Coffee: Now That's What I'm Talking About!

Ah, coffee shops! The favorite haunts of writers the world over.

And why not? They do have incredible intellectual ambiance: writers (and readers) sitting at counters and tables everywhere, typing on their laptops or writing in their notebooks. And they do serve up the elixir of life. Ah...yes, coffee. Hot, wonderful, energizing coffee!

It's a question of long-standing debate: if you slice open a writer's vein, would he or she bleed ink or cappuccino? I'm not sure about the answer. In my own case, maybe a little of both.

I do know that there is a brand-spanking new little coffee shop that moved in just down the street from me and I can't wait to check it out.

It's called Sonoma Coffee Cafe and they are located right here in good old Pinellas Park, a suburb of St. Petersburg that used to be notorious more for saloons than for coffee. We still have plenty of those, too.

This Saturday morning, God willing, and the muse inspires me to go somewhere to write (other than the library), I am going to go patronize said establishment and see if both inspiration and the fine art of people watching conjures up any literary nuggets or causes any plot bunnies to put in an appearance. I'll take my pretty new notebook (for my NaNoWriMo ideas), order a cup of house drip and let the voices in my head do the rest.

I'll do a review of the place in an upcoming post.

What's Going On with My Widget?

What's going on with my weather widget at the bottom of the page?

It would have you think there is going to be no sunshine here in Florida for the next four days. Every day shows overcast. That's unheard of.

I like clouds, so I'm not complaining.

The Shadow of Creativity: Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, Mostly

In an effort to improve my writing prowess, I recently began to think of creative springboards: exercises to fuel my creativity which I could write about and post on this blog, which is, in itself an attempt to become better at my beloved craft. 

One of the subjects that came to mind was a "Why I Write What I Write" exercise, but to author it in the style of a writer whose work I admire. This is not an exercise that I intend to employ as a means of imitating or copying the style of another writer, but one that will hopefully teach me to look for, find and use my own voice, even when I am engaged in writing a Cthulhu Mythos piece in the Lovecraftian vein (which I have planned to do in the near future).

Someone once gave me a book of Lovecraft stories. I no longer remember who presented me with that awesome gift of reading pleasure or what the title of the book was. That information no longer matters. Keys are small things by themselves. But when you turn them, you can open doors into fascinating hidden rooms or ignite engines of great power and complexity. 

All I know is, the opening paragraph of one of the first stories I encountered grabbed me and held me spellbound and it does so still to this day. It sealed my fate in an overpowering desire to write. It is from a story called "Dagon":

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death...

H.P. Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. His first published story was called "The Alchemist" and it was published in 1916 in a magazine called "The United Amateur."

Without further explanations, here is my Lovecraft inspired look into my inner madwoman, an apologia of why I write, and why I write what I write:

The Shadow of Creativity: Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, Mostly

My friends are convinced that I am insane. They are probably right.

Mental balance and I achieved a stubborn stalemate many years ago after decades of ceaseless turmoil and foul warfare. Any measure of normal psychological stability now keeps a well-defined and uneasy, if not peaceful distance from me.

I’m a writer of speculative fiction and I know of no better habitation than the dark recesses of my own fetid imagination. My vistas are oblique, non-Euclidean and terrifying realms of stark raving chaos where strange and often horrifying things dwell in Fortean splendor.

The faces I prefer do not have striking jaw-lines or piercing blue eyes. Instead, I am drawn in a state of near catatonia to visages sporting tentacled chins and piercing fore-claws. Eyes? Just a singular, Cyclopean horror of unblinking, hypnotic skill is enough to send me into a frenzy of terrible shuddering and provoke uncountable sleepless nights. Whenever I do manage to heed the call of Morpheus to "Come, come" my sleep is troubled and oppressed by these maddening visions. I must then get up and write.

My tormented brain chants a continual mantra: sci-fi, fantasy, horror, steam-punk, alternate history, future history, cyberpunk, space opera, scientific romance…mmmm…zombies…alien shape-shifting serial killer spider…Cthulhu mythos….

Like a trapped mink, I'm stuck in the cruelly sharp steel jaws of my own design. Writing is a sweet, albeit temporary, release from the madness, the equivalent of chewing off a foot and limp-running headlong, blindly into the arms of reckless abandon. The Trapper's name is Sanity and I am determined he shall not have my skin!

There are (no doubt) writers whose works are sunshiny blossoms of spring days, all romance and straightforwardness, where there's no mistaking the authors intentions regarding character, setting or plot.

Comparing writing with painting, these writers would rack up with Claude Monet and his Water Lilies. Edgar Degas and his Ballerinas.

My writing is none of that easily definable stuff.

My work is Van Gogh, who, though he painted some pretty sunflowers, he also painted swirling cosmos skies and cut off part of his own ear to embrace his inner madness.

My writing is Jackson Pollock. I desire to chuck many of those elements of my mental mantra onto the page, grab a palette knife and start cutting in, the ink flowing from my fingertips to the keyboard to the blank screen, the chaos taking on form and finally, meaning.

