dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Jan 29, 2023 4:14:13 GMT -5
BLOGPOST #1 – In which dn spraffs about shit, tells Stephen King to suck it.Recent events have convinced me it may be beneficial to keep a blog. It's probably deadnail's fault, I figure that I might fucking die at any minute with fuck all to show for it. So – if I'm dead and you're in the future reading this – know that I fucking hate you. So, what the hell is this document? What possible purpose can it serve? Frankly, I have no fucking idea: there's a lot of shit spinning around in my head right now, and emptying my brainpan – sieving through the shit for gold – seems like a good idea. I've been writing for the past two months – I got a job as a glorified night watchman, and generally have three hours or so spare in a shift. Shit's good, I'm actually getting stuff done on the editing & poetry front: it's somewhat typical for me, I'm afraid, I can't fully commit to actually working on my own shit unless I'm doing it on someone else's dime. Suckers. Last time I was in this position, I managed to get an entire novel draft completed. Admittedly it took the better part of four years, and the whole fucking thing was complete amateur hour bullshit, but still. Nothing is worthless if you learned from your mistakes. So, in the same vein of catastrophic fuckups, I'm gonna use this blog for a couple of things: first, because the writing I'm attempting to do right now is stupidly complex (lotsa moving parts and cross-referencing), it behoves me to have this big stupid fucking blog to keep my head on straight: ideas, for me at least, aren't born fully formed, nor are they born anatomically correct. It's more of a constipated gurning, followed by a bloody splat, followed by sifting through the fucking abortion in search of functional organs to Frankenstein together later. This document *is* that third-trimester abortion. See, out of nowhere the birth-analogy came to me, pasted rudely to the page; massaged, it is now part of a possible future lexicon: maybe I'll clean it up and use it, maybe not. Who knows. So, that's one part of this grand experiment. Another part will be... educational. I've been ripping my teeth on Dante recently, for reasons that I'll get to in about seven fucking blog posts from now. And – as I have reluctantly fallen on hard times and modernism – this means I need to dissect Dante, to analyse it, to get all intertextual up in this motherfucker. Anything to do with the Inferno (and, fuck, there is a lot) is grist for the mill here. Looking at how other creatives have ripped Dante off is instructive, and is good preparation for my own future literary wanderings in Hell. I'm also going to be (in the very near future) writing my thoughts on Joyce, Elliot, how epic poetry informed both author and the resultant prose. Again, there is a lot of shit to run through here, but application can only follow comprehension and how much I actually comprehend is questionable: it's all very well having a vague, phenomenological understanding of concepts, but even God needs a few rough drafts before looking at His works and declaring them to be Good. Guess there will be some autobiographical shit in here as well, just because. Tonight, for example, about seven people were kicking seven shades of shit out of each other outside the Tanner. Proper Scottish fighting (frankly, it sounded like someone was getting stabbed, lol. lmao), proper Scottish Sengas in the background screaming LEAVE IT JACKO HE'S NO WURTH IT, JACKO NOO, NO WURTH IT FUCKSAKE JACKO. What possible use it this, you ask? Well, a) who the fuck is Jacko, and b) what sort of fucking Glaswegian arsehole-speak is that anyway? What sort of fucking mongoloid looks at a name like 'Jack' and decides, apropos of nothing, to add an extra O to the end of it? What sort of fucking council-scheme mentality does that? Never noticed it before (because what's another retard pissing retarded into the ocean of retardation, am I rite?) but the extra vowel at the end of a perfectly normal name... it's the sign of a fucking bampot, it's the mark of the arsehole beast. Can I use this information? Sure. No longer do we have to describe the neanderthal forehead, the beady fucking eyes, the knuckles scraped to the bone from dragging on the pavement, or the subhuman IQ: we can just call the fucker Jacko or Franko or fucking Jim-Bobo and, boom, the job is done. Maximum characterization, minimum effort. * * * I had to mop the floor, so my train of thought got fucked. Fucking floor be a clean motherfucker now tho. Bitches better not be walking over it, I'll kill a motherfucker praise Jesus. * * * I've given myself two years to get this shit out the door. A problem with editing is one of motivation: how many times, really, can a man be expected to revise the same paragraph? Yet, in order to get my fucking ducks in a line and my syntax just fucking so, it takes me roughly 20 drafts. 