2023-01-25 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Wednesday 🗓 Date: January 25, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 23 – Jan 29, 2023

Alright folks, I’m on a bit of a tighter schedule today. I meant to wake up at 5, and I actually slept through until 7, so we need to pick up the pace a bit.

As part of the Novelry course, they’re asking that I pick a fairly tale (or something similar) as a reference story to get started. It’s funny because looking at the idea I had started sketching out otherwise, it was this like multi-part, time-bending metanarrative that would probably be really hard to pull off. And they just say nah, pick the simplest tale you can find.

That’s undoubtedly a good idea, especially for a fledgling writer. You don’t go to the piano and play Beethoven, you play chopsticks first. But I’m also impatient. My biggest issue with this is not so much impatience — it’s rather that when I think of the stories that most moved me and were most profound for me growing up, they usually weren’t those kinds of stories. Perhaps when I was a little child maybe, but that time of my life honestly feels a bit like a black hole. I really don’t remember it particularly well. I mean, I remember reading the Magic Tree House series and Harry Potter, but while I enjoyed reading, I don’t really remember clinging to a particular story like that.

As I got older, I generally turned more to mythology. Greek and Roman mythology were fun, and I’m thinking of looking more into the stories there. Perhaps stories from the Metamorphoses or the Iliad and Odyssey. There may be something good in the Aeneid, for example. There’s also other old stories like the Arthurian Legends (maybe Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?) and Beowulf. I absolutely loved John Garnder’s Grendel when I was in high school, but I think in many ways that falls into the “weird, abstract metanarrative” category that I’m trying to dodge for this story. I simply wasn’t really drawn to fairy tales much, and while I understand their power and potency as straightforward, often-unadorned stories, I generally feel drawn to that longer-form style of writing.

As I was sitting here writing this, I do actually recall some cool Arthurian tales. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is probably by far the most well-known, and for good reason. I always like the surreal, otherworldy nature of that story, of a knight who gets his head chopped off but shortly after picks it up as if it were nothing and rides off in the winter weather. I don’t know if that’s the one I’ll pick for my story, simply because (1) the plot structure of that story is a little weird, although I do kind of like that and (2) there’s always the story of Balin and Balan, which is far more straightforward to put to page. Balin and Balan is pretty obvious: a brother is given a second sword but told not to keep it, lest he lose that which he holds most dear; he doesn’t listen and ends up striking down the other brother in battle. I think I’ll reread more of Sir Gawain and make a decision from there, because that story is a bit more complex and might have some interesting nuggets to work with.

Anyways, as I’m want to do, I spent a bunch of time getting distracted by reading folks tales and not actually writing these morning pages, so let’s get down to business (cue the music).

Great, now I’m pretty much immediately blanking on what to write about.

It’s kinda weird trying to figure out how to consistently wake up on time. I went to bed in plenty of time, so 5am should have given me at least 8 hours of sleep. It’s not like I was cutting myself short there somehow. I wonder in some ways if I need something like a sun lamp or one of those light-based alarm clocks, because I think my biggest thing right now is that I wake up and it’s still super dark outside, so then of course I go back to bed. Given that work stopped letting me use my Forma account for books, I gotta spend that money on something, so I suppose I might as well spend it on some bullshit.

Sometimes the sky here in San Francisco is so blue it almost looks like it’s out of a movie. Like there’s sky blue, but today it almost looks aquamarine, it’s intensely blue. That was one of my big realizations when I was on retreat: it rained for 7 days straight, so we never really got to see beyond the clouds for the whole time. When I walked up the big hill by the top of the drive on the final day, the sky was wide open and the blue of the sky just about knocked me over it was so intense. I just sat there for a good 10 minutes staring at a tree — or more appropriately, beyond the tree — because I was just so astounded that it looked that way.

There’s also not a single cloud in the sky, which I suppose is why it looks a bit more painted on.

Maybe the whole world is just painted on, in this first draft of the universe (yes I did finish Pure Colour yesterday!). That book is so strange, and while I was mostly confused for the majority of it, it really does tie up well in a very poignant way towards the end. All of these strange metaphors and images start to tie together. Still not sure if it’s my favorite book of all time by any means, but it felt worth the read. If anything, my complaint is that it felt like a mediation on a subject or a short story instead of a novel. I feel like it could have been a ~20 page short story and been just as good as a 200 page novel. The novel was also formatted in a way that I understand but that ultimately meant the actual word count probably was closer to that of a short story. Again, I don’t really mind, I’m mostly just surprised that was a book that got published, but I also think Heti has a pretty good track record.

I’m also so on track to get to 30 books this year, I’ll hopefully actually make it up to something like 50-60 if I keep this speed going. It’s probably more a matter of page count, because I can burn through Pure Colour or The Hole in just a day or two, but Name of the Wind definitely took a few weeks simply by virtue of it being 10x the word count of the other two. That said, I also got much more in the groove of taking an hour or two in the evening and just burning through a hundred pages much more common, so I think I can keep up a lot of progress doing just that. I hate to become a hermit and live at home just to read and write, but if I legitimately want to get good at being a writer, I think that’s a bit of what you have to do. Not the hermit part specifically, but the reading and writing a lot part. Ideally, you’d not have a day job and would have much more time to do all these things as you wished throughout the day, but so it goes.

Alright, about 200 words more, what else is going on in the world. Funnily enough, I actually have no idea. I feel pretty detached from the world now that I basically don’t go on Twitter and don’t really watch the news or anything. Is that a bad thing? I feel like I’ve switched sides of the two couples from Season 2 of White Lotus, where one lives in blissful ignorance and the other is deeply tuned in (yet only performatively “empathetic”). Ignorance kinda owns, honestly, and that’s a privileged thing to say, but it does let me focus in more on individual people and be more legitimately empathetic to them. Of course, I also still don’t think I’m really empathetic enough, but post-metta retreat, I do still feel like I can now look at people, even ones I don’t know, and think more complexly about their circumstances and troubles, their grief and their joy. I think the real outcome here is just that I have more headspace. My mind is just a little less pinned-down than it was before, and that may be thanks to many things. In some way, I think following the news less is more of a symptom than a cause, in the sense that I can notice better how shitty reading the news makes me feel, and so I just do it less. That’s a bit of why I drink alcohol less as well, because it just kinda sucks.