More Oliver has more.

So I've encountered some new thoughts for this short story I've been working on, and of course I haven't really worked on it at all what with all the stuff going on these past couple days.

One thing that frustrates me is I don't know how to work in new ideas. How do I preserve what I have done or do I even want to preserve what I've done? I mean, I have put work into the last couple of drafts, in shaping and honing them to support the direction I was going. And now...I just don't know. And it's really frustrating.

So, like, one thing is a line for Rick - "I just want to be able to have these feelings and not feel guilty about it". This refers to feeling scared or depressed or happy or relieved or whatever as relates to his cancer without feeling they're unwarranted or shameful. This kind of ties in with some of the stuff already discussed in the story--much like Rick's 'cause and effect' thing. Like, he worries there's not enough cause for having these feelings, so if he lets himself feel them he's being indulgent and wanton. (which, amusingly, is kind of how his character is, I suppose; so maybe he's actually aware of this about himself now and it scares him?)

Altogether that one line will require a bunch of restructuring, I think. It entails certain subjects and such to follow it, but also requires certain others to set it up (and set up those other following bits, too). At least I think it does. It feels like it's going to be this huge change and I don't know how to handle it if it is. Maybe I'm wrong, and it'll enjoin the rest of the existing action without much messying up. Or maybe it will shift the focus entirely, alter the direction, and instead of culminating in the whole "you're the one making yourself miserable, rick" thing it'll be something else?

Or maybe I can fiddle with that culminating bit. Instead of just referring to rick "keeping score" of his accomplishments and failures, it's also about legitimate feelings? Not sure how I'll do that. Not sure at all. Fuck.

Part of me wants to trash it all and start over or give up entirely. Or go take a nap and pretend it'll just be better later. Well, I think part of the nagginess is that this story grew out of my real feelings and circumstances, and this new dimension is something I've actually been feeling, and I want to remain true to it. But at the cost of the focus of the story? maybe, if I can make it work, sure. But I'm not sure I can. And that's annoying as fuck. Cuz I feel like I have to work this in for it to be a legitimate story. But maybe it's already moved on from my real life stuff and become it's own. Or maybe it's actually a very hollow, shallow affair because it doesn't ring true anymore. Fuckall.

I know, I know; if I just start fiddling about and poking it in differetn ways and trying things out, I'm sure it'll sort itself out. But my OCD hates wasting time doing unnecessary things (though it has no problem wasting time on absolutely useless diversions). So it's holding me up. I just can't get myself to do it because I have no idea what I'm gonna be doing. I guess I imagine fiction writing to be a singular, linear process, without retroactive editing or anything. And that's probably completely false, but I feel like I'd be failing at this if I do that. Fuckall.

Well, that's enough for today. I'll keep thinking things through, maybe even blog some useful notes tomorrow.

Stucky.

Well not really, not too terribly. I'm just a bit unsure how to proceed. Fiction is tough, y'know?

I was saying to Louis that I need to define the characters (and their dialogue) more, even out the story so that it functions better, and generally give everything a bit more focus.

Right now it feels kind of like the characters are irrelevant to the dialogue; that anyone could be speaking it, interchangeably, and it wouldn't matter so much. This isn't inherently or inextricably a problem--I'm sure revision will correct it--but it's annoying as fuck. I'm starting to find Rick's character, and Oliver's is taking shape but needs sanding down in some places.

I'm trying to figure out how to reveal things in a timely and subtle fashion, too. right now it's fairly obvious: some dialogue, some dialogue, reflective prose, repeat. If I could move some of these revelations into the dialogue, I'm sure it'd be less dry to read. The little reveals would feel less abrupt and would probaly help confirm and set eachother up more. Altogether, I can't help expecting this to even the flow and functioning of the stories parts.

And it needs focus. Right now it kind of wanders to a conslusion, which isn't terrible, but I'd like it to move with a bit more exactness or purpose. Like, not have things too focused on one thing then slip into another or stuff. I need to figure out what the story is about and what it's representing on the page. Ground it a bit more in reality and situations, even.

