Scrambled Eggs

Another dear friend/fellow author posted an article today about "method writing," asking if it's the upcoming trend for novelists, and he and his commenters agree that if you're not researching and/or immersed in what you're writing, you don't have any business writing in the first place. (Read the article here.)

For me, at least, the writing process begins with immersion; it's as if I'm approaching my characters as actual people and eavesdropping on their conversations, taking in their environments, etc., writing down everything I see and hear. Then, some of the characters begin expounding on their relationships, their circumstances, and their feelings about all of it, while describing the subtler nuances of where they are: smells, temperature of the air, the weather, light and shade, all kinds of things.

Once I've gotten a sizeable portion written down, I'll begin my research: like Rob Cockayne mentioned earlier, watching movies and reading articles and history about the area. Almost always, I'm quite surprised by how on point my vibes were about a place, despite never, ever having been there or experienced anything like it.

Recently I've been cleaning house spiritually, questioning and throwing out absolutely everything I've ever known ~ no easy feat for a person raised in a mostly strict, always fanatical Christian-oriented family, in a part of the US notorious for unlimited varieties of Christianity, to the point that state-level government is controlled by Christian morals. That'll be another post, though. I said all that to say that I'm looking at soul-recycling as a viable possibility, and sometimes I wonder if my ability to get at least a basic grasp of foreign cultures (and partially speak or understand some difficult languages) isn't related to that possibility.

What I'm positing is maybe I'm not immersing myself in a story, so much as remembering it, because that's exactly what it feels like. When I write, the character in POV is actually giving me dictation and running narrative, sometimes so quickly that it's hard for me to keep up. The weird thing is that I feel like that character, while being his or her own individual entity, is also me, and what they're telling me is stuff I already knew from another time and place. I can feel his or her agony, joy, apprehension, terror ~ everything. I smell what they smell. I hear what they hear. It's all in real time, no matter when in the story it happens.

It's this very thing that makes an outline or timeline impossible for me. My husband and co-author tends to have a much more structured style, so he's an outliner and writes in a much more linear way; whereas I feel almost guilty taking the credit for just being the person taking dictation from somebody else. The story doesn't feel like it's mine, or that I came up with it. It already happened, and my lowly job is taking it all down and transforming it into a story-like structure.

The closest comparison I can make is when Paul McCartney was interviewed about writing "Yesterday." He said that he just woke up with the melody playing in his head one morning, and it was so intensely familiar that he was convinced that he was plagiarizing it from some other source he had forgotten about. It was so overpowering, in fact, that he had no choice but to go straight to his piano and start getting it down, filling in the lyrics with "Scrambled Eggs" until he could work out what they should be.

So that's it for me. That's how it works.

But here's the really sad part: this voices-in-your-head kind of thing is diagnosed as schizophrenia, which I was in November of 2014, and given medication to make the voices stop, because they're not always past-life creative geniuses. Sometimes they're quite evil and need to be silenced. The medication silenced them, but all other voices were silenced, too.

It makes me sadder than you know. I'm hoping beyond hope that, someday, I can conquer (or at least subdue) the wicked parts that want to kill me, and rescue the actual people that have something to say, stories to tell. Because I have unfinished business, and I really, really miss that scrambled eggs feeling.

Reflections of a Piece of Stardust

Ok, so a good writer friend of mine and I were discussing how we can't quite put our finger on why David Bowie's passing is affecting us so much: I think I worked out the reason. This is long, but I don't want to tldr it (ironically I'm out of time), so here it is, me being an avid Bowie fan pouring my heart out, and you read it if you want to at your leisure.

You know what, people like David Bowie have a way of becoming an integral part of our own personal history, so losing them kind of feels like that chapter of history is closed forever. Especially if you're a 70s or 80s kid, or if your parents were and indoctrinated you with Ziggy Stardust and the Goblin King (as they should've or they were failures as parents) -- it's hitting us even harder than losing Robin Williams or Jim Henson, you know? Those guys were a) more localized than Bowie and b) actors/filmmakers, whereas David Bowie created a kind of art that nestled in your soul. Maybe even a place deeper than your soul, somewhere in your gut, because he was so instrumental in helping us understand the differences in each other and embrace them through music.

To put it bluntly, he in particular (for me, at least) was key in breaking down the social stigmas about homosexuality that I was raised with. He was one of the only Warholians to keep up his energy and gain enough inertia to make it past the glam rock years yet still manage to exhibit that kind of flamboyant behavior. I was really scared of him at first. The first time I saw or heard him was the video for "Let's Dance" and it made me really uncomfortable, but what frightened me was how very fascinating he was. "Why is he smearing his lipstick? What does it mean? Why is he wearing lipstick in the first place? That's not normal, therefore that's not okay! This is wrong on so many levels, this lipstick thing! Is he.. Is he... Am I watching a "gay" dude? And he's so ugly, those teeth are hideous, and yet... that flag is so beautiful." Looking back I can pinpoint that moment, in my second cousin's Indiana living room in 1983, as the moment my childhood preconceptions were hit with a tiny, stray pebble of doubt, and began to crack.

Bowie was good at that, though, wasn't he? He was just as careless and brutal with those pebbles as a dump truck (full of gravel) in front of you on a 65mph 4-lane, with a sign that warns you to stay back 100 feet and that it's not responsible for debris coming from "the road." In other words, you know good and well it's a dump truck full of gravel and that if you drive too close for too long, chances are super high that something's going to come flying out and turn your windshield into an exquisite work of art.

