Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Coalescence

No, dear Blog, I have not forgotten about you. I've been a bit distracted is all.//* I was struck yesterday with the oddity of the creative process. Like the great casseroles of our time, it often comes down to throwing in whatever one can find, stirring it up right, and just letting it bake until something better than the sum of its parts comes out.// I'm reading up on the city of Jericho for my novel project, and just finished a section on its geography and tectonic location. It's close to the Arabian-African tectonic plates, which are moving away from each other about 120 miles every ten million years, or as the geologist put it, the blink of an eye (from a planetary perspective). Yes, I find this stuff interesting, bear with me.// This resonated with an idea I had about a school of monks who create a fighting style by watching trees and mountains interact over the course of generations. Without giving too much away, in this case trees and mountains have a big grudge to settle, and the cosmos has ring-side seats during this slugfest.// During my nightly expulsion of brain material, I came across some notes I made years ago about a completely different group of people that abandoned all speech in order to better listen to and understand the world. This seemed like the ideal group to sit around for centuries in order to learn how to throw a punch from an angry pine, or execute a sweep from a river. Playing around with these three separate concepts yielded some exciting results. They may not make it into the first book, but they're excellent material for future stories.// As a proud citizen of the United States, I know I'm supposed to be addicted to instant gratification. If I can't have it now, it's not worth having, all of that. But then something like this happens, where something I started years ago matures into something more than I imagined, it makes me appreciate the virtue of patience. It's kind of a shame we are such mortal creatures, and we have so little time to use.// *Blogger is not letting me use paragraphs for some reason. Until I figure out why and can fix it, I'm settle for // to denote paragraph breaks. Sorry for the ugliness.