At this point it's not too surprising that I'm considering entirely rewriting some bits. Especially the prosey reflective bits. Most of them are highly significant to what's going, revealing important details and so on. Dialogue, too, to incorporate more detail and character expression and development, if only slight hints here and there that are then confirmed as the story continues and so on.

goddamn i'm sleepy as fuck. i may go lie down a mo' and then either try to write some more or leave it for tomorrow.


note: maybe a bit in the story where oliver reveales his great shame or something and they both feel an awkward obligation to help his friend....and brain died.

Some fict.

I finally got back to that little Oliver story I sketched out a couple weeks back. It felt good, it felt interesting. Hard to explain I guess.

Yesterday I picked it up again. As it had been a while and I hadn't revised it at all yet, it was basically a read through with comments and some markup. To be honest, I wish I had just read it first, then bothered with comments. The problem sections, the successful sections, all that came out better as I got through it. Certain earlier comments seemed like trifling worries as other more metasignificant things became apparent. But all in all it felt good; it felt...possible. This project is possible. There, I've said it.

big takeaways:

• Rick needs to be better defined, or earlier established, at least in my mind. Right now he's kind of carboardy at parts, esp the beginning.
• Oliver is doing okay development why; basically snark and sarcasm and an aversion to interpersonal connection, and i'm done. Expressing that is the tough part; it's a question of balance. How to inject those traits to create character effects and such without being intrusive, awkward, or contrived.
• the story definitely starts off kinda empty and actionless (is that it?); it's right about halfway through. Where Oliver proses/prosits "This wasn't what I'd hope for when I thoguht to drop by." Why is that, I wonder. I think because we're finally going inside these characters more; as a vignette and something of a character study, that's significant. Otherwise it feels like empty banter?
• as a housekeeping matter, I was trying out using word's annotations and comments and tracking changes and so forth. It was interesting. Got a bit more useful as I got the hang of it. Not sure exactly how this will work as a system yet, but it has definite possibilities.

So for today's work I'd like to...hm. options:

• liven up or figure out the opening section/exposition
• focus in on awkward passages and fix them
• rewrite? what should I rewrite? hm. I guess that's kinda tautalogical as any of the options will probably entail some manner of rewriting. hm. heh.
• figure out system for editing with Word's change tracking and comments?

God, this is really hard. It's new to me, though. I can write, yeah, and make a story with characters, yeah. But revision? and stuff? tough.

I might not even get all that much done today; I have to take care of a bunch of calls and shit, go grocery shopping, get hair cut (probs), and go to doctor. hm. I might be willing to poke at this later in the evening, but I'm kind of leery of that as it's outside my "schedule" and stuff. hm.

Correction.

So I posted yesterday at length about a character I'm reviving, Oliver Madison, in some short stories I want to work on. Lovely lovely, naturally.

Specifically, though, I was mistaken about just how old a character he was for me. I said I'd been thinking of him for maybe 4 years or so, give or take a month. Way off.

Try 10 yrs.

I'm currently on break from sorting through old papers and projects and notebooks for the move thing. First I found some notes about him in 2006; an intention to write a novel. I think he was going to get scapegoated via his outsider status via his tail? It seemed? Not sure, didn't read too closely really. But then I found notes in another notebook that were dated 04/01/2004. In that point it was all about him being some unwanted teen pregnancy raised by his uncaring grandparents.

But holy shit. This character better make me famous, cuz apparently I've hung on to him for a long ass time.

In other news, I also found a bunch of really old, really bad poetry I wrote. Obviously I'm keeping it, too, to keep me humble.

Fiction!?

I find it kind of funny that within one week I broke my same rule about titling blogs. Somewhere along the line I decided, perhaps for reasons stylistic continuity, that all my titles would essentially be sentences: Initial caps, ending with a period. Of course not actually sentences. Most are hardly fragments. But all the same--initial caps and periods. Yet both this post and another over on the main blog had some other terminal punctuation.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing that amuses me. Also, of course, legitimately funny things, don't worry.


