So anyway — where were we?
“Life is what happens when you’re making other plans,” said John Lennon.
Shortly after my last post here, the first clouds of family crisis blackened the horizon. Priorities began to shift. Soon, exactly three years ago, I lost both parents at once. On the publication day for my most recent novel, The Immaculate Void, I woke up to the not-expected news that my mom had just died.
In the course of normal lifetimes, this is the way of it. You bury the people who brought you into the world. But this was still like ripping off the jumbo-size Band-Aid all at once.
I was appointed executor of their estate, and that was pretty much my life for the next year-plus. A few matters continued to drag on, from 2018 to 2019 to 2020 and beyond. The estate was only able to be closed several weeks ago. The Band-Aid was long off, but the scab took forever.
In the meantime, fresh works of mine — new books, new stories, new film and TV options — came and sometimes went. I had things in the pipeline that continued to pop out, but without much replenishment, the pipeline eventually emptied.
And I was strangely okay with that.
Lifequakes, I’ve recently seen them called: these seismic events that leave our lives forever changed, for better or for worse or neither, just different. Their aftershocks reach into places you wouldn’t think they would and shake things up, sometimes radically: career changes, ended relationships, new missions, old interests falling away as new interests rise to take their place. It’s surprisingly common, I’ve learned.
Just plain surprising, too. After many years of writing various forms of horror — not exclusively, but predominantly, from body horror to folk horror to industrial horror to cosmic horror, and more — I would never have expected to finally get clear of this gauntlet and realize horror no longer interested me.
It gets weirder. At this point, I may not even be a writer at all anymore. Not in the sense of retirement, but rather of negation. Nothing of the caterpillar remains in the butterfly. It dissolved and the soup reconstituted into its own separate thing.
But I’m still sorting that one out. With a good, epic lifequake, it can take three to five years for the dust to fully settle, for the integration of the aftershocks to be complete. I don’t want to write again, necessarily … but I’d like to want to, if that makes sense.
And that’s enough for now. More to come.
Idea Safari: Stalking the Wild, Untamed Spark of Inspiration
by Brian on April 27, 2017
in Behind the Scenes, Commentary, Life & Stuff
It’s the one question every writer has heard, probably more times than we can count: “Where do you get your ideas?”
Treasure — sometimes in the places you least expect it.
I don’t know why it seems so stereotypically targeted to writers. I can’t think of anyone else who’s supposed to answer this with any regularity. So I’m genuinely curious: Do session guitarists get asked this? Research chemists? Or choreographers? A couple months ago I read Twyla Tharp’s quasi-memoir, The Creative Habit, and she left no doubts as to her process, but didn’t mention anyone inquiring about it as if it were some shrouded mystery.
Theory: The mystery comes from writing’s spartan, sedentary nature, in which we work with nothing that anyone else can see. We just type. That’s it. Twyla Tharp goes into her studio and starts moving, and maybe magic happens. It’s probably fascinating and beautiful to observe. But me and my kind? We just sit and type. There is no writer’s equivalent of guitar face. We don’t headbang while channeling stuff through our fingers. There is no body language except slumping. We just sit here and fucking type, with random catatonic states in which not even that happens.
“This is how I look when I work,” said no writer, ever.
Guaranteed, if you were in this room with me right now and not allowed to play with the cats, you could only watch me ignoring you, you would be ready to kill one or both of us within five minutes.
It isn’t that we work with nothing. It’s that the raw material has no tangibility on the outside. Still, it’s there, and it has to come from somewhere, either passively … or not so passively, recalling the advice of Jack London:
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” [click to continue…]