed from a library to a resturant, a Hoss''s specifically). We got zapped by ball lightning on the way in. Members of my family were in there with a big buffet with lots of desert, and when I came in I was the last in line for the buffet, but everyone was waiting for something, not eating. I got the feeling that it had something to do with a church event; once I knew that I wanted to leave, but I couldn''t because of the lightning. I both didn''t want to eat the food because I didn''t want to even pretend to be going along with the religious stuff (I''m an athiest), yet wanted to eat the food to spite them by having it go to someone it wasn''t supposed to. But mostly I was frustrated and disgusted to be stuck in there. Then I woke up.

My interpretation: The librarian is treating me like a second class citizen because I''m not getting my novel written. The three objects are the three main characters (the football would be Attranath I suppose ), and putting them in the library mailbox is like using them properly, or maybe like sending them to the publisher. The bad girl was (I think) a writer of crappy pornographic romance novels. The parole officer was public opinion. I''m really not sure about the lightning, except that it really felt like it did when I got electrically shocked once, and scared me. The Hoss''s probably symbolized ''living a normal life'' (Hoss''s is the resturant my parents always took us to.) This is probably related to the fact that I was unenthusiastically considering applying for a job at the Outback resturant near me because I''m sick of being broke. The deserts on the buffet = the niceness of having money. They''re waiting because no one I know who has a job seems to get any enjoyment out of the money they make, they always need more.

So the only thing I''m not sure about is what the lightning was, why it suddenly appeared, and why it was keeping me trapped. Usually in my dreams I''m immune to that sort of restricting phenomenon or can find a way around it, but this time I was just stuck. Possibly the being trapped had something to do with the reading public not wanting to read what I want to write, but that doesn''t make a lot of sense since none of the relatives I saw there are big readers. Or maybe it had to do with my religious relatives not being proud of me when they considered my art to be pornography, but I didn''t feel like I was being judged - actually I felt like I was being deliberately charitably misjudged, as a ''strayed-sheep'' just because I was one of the family. I had the impression that they didn''t (yet) have any idea what I had created. That was what was so stifling, that they didn''t see me as an artist of hear what I had to say. But still, why lightning?

quote:
If I do get something useful out of a dream it''s usually a piece of character dynamic, and the problem is that these ideas usually overlap or occupy the same story ''slot'' so they can''t be combined to form plot. The general unhelpfulness of my dreams annoys me.

quote:
Hmm. One night, when you are tired, try to go to sleep someplace noisy or busy, and see what some creative provocation does for your dream interpretation. I know screenwriters who make a hundred thousand dollars a week half to a dozen times a year. They go the wierdest places and do peculiar things simply to try not to see things as they always do, so originality and freshness are not lost upon their highly honed interpretive and expressive faculties.

That''s one of the good things about living in an apartment or a dorm - the background noise is good for dreaming. Where I live now I can even choose whether to sleep on the futon and hear the neighbors, or on the bed and hear the front parking lot. Plus we have an airport and a firestation right next to us...

quote:
The difference is, a symbol is a specific object with definite appearance and characteristics that can be written about directly, while an archetype is an idea that I must find an object or arrangement of objects to clothe it in before I can write about it.

quote:
I am not sure I see the difference still, but let me try. That may be my limitation here. What I think you are saying is that when you are "finding an object or arrangement of objects to clothe it in before you can write about it" (and correct me if I am wrong or do not understand) is the method by which you construct archetypes. This implies you are creating new archetypes beyond the classic archetypes, am I correct here?

If that is the case, then when you are searching for the object or array or arrangement of objects to clothe the archetype in, why don''t you simply construct a grid, and place all possible relative objects in the grid, with the center of the grid reserved for the archetype to yet be born left blank, in the grid around the center of the matrix and begin to test for strengths and weakness of the relationships and relevancies of the array symbologies, prioritize and weight them, and then fill in the center and test the new archetypal construct.

Um. My instinct is to say that wouldn''t work, but I''m not sure exactly why. I mean the grid is a problem because the space in which symbols exist is more than 2D, but I''ve dealt with that problem before in other areas. Let me give an example of a symbol and an archetype. The archetype is the powerful object keyed to the hero by blood or other identifier, which the hero uses in his adventures to get closer to his goal. The symbol is a sword with a ruby in the hilt and runes carved into the blade passed from father to son for generations; or it is a harp with three stars inset in the wood which can only be used by the boy with three stars on his forehead; or it is the dragon which can only be mind-spoken too by the owner who has the right kind of soul to Impresses it on the day of its birth. Anyway I''ll play with this grid thing and tell you how it goes.

quote:
Writing is a lot like engineering, I think. Sooner or later, a complete archetype will emerge, and then you have to test it against the plot. Sometimes it will mesh, othertimes you going to have to cut or paste or hem. That''s what rewriting is. This is really just conceptual components tikertoy with a relevancy matrix overlayed.

Generally the problem comes in finding a thorough array of components to play tinkertoy with.

quote:
The problem with clothing an archetype is that there is no good way to select the details of the symbolic version of it to put in your story.

quote:
That is why you have to exhaustively list all possible details and test for relevance, pertinence, viability, dynamic capability (is it action or setting dressing), plausibility -- trust me, it may sound lenthy, but like a long book, it''s still finite.