Meanwhile, I thought to write this post because I started a short story yesterday. Like actually started. (I was on the phone the night before last with a friend, Louis Jordan, who suggested I go ahead and give it a try. That being as interested as I was in the mechanics of storytelling I might enjoy actually telling stories. I figured he was right--it was worth a shot.)

So at this point there is a draft of sorts. It has, like, a functioning first draft. Doesn't yet have an ending or stuff, and it really needs some refinement, but I'm rather proud. I wasn't sure I'd ever make the leap into fiction. Essays and nonfiction I could do (*cough* I've been blogging for 11 years *cough cough*), poetry I knew I could BS well enough if not actually demonstrate skill at, but fiction always seemed mysterious and not quite possible. Though I still thought about it anyway.

In fact, the main character is one of my older ideas, I guess. I've probably even mentioned him on here somewhere before. Probably. His name is Oliver; likely Oliver Madison--entirely because I wanted at one point in younger times to title a book about him "Whatever's the Matter with Oliver Madison?". Kind of screams "youth fiction," I know, but at the time that was what I actually considering. He was going to get stuck in some weird town full of eccentric characters and have to figure out his shit for whatever reason. It was actually going to veer toward the bleaker end of youth fiction, but yeah. He was also probably going to have a tail; like how people are sometimes born with them? There was even possibly going to be a whole to-do about his mother being forced (Or was she going to in the beginning but forced not to, then forced to? Hard to all the ins and outs sometimes.) to abort him late in the pregnancy but he survives, so from the start he'd be a failed abortion. With a tail? Possibly prehensile? I think at this point we can all agree I was aiming for some kinda Magical Realism stuff, which I think I was. Then he was going to get stranded in a Podunk town after surviving some kind of horribly car accident on a nearby high way. Maybe he and a fellow survivor, a young lady, would have some weird personal discoveries in dealing with tragedy and grief and trauma and stuff? Yeah, I feel like I definitely probably wrote about his whole weird saga on this blog before, but I find it funny enough to mention again now that I'm pursuing the new line of his "destiny".

A friend (Paul T. Klein, to be exact) inadvertently saved him altogether from whatever fate that almost was by suggesting that maybe Oliver had enough going on already with the tail or the girl/car accident route, but not both. Some such simple but sobering suggestion, I'm sure. And with it, I all but rewrote Oliver entirely, though not right away of course. (Paul is really great at these kinds of observations; it's one of the reasons why, when I think to, I love going to him with whatever writing project I'm working on to get some input. Thanks, Paul :) )

All this would have been brewing up somewhere back around four years ago. I don't know why Oliver got put on hold not long after that talk with Paul (besides the obvious reasons: procrastination, distraction, avoidance, etc., with work, life, other stuff, etc.), but I never fully gave up on Oliver. In the last year or so, he began evolving. I internalized his problems, drew from experience: I decided that in fact Oliver would be a recovering alcoholic, though it was almost never going to be explicitly stated or a direct focus. Specifically he's what we might term a "dry drunk": an alcoholic who's merely stopped drinking without really working on all the problems and shit that drove him to drink/that he drank over. (In AA this translates to doing stepwork or going to meetings or fellowshipping and making friends and all that; a dry drunk may do these things somewhat but probably never fully giving it a go, at least not enough to get anything out of it, to grow and change and stuff; it isn't a value judgment or anything, many if not all of us in the Program deal with this kind of plateau at some point. I did it my first 6 months or so, when, although working with a great sponsor and doing stepwork, did not let go of my willfulness and righteousness, so I didn't let the Program in enough to let it help me and stuff. The result was a lot of misery and eventually relapse.)

As I said, this aspect of Oliver will likely never be itself stated or focused on. In fact, pretend you never read it. Ever. Any of this paragraph or the last. Spoilers! Ah, well, I guess I might as well finish explaining the reasoning if the secret's already ruined. Besides, I like explaining it. And let's be honest--who ever actually reads this blog, anyway?

