ink

Cage/Gate

tess — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:53:49 -0700

The clock on my deskphone blinks a solemn "11:20 AM", reminding me I only have 40 minutes of my lunch hour remaining. Lunch itself was devoured in less that time, while I depleted the contents of my feed-reader and scanned a few websites. The typical course of the day is for me to go back to work at this point, saving any pursuits of my non-working life for off hours when I'm well away from my desk.

It seems, however, that less and less happens while I'm away from my desk. Work has taken over my life, my demanding work-out regimen feasting on the remains. As a result, I barely have the time to relax let alone be creative. It becomes more and more difficult to ignore the creeping thought that I should simply give up creative pursuits. The weary mantra of "There's no time nor energy for anything else" seems a sad stereotype. "Occasionally, I find the time," I begin, squaking some lackluster justification to complete the sutra. Perhaps it's true that I'm simply not at the point in my life where I can sustain anything else.

You'd think that giving up would provide me with comfort. "Give yourself a break," "Take some time off," "It'll come back." My friends do try to help, but taking their advice to heart only seems to make me feel more and more confined. I can't escape the demands of my life, I can't walk through the immaculate gate in my mind that leads to imagined people and realities. I seem forever chained in the present, free only to catch glimpses through the doorway before it's slammed shut once more.

When writing software, I can fly. I can speed through intricate, ever-changing machines in a infinite field of electric blue.
When writing stories, I'm an invisible telepathic. I can listen in on conversations and peer into secret dreams.
When drawing, I don't exist at all. The world consists only of shape, stroke, and motion. Color is solitary expression.

I'm tired of being chained. I'm even more tired of being aware I am chained.

For all my artful descriptions, there doesn't seem to be any easy solutions. There seems even less a simple explanation for my state. Maybe there aren't any, maybe the only thing to do is shrug off the weight and sound of clanking metal, reach for the doorknob and turn...

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Tess d'Minnesota

First Lines Don't Matter

tess — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:00:00 -0700

I learned something about writing last Friday. For the last several weeks (maybe a month) I've been trying to divise a new opening for Paper Girl. To say that this has been no easy task is an understatement. I've gone through several different versions and false positives. I researched the experience of other writers -- all far more experienced than myself -- in crafting the perfect first line:

The first line is your best advertisement next to the book's cover.
The first line sets the mood and tone of the book.
The first line should crystallize the plot but only so much as to make the reader interested.

How the hell, I thought, do I stuff all of that into one sentence? Most of the time the first line just comes to me, and I can build a story, chapter, or blog entry around it. The problem with Paper Girl is that it's far, far bigger and a more ambitious story than any I have attempted thus far. Crystallizing that down to one sentence seemed ludicrous. I tried meditation, interviewing the characters, even brute force, but the only thing I was successful at generating was frustration.

On someone's suggestion, I decided to take some time off from the project. I put it out of my mind, or as much out of my mind as is possible for someone with my personality. It helped somewhat that I was out-state on assignment last week. Being away from home tends to make me value my imagination more and I have less distractions available. After all, only so much fits in a carry-on. I put Paper Girl out of my mind primarily for the reason that I felt overworked and needed a break. After a week, my creativity gave suggestions of a return, but nothing solid.

It was on the first leg of my flight home Friday that inspiration struck. I was in a cramped DC-80 somewhere over Kentucky, making my way to O'Hare International. I was convinced that I wasn't going to make my connection since we were delayed taking off, and then there was a ground hold at Chicago. I sat in my seat and thumbed through my music collection on my BlackBerry.

A few songs in, the thought occurred to me that I hadn't been listening to my playlist of Paper Girl related music. I tend to assemble playlists for my writing projects to serve as both focusing and inspirational tools. Lately, however, this habit has fallen out of use in favor of less purposeful listening. On a whim, I decided to change that. The first song I naturally turned to was "Chop Suey" by System of a Down.

"Chop Suey" has been a strong member of the playlist for years. Since college, I've imagined it as the closing song to the fictitious Paper Girl anime. Always the same selection of images flickers in my mind to that song, a building in flames, a girl falling along a mirrored wall, and an assortment of others. Like many of the songs on my writing playlists, "Chop Suey" has a key lyric that is relevent to the story as a whole or a particular character. In this case, the majority of the song has both been parallel, and shaped the nature of the story.