Like I said, I''ll give it a try.

quote:
The details matter just enough that you can''t decide on a whim, but not enough that the answer is obvious or comes to you in a dream. I believe I mentioned this problem several posts up in this thread.

quote:
Yeah, try it as a graphical representation where you can move the symbols and details around like one of those kits with the furniture you can move around the floorspace. Simply by approaching it from a different POV often does the trick. Be aware this is a very powerful concept proofing tool I have never shared with any other writer for competitive reasons, and the real thing to remember is that when you start working with information in this way, better have a legal pad handy, because it is flowsvilleomatica when it starts working.

The main thing to remember is that the details are finite, can be represented spatially rather than linearly, made to work rationally or representatively (more properly) and then simply converted back into linear form and boom, problems solved. Do I get a promotion for this or something? Wait, let''s see if it works for you first.

*Blink* a graphical representation? Hmmmmm. Actually I''ve been having a bit of trouble visualizing things in this story - the characters, who are supposed to be aliens resembling bird dinosaurs, keep turning into humans when I''m not paying attention. ^_~ But lets see, how the heck could I visually represent the various ideas that have to go into this novel? I already tried tarot cards, but I suppose I could try it again now that I have a slightly more concrete idea of the plot. I tried visualizing the plot as a timeline, taming the fourth dimension by rotating it to be a lower dimension, but that didn''t work. I made notecards and arranged them on the floor. I''m still working on that outline of the first 12 chapters. I could take another stab at trying to sketch the characters. I dunno, have any other methods in your bag of tricks? ^_~

quote:
The way I feel is more like you mentioned about wanting to have accomplished something before you die. I have been writing for 9 years, I want to have a novel to show for it, damn it. (Not swearing at you, just to express my frustration.) I feel that ''this has gone on long enough'' and ''if I don''t finish something I have to admit I''m a poser''.

quote:
Well, first of all, let me say I have faith in you. You can do this. The thing you gotta give yourself a break on is time. Remember Joseph Wambaugh example above. Time is not the deciding factor here, completion is. If that story moves you deeply enough to write it, you will by definition complete it sooner or later. It just have to move you. It has to give you feelings you can resonate with. Often more than not, it is an emotional process more than a technical impediment, there are tools for impediments, the primary one being in your ability to change flexibility in your POV and methods/techniques. Remember, when in doubt, play with it. It''s not a snake. I''ve stories about that, but not for now. Pick that story and those archetypes up, give them a good shake, and show them who''s boss.

Thanks. Lol, "give them a good shake and show them who''s boss" huh? If I knew how, I would. I''m definitely looking for that emotional resonance, I suppose I just have to work on it more. I encountered an interesting advice in a book on how to write romance novels the other day. The writer recommended: Imagine throwing your novel away, into a trash can. Now, if you could save only one piece of it, what would it be? The answer might surprise you. Use that piece as the seed for your next revision, rework everything around it.

quote:
lol. What''s a cistine experience?

quote:
It''s an old story about how when the pope visited michaelangelo quite a way into the chapel ceiling painting process, and complained about how much money he was spending on this cieling while he had to pay for a war at the same time, and that while both were quite long endeavors, one could easily become more expensive than the other. Michaelangelo spoke to him about how masterpieces were quite indifferent to matters of time and money (my producer howls at this part, and I''m not even to the punchline), and that the pope couldn''t possibly understand that aspect of art, when the pope shot right back with a interpretive statement about the project from an artistic standpoint that totally nailed michaelangelos artistic intent better than michaelangelo could have expressed it himself. Michaelangelo looked at the pope in utter amazment as if he''d never seen this side of a man he''d known for years, and possibly had misjudged him all along, and the pope read this like a book and said, "What did you expect, I am the pope." He walked away and told Michaelangelo to finish.

Lol, that''s cool. ^_^ That would be a perfect thing for one of those cool egotistic anime villains to say.

quote:
BTW the 9 chapters turned into 12, and I''m still typing up the outline, so maybe tomorrow.

quote:
By gosh, pinch me if I''m not being a little inspirational. :D

Heh, actually in that particular instance I just realized I had forgotten two chapters, and that things had sorted themselves out enough in my head that I knew what had to go in the next chapter. But yes, you''re definitely being inspirational. :D And so I will go work on the outline and archetypes some more until I fall over asleep.

Sunandshadow wrote:

Ok, back.

quote:
- There is no such thing as an inappropriate love, or an indecent one. Love, by connecting us deeply to another person (or people) is what makes life meaningful.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Sounds like it. He killed himself once he realized it was the only way he could proclaim his love from the top of the world, and live with the fact there is *inappropriate and indecent* love that society will not accept, and he was man enough to not hide his love.

Grotesques and wan Fay Wray type flapper girls can love in moralistic society, but they will be at the least unaccepted and at the most hunted down and killed, so, either you are going to discover what Victor Hugo discovered, and it ain't so here on earth, or, convey the notion in an alien manner on an alien planet and risk losing human readers who view through that edwardian notion, the very people who will buy and review your work.

