Clarion Week Five

Steve Berman knows how important a fallback career is

Crickets keep me awake at night. Outside my window, a mere three feet above the ground, live the biggest crickets in the world. They rub their legs or whatever it is they rub, and make a colossal noise like a child scratching a frying pan with a stick. The sound gets inside my head and I begin to picture monstrously overgrown crickets sitting on the window ledge purposefully tormenting me. That in itself tells me I need to sleep more, but there's the rub.

I'm not helped by leaky shower faucet that offers a metronomic drip drip drip twenty four hours a day seven days a week. Thankfully my hearings not so great -- too many nights in clubland -- and I can usually phase out the sound.

I begin this entry in this manner because this is the week my body struck back. Cans of Monster (500ml Red Bull clones) are no longer helping. The combination of bad food, little sleep, near constant mental exertion, and no excercise, has finally caused my body to say "Enough!". Kelly Link and Holly Black joined us as the last fortnight instructors, but my fatigue has meant that their presence is not as concrete as it should be. They work and play hard, and they've setup discussions and excercises most days, but it's like I'm experiencing things through a thick fog. On Wednesday I missed the circle in an effort to get some extra sleep and clear my head.

In the critique circle they've definitely got their unique styles, which again is very refreshing. Kelly really makes us think about who are characters are and how we can show who they are. She has helped me understand how people think and hopefully stopped me being (i) the plot's bitch instead my characters', and (ii) so heavy handed in my character's rationalisations. It's like people can be rational, but the way they rationalise in their head isn't through sequential logic but much more through intuition. This means I should leave out a lot of explicit reasons which are implied by character action anyway. Holly takes a more holistic approach and pursues different elements as she sees fit. Both of them have a lot to say after each story has been critiqued by the group and often talk for up to twenty minutes.

And then there's R2D2...Kelly and Holly story-arc Star Wars
Post-critique discussion of stories is declining and I think that's a function of fatigue. It'll be super-fantastic if the stories we've made here steadily bleed their way into the published-world. Not only will I be stoked for the authors, it'll be a real personal pleasure to buy the magazines, anthologies etc and reminisce about the tales. So Clarionites: get those stories out there!

One excercise involved a method employed by a writer whose name I've forgotton, but was always in awe of Raymond Carver's utterly real characters. Carver told this writer that his realism of situation came from being an organic writer who just set a scene and then let it write itself without planning. One weekend the writer got layed up with the flu in a hotel room and decided he was going to write sixty first lines. After that he would write sixty first paragraphs and then pursue the most promising ones. It led to a dozen or so very good stories. So our task was to compose sixty first lines. I got to twenty-seven. And I cheated a little by sometimes writing two lines. Some of my own favourites include:

1. Cut a worm in two and you've got two worms; cut a baby in two and you've got major problems.
2. Under the kitchen table, beside an old bolognese stain, Ritchie, the mechanical ant, scrathed his hind leg.
3. Rachel's skin tasted of salt and kerosene.
4. Fucking is way more fun in zero gravity.
5. Go down Duke Street, turn left at the Hippy Happy second-hand clothes store, wait by the telephone box with the broken receiver and when it rings scream "Walstack Industries are headed by a pus-brained cocksucker!"
6. Snow-capped mountains, burbling streams, vistas of rock studded hillsides -- everything Jack talked about made me want to vomit.

I will definitely work with some of these.

Alexandra goes for slutty while Rahulia goes for coy
After the usual Friday night at Harper's -- we did make an effort to go elsewhere, but Harper's was just too good to resist -- Holly and Kelly threw a cross-dressing ball on Saturday night. Except it wasn't really cross-dressing; everyone wore women's clothes. A number of people went out to a thrift store to buy dresses -- including Michael who bought two! -- but I used my sarong and a breezy black shirt to be transformed into Stephanie. Actually, I have Shveta to thank for the bulk of the transformation. She applied eye-liner, lipstick and nail varnish, supplied bracelets and a hairclip (lost later during the water fight -- sorry!), and showed me how to cross my legs. Let me tell you, I got a lot of attention that night! -- mainly from some very butch looking women...

At the party everyone hit the drinks hard -- an effort to put out of their minds some of the horrors that stalked room, I think. This led naturally to ghost stories and later a Call of Cthulu role-playing game led by Will L. The story was a mix of Boy Scouts in the woods meets Blair Witch project. There was certainly exterior and interior conflict, for sure. Good job, Will!