The idea is most of the things afflicting an alcoholic are exaggerations of problems most people face, mixed with bad coping mechanisms and other also very human ingredients. It's a messy, messy but utterly brilliantly human affair, and I find it an irresistible character sketch. Most of the stories I'm thinking of for Oliver are almost like chamber theater or theater in general--an approach I was once told to playwriting was that a play singles out an idea or notion and then tests it, like an experiment, to see if it holds up or fails, to see what happens in different circumstances. Likewise I want to put this dry drunk Oliver in different situations to probe at, most obviously, his issues and insecurities via his reactions in those situations and, indirectly, more broadly reflect on what it is to be human and how we survive. It's all about coping; so I'm thinking I may title the eventual collection simply "Trauma" instead of that assonant title I was considering before. Because we do know what's the matter with Oliver Madison--or, at least, I do. I live it every day, though not at all as hopelessly or roughly as he does.

In fact, amusingly despite having at least two other stories sketched out in my mind for him, the story I started writing yesterday is entirely new, entirely based on current events in my life. Like flagrantly and transparently so, at least for now. I may change the circumstances but for now it's a nearly literal transliteration of what's happening in my life: Oliver has come to visit a somewhat friend, Rick, who's recovering from testicular cancer; the guy has been living with his parents but now, coincidentally, both Rick and his parents are moving to new (separate) homes; and with all of this going on Rick feels his life has been pointless. Despite the obvious correlation to my personal life's circumstances, I don't actually see myself as Rick. Rick and his insecurities are at best drawn from things I've wondered about what's going (feeling guilty about not helping Mom pack or amazed that I'm not in worse, more crippling pain) but either dismissed, laughed off, or put in perspective, but Rick takes them seriously, takes them much farther into the neurotic deep end.

All of this developed as I wrote, to be honest. By the end of my work yesterday, we have Oliver having to deal with Rick's emotional burden (all but outright histrionic, too), and frankly that's not one of Oliver's strengths--dealing with feelings head on, especially other people's. And also Rick's angst hits home: Oliver worries, too, about the pointlessness of his life. Although he expresses it differently and would rather avoid it than impose it on some other person or deal with it on his own, he's stuck there out of the social obligation of visiting a sick friend. And eventually he snaps at Rick (in what I hope will be, essentially, the meaty important take-away bit of the story).

I'm glossing over a lot here, I know. There's bits I want to blog about today and there's bits I know I don't have time to and there's bits I haven't processed enough or can't remember enough to. But one thing I do want to mention is some of the more mechanical aspects of writing this draft yesterday; things I noticed I care about or want to work on and develop, both within this story and more broadly for my style.

One is absorbing as best I can the strengths of Alice Munro, whom I've been reading lately. She's very good at efficient and subtle character statements; specifically means by which she reveals characters' inner lives through an observation the character makes, but as often it's how the character observes and phrases it as what they're expressing directly. It's utterly brilliant and entirely thrilling for me as a reader who cares about writing, and also just anyway cuz it's brilliant as fuck.

So beside needing to go back and refine the Rick character, as he really changed in some ways over the course of the drafting process, I want to refine Oliver's reactions and align what they reveal to us about him.

In terms of Rick, in some ways from the start he has an almost transparently Freudian way of projecting his guilt and stuff, but later it's something else. I need to figure out what that is--what he wants--at least enough to string it up through the whole of the story so that it's not liking having all the lights on one side of the Christmas tree but distributed evenly and consistently through out. As I said he's worried about his life feeling pointless; I want to tie that in, if I need, to the guilt he feels at the beginning for not helping his mom with the move more. Rick is convinced his mother resents him for not helping though she's made no such mention or indication. He thinks it's because he's not as helpless and bedridden as he expects he should be and that she must think he's just lazy or faking. This tranforms somewhere into an obsession with what he likens to "cause and effect", that his invalid status doesn't match up with the reality that should entail it; he doesn't feel like he's actually as helpless as he's expected to behave. Of course part of Rick's problem is that instead of offering to help in whatever way he is capable of, he just feels bad about it and indulges his moping, and therefore loafing, even more. For Rick this perfectly encapsulates the last several years of living with his parents, and thus feeling shitty and pointless. That he can't explain why he accomplished nothing, so the nothing feels extra pointless.