David Brin created such a love in one of his Uplift Wars books, and even then, the alien woman in love with the earth monkey metamorphed through adaptive powers into a human looking female so all the other species would not morally rebel. In the end, she too died, though she proclaimed her love. These writers did not create these sociological psyche cushions for no reason. What reason could it be? Is is just hard to write, or, by advancing the notion and arguing for it, you hurt your chances of sucessfully getting positive critiques which help sales? I would not know how to make that choice, as I have never had to cross that road.

quote:
- Happiness is working with the ones you love to accomplish something great together that you couldn't have done separately. This may be raising a well-loved child, creating a work of art, or founding a university.

I can see the reviews raving already.

quote:
- If you aren't loyal to your loved ones with all your heart, you aren't loyal to yourself; and any system that won't let you be loyal to yourself doesn't deserve to have you be loyal to it.

Ooh, juicy. "I led the rebellion to overthrow the regime to simply have the chance to express my love the way it should be." Mmmm, tasty.

quote:
- Caring is about being nice. Passion is _not_ about being nice. Love must be made out of both, like salad dressing made out of oil and water.

Sometimes caring is about being firm, and not giving somebody what they think they need because it will actually hurt them. I'm not advocating tough love, but there is validity and value in this direction of relating. "Honey, I know you love marijuana, but new research indicates it's a cause of a particulary cruel and massive depression. I'm taking your bong away and calling your benefits department."

quote:
- You are only a slave if you think you are a slave; but you are an animal until you can communicate that you aren't. Being a free, human adult is about living an examined, introspective life while also being careful and caring of those around you.

That's a lot to ask as a criteria of being a free human adult, the last time the definition was described. Are your characters eternally walking on the razor's edge? Is that enjoyable to read?

quote:
- Someone must lead and someone must follow and each needs the other and neither is better, you must be whichever one suits your nature (hmm, sounds like a poem idea...)

Yes, it does. This kind of relationship is cyclical too, and people are more than happy to let somebody else take the lead just for the opportunity to avoid blame when something goes wrong and can say, "It was somebody -ahem- else's idea."

quote:
o_O you can see why it has to be a romance novel - have you ever seen the word love so many times in so few sentences? lol

This a bold love novel, I think. You are taking on some strong things here, no wonder it's taking a while to formulate. Your plots are much more complex than mine.

quote:
But still, why lightning?

Inspiration striking. Everyone in your dream is you. When you are doing something, it is a teaching dream. When something is being done to you, it is an instruction dream. Did you journal it and then meditate on it later? That often helps.

quote:
The general unhelpfulness of my dreams annoys me.

Feels like an major opportunity to find inspiration 'out there.'

quote:
That's one of the good things about living in an apartment or a dorm - the background noise is good for dreaming.

The problem with that is that you are already predisosed to that subliminal sound environment. I meant a total change.

quote:
Um. My instinct is to say that wouldn't work, but I'm not sure exactly why.

Instinct is reason without fact. You need to try to really know. And remember that writers are almost always inventors tool. A game programmer also makes tools to do the job before they even go in and work on a graphics engine or another part of the game codebase.

quote:
I mean the grid is a problem because the space in which symbols exist is more than 2D, but I've dealt with that problem before in other areas.

You are relating concepts, the dimensionality of them is secondary in importance to ensuring the relationships are in harmonious, or even purposefully disharmonic (such as in a sweet as sugar antagonist; my favorite character to create, because he/she is the only one who can do what agent smith did in the Matrix, tell humans what they are like from another point of view other than ain't we the greatest, like we usually do.

quote:
Let me give an example of a symbol and an archetype. The archetype is the powerful object keyed to the hero by blood or other identifier, which the hero uses in his adventures to get closer to his goal. The symbol is a sword with a ruby in the hilt and runes carved into the blade passed from father to son for generations; or it is a harp with three stars inset in the wood which can only be used by the boy with three stars on his forehead; or it is the dragon which can only be mind-spoken too by the owner who has the right kind of soul to Impresses it on the day of its birth. Anyway I'll play with this grid thing and tell you how it goes.

Did you consider e-mailing Anne McCaffrey with this? She's quite accessible to writers and a giving teacher.

quote:
Generally the problem comes in finding a thorough array of components to play tinkertoy with.

Arrays are not infinite in a consistent story universe.

quote:
Like I said, I'll give it a try.

Sorry if I sounded pushy, I didn't intend that.

quote:
*Blink* a graphical representation? Hmmmmm. Actually I've been having a bit of trouble visualizing things in this story - the characters, who are supposed to be aliens resembling bird dinosaurs, keep turning into humans when I'm not paying attention. ^_~

Quite a morphic story, some piece of work you chose. If my dinosaurs turned into humans, I'd have a social life again.

quote:I dunno, have any other methods in your bag of tricks? ^_~

I have a method I learned from the writer of "The Player", Micheal Tolkin. It's called, "The Crash Test Dummy." You take a classic plot, anything will do, even a fairy tale, and lay down lines of it in between outline paragraphs of your plot. It will yank you out of the way you see your story in an instant, and show strengths and weaknesses. I use it only with my own plots, usually a sci fi and a macabre, so the distinctions and dischords are really clear. It *always* shows you what parts of the story you are so loyal to you wouldn't change them for anything, and, shows you what may not fit at all or need to be changed towards those things that cannot be cut.

quote:
Thanks. Lol, "give them a good shake and show them who's boss" huh? If I knew how, I would. I'm definitely looking for that emotional resonance, I suppose I just have to work on it more. I encountered an interesting advice in a book on how to write romance novels the other day. The writer recommended: Imagine throwing your novel away, into a trash can. Now, if you could save only one piece of it, what would it be? The answer might surprise you. Use that piece as the seed for your next revision, rework everything around it.

