Drifting in Limbo and Stoking the Dream Machine

Drifting in Limbo and Stoking the Dream Machine:  Since December 10th I've been talking about how I'm drifting, aimlessly, but pleasantly.  And that's still true, except that meeting up with last Sunday got me fired up about writing.  It got me back to critiquing dramatic fiction (his ) and thinking about completing the storylines I started, oh! so many years ago. 

One of the resources I shared with Dave that I'd like to share with the world is James N. Frey's How to Write a Damn Good Novel. biblioteka.teatr-obraz.ru/file… (It should be Damned Good, yes?  but who am I to argue with Frey.)  As a result, I started picking through it, myself, for the first time in a long time, which lead, quite naturally, to reviewing my own stories.  

The first thing I did was to copy the stories in my DA literature sub-gallery to rtf on my hard drive, because almost all of my written work was either lost to viruses and hard drive crashes, or is preserved in its crude beginnings on old diskettes that, because of obsolete formatting, can't be read by Win 10 or used by today's word processing programs.  I have a few hard copies in various stages of revision, but these, too, are obsolete; I've developed them considerably since then.  So, If I were to lose what's in this gallery, I'd have virtually nothing to show for efforts at writing.   

While I started cooking a few stories (i.e., Sunday's Child), I'm nowhere near doing the kind of research I'll need to do to get the realistic texture for a finished work. And that would be premature, anyway.  I'm still wrestling with structure.  Just because I understand structure, doesn't mean I'm facile with it.  I'm good on the editing end of it, but find it difficult to coordinate it with the creative process.  Switching gears between the two is something I do over the course of years, even decades; it's not something I do on a daily basis, devoting, say, the mornings to editing and the evenings to exploring the material.  This last way would seem to be a good way to work. And it seems to me that's what I was aiming at when art was on hold and I was deeply into writing, instead.  Unfortunately, I haven't worked at writing for a long time - and haven't even thought about it seriously enough to ponder different ways to schedule it.  Well, I'm thinking about it, now.

I'm thinking about it, now, at the same time that I'm thinking about drawing, painting and sequential art.  The result, as I expressed in a message to Dave, is that I find myself between two stools with no place to sit!  I find it difficult to settle down on one, or the other.  My mind keeps flying from one to the other.  The tension behind it is driving me nuts.  The usual antidote is physical exercise, like doing a long ride or a hill climb on the bicycle.  In fact, yesterday, that's what I did.  The temporary shift to mild weather accommodated it.  Otherwise, nothing I can do, except roll with the punches and wait till things inside calm down.  

Well, maybe there is one other thing I can do - attend to the dreams.  I've had some doozies, recently, and they seem to be coming with increased frequency.  There was a time when attending to and analyzing dreams was all I did - thirty years of archived dreams would seem to prove it.  But that came to an abrupt end when I started Sundog Studio, which seemed to channel the life energy into technical practices and meditations involved with creative arts, as of writing, drawing, painting, and sequential art.  Maybe 20 years the dream machine laid dormant.  Now, for some reason, it's active, again.  Something's trying to get my attention.  I'd be a fool to ignore it.

Maybe - and I've been wondering about this for a little while, now - maybe I've been so engrossed with living my life in the moment that I've neglected reflection?  Maybe it's time to reflect, actively, to flex the mental muscles of imagination?  Which leads to what?  Desire.  Which leads to what?  Action.  I would think that action in pursuit of a goal is the way out of limbo.  

I tell myself I'm perfectly comfortable as I am.  Could it be that I'm lying, or simply don't know what's good for me?  Could it be that it's time to accept a great challenge?  One that I don't want, but one that meets an unconscious need, so, in truth, one that I want - and want desperately more than I know?  If so, I have to wonder (with enough apprehension to feel butterflies in the stomach) what might that be?*  

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NOTES
*  The title of the entry and the tone of it hark to The Long Way Home, in the literature sub-gallery.  I realized this as soon as re-read the journal after posting it.  Makes one wonder . . . Apparently I've been here before, experiencing this "fatal comfort", as I called it in the piece (linked below).  I could be this guy (Larry Towers) whose relaxed mind "floated effortlessly in a black pool of oblivion . . . ."  In fact I was, so I am.  As I said, maybe it's time for some serious reflection?  
   