Sorry, that was all basically just my thinking out loud, outlining Rick's issue to pinpoint it. Because as I said, the transition in the story I represented above was actually a transformation in my mind as I wrote; as I revise I'd like to keep the big picture in mind so I can tweak accordingly. Right? Right.

I also need, likely at some later draft, to figure out how much of these circumstances are going to stay identical to reality or need/want altering. But that can come as needed, whence came my saying "later drafter". But also, back to consistency and such, I need to figure out what kind of character/person Rick is. I seem to recall his banter with Oliver early on is almost witty, at Oliver's level, but later I kind of wanted him to be a histrionic, insufferable sod, not quite self-aware enough to save himself from his own pretensions and revelations and shit. So do I need to dumb him down? recast the opening conversations entirely? These and other questions will want both revisiting those early parts of the draft in particular and reflections on Rick as a character in general, so I don't need to worry too, too much just yet.

As for Oliver, part of the tricky part is keeping in mind his broader story and character. I think I capture his snarky assholishness and self-centeredness fairly well. (For example, he feels bad after yelling at Rick near the end, feeling that as useless and annoying as Rick is he didn't deserve it, but refrains from apologizing because it might entangle him into Rick's bullshit all over again and at last he's got the best opportunity yet to escape the unbearably awkward situation whole thing.) Oliver is a jerk but he isn't a bad person, exactly. It's not that he doesn't (entirely) care, it's just that he's more concerned with his own extreme discomfort and such, so much that he's not even aware of other people's problems. [I think that's where I was going with that thought; I got distracted. {on a side note, I'm glad I've decided to separate this blog from my main one; i find these sorts of reflections invaluable and I'm sure there are a few others who would enjoy them, at least for skimming or research if i actually do become someone people research and write about, but the general masses would probably be extremely frustrated by now.}]

Other issues arise as well. For example, in trying to tell Rick to be grateful, Oliver says "if I tried to pull this shit, my mom would have kicked me to the curb years ago!". Yet, in another story I have sketched he has been doing just that--living with his parents while in a rough patch. Perhaps that is more of a month-long interim style "visit" than a multi-year long squat, but perhaps not--one of the things I'd hoped in that story was he'd be angry with himself for living with his parents. (Clearly I must have some awful resentment against myself for this--if I have two different characters in two different stories (out of a possible three planned) fixating ruefully on living with their parents and shit. Or maybe it's just a nugget of commentary I haven't found an adequate home for.) So there's some continuity issues like that I may want to look at later, but that's definitely a "later" problem.

I'm not as worried about this problem as I suspect revising will balance and resolve it, but I'm concerned that Oliver isn't really in the story much. I feel, and this may be mistaken hindsight, his own reflections comprise barely a quarter of the draft. The majority of it is the dialogue between Oliver and Rick though (it's a vignette afterall), but I cna't help feeling it could be better or at least more purposely (subtly, of course) distributed? As I said, I want to work on those indirect character reveals that Munro is so good at (of course I do realize she's been writing probably twice as long as I've even been alive, she's had plenty of time to hone her craft whereas I've hardly begun), and I suspect the subtlety could be undermined by lumping all the non-dialogue together overly much. There were some good moments, I thought, where I managed to have Oliver slip some thought comment between things Rick was saying or unsaid things between what he was saying himself, but I'd like more of that or at least refine that, too.