You know how because you are the person who wields the pen. All characters, no matter how magnificently powerful, or dangerous, or innocent, should quiver a little in fear as you pass the pen near the page. You are the master of the realm of your story, and you are giving these characters permission to come to life and play in the world you create for them. You are the boss, just recognize that and start acting like it. They really shit their drawers if the pen is blue, but I don't get that out usually because it's the edit of death, and they know it.

quote:
Lol, that's cool. ^_^ That would be a perfect thing for one of those cool egotistic anime villains to say.

You, as the author, are the arbiter and civil engineer who would survey best where that line were to go, and whether to spade it in or bulldoze.

quote:
Heh, actually in that particular instance I just realized I had forgotten two chapters, and that things had sorted themselves out enough in my head that I knew what had to go in the next chapter. But yes, you're definitely being inspirational. :D And so I will go work on the outline and archetypes some more until I fall over asleep.

One of these mornings, you should just sit down and try to write the end of the book without having to reference any notes, and find out where you stand in the context of your material.

Pale hacks like myself end up with lines from our 'regurgitated on the roads' such as "happy motoring", but that's my lot. Know yours.





[edited by - adventuredesign on November 9, 2003 10:27:56 PM]

Part 1 Reply

quote:Original post by sunandshadow
O_o is it just me, or are these posts approaching novel-length all by themselves?

quote:Original post by adventuredesign
Yes, they are, and I have to get back to my novel soon.

Oh by all means, don''t let me distract from your creative process, that''s always the first priority.

quote:
Hmm, I was thinking that literary theory included the part of creativity theory that studies how and why people write, which would naturally make both rife with myth and misnomer, etc.

quote:
Nah, one is involved with the study of tangible, relevant existing literary works, and the other is an area of psychology. There''s not a lot of myth in literary theory except in criticism and editorial opinion. Linking the two does not make them subject to the same criteria or interpretive derivation, it simply links them by their causal relations.

Well if you get into structuralism and narratology, they''re classified as literary theory but they''re at least half-way psychology. In point of fact I would say that at least half of all literary theory is psychology: the concept of foreshadowing and teleologolically satisfying endings, reader-response criticism, freytag''s pyramid, plot snakes, trees, and other diagrams, they''re all about how the human mind responds to and gives life to what it reads. Which completely makes sense when you consider that a piece of fiction is really nothing more than a solitaire mind game that the author plays with him/herself, then records so that others can enjoy it.

quote:
I''m going to continue to argue that great moments in life are relative.

quote:
To one''s experience, agreed. Whether that experience is personal by way of external conditioning, or personal by way of self cogniscence, well the difference is of entire orders of perception. You assume all subjects in the test all share the same background, when I see people of advanced age who have never really lived at all, but just acted out experiences they had been conditioned into by institutional academics and media, one is created, the latter is synthesized.

They are completely different, and the real difference meets the test when you remove the conditioning from the human subject and expose for experience and reaction and the conditioned subject cannot originate, merely react with embedded perception. You really ought to consider the distinction between people who are "made" and people who are evolved.

Since all people are both made and evolved (that whole nature vs. nurture false dichotomy), and since you can''t produce a human being who isn''t conditioned or remove the conditioning from an existing human being, I think the point is moot. Certainly there are people who are crippled by traditional morality and fear of social disapproval. The character Attranath in my novel is someone who has to suffer through this and grow out of it.

If you look at psychological studies of babies (the closest we can get to non-conditioned humans), you can observe three interesting things: 1) babies prefer to look at attractive people rather than unattractive people, 2) toddlers get sympathetically sad, angry, or happy with the adult or older child they''re with, and will try to make a sad person feel better by patting them or giving them a toy or food, and 3) toddlers recognize and can anticipate social disapproval, and they react to this with either guilt or anger. While these latter two behaviors are only demonstrated by somewhat older (and therefore more conditioned) children, the behaviors are also observed in many higher mammals such as dogs and dolphins, so I think it''s safe to assume they are evolved rather than made. Guilt-based ethical systems of tradition, unpleasant as they can be, merely build on our natural social instincts.