The sexiest dump truck in the universe.

I worried at that crack for the next year or so, until I encountered Duran Duran for the first time, and holy crap that one guy isn't just wearing lipstick, he looks like he just walked out of Glamour Shots, but that other guy, oh my god, it's all over. Simon le Bon was my *poison.* I plastered every possible image I could manage to beg, steal, or borrow over every square inch of my living space. I spent any money I had on D2 paraphernalia, and growing up in poverty like we did, magazines (Star Hits, lol) were the most affordable (and reliable, we didn't always have electricity and MTV was a rare luxury) way to get my fix.

So magazines I got, and studied, and mutilated. Being so enmeshed with the 80s "beautiful & heterosexual = talented" culture, I regrettably eschewed a fair few bands that I was destined to adore in about 3yrs time (The Cure comes to mind), but that David Bowie crack spread more and more as he emerged so much to the forefront of alternative 80s music, the only alt music the radio stations would play, the only one you could get in the 12 cassettes for a penny from Columbia House. His voice was so mesmerizing that he was just about the only other thing I would drop everything and fly to my cassette deck to unpause "record" for.

"China Girl" especially gave me feelings I couldn't sort out. Looking back I can identify them as being extremely attracted to him, that there was some kind of playful and cruel strength in him that I craved. He wasn't afraid of anything. He wasn't embarrassed or ashamed of anything, not even those terrifying teeth. Not only did he delight in who he was, his easygoing confidence in not giving a shit of any kind was such that I was drawn in by it without realizing it, guided by it, even.

Before I knew it, I was looking beyond the makeup on Nick Rhodes and seeing his face. It wasn't long until I wasn't seeing the makeup at all. I mean, my god, Poison was around by then with softcore pron vids and they were apparently very straight, regardless of how sparkly and flammable they were.

Seems legit. 100%.

And, Bowie had a unique masculinity about him. For a while I was convinced that suits were created only for men like him to be poured into (and maybe that Spandau Ballet guy to some extent). Bowie redefined masculine grace. It wasn't until John Malkovich played the Viscount de Valmont that I realized: the grace that Bowie exhibited was that kind of grace, an elegance untouchable by time. When I fell in love with him (which happened to be when a fragile glass sphere danced across his fingers in Sarah's bedroom; I'm pretty sure now that I was hypnotized into believing he was the hottest human that would ever walk this earth) I realized: he's not timeless, so much as outside of time. He's in a place of artistic nirvana that can only be achieved by releasing anything, everything, all things that bind you to preconceived notions, to overcome self-consciousness with self-awareness.

Essentially, if you're a guy and your situation just so happens to call for periwinkle tights and a short but dazzling jacket and an open poet shirt that shows a discomforting lack of chest hair in the Tom Selleck era, so be it. If you are asked to be the physical embodiment of an underage girl's image of the kind of virility that her budding desires don't even yet realize that's precisely the direction they're headed, so be it. If the situation requires you to speak her name in such a way, in such a voice and quiet, subtle tone that ensnares her and convinces her that being ensnared by you is her deepest unspoken need, so be it. If you have to aggressively exhibit this kind of angelic, almost androgynous sexuality in said underage girl's parent's bedroom while her parents are totally not there, while hypnotizing her with a glass ball, *after,* mind you, you've committed a major kidnapping/breaking & entering felony in her world of origin, SO BE IT.

This dude gets it.

And if all of this is to be achieved with moves so smooth that not even penguins in spiked mountaineer boots could stand on it, there is only one man in the universe who could pull such a thing off, and do it so successfully that grown men will still be getting tattoos of your face as a quick & easy seduction tool: David Bowie.

Bitch, please.

David Bowie is why I gave Queen a chance and learned that all is still well with the world if I enjoy gay men singing about falling in love, and about the tortures of being gay in the 70s, and from there gained a ton of respect for guys like Freddie Mercury (who made Bowie look like Adonis in comparison), who were literally some of the bravest pioneer artists of their time. Then I became addicted to respecting visionaries and sought out more so I wouldn't have to stop respecting artists, and through that gained the courage to be an artist myself, first in fine art then adding graphic design and eventually becoming who I am today, and evolving all the time, because without ever knowing the faintest breath of my existence David Bowie taught me that everything is a canvas. Nothing is safe from art. Nothing should be protected from art. Art is what it is, because you are who you are, and once you start on that incredible path of divergence from everything you think should be normal, you will eventually be running as fast as you can away from any and all things considered normal, because it's a very ancient lie to believe that the only way to make it in this world is to be like everybody else. It's a crippling, self-defeating lie to believe that you have to do anything you can to make sure people like you, to be careful what you say or how you dress because it's awful to be rejected and labeled by the world as a freak.

David Bowie was probably one of the most successful men to ever live, because he achieved exactly what he set out to do, and that was to shower the world with enough stardust that some of us got the message, that we're stardust too.

So I think that's why we can actually feel his absence in a way that is so personal. It's because we were connected to him. Although I have some theories, I'm not sure what happens when we die, but I really really hope that he's in a place or has an awareness that affords him the ability to stand back and marvel in awe at the impact he had on the entire planet. And I hope he knows now how much each one of us, his stardusters, cherished and admired him. He had a lot more to give, too, from his overflowing creativity, but then again so did so many others that were given a lot less of a chance to make their mark. He's now taken his place in that special group of people outside of time, that when we read their words or look at them in some way or hear their music, they're with us.

...far above the moon...