One last thing: One of the big breakthroughs I had was to put it in first person. I think it was a hold up for me with Oliver and what I was trying to work on with subtlety and stuff to write Oliver's situation in third person all the time and not flagrantly defy "show don't tell" and such conventions. It really was holding me up. So at least this story is in first person. I can see how working on making third person function would also help develop these subtlenesses and stuff, but for now I also want to work on confidence with fiction and stuff. Obviously I'm trying to wrap up and this housekeeping is messier than the loose ends i'm trying to pull together, lololol. See?

Sounder structure than before.

This is the same sonnet I posted the other day but now with the opening quatrain replaced with something much more fitting. And dignified. I did not want to read it and prefix my name to it until I'd replaced that quatrain. It still needs work, of course; I've underlined things I want to revisit later.

For those I haven't told (which may include all you reading, or not), my hope is to write each sonnet and bring it to a readable, enjoyable state. Then, after writing some total number, revisit each one and bring it up to snuff and standard. By this point, I hope to have a better grasp on the workings and tricks of sonnets and rhymes and so on. So when I say "revisit" or some such, I may mean later this week to poke at it or later this month or some such to redo as necessary. It remains to be seen, y'know?

Another thing I hope to incorporate: practice. I want to perform these sonnets (and all my poetry, really) as a sort of dramatic monologue-ness. I have no real basis in or much awareness of poetry slams, rap, spoken word, and so on or their respective presentational styles. I know, I live a sad, sheltered life. So the only real reference point I have in this, the closest to anything, are my experiences acting in high school (primarily Shakespeare) and a brief workshop on bring monologues to life (same director as the Shakespeares, incidentally).

As it is, though, and especially as these poems become more finalized, I hope to take time to really plan out their performance. When to do what with my voice, when to move thus and how to act so, generally slow down and relish each word (versus my usual anxious rushing).

Anyway, sonnet time:

All else stops as he roves the nearby crowd.
His shoulders flare so spread out broad and thick in show
Of something swarthy. Yet he does not go
--But comes. All thoughts but wanting disallowed!
He catches my lust, my longing; my gaze, now cowed,
Looks back--still staring now, now nearing. I know
His quarry, wanting his hard-sinewed glow,
Shudders at touch but has eyes unproud.
Would that I could turn to him and have hands
Have lips, have sighs. Would I could taken,
--Be with him or be him. Would that we stood
But a moment magnetic, against spans
Of time and desire--but leaves me shaken,
Untryst And twain. Would that I could: I would, I would.

An almost working sonnet.

So basically this was inspired by true events; emphasis on "inspired by". I was at the club, and this really hot guy passed me in the crowd, and though we made eye contact and he was hot as fuck I lacked the courage to engage him. Sucks.

The next day I dashed out a rough draft of an octave for a sonnet on my phone and then had work or class or something so left it at that. Later, I sketched out a sestet in my marble notebook and proceeded to rework that and part of the octave that had bugged me, and reworked and reworked and freewrote and reworked. Eventually the sestet and that latter half of the octave reached a pretty damn satisfactory point, though the octave's part still needs work.

Then I finally transcribed in what I'd dashed up on my phone. Yikes. Kinda way underworked compared to the other stuff I'd been fiddling so much with since I made those notes. All the same I'm going to post the current version including the opening 4 lines from the phone version despite having not gotten to revisit them. They will be in italics. I've included them because they do help introduce things and altogether help form a complete-ish sonnet. At the same time, I've underlined the lines in the sestet I find especially weak and requiring more work. Like, I kinda dislike that word "untryst" but I needed a foot there to make the line pentameter, sooo.....

A Great White swims the undulant crowd.
He makes his way immeasurably slow.
So tall, thick; so broad, strong; his ebb and flow (?)
He pushes through the mass unbowed
He catches my lust, my longing; my gaze, now cowed,
Looks back--still staring, now nearing. I know
His quarry, wanting his hard-sinewed glow,
Shudders at touch but has eyes unproud.
Would that I could turn to him and have hands,
Have lips, have sighs. Would I could be taken--
Be with him or be him. Would that we stood
But a moment magnetic, against spans
Of time and desire--but leaves me shaken,
Untryst. Would that I could: I would, I would. 