Oh, one other thing about baby psychology: babies are observed to have one of three types of attachment to their mother (or surrogate): anxious, secure, and avoidant. These attachment types (again observable also in dogs and monkeys) correlate strongly with the amount of exploratory behavior the child displays, with anxious-attachment babies clinging to their mother, being upset when she is not present or if anything new enters their environment, and generally refusing to explore (this is my roommate, who refuses to call people on the phone to order a pizza and is unhappy if I go anywhere without him), secure-attachment babies being willing to explore but also returning to their mother regularly or if anything disturbs them (this is me ^_^ ), and avoidant-attachment babies who disregard their mothers and will wander right out of the room if you don''t keep an eye on them (these people often live alone as adults and like to explore a lot). This is wht I said before that 1/3 of people are natural explorers and the other 2/3 aren''t. The anxious-attachment third would be the xenophobic ones.

quote:
I liked looking at Niagra falls as part of a tour better./quote]

quote:
/me throws himself down a steep ravine, screaming his last words, "She''s aaaahhh bourgiousiEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!! in socialist Roooooooooobbbbbbbbbbbbessssssssssss!!!!"

Hehehehe. Socialists can believe in bread and circuses (or waterfalls) for the masses as long as we disapprove of the fact that the masses have to pay for the experience.

quote:
Okay now _you''re_ being silly. Women are not inherently beautiful, unless you want to say that human beings are inherently beautiful, which is possibly true for a more metaphorical sense of the word beauty, but then you said you aren''t talking about the beauty of art or mind.

quote:
Thank you. Like I said, you are beautiful. Life, dear is beautiful. Females have the power to create life. They have a corner of the market of beauty. You''re telling me you don''t know this. Are you shy or something?

I always thought it was rather unfair that men can''t have babies unless they can persuade a woman to carry them. You can say women have the power to create life (although they need a man''s help at least in the minimal form of a sperm sample, and that''s totally leaving out the importance of dads). But consider this: it might be equally fair to say that men _are_ life. If you look at all the most glamorous and heroic positions in society, like paramedics, politicians, inventors, ceos, (and yes, the military), what do you see? Men. Like ten of them for every woman. If you did a survey of novels published this year you would find that way more than half of them have male protagonists. In videogames the proportion is even more skewed. Really, I see both genders as having their own strengths and beauties, and if I had to pick which I''d be... well I would really have a difficult time choosing. Probably I''d ask if I could be a hermaphrodite and have the best of both worlds. ^_~

Am I shy? No. I''m just used to the fact that people don''t think I in particular am beautiful. Smart, I get that all the time. Creative, businesslike, crazy, egotistical, nice, easy-going, selfish, manipulative, continuously plotting... I get all that, and I have the yearbook inscriptions to prove it ^_~ , but I never get pretty, and I don''t get hit on except online. All you have to do for proof is take a look at the lounge thread where people post their pictures, I believe I''m on page 15. Lilwonder gets wedding proposals, I get O____O s. That''s just how my life is, and I''m used to it.

quote:
Mostly it just ticks me off that I don''t get hit on more often. ^_~

quote:
Well, there''s a lot of ways to fix that. I date women your age all the time. It''s mental most of the time, attraction. The unknown draws us inexorably. You''re just one of those people who is probably really, really clear. That can often be misdiagnosed (and sadly so) as uninteresting. What kinds of things have you done to alleviate this? Besides the obvious that a bisexual''s dilemma naturally is to never have the choice of loving just one person.

I read a book about the psychology of attractive behavior one time. I wouldn''t say that people tend to percieve me as uninteresting, I would say that they tend to percieve me as wierd, alien, intimidating.

quote:
I haven''t seen it. But it sounds fascinating. Wasn''t it Kurt Cobain who said, "Nature is a whore?"
[/quore]

Clicky for The Dior Website, John Galliano''s Designs Choose your language, a window should pop up, under the channels choose live, then choose the spring/summer 2004 movie and hit play.

quote:
I wouldn''t think a bridal place would have very interesting fabrics.

quote:
It depends on the kind you go to. It''s easier to prototype in silk, satin and lace simply because models will wear it more readily, and, there''s always a bunch of free leftovers they will happily give a man interested in his own designs. They''re all a bunch of dash down the aisle types for pay dirt, but, that''s the tolerance I will exercise to get it for nothing.

Hehehe, that''s what Merru would do. Take what you can get, there''s one of my mottoes.

quote:
My general verdict is that it''s too much work

quote:
I agree, but my game fashion is important as a revenue center for the entire enterprise, so consistency with the game virtual motif as well as my needs for creative control. There, I said it, I''m a closet director.

Now there''s an odd business model. You _make_ money on your game fashion? There''s a trick I''d like to pull off. (And aren''t we all closet directors? Writing fiction is great because there''s no budget, no actors with big egos wondering what their motivation is, no contracts, no makeup artists... just pure directing. ^_~ And I think this is the third of fourth time I''ve defined writing as something different in the course of this conversation. That must be what our collaborative novel is about. ^_~

quote:
largely because it''s impossible to fit clothes to yourself unless you know a lot more about patternmaking than I do.

quote:
I''ve learned some, but I found out there is software that can do this for you, and I am trying the different design and fashion institutes here in SF to see if I can get a look at the software.

Ooh, lemme know what you find out. ^_^

quote:
No, I''m fanatical about IP, and rarely divulge details about what I am currently working on. It comes from my architecture days, when competing in the high end estate markets, spying was commonplace. Since we did things drawn by hand to spec and detail instead of relying on CAD (something you can do mostly only in the high end custom estate market; it''s not cost effective otherwise in mass manufacture cookie cutter development), we were able to have a more artistic set of design documents which seemed to be effective in impression boards of architectural review, whom looked at drawing all day perfectly printed out, but sterile of pochey and other lighting, dimensioning and artistic details one can do by hand to bring a design to life on 2-D graph paper.