Somewhere near the end of the song I found myself sitting bolt-upright. I'm sure that if anyone had seen my expression at that moment people might have thought I had just witnessed the fuselage being torn to pieces before my eyes. I didn't even voice if it were the right line or not, I simply knew at the gut level that what had come to me was it.

Lacking a pen and paper, I switched applications on my phone and began typing in what I had just written. It didn't take me long to realize that this wasn't the first line of the story. If I hadn't been so caught up in the moment I might have been disappointed at this point, instead I realized that this was the last line of the opening paragraph.

Drawing from some recently generated ideas, an image suggested from a friend, and two failed introductory paragraphs, I began formulating a new opener. It flowed surprisingly easily at 30,000 feet. A flight attendant passed by in the middle of this and asked, "You're not sending that, right?" She thought I was tapping out a text message or an email; I told her I wasn't and she was gone before I could explain further. Some minutes later, I stared at the completed introduction:

NOVELLA:
It's a lot like watching a television set. Everything you experience
has an off-white sense of distance, and a high frequency buzz barely
low enough to hear. Even touch feels rubbery like the buttons of a
remote control. Except, there's no remote, no channels, no off switch.
You're always watching yourself, a puppet made of flesh.

I hated it. I wanted to break my gaze, unplug the world and be free and floating. But then I met an angel who said she wanted to die.

What I had learned as a writer in that moment was that the first line, the very first line doesn't matter. The first line of the above section is actually quite banal, but it does hold your interest long enough for you to read the first paragraph. What is like watching a television set? you may ask. The line also does set the mood of the story as well as tell you something critical about how the main character perceives the world.

Instead of crystallizing the entire story in the first sentence, I decided to make a grabber. The first sentence keeps the reader interested long enough to finish the paragraph -- or the first few pages if they're particularly attentive. The paragraph alone, however, isn't enough for most readers to finish the book. You need more for that. Instead, the first paragraph serves to build up interest and set mood so as to prepare the reader for the really, really grabbing line in the second paragraph.

This line you can call a "nail", as in, "If I haven't nailed your interest by now, you might as well put the book back on the shelf." It's this line that serves to capture the readers interest, as well as act as a point of reference for the writer.

The majority of the analysis occurred over the next 40 minutes of my flight. I was so excited by this revelation that I wanted to randomly show it to anyone that would listen, asking "Would you read a book that starts with this?" I managed to restrain myself enough to compose an email, and set it for delayed send once I was back on the ground.

Since then I've shown the intro to several different people who's sense of writing I trust. The response has been overall positive and I see little reason to change that. Now the problem is crafting the remainder of the first chapter. I have some dialog already, but it's no where near long enough to make a chapter. Now that the imfamous first line is behind me, hopefully it'll be easier to pen the remaining.

deninet Staff

Toy

tess — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:19:40 -0700

I had come to the cafe looking for someone, but what I had found was just a toy.

I realize I had loved this person once, in that leap-of-understanding way so common in dreams.

So this is how it ends, huh? I thought, leaving the cafe. Not a name or a memory of your own. Not even a gender. Just a bit of human brain in a grubby plastic shell and a painted smile.

I had failed to see the small portrait on one of the paneled
columns. Two figures, myself stood in the upper right looking dour yet
somhow happy. The other was the person I had loved when they were still
human. She was smiling broadly and happily.

Who put up that photo? Did the toy stare at it after-hours thinking Those two look so happy, not realizing it used to be one of them?

Geneology

tess — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:53:02 -0700

It was late at night and I was rifling through my library. I would take a book from the shelf, and open it to the first page. The book remained open only a moment as I scanned the page before returning it to the self and moving on to the next book. The process did not take long due to the size of my library. The two stout, white painted bookshelves could only hold so many books and manga. I was searching for something.

To be more accurate, I was conducting an analysis. I was looking for archetypes, patterns, and ultimately, guidence. I read only a short selection from each book:

"My name is Kathy H."
"All of this happened, more or less."
"A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories."

...came the first three. The next were personal favorites and rather striking:

"It was a pleasure to burn."
"The sky above port was the color of a television, turned to a dead channel."
"Two hours before dawn I sat in the peeling kitchen and smoked one of Sarah's cigarettes, listening to the maelstrom and waiting."

As I'm sure some of you have recognized by now, I'm looking at the first line in each novel. Crafting the first line of a story is a kind of art form. It has to grab the reader, while giving you a hint of what to expect. They have to envoke atmosphere and scene in one fell swoop. And of course, it has to sell the damn book.