In the end, obviously, I'll rework the octave (all of it). I may all but entirely get rid of the current opening as the current second half could kinda make for a neat in medias kinda opening. Which I imagine would probably be pretty edgy and hip and stuff. And you know how much I care about keeping things edgy and hip. Who knows though, I really haven't reflected much on it at all.

Some notes on that draft and others.

A lil while back in posted a draft of a poem. It was a bit rough. Haha.

I've since decided to split the octave from the sestet; they're just too different and I want to develop the ideas in each part more and won't ever have space to as long as they're still conjoined. Makes sense right? Well see how that goes.

I can't remember if I explained this cycle already,  but I'm gonna write a bunch of sonnets and call them The Buttsex Sonnets. Lololol, right? Hopefully.

Basically they will all have something to do with gay stuff, but on a deeper level meditate on themes of love and lust and how they are so easily alloyed with other passions and become something different.

So, like the sonnets that will come from that other one:
The one building off the octave's material will further explore the contempt and judgment and mockery in the first 4 ish lines as the new octave. Then in the sestet it will take from the second half of the original octave: envy. A wish to be as seen and noticed as the "faggot in horizontal stripes", even though it's negative it's still more attention than the speaker feels he gets. I get. Whatever. Either way it's turning that contempt inward; this "gaybra" is actually cute as hell even as tackily dresses and obviously gay, and can probably (or so the speaker surmises) get sex anywhere anytime.

I like the language and tone of the sestet's material; it's idea isn't bad just underdeveloped as it stands. Basically it was replying to the gaybra's obviousness and shit and trying to compensate fro a perceived sense of inferiority.

There's another I'm working. It was inspired by this ridiculously hot guy at the club (yes I do go clubbing. Sometimes.). Basically he was rapturous. Like some magnetic predator sliding through the crowd...and we made eye contact, which he held, he continued to look, stare even, as my badhfulness took hold and I glanced away--only to find each time I glanced back he was still looking. And then he brushed against me and good god....Hot as fuck. But what I'm really excited about is the sestet. I'm using a lot of echoing--specifically "would I could" and stuff--to fey a haunting effect. I can't wait to read it out loud, especially the last line "...would that I could: I would, I would."

But why sonnets? Well originally it became a sort of challenge. I suck at rhyming and struggle with forms and generally write in meters other than pentameter. So I figured I'd challenge myself and it's been pretty interesting. As I've worked on them though a new awareness has taken hold: the conceptual potential of the conceit-volta dynamic. It's dialectic or so shit. So it provides profound possibilities for expressing and exploring specific ideas--especially in a contracted form. Because in order to develop the ideas most fully I need to be concise and creative. So I think this challenge had blossomed into something really interesting.

A draft of things to come.

So I recently got it in my head to write a cycle of sonnets. I'll see about posting some of my meditations regarding concepts/themes/fun times later, but know they're gonna be called The Buttsex Sonnets. Yup. It's a thing.

In fact here's a draft of the first sonnet. More textual/author's notes after the verse for those interested.

There's a faggot in horizontal stripes.
See! Lolls his head; flaps about at the wrists;
And wags his hips, and--oh--so sweetly lisps.
By this and these we know these types.
I'm sure if he saw me, he'd think likewise
In stereotypes: we all have our nitch.
O, to be noticed by this little bitch
Or anyone--to feel as cute--would be nice.
Catch me a fairy, hark, hail me a sprite!
Tear off his wings, his weeds, his airs, and thrust
Deep and unbidden. I'll show you what lurks
Beneath assumptions, between soul and sight:
I have as much machismo, I trust,
As much I must, as you your flippant quirks.

Sooo, yeah, there's that. I've already made notes for revisions and restructurings (mostly regarding lines 4 - 7 and chunks of the sestet, which I consider somewhat useless and weak sections right now), but this is the original (complete) draft. We could even call it the first draft.