During the period subsequent to the Postdigital Age,
discorporeal Klaatu artist Iyl Rayn attempted to enhance her status within the
Cluster by conceiving an unconventional entertainment. She contracted the
services of Boggsian corporeals to construct a network of portals, or as she
called them,“diskos.”
Remarkably, those clunky opening sentences—chock-full of
fuzzy, polysyllabic, nearly nonsensical words—have survived more than thirty
drafts. I’m pretty sure that when
I wrote them I had no idea what they meant, and for the last eight years I’ve
been trying to make them make sense. This is an example of how far some writers
will go to avoid murdering a darling.
I had a couple of deranged sentences I liked, and even if it took me
nearly a decade, even if it took nine hundred pages, I was determined to
extract a plot from them.
This is not unusual, at least for me. I am capable of killing off my
darlings—dozens have perished in this trilogy so far—but I can also be fiercely
protective of them, often for spurious reasons, and occasionally to my
detriment. In this case, my stubbornness is paying off. The first book in the trilogy, The Obsidian Blade, will be coming out in about a year.
Black Painting by Ad Reinhardt |
Embracing an odd premise and refusing to let go is one of
the ways I kick-start my imagination. Maybe you do something different, but it
works for me. So there.
Speaking of…aargh! Can’t find a segue…I’ll be at Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis’s Linden hills neighborhood this Saturday, February 12, at 1:00 p.m., to talk about The Big Crunch and Blank Confession. Please stop by if you are able. Have a pastry and coffee at Turtle Bread—the Twin Cities second-best bakery (It used to be the best, and it’s still damn good, but in recent years Rustica has taken the lead.)—then pop over to the Wild Rumpus and pick up a book for yourself, your kid, your niece…your cat.
It’s supposed to be a nice day. By which I mean, ABOVE FREEZING.
4 comments:
So sad that I don't live in Minneapolis. I'd try to lure you to New Hampshire with promises that it is much warmer here, but that would be a blatant lie. Though...It's so warm here you should totally come ;)
Tomorrow we are supposed to have our first above-freezing temperatures in a month. Soooooo excited!
Hi I'm 15 and I just got done reading Rash. You are probably the coolest and funniest writer that I know, and your writings can be compared with Kurt Vonnegut's finest. I'm going to try to find some more books by you.
Hey, thanks, Anonymous. I started reading Vonnegut when I was your age. Cat's Cradle. Still my favorite.
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