Saturday, May 02, 2009

Writing yer blaa-blaas out

I went to the cafe today, mainly since I may or may not be getting involved in Roger's exhibition. I sat there fiddling away on my laptop and didn't really get anything done, except look up stuff on how to write a murder mystery and an interesting story that could turn into a murder mystery at a later time. I never really got to talking about how I might get involved in this exhibition, since Roger suggested that I could do some poetry because of how he was impressed with my Manifesto. In the end we didn't talk that much. Roger's a pretty quite guy, and I don't think I can do a reading at his show anyways. I don't have anything prepared and I can't think of anything appropriate to read.
In the department of writing, my novella seems to be coming along. I'm going to have to edit it up on a different computer then my laptop though, because I simply don't have the ability to properly edit it on my laptop because the mouse won't let me cut and past on the word processor. Along with this, I also want to get started on another short story, and while I'm editing my novella I can write something shorter. I don't have an idea. I'm toying with writing a Jack Monsairty story, but I see the Monsairty stories as primarily mysteries. Maybe I should try writing something about Jack that isn't a mystery, just a straight up story. I can't have him detecting all the time.
I also talked to Rowan, and he suggested I just write little sketches of characters. I've written two I think are alright based on characters for WoD games I've toyed with making. He suggested I write about actual people, and I may do that at some point soon. At the moment I just feel a bit inadequate. Maybe it's because I woke up so late and I have been rained on. Anyways, I'm going to type this up therapeutically to see if I can't get something out of this.
As I spoke of last post, I want to write metaphysical mysteries. These will be most prevalent in two novels I have planned, which will both be mysteries of a sort, but before that I'd like to get a handle on the mystery-genre. I want to try my hand at writing a mystery or to before I get onto those novels. But now that I think about it, I don't really want to write a mystery at all. The mystery format tends alot towards plot, and I want to concentrate just on the character. The mystery seems to be a hollow puzzle (was it Ms. Scarlett in the Library with a pipe wrench?) where as the questions I want to ask are more metaphysical (Is Modernist Jesus real or is he just a prank of Gertrude Stein and a secret cabal of critics?). But also, the Big Novel is a murder mystery, but it's also a bit straight forward as the reader knows what happened before we even get to it. I might not even introduce the novel until page 150, where as in a traditional murder mystery you have the murder in the first 50 pages, and not know who the killer was unless it's Colombo or something. I'm also worried I might start relying to much on the mystery plot structure and I don't want to be seen as a mystery writer, I want to be scene as a writer of Great Literature who just so happens to write the odd mystery, but in a Borges-Eco sort of way.
Ah, this isn't helping. I'm going to shut this off and leave you here.

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