Line 'O the day - August 9, 2008

The world is gonna end someday. But that don’t mean shit to me right now. (Rather unoriginal)

I'm a hollow motherfucker.

It sounds bad, but it ain't. Like a hollow tree is probably a dead tree, which isn't good for this analogy. A trumpet is hollow too though. And when the world spits and blubbers in one end ideally I can take that shit and make it sound like music when it comes out the other.

Line 'O the day - August 2, 2008

I understand the allure, but I just don’t see the pay off.

Being a historian

I'm filling up a notebook with shit I want to imagine I need, but probably don't. The quick run down is that I have an idea for a fantasy comedy series. Think Lord of the Rings, but shenanigans, dick jokes and fowl language take precedent over whatever the hell Joseph Campbell was always yammering about. The great monomyth is my backdrop, it is my bar in Boston, my community college study group, my deluxe apartment in the sky. And with the idea I have I think I can mine some decent comedy out of the situations.

Now I'm doing two things at the same time with this idea before I actually sit down to write my first episode. First and more importantly I'm figuring out who my characters are. There are five main characters and a few pop ins. Now I do this with all my characters, create their back story and play with how those experiences have shaped them as individuals leading up to whatever fucking events are about to transpire in their lives, which is what I actually want to write about. This ain't a novel or a feature script and the serialized nature of the thing in my head means I perhaps might leave a little more malleability to the characters than I normally do, so they have room to wiggle if I want to do something with them later that might not fit in with a rigid character outline. Still though it's a lot of shit to build up that I really want to rush through so I can sit down and actually write their misadventure. You can't rush through it though cause in practice what I write suffers if I don't lay the ground work. This is filling up a fair bit of a notebook, but that part isn't my problem.

The second thing I'm doing at the same time is where I might have gone of the rails, but I'm reluctant to pull the brake because it might end up somewhere worthwhile. See all of those fantasy worlds have a rich and expansive history. So while I'm building my characters I'm also chronicling the tales of the 'realm'. I've come to find out that this history is fucking elaborate. There's a page in my notebook with the heading 'mini time line' which has seven, like one sentence, points under it. It's a quick outline of the Ages of the world. Just for reference sake, from the beginning of history in this fantasy world to the present day that my characters inhabit is roughly about 14,000 years. I thought well I'll start from the beginning... Fuck me.

I needed gods and their mythology. One of them is not a nice god so the others get pissy at him. The gods leave the world to its inhabitants and the real sort of history begins. I spent a mere three pages on the gods, which is perhaps too long. Once real events start happening to real people though I decided to just make it like a cliff notes version of history. Which still means I'm making up FOURTEEN THOUSAND YEARS of stuff, all of which is important to the world, but perhaps not so much to my hero and his sidekick's mundane (though ideally funny) conversation about how elves are kinda assholes. I'm through about 5,000 years, but I made some big fucking leaps, like a thousand years here and there. Which is easy cause the elves ran the show for quite a while and they're basically immortal, yes obviously the elves are immortal you can't question that, so there were big chunks of time where peace enveloped the land. Once I get into the human histories I'm seriously going to have to narrow down what is and is not important.

The point being I'm aiming for a no winking vibe, like the world around my story is just as real and filled with conflict and weight as Tolkien's compendium, and my silly characters live there, but the shit they do is funny and odd, but no one really recognizes it as such. Conversely these weird bastards are also very important to the world as their my Frodo or Rand al'Thor (No I haven't read The Wheel of Time, I just do my research). Do I need to know the histories of elves, men and dwarves (of course there are dwarves I've already got elves) to have the aforementioned mundane conversation? Part of me says no, and another says yes. And in my writing I've learned that when in doubt take the long road. No matter how much you may dislike the scenery it will deliver you to your destination in far better shape than if you take the quick and easy route.

So basically I'll just continue to scrawl out tales of this other world because... what else am I gonna do. Essentially I just wanted to vent a tad bit and hadn't posted a blog in a couple weeks.

Line 'O the day - July 23, 2008

If ‘home is where the heart is’ it’s amazing how long I can live without my heart.


Present day note:
That's a couple weeks before my birthday. Little bit of longing going on for the old homestead.

Line 'O the day - July 20, 2008

Well I don’t want to oversell it, I was slightly frustrated.