This is not to say that a bland opening line means a great novel. My first example came from Never Let Me Go, a surprising and heartbreaking fictional biography set in an all to possible futrue. Of all my examples, it's the plainest and least grabbing. It does, however, offer an odd clue and hint of personality in the fact the narrator's last name is abbreviated. Little details like that can make or break an initial line.

Crafting the perfect first line was foremost on my mind that evening. I had been beating my head against the wall attempting to come up with the first line for Paper Girl. When I set about to write something, be it a journal entry, a blog post, or even a story, I often find myself unable to start without having that first line. It's not exactly fear that's holding me back. The first line is a kind of parent that each following sentence descends. I've often started over or abandoned entire bodies of work due to a bad first line.

Thankfully, I have yet to abandon the few pages of script I have written. Unfortunately I haven't settled on a first line either. Some months ago I thought for sure that I had nailed it. I was so excited by the line I spent my morning throwing together a new comic just to introduce it to others.

At the time, it summed up exactly what I had in mind for the story. It was also provocative, and grabbed my attention straightaway. Unfortunately, I began to rethink this the last few weeks.

The problem is that since I had come up with that line, I've been heavily reworking the main character, Novella. Novella has always come across as a weak character, too pliant to the wishes of other's in the story. For quite a number of outlines she didn't seem to have any concept of free will at all. The other characters of Akisa and Miki seemed far more clear in my mind, and I was able write them with much more focus and easy. Novella, by contrast, came across to one of my friends as "someone afraid of her own shadow."

The last few outlines I have been trying to improve her, especially the current Draft 5 plotline. Even so she seemed missing some critical component that made her more dynamic. Oddly enough, a workout session while watching the anime series Ghost Hound provided some inspiration. Since then, the character has been turned around in such a way that breaks the mold of a Transgender character in a webcomic. In fact, it's questionable if Novella is really Trans at all.

Since then I've been trying to get to know this character in a way I couldn't before. This Novella spoke more clearly, although I felt as if I wasn't getting to her directly. It's an odd thing to explain; directed image techniques and modified meditation doesn't always yeild results that make sense. Earlier this week, however, Novella seemed to overcome any communication difficulties and spoke to me in a way that was rather alarming at first. (Didn't I say directed image techniques were weird?)

All of this, however, didn't seem to deal with the problem I was facing. The line I came up with before didn't actually make sense for chapter I had written. The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that line needs to be conserved until later in the story where it will be far more relevant. It was also the wrong character speaking. By all rights, Novella should be the one granted the first line. I've done my best to come up with that line, but nothing seems quite be it:

"I can't remember when it first happened," or "When I was young, I remembered what the world felt like," aren't terrible. Yet they are lacking a quality that makes me stand up and say, "Yes! This is the first line of Paper Girl!" Some have suggested that I move on and write other parts of the story and get back to the initial line later. This is where I run into a problem. Paper Girl will take literally years for me to complete. The story I have in mind is complicated enough to warrent several volumes. Considering I plan to draw this story as a webcomic, I don't want to wait until the script is perfect to begin drawing. On the contrary, I want to keep the script only a bit ahead of the drawing so as to keep me interested. And of course there's my problem of how the first line is the progenitor of all the following.

I hope I come up with something soon, the wait is annoying.

Paper-Girl

An Experiment in Zen

tess — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:59:52 -0700

"How do you do it?" I asked offhandedly in the chat window. It was late evening, and I was experiencing a rare moment of lucidity in the seeming perpetual fatigue I now exist.

Bing! rang the computer speakers. In my memory, her reply came back as a kind of "Eugh?" in a Japanese accent, plucked from some forgotten anime series. I explained that I agonized over every little detail in my creative pursuits, accepting nothing less than perfection from myself to the point of being unable to do anything at all. Meanwhile she manages to turn two webcomics and a writing project in her limited free time. "How can you keep that up without succumbing to the pressure?"

"Mostly," she replied, "I don't think about it." I balked. By nature, I'm a thinking-type personality. I tend to analyze every possibility to the point of excess. Not thinking seemed...well, unthinkable. She continued typing, "If I start to get that way, then I know I'm in too far and I need to back off".

I've never been able to maintain that sort of distance with my projects. Instead, I become overly involved and place too much value on their success or failure. This is a horrible thing to do to any sort of project. You lose your objectivity, and begin to obsess over each perceived deficiency. Most importantly, you lose sight of the fact the main goal is always completion.

