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last night i had a Revelation (with a capital R no less).
i've been futzing with the start of season three of Reconstruction and i realized what's really wrong with it. yeah yeah, narrative voice, i'm gonna fix all that (that was last week's small-r revelation). but the real issue is: the thing's so darn grounded in reality. i think i got so caught up in trying to write something that was sort of a straight soap-opera style drama that i leeched out all the weird supernatural/metaphysical realms of the unreal that usually inhabit my work.
i mean: isn't Slaughter's Mountain about the perplexities of destiny? isn't The Third Kind of Humility about demonic possession? isn't Asylum about the devil incarnate? Isn't there a talking pear in Razi-el's Dream? and what have i done here? set the whole kit and kaboodle in a camp that has a legacy of being an apocalyptic battleground and yet no one bothers to mention this past-history? no one seems to remember the supernatural evil that inhabited these forests? and what about that infamous rabbit-headed child? it's only been 18 years since he disappeared.
how could i have managed to bring these characters so far and then trap them in this banal little enclosure of "reality-only" storytelling? i've even been treating the phantom Tall Blond Solider as little more than a drug-induced hallucination ~ for shame!
and yeah, i know i've been watching a lot of X-files and that's totally tainted my views, but it's also brought me back around to what i normally write ~ and that is magical realism which, for whatever reason, i seemed to have abandoned in this series!
the problem is now fixing that (as if i don't have enough on my plate). it's especially a problem because i've written three and a half "seasons" of Recon in this vein. what do i do now? go back and rewrite it? start over where i've left off?
first i need to get a solid handle on the mythos of Camp Faiger (for one thing). my unnamed soldier's fort needs a name and more of a history than a pumpkin monster named Richmont for a commanding officer. i'm playing with the idea of having some nasty post-Eleison retribution: killing off all the men in the war is easy, but it would be fun (well, you know what i mean) to kill off other people too ~ thin the herd, as it were.
i mean, the environs aren't possessed or haunted in that way ~ they're sort of the peaceful aftermath of horrendous things. sorta like you would expect auschwitz to be, or ground zero in nagasaki. like a graveyard. reconciled to silence, cold, but not necessarily bitter. if there are ghosts here, they are friendly (i think). this is, after all, consecrated ground. the battle against evil was fought and won here. this is a place of rebuilding (sort of the anti-Southern gothic, if you will).
i love this landscape ~ this is the "feel" of what i mean
i also love this one ~ has a similar effect for me
i'm also considering using the device of an old (twenty year-old) gazette that used to be published in Leverittsville, which i think James could easily acquire. then he could be the ringmaster (as it were), keeper of the bizarre history, propagator of the myths. i still haven't figured out why he is building his own variation on the Winchester house, but i'm hoping that will explain itself to me eventually. i don't want it to be some weird guilt-trip "haunting" thing. i think it's more peculiar than that ~ and i need to find a way to spin it more positively.
a fun gazette banner i can prolly work with
anyway, i have a lot of work to do still ~ thinking this through and deciding how best to proceed. i know i want to redesign the site, but haven't decided how exactly to go about doing it. i flittingly had a thought that i would go back to the original intention: making it all illustrated, but i don't know what the wisdom of that path would be. i know i want to redo a lot of the graphics. but that's a major undertaking all its own. i think i need to figure out the text first.
okay, i'm off to work on that for a while. long day today.
: o p
i've been futzing with the start of season three of Reconstruction and i realized what's really wrong with it. yeah yeah, narrative voice, i'm gonna fix all that (that was last week's small-r revelation). but the real issue is: the thing's so darn grounded in reality. i think i got so caught up in trying to write something that was sort of a straight soap-opera style drama that i leeched out all the weird supernatural/metaphysical realms of the unreal that usually inhabit my work.
i mean: isn't Slaughter's Mountain about the perplexities of destiny? isn't The Third Kind of Humility about demonic possession? isn't Asylum about the devil incarnate? Isn't there a talking pear in Razi-el's Dream? and what have i done here? set the whole kit and kaboodle in a camp that has a legacy of being an apocalyptic battleground and yet no one bothers to mention this past-history? no one seems to remember the supernatural evil that inhabited these forests? and what about that infamous rabbit-headed child? it's only been 18 years since he disappeared.
how could i have managed to bring these characters so far and then trap them in this banal little enclosure of "reality-only" storytelling? i've even been treating the phantom Tall Blond Solider as little more than a drug-induced hallucination ~ for shame!
and yeah, i know i've been watching a lot of X-files and that's totally tainted my views, but it's also brought me back around to what i normally write ~ and that is magical realism which, for whatever reason, i seemed to have abandoned in this series!
the problem is now fixing that (as if i don't have enough on my plate). it's especially a problem because i've written three and a half "seasons" of Recon in this vein. what do i do now? go back and rewrite it? start over where i've left off?
first i need to get a solid handle on the mythos of Camp Faiger (for one thing). my unnamed soldier's fort needs a name and more of a history than a pumpkin monster named Richmont for a commanding officer. i'm playing with the idea of having some nasty post-Eleison retribution: killing off all the men in the war is easy, but it would be fun (well, you know what i mean) to kill off other people too ~ thin the herd, as it were.
i mean, the environs aren't possessed or haunted in that way ~ they're sort of the peaceful aftermath of horrendous things. sorta like you would expect auschwitz to be, or ground zero in nagasaki. like a graveyard. reconciled to silence, cold, but not necessarily bitter. if there are ghosts here, they are friendly (i think). this is, after all, consecrated ground. the battle against evil was fought and won here. this is a place of rebuilding (sort of the anti-Southern gothic, if you will).
i love this landscape ~ this is the "feel" of what i mean
i also love this one ~ has a similar effect for me
i'm also considering using the device of an old (twenty year-old) gazette that used to be published in Leverittsville, which i think James could easily acquire. then he could be the ringmaster (as it were), keeper of the bizarre history, propagator of the myths. i still haven't figured out why he is building his own variation on the Winchester house, but i'm hoping that will explain itself to me eventually. i don't want it to be some weird guilt-trip "haunting" thing. i think it's more peculiar than that ~ and i need to find a way to spin it more positively.
a fun gazette banner i can prolly work with
anyway, i have a lot of work to do still ~ thinking this through and deciding how best to proceed. i know i want to redesign the site, but haven't decided how exactly to go about doing it. i flittingly had a thought that i would go back to the original intention: making it all illustrated, but i don't know what the wisdom of that path would be. i know i want to redo a lot of the graphics. but that's a major undertaking all its own. i think i need to figure out the text first.
okay, i'm off to work on that for a while. long day today.
: o p
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