Bombastic Bibliophilia

Or: What Words Do To You When Your Not Looking

I've recently rediscovered the joy of writing short stories for the sheer unadulterated hell of it. In any downtime I find myself with (usually either mornings at work between finishing the A.M. duties and when customers start coming in around noon, and evenings before bed) I've been either grabbing a pen or opening a new text doc respectively. There's a release in shoving still steaming sections of my psyche whole and quivering onto a ruled sheet of wood pulp or syphoning a desperately struggling stream of consciousness through my fingers into the memory banks of my trusty box. The conversion of thought to image and image to eloquent description is intoxicating in its convoluted mechanization.

Several of my readers have commented more than once on the incessant and multi-directional nature of the flickering witchlight that is the focus of my subjective consciousness. It's always been slightly startling how easily that mindset transfers to a more permanent medium, how effortlessly one scenario (often one sentence) can be extrapolated into a fuller, more perfect union of thought and word.

At one point or another, every student of the written word believes that they might (just might) be capable of writing the next Great American Novel. I'm as guilty as the next guy of this self appreciating behavior, however I (unlike the true greats) got over it. I've tested my teeth against the raw strap that is the full length novel, and found myself (sadly) lacking. Not lacking in style, form, or capability of completion, only in the belief-of-self needed to sustain a constant review and self-editorship of a work of significant length. Thus I now turn my hand to the blunt art that is the shaping of short stories. A sculpture chipped with agonizing patience from a half ton of marble with tiny hammer and chisel can weather centuries without noticeably changing (whether or not its worth looking at to begin with), conversely a block of ice can be hacked into an angel of dazzling translucent beauty with a chainsaw within a half hour, delighting every eye that falls upon it, until the collective heat of the bodies at the party melt the damn thing of course. I've heard time and again that wordsmithing short stories is in point-of-fact a much more difficult endeavor than the long con that is full length fiction. The voices that express that particular opin are of course authors of multiple novels who found they lack the ADD needed to scatter shot slivered fragments of their personal mirror across the pages of compilations and instead spend their time inscribing half a thousand pages as a warm up. Cum Granis Salis people.

And that, in a honey roasted nutshell, is what's on channel Niq tonight.

Offer unto Hojo laudable exclamations of approval and adoration.