Great Scads of Words

I am very sorry for starting a blog.  It’s just that you have no idea how much I miss writing essays. 

Are introductions in order?

I have often said that there is “too much of me.”  I have always needed to find places to put it, but too often, it has flooded its appropriate confines and drowned something (or usually, someone) important in my life.  I figure that from here on out, I may as well place it here, in the great wide abyss.  Surely here it is harmless.  Most will never see it.  The internet is infinite, and here it does not matter whether it is read or not read.  Surely “infinity” is a receptacle large enough. 

Wise Wordpress says in one of its many tutorials, “You don’t just want to write blog posts and have them sink into the bottomless pit of the internet, you want people to read them.”  I would argue to the contrary that one of the internet’s greatest advantages is that it is such a great ocean that no one is ever likely to read much of anything. 

I am with the camp of people who see it as a necessary, though regrettable, evil to label ourselves.  (Actually, I’m not with any camps of people; but it’s just an expression.)  For me, just one of those many labels might be (bear with me) fantasist; also, recluse.  The latter seems important to note because it explains why I appear ignorant of absolutely everything going on around me in the world: I am.  If I ever write about anything relevant or current, or indeed anything that has happened in about the last few hundred years, I can assure you it is entirely coincidental and accidental.  Any resemblance to others’ opinions or activities, or any reference to anything going on anywhere in the world would be, in fact, miraculous.  Like when you’re having a conversation with someone while watching TV and in one bizarre synchronous moment you utter the same word or phrase that the actor on TV is uttering. 

I write.  I don’t believe I can properly be termed a “writer.”  To me, in the modern sense of it, a writer is a person who consistently seeks to be published, and who wants to live a literary lifestyle, which involves a presence within certain circles, on the internet, and so on.  I don’t do these things properly (probably can’t do them), so I don’t believe it will ever be accurate to call me a writer.  I have an MFA, but we all know that a slip of paper doesn’t make us anything.  Further proof against any ownership I have of the word “writer” is that I’ve never earned a penny for it.  Money is what defines us. 

Regardless, I write, and I’ve always written, and that is the one thing I know of a certainty.  I write more constantly than I do anything else, and it’s the only thing I love doing.  I write inane meanderings like this.  And I write Muller’s Mile, in its many thousands of pages.  Across the years I’ve always been doing that, no matter how quietly.

In my life, despite all the quietude, Muller’s Mile can’t help occasionally coming up.  I have no elevator pitch for this leviathan and have given up trying, especially since I can’t remember the last time I was in an elevator, or for that matter, in a conversation with anyone. I can form an anti-pitch by saying that Muller’s Mile is a kind of elf-less and dwarf-less and quest-less fantasy. Recently I have had serious thoughts that it is a fantasy-less fantasy, and have wondered in a very desolate way where exactly that leaves me.  It’s true that there are elements that exist in Muller’s Mile that don’t precisely exist here in reality.  For some reason, I guess that makes the work fantasy.  (Doesn’t it seem, though, that the existence of a few unreal elements in a work make it, rather unremarkably…fiction?)

In any case, when you’re in the position of having a few unreal elements, you feel compelled to call the work something.  And that something tends to be the preposterously broad label of fantasy.  (I know there are potential other labels as well as thousands upon millions of sub-labels, but it’s always made me very tired trying to think about it, so “fantasy” will have to suffice.)  Fantasy suggests, to me, a great degree of inventiveness, and I know that I, for one, am a million miles from being inventive.  From the review of a recent well-regarded speculative fiction release, I snatched these two phrases – “dazzling imagination” – of which I have none; and “virtuosic prose” – also nada.

I’ve noted that one of the most common (and very natural) questions posed to me (and others in my position, too, I suspect) is: “Who are your favorite fantasy writers?  Who inspired you to write?”  The question seems to implicate: From whence do you spring?  Justify yourself!

I feel like I’m either a vast disappointment or liable to get my ass kicked when I answer apologetically that I don’t read in the fantasy genre.  I’m not really a fan of it.  Oh, I do generally trot out Tolkien.  And by that choice of words, what I mean is for the love of everything elvish and dwarvish, who in their right mind doesn’t trot out Tolkien?  Lord of the Rings is viewed by some whose job it is to have important views as the greatest and most influential work of literature of the 20th century.  It’s been blowing out the back of people’s heads for a long time, and will be continuing to do so for a long time to come.  So of course it blew out the back of mine.  But that justifies exactly nothing.  

I can also say timidly that I enjoyed Harry Potter as much as the next person.  But that distinguishes me from exactly zero other humans on the planet.  And because I am too old to have experienced Harry Potter as a child, I don’t even have that sense of proprietorship of it that those of younger generations have.

Moving away from literary pop culture and into the more general world of pop culture, I can boast of a greater ardor for Star Wars than most females of my generation.  (Now, generationally speaking, as a child of the 80s, I do claim shared proprietorship of Star Wars. Don’t get me started on that one, though.)

