A Few Brief Thoughts...

"I remember black skies, the lightning all around me..."- Linkin Park, New Divide

on cross-genre pollination. I've been climbing a lot of tall mountains lately. It started in Ecuador with some 19,000 ft. peaks, and now that I'm in Colorado again, surrounded by oodles of gorgeous 14,000+ ft. mountains, I've found myself inexorably drawn to them.

I'm also living with like-minded folks, and, well, it's led me to begin pilfering their libraries. I began with Into Thin Air, last week. Say what you will about Jon Krakauer as a journalist, or about the ethics of writing a book like he did, about what he did (for those who don't know, one day on Everest during which a lot of poor decisions were made that led to the deaths of a number of people), but as a writer it was fascinating to read.

One thing Krakauer does better than most is break down the decision processes of people under stress, in crisis. I know a thing or two about the subject--I've been trained for it as a trip guide myself, and gone through exercises that forced me to make decisions regarding the lives of others, and I've chosen poorly in them. I've also made decisions in the field that had strong reprecussions on the safety of those I was responsible for.

Which brings me to Chapter 18 of Soulwoven, in which some characters in a very difficult situation are forced to make some rather difficult decisions. I don't know if it was serendipity that brought me Into Thin Air as I was working on this section of the novel, but it did work out well for me, both in showing me how one writer had done the decision thing well and in bringing to the surface all of the other knowledge I had about decisions made under duress at the time I needed it most.

So yeah, pollination is the right word for this cross-genre stuff, I think, because it's sure as hell helped pieces of my experience leap-frog from the place they usually live into the place where I write.

Letters

"She said there ain't no rest for the wicked..."- Ain't No Rest for the Wicked, Cage the Elephant

I've begun reading a book titled The Letters of Tolkien which is, well, exactly what it sounds like. I discovered the book in a library while manipulating my college educators into letting me write a term paper on magic in The Hobbit, when I used several of Tolkien's letters as sources for my analysis. Excited by the find, I talked about it to my parents and they bought me a copy for Christmas that year. Then came London and a whole lot of life and the book went unread, until now.

What I find most interesting about the letters so far is that Tolkien's skill as a writer and, especially, a storyteller, shines through so well in them. I haven't yet reached far into his life, and most of the letters themselves are excerpts from his time at Oxford or serving during World War One. The information in them is often esoteric, not directly linked to Middle-Earth at all, and generally not what I picked up the book to read.

And yet I read on anyway, swept up by Tolkien's prose, even when it's misspelled or the editors couldn't decipher his handwriting, and his ability to create scenes and tell stories.

Since graduating college, I've exchanged a number of e-mails with friends and professors of mine whom I'm not likely to see for a long time, and whom I would absolutely have lost touch with without this concerted effort to stay a part of each other's lives. And I have discovered that though I sometimes procrastinate writing my lengthy replies to them, their messages are often the highlight of my day when they come.

I think this is something that my generation misses. It is so easy for us to pick up a cell phone and call someone or to hold conversations instantly with a dozen people at once over the internet, that we miss the anticipation of waiting for a letter to come, lose a sense of the concentration and sheer amount of time it takes to craft a missive for someone else. I have gained a sense of this with the e-mail dialogues I hold now, but I also remember writing love letters to girlfriends as a kid sequestered away in the Adirondacks for summers at a time, beyond the reach of telephones or the internet.

There is a certain amount of respect and humility that comes in taking the time to hand-write a personal letter. It says, "I am willing to dedicate this amount of precious time to you, during which I will not do anything else." I'm not sure if that is always respected by my generation as much as it should be. I know that I, at least, have been guilty of underestimating it in the past. Perhaps if I had taken the time to write letters during one long-distance relationship I had that wound up failing spectacularly, rather than relying on cell phones and instant messages, things would have turned out differently.

So in the future I shall write more letters, and furthermore I am resolved, once I am famous enough that people want to write me (ha!), to take the time to answer every hand-written letter that arrives to me in kind, even if it is not convenient, and to always be available for a rational discussion of just about anything with an interested party via mail. I would encourage others, writers or no, to do the same.

...and he's back!

"She wants to touch me (whoa-oh), she wants to love me (whoa-oh)" - Don't Trust Me, 3OH!3

Hey! I'm back! And in the meantime, Blogger has added a "monetize" button at the top of my blog posting screen. How interesting---it's now easier than ever for me to sell out and make money off of the few people who read this by slapping ads on the blog, you say? Bollocks, I say back.

Anyhoo, college is done, and real life is just starting to gear up. Sad to report no luck so far on finding work in publishing (there isn't much in Denver, so it's sort of a waiting game), but I did find work. Which means I can pay my bills, and write on the weekends. And start blogging again, I s'pose.

Today's topic: life and living, and how it relates to writing.

Having now passed beyond school and into the world of the 40 hour workweek (which, it seems, is more like a 45 hour workweek, given the nine-hour shifts broken up by a one hour lunch, and a 50 hour workweek if you count the time I spend commuting...), the time I have for writing has been significantly shifted. I'm so exhausted when I get home from work most days that I just don't have time for it, and it gets shunted to the weekends.

But the weekends are also when I get to spend the greatest deal of time living. And life breeds art. Last weekend I climbed two 14,000ft peaks. And aside from the raw material that sort of experience gives one to work with, getting out and living life is sort of like a shot of caffeine for the brain. I write better the more richly I live.

So now it's all crammed together, the writing and the living inhabiting a 48 hour space every week when I don't need to show up to work. I'm not sure how tenable the arrangement will be, but I intend to strive to make it work. After all, one thing I've realized is that the best writers tend to be interesting people who do interesting things (read Neil Gaiman's blog sometime if you don't believe me), and that sounds pretty good to me on many levels.