The Thai food was EXCELLENT. Pad Se Ew, my favorite!! 🙂
Despite the putzing around, I got an article re-written and a poem sent off to Mosaic Minds, which I’m also the new Poetry section editor for. 🙂 If anyone reading this is interested in submitting work, especially poetry, to the zine, the theme for the 2nd issue is Nostalgia.
I want to write and write and write until my fingers fall off. How come I feel like everything I write has been written before and better? I want everything I write to come out perfectly even though I know that is not how it works. Sometimes I can, though, and that makes me want to be able to do it all the time. If I can whip something I’ve thought about out on to the page and be perfectly satisfied with it as it is, that’s great. But sometimes I have to rewrite and revise until it barely resembles the original and is much the better for it and which way is better? Writing makes me wish for uncrampable hands and a writing style that goes faster than thought. How much do I lose because I can’t get it down fast enough?
Wouldn’t it be great if I could just think my poems and essays onto the page without having to type or write them down? I could get one step ahead of myself that way. The words would just appear, black and bold, perfectly typeset, beautifully indented and punctuated. A human word processor. Just look at a page and think. To delete, just think about it erased and POOF, it’s gone.
In Dune, Leto Atreides II has an Ixian machine called a dictatel which prints thoughts by a device implanted in the brain. That’s the kind of thing I would love to have. How come all the cool stuff is in books? All the cool people too. When I get asked those questions about what one famous person would you like to meet, living or dead, my answer is always someone fictional. How incredible it would be to meet your favorite characters and be a part of their lives and have them be a part of yours in a way that isn’t restricted to the covers of a book! Would they lose something in reality? Is my perception of a character so influenced by the bias I bring to reading and by what the author tells me, or would they be true to themselves in a way no author could plan?
And how different would I be, if I were fictional? Would I be any different at all? The story of a woman who met her true love and moved to Sweden, and so on. I wonder if fictional characters know when you’ve finished reading. Perhaps they sit inside their books and wait for someone to open the cover and begin reading. Imagine them playing cards and sleeping until someone picks up the book and starts their own personal movie rolling again.
What if they could peek out and read me while I was reading them? Would I make them laugh and cry and angry and silly like they make me? They could be as absorbed by my story as I often am by theirs. After all, I am fictional in the sense that I have written my own story, right? You’re reading it now.