Beyond that, the list continues to be rather generic and broad.  Like everything else above, it’s stuff that most people can claim to like to one degree or another – Marvel comic books, Star Trek, and more recently for me, Doctor Who, which I guess boasts of somewhat less bulky fandom.  But not much.  I’m a geek, for sure, but I don’t have genuine geek cache. 

But returning to the real point, I have rarely been inspired by a fantasy writer to write.  When I did my MFA at NC State, I was relieved to discover that in fact, it’s not necessarily uncommon that the genre that writers read in is not necessarily the genre they write in.  However, it is more common that they do.

I greatly respect the track that many take of loving a particular work or genre, then emulating it.  But in regards to most everything, I’ve always been inside out, ass backwards – I was born all wonky and reclusive, and that’s my one and only qualification for writing what I do.  My head sprouts fantasy the way other people’s heads sprout status updates for social networking and outstanding ideas for getting out of the house for the evening.  If my head is anywhere, it’s imagining what’s going on in the heads of the people I dreamed up when I was still a toddler and have been following around like the proverbial puppy dog ever since (when I should have been following real people around like a puppy dog instead); they grew as I grew. 

My grasp on reality is tenuous at best. I don’t mean in a paranoid schizophrenic, hearing voices in my head kind of way.  Nevertheless, the last thing I need is fantasy as an “escape.”  Just like most people live in the real world and need to go out to a fantasy film, I live in fantasy and need to go out and watch reality – in other words, what I need from what I read or watch is a lifeline to reality to keep me tethered.  Most of what I prefer is just real, fairly straightforward stuff, I’m afraid.  But what I really love is 19th century British literature, and modern criminal investigations, and a whole host of other typically eclectic stuff.  There happens to be a little fantasy mixed in, but no more so than the average person. 

But all of this is trying to justify myself as a fantasy writer, and I already said I’m not a writer.  I did however call myself a fantasist.  This suggests someone who lives in fantasy, someone who is immersed in it, defined by it in some sort of innate way.  That seems accurate.  It also has more than a touch of self-satire in it, and that’s a relief, since it means not having to take anything seriously.  

But problematically, above, I call myself “fantastic,” or at least I appear to.  We often use this word sloppily and informally to mean, “really great.”  But anyone who knows me knows that I would never be trying to say anything nice about myself.

So to pause a moment and appreciate the wonder of words when we are precise with them and really consider their derivations, here is the word “fantastic,” in all its glory, as defined by dictionary.com:  

fan·tas·tic

adjective

1. conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination; odd and remarkable; bizarre; grotesque: fantastic rock formations; fantastic designs.

2. fanciful or capricious, as persons or their ideas or actions: We never know what that fantastic creature will say next.

3. imaginary or groundless in not being based on reality; foolish or irrational: fantastic fears.

4. extravagantly fanciful; marvelous.

5. incredibly great or extreme; exorbitant: to spend fantastic sums of money.

6. highly unrealistic or impractical; outlandish: a fantastic scheme to make a million dollars betting on horse races.

7. Informal. extraordinarily good: a fantastic musical

Origin:
1350–1400; Middle English fantastik  pertaining to the imaginative faculty < Medieval Latin fantasticus,  variant of Late Latin phantasticus  < Greek phantastikós  able to present or show (to the mind), equivalent to *phantad-,  base of phantázein  to make visible (akin to phānós  light, bright, phaínein  to make appear) + -tikos -tic

It would appear that I am fantastic in the sense of being unrestrained, odd, bizarre, (grotesque?), fanciful, capricious, foolish, unrealistic, impractical, and outlandish. 

So I have justified that I am fantastic in some sense.  Fortunately, I need far less space to justify myself as a recluse.  I leave my house to teach.  That’s about it.  I feel that I know very little of the world, and that as the years go by, I understand less and less.  I feel that all I can do is continue to happily dispatch from my remote island.  The Last-Lorn Islands, as referenced in the banner above, is the name of the world in Muller’s Mile.  I usually prefer to keep my “self” and Muller’s Mile as purely separate topics, but I will indulge myself just once by saying that for the most part, I am the Last-Lorn islands.  They were born with me in 1976, and we’ll continue on together for some time.

I love this quote from Russell Baker: “I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.”

I’m not that disillusioned, though.  Yet.  Let’s continue to dispatch for a little time.

One thing I have long noted with the “too much of me” problem is that others have lives.  I do not, despite much sound and fury signifying you know what.  So, in lieu of life stuff, all this energy goes into the production of thoughts that might be suitably converted into words.  I have discovered, through nearly forty years of experience and experimentation, that this is good for exactly nothing – not friendships, not relationships, not making money, not networking, not getting the house cleaned, not planting a vegetable garden.

It is good for one thing, and one thing only – making words for the sake of making words. 

But there comes a time when you have to live the life you have instead of hiding away because you failed to live the life you wanted.

So please forgive me: I will produce words.   Most likely, I will produce great scads of them.