Plus, I have actually had to bring suit once over a copyright violation, and I never want to have that experience again, so I am pretty much self restricting in that department. Besides, my designs are integrated, if you saw my game fashion, you''d know something about my gameworld and gameplay by inductive logic. I trust you, of course, but, not the rest of the internet.

You had to cue somebody? That must have been unpleasant. Well, if you ever want some feedback on your sketches you can email me some privately. Other than that, let me know when you release your game.

quote:
I would probably pick an opal which is almost as expensive. ^_~

quote:
The Kemper black opal, which I saw upon the finger of a Kemper themselves (disgustingly old money on the super wealthy scale) is in my new script. I trundled her and her Swiss Banker "friend" around Malibu driving a limo while in Screenwriting school. Pick one of those, please. Please.

lol that''s a great cooincidence. ^_^ I do like black opals, although I also like boulder, jelly, and fire opals. The most beautiful opal ring I ever saw had different types of opals set into it in a tile mosaic or quilt-like pattern.

quote:
What about giving that to the bride and groom so they could spend the first six months to a year of their lives together without having to go back to work in three weeks like the majority of them do, and they end up saying "it wasn''t long enough" like people say about vacations. Were I to dedicate and spend the rest of my life to the love of my life, I would want to start that thing out in terms of human bonding time, not in terms of we have to get back to work and get our lives started socially engineered lives. All of a sudden, you look back on your wedding as a packaged experience, and realize that you are going to work the next twenty years of your life just to get the time you wanted with the significant other back. People see divorce as a less disappointing option.

Hmm. In my mind spending six months full time with anyone would be just asking for the two of you to start ignoring each other some of the time out of self-defence, but maybe it''s different if you love someone enough to want to marry them. The only comparable experience I have is with my roommate. We''ve been best friends for five years now, living together on and off during that time. For about the first two years we talked to each other incessantly about anything and everything, but now we each know what the other thinks about everything, we''ve found all the subjects about which we have to agree to disagree, we do that finish-each-others'' jokes thing, and we spend a lot more time each working on our own projects than actually socializing with each other. But again, maybe it''s different for lovers than best friends.

quote:Original post by sunandshadow
Part 1 Reply

quote:
Oh by all means, don''t let me distract from your creative process, that''s always the first priority.

Well, my humor skills are really appearant. Guess I''d better stick with action adventure and genre period fiction.

quote:
Well if you get into structuralism and narratology, they''re classified as literary theory but they''re at least half-way psychology. In point of fact I would say that at least half of all literary theory is psychology: the concept of foreshadowing and teleologolically satisfying endings, reader-response criticism, freytag''s pyramid, plot snakes, trees, and other diagrams, they''re all about how the human mind responds to and gives life to what it reads. Which completely makes sense when you consider that a piece of fiction is really nothing more than a solitaire mind game that the author plays with him/herself, then records so that others can enjoy it.

I can see where it would be a mind game for some authors, but I am of a view that it''s more serious creative expression, even when light hearted comedy is being done. I don''t know a single working writer who isn''t amazingly engaged in one aspect or another. As far as literary theory being psychology, psychology itself is an art form, and I believe that because my dad used to be one, though he used to produce theater and act as well. He used to kid about the lack of difference in therapy and fiction. Gawds, where I have taken that.


{quote]
Since all people are both made and evolved (that whole nature vs. nurture false dichotomy), and since you can''t produce a human being who isn''t conditioned or remove the conditioning from an existing human being, I think the point is moot.

Unless the individual, through self awareness, does this for themselves. There are plenty of people out there who avoid media, marketing, they know the difference between conscious humanism and consumerism, and they don''t let it interfere with their intellectual freedom.

quote:
Certainly there are people who are crippled by traditional morality and fear of social disapproval. The character Attranath in my novel is someone who has to suffer through this and grow out of it.

What I don''t think I am perhaps communicating is the overwhelming numbers of populants that have succumbed to this, and, the overwhelming assault on our intellectual freedoms and humanism capitalistic greed and instituional morality foments.

quote:
If you look at psychological studies of babies (the closest we can get to non-conditioned humans), you can observe three interesting things: 1) babies prefer to look at attractive people rather than unattractive people, 2) toddlers get sympathetically sad, angry, or happy with the adult or older child they''re with, and will try to make a sad person feel better by patting them or giving them a toy or food, and 3) toddlers recognize and can anticipate social disapproval, and they react to this with either guilt or anger. While these latter two behaviors are only demonstrated by somewhat older (and therefore more conditioned) children

This is a result of maturity in conscience rather than external stimulaic conditioning.

quote:
the behaviors are also observed in many higher mammals such as dogs and dolphins, so I think it''s safe to assume they are evolved rather than made. Guilt-based ethical systems of tradition, unpleasant as they can be, merely build on our natural social instincts.

