I’ve been looking for something over the last few days. I didn’t know that I was looking for whatever it was, let alone what it was that I was looking for. And now I know I’ve found it, I still don’t know what it was.
There’s this story by Theodore Sturgeon, The Dreaming Jewels, I think, where the main character eats ants as a young child, because his body was lacking some kind of nutrient. It felt like that. So I read a bunch of Steven Brust*–not the Taltos stuff–and when I got to the end of The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars (which always puzzled me before), I felt fine.
So–where do my ideas come from? It’s not important; they just come. But how do you make them just come? Easy. Every once in a while, your mind and body give you instructions, and you follow them. It’s like a deal with the devil, or having vowed to serve a fairy. The problem is that nobody tells you which ideas are the good ones.
I’ve been thinking of taking November to write a kind of fairy tale in which a girl follows an old railroad — the tracks are gone — into a place where mechs are the dominant life form. And I keep thinking…this friend of mine took this black and white picture of a woman staring into a train compartment on a misty day, only it looks like she’s staring at her own reflection in the shiny, shiny side of the train, and everything behind her is reflected, too, only there’s this big blob hanging over her head, and there’s nothing for it to be reflected from. There will probably be sex in the story, too, which makes me all kinds of nervous. How nervous am I? Let me count the ways…
What story am I being steered towards? Why? Who knows?
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Notes from the evening:
I’m scared of the last section of the book, which is basically a shootout at the OK Corral. I like the rest of the book, and I think if I don’t like the end anymore, I’m going to cry.
A concatenation is a series of interconnected or interdependent things or events. The scene where the book changes from the middle to the end is a concatenation: the following collection of brief snapshots are happening all at pretty much the same time. They don’t seem like they have anything to do with each other, but because they’re in the same section, they must, o reader, they must.
*I also had to read Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. Great book, the best description of what college felt like that I’ve ever come across. College is fairyland, didn’t you know?