The Diamond Island

Been listening to special instructions and watching interstellar phenomena within the soul.  Training under the patient and wise gaze of Lucerna, Mother Mary’s Personal Assistant.  She keeps nudging me further into the cold waters of trans-personal warrior training.  It’s a side of me I’ve only just now started experiencing and accessing with an inner eye.  There’s a large shadow cast by the cloud over parts of me I never recognized, but the weather has changed and colors are clearer and sharper than I ever would have believed.

Floating around my pillow are a number of texts I’m reading, grab and seek the new game of play.  Reasoning and meditation as making mud-pies in the brain.  Themes emerge along the dream like an ultraviolet glowing cellphone from the beyond giving me the ring-tone of my self in a new looking back.  Seeds are always sprouting just when you thought the land had given up on you.  I picked up the phone even though I was busy and flipped open the communicator to the starship everywhere.  I’m busy so I’m available.

Dreamtime might be overrun with plastic shamans, but they’re an outer characteristic of the inner journey.  We all have to do time with our imagination until it can grow to fill the form we can’t see with our little light.  I’d forgotten about a sizable chunk of my New Age explorations not too long after willingly suffering The Nightmare Maize Of Singular Violation to finally understand what I was missing.  Some things you leave behind in the guiding of the divine back to the outside world.  I do appreciate the Dark Goddess returning my backpack!

I read about the Sioux keeping and releasing of souls, and reflect.  Their ways and understandings are a sound in my being rich with clues, stimulating thoughts of what a dedicated clown might accomplish despite being dazed and befuddled.  The recognition of death as an opportunity for those alive to recognize their sacredness and experience purification beyond our experience.  That to move beyond bodies—created out of the nothingness of unfathomably unlikely chance in time and space—into a larger comprehension of being as a form of non-being is natural and joyous, even though there are tears and pain.

Our dullard senses stumbling with such vast experiences of awareness, perhaps some compassion is in order for our falling down and skinning our tender mental knees and scraping of heartstrings with a rough clasping.  Our helplessness and inadequacy are stunning to those outside time and space, and evoke mercy from the most mysterious of depths; do we not ourselves rush to the side of a stranger as if they were ourselves at unusual moments?  As above, so below, as within, so without.  A mote of fire in the gloaming of our chemical stew of a brain.

I’ve been grieving and mourning, welcoming inside and treasuring, coming to the place where there is the happiness of dawning and dusking inevitable.  In a sense, this long period of overwhelmed underwhelming has been a new idea breaking out of its shell and evoking my response.  Some ecstasies are vast and immeasurable, like the numbing flash of a dunk in cold water.  I can see Molly on a beach with an empty and dripping bucket, laughing.  Yoshie covers her mouth and makes a giggly face.

Hey!

Now for pizza…and margarita shooters!

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to order out.  You still lose a turn and get the beat down.  I’ve been trying to get back into the process of generating new and exciting adventures on the Paulie channel.  Alas, real life has been demanding tribute in the form of everyday banality in the name of mere existence.

Maybe it’s the crummy summer solstice.  The height of the light in which the darkness is reborn and winter begins to regain its strength.  People have just been down.  The gnats and mosquitoes are out in force now and vicious in their quest for eyes and blood.  The weeds are thick and virulent, wide-awake drunk with the power of full-fledged summer tangle.  The humidity and searing heat of the long days drags on and on, bearing down on us with the ripeness of life as surely as the bleakness of cold twilight at the other edge of the scales.

I’ve been trying to get the full PDF of Diamond of Darkness up in the Gimmie Stuff page, but failure seems to have been on an auto-repeat for me and it’s all I can do but stare in horror as my blog posts and other projects twist like tendrils of cat puke in my hands.  Stuff is totally resistant to conscious intentions; I am in a moment of pause.  Come back later KTHXBYE.

World keeps on turning though.  Anybody want a slice?

A gal over at one of my watering holes started talking about plot, mentioning it as a process. I keep seeing plot mentioned in and around the stellar chatter of the interweb system channels, so I figured I’d tackle this one.

Simply stated, plot is “what happens”.

Not to be confused with premise, which is “what it’s about.”

I wonder about the aversion some people have to formulaic plots.  I don’t believe that’s what people object to exactly.

For example, I think of the TV show House, which is the same plot every episode—cranky doctor solves medical mystery despite obstacles.  Even though it’s the same thing every episode and the premise is never actually addressed—it’s better to be an honest jerk than a well-meaning phony—I still see it as an interesting show because it is reliable.

I think what people object to is the use of writer force to override viewer authority.  In other words, bad technique.

Plot, like light, is actually both a wave and a particle. It can be both a thing and a process.  The question is whether we are dealing with prep or improvisation.

Plot emerges from the work through the resolution of situations (character plus setting equals situation).  When it’s a process it arises from the working out of the story.  When it’s a thing it is exerted upon the story as a planned phenomenon.

Both have an underlying structure, a platform in which they emerge on-stage.  Both require practice in order to put on a good show.  Both have strengths and weaknesses it pays to spend time understanding.  Both are legitimate courses of exploration that can be adjusted to fit the project.

I’ve kept my promise and let myself come out of the tomb to speak with the tools at my disposal. There’s still much work to do before this first novel can be considered fully complete; developing that aspect as I work on the next novel in the series, as well as other things I have in the creative hopper that need their turn.

This shipping out of chapters has been a sort of withdrawal for me; all my other usual artistic activities have strangely gone quiet and invisible.  The release of this first effort has taken a long time to arrive at, and letting it go has required the utmost of courage to undertake.  I decided to lower the cloaking shields and let the principled search engines in to catalog my site; it really is out there now for all to find, three years of internalized contemplation.

So much has gone into just this single act of a novel that I’m now in uncharted territories again. I have worked it as much as possible given the huge obstacle of just doing it. I had no idea how long it would take, even given an impeccable commitment. In a sense, this is where the real work begins; because having done it once, now I commit myself to further developments.

While I was releasing the chapters, I had a dream:  The universe recognized my offering and liked it, told me I’d done a good thing.