   White of the Die: Chapter 1 - The Long Way Home      The voice resounded in his head the way it might in an echo chamber. It was the voice of Count Guido Vincente.
      "Can you hear me?"
      "Yes. . . . " came the beginning of a reply, but the breath it floated on trailed off to nowhere.
      "What's the matter with him?"  The count asked Carlo, his henchman.
      The stoop-shouldered goon crouched over the naked body of the tortured man, then turned to face his master.  "I think he's dead," the brute said, sheepishly.
      The count was furious with his inept servant.  "Fool!" he cried.  "I'd have reserved the pleasure of killing him myself, if I'd wanted him dead!  Have I schemed so long and so artfully to work out my plan of revenge on a corpse?  No!  Revive him!  Bring him back, or take his place as my most hated enemy!"
      The lummox s

Note 2)  Solved the mystery of the leaking roof and the squirrel hole inside the roof in the great room.  The problem is a poorly designed, poorly installed chimney saddle that 1) doesn't channel water around the chimney and 2) provides a haven for squirrels and other wild life.  I've alerted the county agency with whom I contracted to rehab the house, which included laying a new roof;  sent them pictures of the roof, the squirrel nest and the tunnel exit inside the roof in my living room.  Along with that I made some observations about planning, design and quality.  Waiting for them to respond.  
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REFERENCES

I put the links to these books in the Quick Picks for future reference.  They are recommended reading for anyone interested in writing dramatic fiction.  That includes writing for comics.  Though they are skewed toward creating plays and novels, the import is about the principles of drama and the structure of storytelling.

James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel  biblioteka.teatr-obraz.ru/file…

Aristotle, Poetics  www.arts.rpi.edu/~ruiz/Advance…
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29 January 2018 Supplemental:

Didn't take long after asking the question that the answer came.  And, yes, the prospect is scary.  It's an opus of a sort, on Psychology and Drama, a quazi-academic treatise exploring the connection between Creative Arts and the process of Individuation. 

Instead of using case study material from patients, I would confine the material to my own. I would base the work on twenty-three literature posts in my DA sub-gallery.  That would make an usual autobiography, in some ways. Unusual, since I'd be dealing not with historical events as they are ordinarily viewed, but, instead, with their transmuted reflections, as might be encountered in dreams. I think the result would have very little to say about the detailed historical individual (me), favoring, instead, the generic man as he's portrayed in the characters of those fiction samples produced by active imagination.

Let's hope it's just pie in the sky, because realizing the goal as I envision is IMHO beyond me.  I might have been able to do it badly when I was much younger and full of myself.  Haha.  Now that I have the missing ingredient of having ripened, aka humility, I lack the arrogance required to take this bull by the horns. 

Not that I'm without drive.  But, I'd rather sit my crippled ass on a bicycle and attack ridiculously steep hills, labor at the drawing board with the idea of producing a comic, sit at the computer day after day hacking out a genre novel.  I'd rather finish something that I started along those lines (i.e. the small parts), than kickstart my intellect and supercharge my ego in an attempt to weave together all of it into a Magnum Opus.  (That is what this would be, for me; for anyone else it would be a term paper.) 

God help me. I've really stepped in it, now. Thanks, Dave.  (I'm pretty sure that encountering brought me to this.  Is he to blame, or to thank?  Time will tell.)   

Well, at any event I can't stop thinking about it, my thoughts racing faster than I can keep up.  Last night I saw/worked out the main approach, outlining several of the key ideas and fleshing them out.  I suppose I was in an altered state of consciousness.  Don't know how I ever fell asleep. Then this morning, after breakfast, I did my best to put on paper (er, word processor document) what I could remember of it. 

As with a dream, much had slipped away by then.  But, decades of practice working with dreams conditioned a presence of mind, active in and proximal to altered states, that knows enough to nail down key points, locking them into memory so that I can retrieve them and review them when I'm fully awake.  So, I was able to reconstruct some of the outline in the morning. 

Contrary, then, to my initial misgivings, I have to admit that in many ways this project would seem to be right up my ally - the working method (involving altered states) the material (dramatic fiction), the subject matter (Individuation) . . . . Hmm.  What's not familiar? 

Maybe it's not beyond me, after all? Maybe I just got soft?  Maybe I have to relearn how to take a kidney punch?  

Let's do this!