More of Everything
The title is an old feedback-request from Christine, which could apply to almost anything I’ve written. I agreed with her, of course: I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to make people care about characters and worlds is filler, filler, filler. My fingers hurt just thinking about it. Brevity is the soul of my muse, unfortunately, which means the filler gets left to yours truly.
On the Lori trail again, I renewed my passport recently. I had to bring it into work to prove I was legal (to work, not to drink), and only then did I notice it had expired. (For those of you keeping track, yes I have been working for this company for six months already. Don’t tell the feds.) It was a questionable matter, as I assembled bits of the passport application to mail in, whether I would end up wearing the same clothes in my new picture as in the old one. I’m pretty sure I pulled that off with a license once, but not this time with the passport. I’ll give it another shot in 2012.
I didn’t know that my thrift-shop fashion sense, my mind-like-a-steel-sieve time sense and my Nazarite hairstyle were I-N things. There goes another bit of me, pegged, labelled and catalogued. What was that quote about psychology robbing us of of our individuality? Please Misunderstand Me…
Back to blogness: a few entries back (Kept Muse) I said something vague about the cohesion between Beginning and End. I’ve come up with an even fuzzier term for it: storiness. The essential storiness of a story isn’t much easier to pin down now that I have this highly technical term for it. Of course, in all matters my first thought is plot, but other things can hold a story together: theme, mood and style can all establish storiness in the shortest of stories. Longer stories need some plot, too, but plot is not enough to distinguish a story from a loose collection of notes. There has to be…more of everything.