Paper Girl has been in existence now for almost 8 years now. The furtherest the project came was late 2002 and 2003 when 24 pages of comics were produced. Shortly thereafter, I put the project on hiatus while I worked on “script issues”. What I had hoped to be 6 months became 3 years.

In 2006, I found myself in a much more stable life situation. I had a good job and a home of my own. I decided it was time to write down all the ideas I had in that three year interval into a cohesive outline. Outlines were all I managed to produce until sometime late last year. I threw out all the outlines and came up with a simple 9 page document (the previous ones were 40). I avoided details and focused on the major plot points. And then, quite unannounced, I turned my back on outlines all together.

Since late last year I've been working on the Paper Girl script. So far, the work has been pretty slow. I've managed to put together two chapters, with a developing idea for a third. This sort of thing seems to come in fits and starts for me. Some evenings I find myself staring at Open Office Writer blankly, unable to write anything at all. Other nights the words come quickly, spilling over the brim of my mind and splashing on my fingers faster than I can type them out. Most nights, however, I'm simply too tired and exhausted to think about the thing at all.

My life has become busy again this year. There are a lot of projects and clients at work making my days draining, but ultimately rewarding. I started a new exercise regimen that is requiring a great deal of my free time, not to mention free energy. Starting this week, I'm at the gym 6 nights out of 7 – tonight is my night off.

Recently I've began to think, This isn't working. Maybe I should just give up and cancel Paper Girl altogether. I hated that thought. I hated the fact that I couldn't see why this had happened to me. For the last year I haven't been able to draw or write unless I forced myself. Occasionally I manage to produce a new piece of artwork or some lines of dialog, but the effort was strenuous.

Fear, of course, was weighing me down. Overcoming that fear requires a great deal of energy in addition to what is required in order to work on a project in the first place. With my exercise regimen, energy is at a premium. I can't afford to force myself to draw or write, and instead I do nothing.

Doing nothing is certainly not helping. The few times I manage to draw or write are a great stress reliever for me. It's an opportunity to leave the stresses and concerns I face in daily life and enter into another mental realm where all that's important is what's in front of me. Doing nothing, however, has allowed me to examine the history of this and other projects and realize how maintaining a degree of distance is important. Didn't a Zen master once say, "Act without doing; work without effort"?

This is usually the point in the entry where I make some sort of promise to produce something. I certainly would like to produce something soon. The script as it stands today has some issues, but has been received overall very well by my “editors” and I have ideas to improve it. I would like the script to be at least three chapters ahead of any drawing I produce.

I almost made a promise there, didn't I? I have two chapters already, with thoughts on a third. If I manage to produce the third, what exactly is holding me back from drawing comics? Nothing really. How then, shall I publish these things?

It's basically impossible for me to maintain the three or two-day-a-week schedule that pervades the webcomic world. I can imagine I'd barely be able to produce a page a week as I intend to post each in full color with airbrushing. Instead, I will probably follow the pattern of Faith Hicks of Demonology 101 fame. I'll release a series of pages at a time, with no hint of a schedule. In a world of RSS feed-readers, do we really have need for scheduled posts anymore?

As much as I want to avoid making promises in this post, I shall make one: I promise I will try.

Paper-Girl

Dimensions of Shadow and Sound

tess — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:29:05 -0700

Nifty! Moonspell is releasing a new album this month in Europe, and next month in the US (drat). I only stumbled upon it earlier this week when Sirius 27 played the title track. Needless to say, it's been stuck in my head for the last few days.

Sample, anyone?

I've developed a fondness for the Portuguese Gothic Metal band the last few months. More times than not I've plugged their name into Last.fm and listened for hours and hours. Delicious, dark, symphonic in places, their sound can be oddly comforting to me.

Perhaps it's a bit contrarian that harsh riffs, and Death Metal grunting can be comforting; music with a much brighter tone (irrespective of the lyrics) fill me with a kind of squeamish disgust. It's like being drown in honey. I want to rip through it, tear through the golden color and the stiflingly sweet air and unmask all that is ugly and painful. That release is precious to me as it was something I was not allowed to do growing up.

In a way, I feel that unmasking is my calling as a writer. I want to pull all the ugliness of humanity from its dark hiding places and force them into the light. Only then can we appreciate its subtle beauty.

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Tess d'Minnesota

Knot

tess — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:40:13 -0700

She had forgotten the simple relaxation of housework. Most of the time, it was a recurring annoyance. Lately she hardly had the time to pick up her apartment, wash the dishes, or even do laundry. Her life had become a blur of airports, hotels, and clients from opposite ends of the nation. The little time she was home, such mundane tasks only got in her way.

