2023-01-21 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Saturday 🗓 Date: January 21, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 16 – Jan 22, 2023

Today — well technically last night — started the beginning of the New York Short Story Challenge. In practice what that means is that I have 8 days to right a ~2500 word short story that’s (1) fantasy about (2) a tourist and related to (3) greener pastures. I’m not totally sure what all three of those are going be like yet, hence why I’m starting here.

Fantasy is easy — I just finished Name of the Wind about 2 hours ago, so I’m very much in the fantasy headspace. That said, greener pastures is the one I really need to figure out.

So what sort of greener pastures could there be? A young man searching for greener pastures after the loss of his beloved. A soldier fleeing from a losing war, in search of inner and outer peace, only to find that among the nearby monastery.

Hmm, I suppose the question really is, what are we all seeking? What are the greener pastures most people aspire to? We aspire to live life to the fullest, to soak up every bit of meaning that there is in the world (whatever that may mean to us). We’re seeking happiness. We’re seeking that feeling of things being deeply okay. We’re seeking “our people,” where it doesn’t take energy to be who we are. We seek to be who we are, which requires us in some way to know who we are.

And with the theme of “greener pastures,” I suppose we must begin in some, shall we say, “less-green” pasture. The grass is dead, rotten, it won’t return in the spring. Grass in the winter time. Grass that’s been burned down to the root. Grass that’s been poisoned, defiled. Maybe there’s not even grass here at all — it’s not about the grass, it’s about the pasture, although there may not really be a difference. Just thinking things out.

So what do less-green pastures look like in life, especially in a more “fantastical” setting. I suppose it’s less likely to be a “search for meaning,” for a “living life to the fullest” sort of thing, although it’s not entirely out of the question. It simply seems less fitting. That said, “greener pastures” implies less of what I’d normally associate with fantasy — it’s less swashbuckling, it’s less bravado, less magnanimous in character. It’s quieter, but maybe it doesn’t have to be.

Greener pastures feels more internal, I guess is what I’m thinking. Fantasy feels very external, but the greener pastures could always be the desire for adventure, desire for another way of life. Even desire for a simpler life, desire for piousness, desire for acclaim. Or even better — a story about rejecting the greener pastures. Rejecting them for the sake of another, rejecting them for the sake of morals, rejecting despite wanting them. Picking something else over freedom.

Potential idea: focusing on one who doesn’t desire the greener pastures coming in contact with a tourist who is seeking. I wrote this out and immediately thought it sounded boring or preachy. I really want to avoid the preachiness or this desire to enforce some kind of quote-unquote meaning here. Trying to teach through the story is the surest way to make it sound like a parable. No no no, this is really a way to discover what could happen.

A tourist. What sort of food do they like? They have a craving for roasted potatoes with cheese quite often, but they stick with stew most days. A shoemaker in training, he rarely gets to leave his father’s shop. His shoes are pristine, the soles hardly worn in. His hands are calloused, nearly indistinguishable from the boots he sews most days. His feet, though, are soft and uncalloused, a far cry from the rough, cracked soles of the local pickpurses and orphans.

Why would he leave home? What does he desire? Freedom from his overbearing parents, the adventure of the sailors and travelers on the seas, freedom from expectations, freedom from the noise of the port. I suppose it could be any of these things really.

Alright, enough thinking about this story. I’ll leave that for tomorrow. Some reflections on thinking about this: I find myself largely poaching from other things I’ve read/seen/played before as part of this. The shoemaker comes from Name of the Wind, the idea of being attracted to being a sailor or boat traveler came from thinking about Return of the Obra Dinn. Maybe that’s the whole crux of it — Stravinsky said that great artists steal.

I really just need to get started somewhere, as is always the problem. This time around, though, being constrained by these other things means I can’t really pull anything from my direct experience, which feels a bit disorienting.

Side note — tomorrow I should actually do my morning pages in the morning. Right now it’s 8pm and I kinda just want to go bed. Instead, I think I should just crack open a Yerba and do this in the morning when my mind is the clearest. Writing at night feels way shittier. I wonder if learning things in the morning is actually the easiest time; I’m doing something uncomfortable and new and out of my norm, so I should do it when my mind is the brightest. If only it were that easy.

Rob Burbea mentioned this in a talk before, that he was talking to someone who procrastinated a lot and was only seeing the negativity in that but not the positivity, that they avoided work because they were a perfectionist, that perfectionism, by it’s very nature, means having a love for the output and caring deeply about it. I think that’s how I feel about writing (I just felt a feeling of metta as I wrote that): I care too damn much about the output to write poorly, but it’ll also take a ton of hard work to make my writing good, so I just don’t write at all. Fuck that, we’re love-maxxing this time, lads. We’re writing from the heart, we’re giving it our all. This is gonna be the best damn story about a shoemaker who leaves home in search of a better life that’s ever been written. It probably won’t actually be about this shoemaker, but that’s okay.

But anyways, what else is going on. Ummmm, I don’t really know. The world “whales” just popped into my head, but whales are cool. Super fucking big. I don’t know. There was this artist who used to draw these gorgeous illustrations of whales in the sky, flying high over (and sometimes into) buildings in what I could only assume to be Tokyo. Those were cool. Maybe my story will be about greener pastures, the greener pasture being a world where flying whales exist. And Tokyo, in a fantasy setting. That would be cool, and kinda no longer fantasy, but so it goes.

I wonder about the rules of this competition — specifically exactly how far I can stray from most of the limitations. Like, I don’t think my main character needs to be a tourist, but a tourist does need to be involved. I suppose that means the most likely role for the main character is either the tourist themself or someone who’s profession would likely see a tourist, although I suppose if you live near a notable site then just about anything could fit that bill. That said, someone who’s e.g. an inkeeper will probably get more tourists than someone who sells castle insurance. The idea that just popped into my mind is basically the fantasy equivalent of people doing ayahuasca trips in south america, where a tourist goes to another kingdom to try some magical potion, resin, fungus, concoction, or otherwise illegal/unknown substance, believing that on the other side it fulfills some desire of theirs: it gives them inner peace, it gives them strength or intellect, it gives them some strange power. Now that sounds fun.

Keep 👆🏼 that in mind, big boy. It feels like there’s a lot of potential there, because describing a trip with fantasy-ish language would be really fun. You could swear to unknown gods, you could do all your descriptions in that high-fantasy semi-folksy way, a lot of nature and interesting made-up things to see with a new set of eyes. And who knows what the outcome could be? Are the greener pastures the trip itself? What comes after? Are the real greener pastures just knowing what the targets can be? Maybe there are no greener pastures at all, and we’ve been in the greenest pastures the whole time? You choose, western man.

(Okay I need to put 10 more words here to make number go up high enough, done.)