lookingland

there's a special rule in the land of fiction writers that they should never forget:

when all else fails, make shit up.

this morning, frustrated by two subjects i loathe to apply my brain toward but seem to have unwittingly agreed to write about ~ namely law and politics ~ i have given way to swinging more toward fiction and away from fact for this tiger's tail of a project.

i hate doing this. there's so much bad fiction on the subject already out there and i don't want to add to that particular canon, but at the same time i am most certainly unqualified to write with any authority whatsoever in a "serious" capacity. i am also far from objective on the matter.

i don't know or understand enough about law or politics to care to research it any more deeply than i have at this point. and the tangled web of who did what and when and why has got me so far off track from the story i wanted to tell that it can't possibly be worth the continued exploration.

i thought this was a good idea because of betty's "definitive" text, but through my own research, i begin to think betty's emotions (and agendas) have clouded the integrity of her findings. on the one hand i'm relieved (things were maybe not as horrible as betty put them). on the other hand, i'm sorta mad at betty. her version, of course, makes for the better story, but since i don't entirely believe it anymore, that leaves me holding an empty bag.

so i think i was trying to compensate for betty's misdirection by filling in with other stuff, but maybe the story is still a good one, even more reasonably told than betty would have it.

so: Bing, Bolt and Burn, you unholy three are relegated to the sidebar (and be grateful for that since it had never been my intention to make you characters at all, originally). you too, Reverdy (confound you). i'm going back to focusing on Poppet, Hanty, Chammy, and a consortium of outsiders (like Gat and some fictionals) to tell a narrower tale. i haven't decided what to do with Ew and Pebblehead and those guys (much less Eck and Scully). the story will prolly still have a cast of thousands, but i think most of them will just do the catwalk and vanish.

[i just had a weird image of general grant strutting on a model's runway ~ but in deference to common decency, i will restrain myself from photoshopping such a thing]

i'm too sexy for my history books.

off to remove the fifth wheel from my donkey cart.

: D