I think you underestimate the ability of subliminal techniques that can rather easily bypass instincts and conditioning because the implementers know these types of resistance are in place. It''s about the levels of consciousness. poleshift.org/sublim

quote:
Oh, one other thing about baby psychology: babies are observed to have one of three types of attachment to their mother (or surrogate): anxious, secure, and avoidant. These attachment types (again observable also in dogs and monkeys) correlate strongly with the amount of exploratory behavior the child displays, with anxious-attachment babies clinging to their mother, being upset when she is not present or if anything new enters their environment, and generally refusing to explore (this is my roommate, who refuses to call people on the phone to order a pizza and is unhappy if I go anywhere without him), secure-attachment babies being willing to explore but also returning to their mother regularly or if anything disturbs them (this is me ^_^ ), and avoidant-attachment babies who disregard their mothers and will wander right out of the room if you don''t keep an eye on them (these people often live alone as adults and like to explore a lot). This is wht I said before that 1/3 of people are natural explorers and the other 2/3 aren''t. The anxious-attachment third would be the xenophobic ones.

This does not account for the signals the parent sends effecting the child''s reactions. If all parents were calm, relaxed and serene, instead of on the phone, in the SUV, at the fast food place, in line at the courthouse, would the results be as consistent. Account for all factors of stimuli when you make these predictions about behavioral outcome, becuase full analysis will.

quote:
I always thought it was rather unfair that men can''t have babies unless they can persuade a woman to carry them.

Most of the time women convince themselves, due to their genetic predispositions.

quote:
You can say women have the power to create life (although they need a man''s help at least in the minimal form of a sperm sample, and that''s totally leaving out the importance of dads).

It''s an unequal bargain at best, but putting it in equitable terms helps your supposition. A man does a lot of display and provision to earn the right to help. A woman can go out and get pregnant with a total stranger and leave in the morning and never see him again and not care about it except that she did see him as a sperm donor and not a mate. Many, many women I know chose to raise a child alone simply because they saw the overwhelming majority of males as inappropriately equipped emotionally, financially, relationally or intellectually to be a good dad.

quote:
But consider this: it might be equally fair to say that men _are_ life. If you look at all the most glamorous and heroic positions in society, like paramedics, politicians, inventors, ceos, (and yes, the military), what do you see? Men. Like ten of them for every woman.

I think the phrase ''enviable positions women can barely get into even after years of progressive equitism'' would be a more accurate representation of this glass cieling rather than characterizing men *as* life. Those occupations are lively, but not life. We are talking the miracle form of life creating here, not upward mobility.

quote:
If you did a survey of novels published this year you would find that way more than half of them have male protagonists. In videogames the proportion is even more skewed. Really, I see both genders as having their own strengths and beauties, and if I had to pick which I''d be... well I would really have a difficult time choosing. Probably I''d ask if I could be a hermaphrodite and have the best of both worlds. ^_~

Surely, but that is a result of enormous tradition where the male lead was chosen by virtue of gender more than literary viability. There are plenty of great works of fiction with women leads, but the fact remains when you write a woman character, you have to have some depth, where when you write a man character, you have to go Ahnuld, and the only character that can be a man who can also be sensitive and introspective and respective or emotions is the old grey commedia del arte guy who was a counselor in the old wars type of male.

These literary traditions were made idealistic because the male dominated cultures of the past desired them to be idealistic. We now just have to write to an old warped sense of taste as if it were the idealistic standard. It ain''t, but it is tradition, and if you want to sell, it''s hard to break those rules. You gotta have something really special.

quote:
All you have to do for proof is take a look at the lounge thread where people post their pictures, I believe I''m on page 15. Lilwonder gets wedding proposals, I get O____O s. That''s just how my life is, and I''m used to it.

I tried to see it, but it would not show up in my browser. A lot of them men here did have exceptional comments. I''m going to try again, but, I sure wish I had seen it.

quote:
Mostly it just ticks me off that I don''t get hit on more often. ^_~

quote:
I read a book about the psychology of attractive behavior one time. I wouldn''t say that people tend to percieve me as uninteresting, I would say that they tend to percieve me as wierd, alien, intimidating.

What women think men think of them is usually way off, and that is just the nature of the beast. I would have to see for myself. Thank goodness I''m old enough to wait for the proof in the pudding.

quote:
Clicky for The Dior Website, John Galliano''s Designs Choose your language, a window should pop up, under the channels choose live, then choose the spring/summer 2004 movie and hit play.

quote:
Now there''s an odd business model. You _make_ money on your game fashion? There''s a trick I''d like to pull off.

We don''t do T-shirts, we want players to wear it to school, work, mall and grandmas. We gots joo accessories an everting.

quote:
And I think this is the third of fourth time I''ve defined writing as something different in the course of this conversation. That must be what our collaborative novel is about. ^_~

Collaberative story conferences are an amazing human interation, especially when five other writers gang up on the head writer. The producer is never scheduled or notified. Alcohol usually follows.

quote:
Ooh, lemme know what you find out. ^_^

Fashion designers are more vain than actresses, and getting a CD out of one costs practially proposals, but I will get the program somehow.

quote:
You had to cue somebody? That must have been unpleasant. Well, if you ever want some feedback on your sketches you can email me some privately. Other than that, let me know when you release your game.