In comparing my work with other speculative fiction authors, my earliest recollections find me contemplating the experiences of being absorbed in the macabre murkiness of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe and a starkly surreal and sometimes hellish poem that I often still to this very day find myself reciting snippets of without being cognizant of it called "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Then, I found my uncle's sci-fi collection and visited Niven's "Ringworld," became too confused at too early an age by Heinlein's "Stranger In a Strange Land" (but not in too bad a way) and discovered even more treasures at my school and local library.

All of these inspirations are what have fueled my intense longing to create strange phenomena, alien landscapes and slimy vistas of darkness so foul and inhabited by denizens so terrifyingly bizarre as to induce nightmares just by reading about them.

That's what I'm hoping for, anyway.

Yes, my friends, I am insane. But it's okay.

I am a writer. I can live no other way.


Dedicated to H.P. and to the author who is the source of my writer's "Quote of the Week" for this blog this week, E.L. Doctorow, who said: "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

To listen to a truly creepy audio version of "Dagon" visit "The Drabblecast."  Clicking this link will take you directly to the site. "The Drabblecast" is a weekly short fiction podcast. The stories there are mostly narrated by the extremely talented and creepy voice of Norm Sherman. 

What Every Mac User Knows

The help desk people didn't inform me that when I zapped my PRAM, it might zap me back. Now my brain is stuck in 'safe mode.'

People Without Pets

We'll be sad if dogs and cats transcend sapience and leave Earth. What will we do with their squeaky toys and catnip mice?

A Frog's Tale

Well, I've been inspired by frogs again.

Quite possibly, my muse was a frog that was transformed and lived a very unhappy life as a muse. Thus I am tormented with crazy but brilliant (IMHO) ideas concerning frogs. Or an equally plausible reason is that the frogs living in the tree outside my bedroom window are actually brainwashing me as I sleep with their incessant chirping.

Whatever the motivating factor is, I have been thinking about the whole Frog Prince story lately. You know, the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm? It inspired me to do a twitfic (for those of you who don't know, a twitfic--or twabble--is a one hundred character story, not including spaces) about it. See "Pop Culture Fairy Tale" in an older post.

That failed to calm my muse on the subject.

I started getting the notion that perhaps there was another side to the story. One that needed to be told. And maybe, just maybe, the Grimm's got the story from a rather biased, and therefore unreliable source. The princess. Did anyone even bother to discover how the frog really felt? Was he happy about being a prince and marrying the princess? What if he wasn't?

Now, with thoughts like these, an ordinary person might think: "Who cares?"

Writers are not ordinary people.

So, I've started writing the a new take on the classic tale from the frogs perspective.  I'm calling it "The Reluctant Prince." I'm not intending it to be very long, or to take too much time in the telling. But tell it, I must.

Maybe then my frog prince muse will let me sleep at night.

Until the next inspiration, anyway.

Research, Research and More Research...

 

I love the library.

I've been accused of being a closet librarian, I love books so much and spend so much time in Dewey Decimal World.

I am on my local library's website searching for books more than I check my damn email.

So, I go to pick up some books today that I have requested from other libraries in the area, since my library didn't have them. I approach the desk and hand the librarian my card and say, "I believe you're holding some books for me."

She looks at me and laughs, "So what else is new, Miss Kelly?"

If they'd let me, I'd put up a cot in the science fiction and fantasy section, being the speculative fiction reader version of the "The Self-Taught Man" character in the Jean-Paul Sartre novel "Nausea" that works his way through the library from A-to-Z.

Today I picked up a fabulously cool book called "Dragonology" by Ernest Drake and Dugald Steer. It looks like an ancient book. It's large (like, coffee-table book sized, but not very many pages) and it had tons of stuff in it, like samples of dragon scales and wing membranes. It looks sort of like a book you'd expect to find at Hogwarts, in Harry Potter's world. I am going to get a lot out of it for research on my dragon story (and possible future novel).

I also found a pretty good article online from the NY Times Science section from 2003 on dragons and where we, as humans, may have gotten the idea of them. It's called "From Many Imaginations, One Fearful Creature," and if you want to, you can click on that title and read the article.

I've been filling the "Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dragon" section of my story notebook with all kinds of great ideas and information, and hope this book and article will be the fuel providing me with more energetic thoughts on the matter.

I've also got to start researching psychological information for my novel "The Coffee Wars." This story is about humanity becoming enslaved to an alien race through hypnosis and addiction to a powerful drug and how we struggle to break the bonds and fight our enemy. Our biggest enemy in this story is not our alien oppressors, but our own weaknesses. No surprises there.

This novel concept grew out of a short story I wrote called "We Hardly Ever Cry Anymore."  It's a very short, flash fiction piece that is first person narrative of an unnamed protagonist who relates his experiences of being a "worker" on a farm that grows and processes the alien plant Waithyll into the drug that desensitizes and enslaves humanity through a detached euphoria. I've been told by too many of my friends that this piece needed to be part of something bigger, and so, the idea for "The Coffee Wars" was born.

I am going to be doing NaNoWriMo next year, God willing and the muse doesn't go on strike. I am seriously considering doing "The Coffee Wars" as my NaNoWriMo novel.  I'll have to think about it.
I wonder, does it count if you've already started?

So. There you have it. I am keeping very busy with research. I plan on doing some writing on "Tiny Dragon" this weekend.

I also have a huge pile of books to read.