Tonight, however, was different. She had received word that she would be home for the rest of the month. She had decided to take advantage of the upcoming spring holiday and put in for an additional day off. No one questioned or debated her request; it was approved without protest. She quietly breathed a sigh of relief when approval came in. She hadn't had a day off since New Year's, and constant parade of rush assignments and last minute clients had worn on her. Everything seemed to slow and stop. For the first time in what must have been weeks, she felt grounded enough to clean her apartment.

It wasn't a complex operation. While the place looked shabby, it was merely disorganized. The dishes had to be done and were. The clothes she had left out to dry on two collapsible racks were ready and were folded. Loose items on tables, chairs, and the floors were gathered and put away.

She didn't listen to music or play a movie to keep her company. Sounds drifted in her open windows of the nearby highway, neighbors in other units, and a small Latino family watching their little boy play ball. Occasionally, between shouts of Spanish came a dull rubber thud as the ball rebounded against the sidewalk.

Nor did she place some topic in her mind for debate. She simply detached it from the worries and frustrations of the day and existed in the now. Slowly, like a knotted muscle, her mind began to relax. The feeling of it was almost too much to bear if she paid it too much attention – the relief of months of pent up stress. She felt tears welling up around her eyes, but put the feeling behind her before they could peak.

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Tess d'Minnesota

Music Reviews by Tess

tess — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 07:32:17 -0700

I've developed a love of posting oddly poetic posts in the shoutbox of various songs on Last.fm. I began doing so after realizing so many people posted variants of "I love this song!" or (given my playlist) "It's so heavy!". In my mind, there's something a bit mischievous about posting something like the following in such a venue.

Here are some examples; for "Traverseé" by Year of No Light:

"Amazing, graceful in it's ugliness; a hand reaching to block out the sun."

For "Hyenas" by Khomoa:

"A quiet space;
a field of wheat,
the smell of coffee
and of rain."

For "The City in the Sea" by The Ocean:

"Grinding machine, terror of gears. Whom in the city can deny its sound?"

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Tess d'Minnesota

Insistence

tess — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:03:23 -0700

I did not sleep well after my flight yesterday. I woke up at nearly two hour intervals. Sometime around 3am, I woke up with a character knocking at my mind's door. I heard her voice through threshold, even managed to catch snatches of words.

Even so, I ignored her. Look, I mentally muttered, I have to be at a client early tomorrow and I'm three timezones behind. She didn't seem to care. Her voice -- nearly 12 hours later -- is still fresh and clear. Finally, I gave up. I switched on the light and groped for the notepad often found on hotel nightstands. In my unsteady, sleep-deprived hand, I wrote down what she said.

She went silent. Had I been paying attention, I might have heard her linger by the doorway for a minute before quietly walking away. I tossed the notepad aside and went back to sleep.

Some hours later my alarm sounded and I went off to work, leaving the note behind. In fact, I completely forgot about it soon after waking as one would any number of dreams. My client for the next two weeks tends to start very early in the morning, and ends their day similarly early. I had been coming in at the tail end of a sizable systems migration, and no one was quite ready for me yet. I helped where I could, went to lunch, briefly planned our tasks for the next fortnight, and went back to the hotel.

I decided to relax for a while on my bed, catching up on many of the sites on which I had been delinquent this morning. The outlet was on the right side of the room. Nearly finished settling in, I found the scrawled notepad. I was startled by what it said:

I know one thing for certain: I was or am born in the 20th Century. If you find my story useful, you may personally reward me with another life.

I had written questioningly "Reki?" under the quote. The character did sound very much like the voice actor for Reki in Haibane Renmei, but I suspect this is a passing resemblance.

Despite the fact I the "letter" was in written by my hand, it feels strangely foreign to me. It's almost as if this note was left behind for only me to find.

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Tess d'Minnesota

Tolstoy Durden and the Writing Club of Doom

tess — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:07:46 -0800

Here stand the rules of Write Club.

Don't think, write.
DON'T THINK, WRITE!
Write now, not tomorrow, not after breakfast, now.
If you can't write, read.
If you can write, read, then write.
Write "with the door closed".
When writing something for the first time, don't look back, don't edit in place.
Edit when you're done writing. That's what a second draft is for.
Always ask what your characters would do, not what you want.
Story is king. Always listen to the king.