Yes, it wasn''t pretty. That''s the old saying about Santa Barbara, a sunny town of shady people. Isla Vista and Montecito are nice though.

quote:
I would probably pick an opal which is almost as expensive. ^_~

I summon the bond of Opal buddies!


lol that''s a great cooincidence. ^_^ I do like black opals, although I also like boulder, jelly, and fire opals. The most beautiful opal ring I ever saw had different types of opals set into it in a tile mosaic or quilt-like pattern.

Fire opals are really ''supposed'' to be of low quality in the opal family, though they are certainly beautiful no question. You can actually save about 90% on the retail price by taking a cruise to the mexican riviera from the Port of LA, and bring them back in duty free (at least that was the way it was in ''98) and the quality down there has great variance, but the ex and I got a fire opal for 400 US and brought it up here and had it appraised for insurance purposes for 5K. Well worth the ticket price, though I did come down with that cruise bug, so take some strong yogurt, and eat lots of dairy while on those cruises, and you should be fine. The horserides to the mountaintops along the seaside at dawn are totally rad.

quote:
Hmm. In my mind spending six months full time with anyone would be just asking for the two of you to start ignoring each other some of the time out of self-defence, but maybe it''s different if you love someone enough to want to marry them.

I think so. It is a permanent life bond mating thing, of which sex and personal time is only part of the relationship.

quote:
The only comparable experience I have is with my roommate. We''ve been best friends for five years now, living together on and off during that time. For about the first two years we talked to each other incessantly about anything and everything, but now we each know what the other thinks about everything, we''ve found all the subjects about which we have to agree to disagree, we do that finish-each-others'' jokes thing, and we spend a lot more time each working on our own projects than actually socializing with each other. But again, maybe it''s different for lovers than best friends.

Oh yeah, love changes everything. Sigh.

Yours truly,

Adventuredujour

Rrr, I had most of a reply to this written, and then my browser crashed and it was gone. >.< I''ll try to recapture what I said before.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame - I''m surprized you think this. I mean, it''s true that historical literary tradition has been to ''normalize'' all couples before the end of the book (look at beauty and the beast and the phantom of the opera) but this is not an ironclad rule, it''s a cop-out that I detest seeing, and there are a lot of people who protest against it, especially by using fanfiction to make the story work out the way they thought it should. And since the fanfiction community is essentially the audience I''m aiming my novel at, they ought to be estatic to see somebody do things right for once. :D And there is published science fiction to support my theory, for example Lisanne Norman''s books where a human woman has a romance with a telepathic catalien, marries him, bears halfbreed children and everything else.

Are my characters walking the razor''s edge of being free human adults? Yes they are, yes it works, and yes people like it in my fanfictions. The ethical tension provides some nice internal conflict and opportunity for introspection, and introspection is what my narration is all about. Fangirls can really empathize with being torn between loyalty to a cause or a band of followers and wanting to give in to the villain''s dark magnetic appeal.

Is the plot complex - Well, thank you for saying so, it''s very encouraging to hear you say you would expect it to take a long time. I would characterize these things as themes rather than plot, but it''s certainly true that the plot has to be formulated so that it gets at all of these themes, in good order and without any spots that are boring to read. And that formulation is definitely waht''s taking me so long. Sometimes it seems like the only real way to make any progress at this is to spend all day laying on the couch daydreaming (or meditating if want to make it sound more professional ^_~ ). And the problem with that is I keep falling asleep.

About the lightning - I don''t think it''s inspiration; it didn''t ''strike'', it ''shocked''. But that may be one of those awful dream puns, related to the idea that my writing is ''shocking''.

Why the grid won''t work - Simple, because I don''t know all the options to put in it. If I did know all the options the right choice would probably be obvious and I wouldn''t need a grid anyway. What I need to do is sit down and think of all the options. I do keep having new ideas for options occurr to me every other day or so, but it would be nice to be able to speed up the process.

quote:
I have a method I learned from the writer of "The Player", Micheal Tolkin. It''s called, "The Crash Test Dummy." You take a classic plot, anything will do, even a fairy tale, and lay down lines of it in between outline paragraphs of your plot. It will yank you out of the way you see your story in an instant, and show strengths and weaknesses. I use it only with my own plots, usually a sci fi and a macabre, so the distinctions and dischords are really clear. It *always* shows you what parts of the story you are so loyal to you wouldn''t change them for anything, and, shows you what may not fit at all or need to be changed towards those things that cannot be cut.

Where do you get classic plot outlines to use like this?

quote:
You know how because you are the person who wields the pen. All characters, no matter how magnificently powerful, or dangerous, or innocent, should quiver a little in fear as you pass the pen near the page. You are the master of the realm of your story, and you are giving these characters permission to come to life and play in the world you create for them. You are the boss, just recognize that and start acting like it. They really shit their drawers if the pen is blue, but I don''t get that out usually because it''s the edit of death, and they know it.

I think it would be counter-productive for me to envision myself as intimidating my characters - one of my worst problems as a beginning writer was that I liked my characters so much I wanted only good things to happen to them, and as a result I wrote no conflict. o_O I finally learned a better way to do this - think of the story as therapy for the characters, stressful or embarrassing at points but they''ll be happier at the end because of it.