20. On average. Jesus fucking wept. I used to keep taps on the wordcount – and yes, breaking the 80'000 word barrier was fucking satisfying. Unfortunately, wordcount is a piss-poor metric when writing for a thousand (or 80'000) reasons: first, because size is no guarantee of quality, but mostly because when editing the idea is to pare shit down. When sitting on a 120'000 words, and you've been using wordcount to measure the fucking enormous girth of your literary cock, it's fucking depressing to watch that count slide backwards as you slice away one unnecessary adverb at a time. Better, then, to use hours worked. Fuck counting words and characters, just say “I've worked on this for twenty-eight hours this month, God I fucking suck.” Keeping count of that shit at least gives you the illusion of progress made. I was, initially, convinced that no sane fucking author could ever approach work in this manner. Looking at Stephen King, who I'm convinced has accidentally released at least one first draft over the course of his career, for example: there simply isn't enough lifetime for a man to write over fifty fucking books and actually, you know, read through what you've written afterwards. Yet, King fucking sucks (yes he fucking does, I see you bristling there, Stephen F. U. King fucking sucks and has never stuck a fucking landing yet, eat a dick constant reader) but is undoubtedly successful. So, one path through the editing process is to take a lot of fucking drugs to get rid of the impostor syndrome and then just release any old shit. I'm not keen on this idea, even though the sapient amphetamines writing books under the pseudonym of Stephen King were sometimes funny. So, the drugs are out; the alternative (which was to write, rewrite, get depressed, throw the whole fucking baby+bathwater combo down the fucking septic tank and do fuckall for the next six months) wasn't working either. Then, I read Dante, because I was fucking bored, then I read Ulysses because I fucking hate myself, and I applied myself to trying to understand both of them. Not, like, the usual “well Ulysses follows the story of the Odyssey and blah blah blah I'm an academic wanker” - that's shite, no one gives a fuck about that. What I got focused on was *why* Joyce wrote it that way, why he infused this fucking novel with seven or eight different layers of what is, ultimately, literary wank. Like, Ulysses is entirely wank, it's the book equivalent of a crusty gymsock, or Hunter Biden's niece: the thing is fucking stratified with wank. It's geological, there's fucking shit fossilized down there near the core. Why? Well, what academics failed to tell me (christ, I've read the Bloomsday Book, God help me) and the conclusion I've come to is as follows: The first draft of Ulysses was probably fucking normal, it was a book-sans-wank. The wank was added with every fucking revision, because Joyce hated fucking editing, he got bored doing it, so to keep his brain from suicide he added more and more and more wank with every revision until it got so fucking complicated that even he wasn't 100% sure what the fuck he was trying to say anymore.And, just like that, the greatest novel in the English language was written. And rewritten. And published. And rewritten. And it's mostly layers of crusty wank. Seriously. Look at this shit. Honestly, what the fuck is that shit, you cannot be serious. Here's the thing: this, unfortunately, is the only fucking way I can even think about doing another draft of this fucking writing bullshit. So, wank it is. Right, that's the first blogpost out of the way (and I'm doing this because I'm ahead of schedule – we're aiming at a chapter a month, natch). Next blogpost will be... fuck knows. Probably an examination of cantos 1 & 2, possible application, other dotplan bullshit. CANTO! CANTO! LEAVE IT HE'S NOO FUCKIN WURTH IT! CANTO FUCKSAKE!
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Jan 29, 2023 4:17:38 GMT -5
BLOGPOST #2 – In which dn talks about modernism, rape, the application of wankSo, we've looked at... whatever that spreadsheet from hell is above, fucking organs and fucking colours and bullshit. What exactly is it, what purpose does it serve, what the fuck does it do?For those fortunate enough to have never suffered through Ulysses, let's do a quick cursory examination: on the surface, it's the story of a guy who wanders about Dublin being insufferable. Then after five chapters, it becomes another story (the focalizer changes, because FUCK YOU THAT'S WHY) about another guy who wanders about Dublin. The two wander, miss each other by feet, eventually meet up in a brothel, boom da boom turns out one guy is feeling like a fucking orphan and the other guy is a father figure then we introduce a third focalizer and the whole fucking slab of book is completely pointless. As far as plots go, it is not without its critics. So, why the reputation as the finest work of English literature ever committed to the page? Well, it's mostly because of the aforementioned wank spreadsheet. Fair enough, if the plot of the novel (loosely) follows the wanderings of Odysseus, well I guess that's the sort of classical bullshit that gets academic vaginas squirting. But, well, layer in enough strata, and your story starts to feel like it has *weight*. Fire in enough intertextual cross-referencing, analogise your characters with 17 separate fictional and historical figures, be a smart fucker with the language itself, throw in the academic equivalent of cryptic crossword puzzles, shit, throw a fucking A-tier analysis of fucking Hamlet in there as well while we're at it... If you can imagine the text of Ulysses as a series of hyperlinks, each word will take you somewhere else. Worse, each click on a link opens seventeen separate fucking wikipedia articles at once, each different yet somehow connected. It's fucking *dense*, and that density – like a fucking star threatening to collapse under it's own weight – adds gravity to the text. It sucks you in. As I postulated earlier, my theory as to how Ulysses ended up the way it did was because successive edits were driving Joyce fucking bullshit, so he started playing these fucking intellectual games to keep his mind off the tedium of the editing process. So far, so good: the end result adds a skeleton to the meat of the novel. I'm going to do likewise, but we're using Dante, because fuck Homer. This is not an original thought: Heart of Darkness (you kids will be more familiar with the modern take on Conrad's novel, Apocalypse Now) is likewise a decent into Hell. I have no fucking idea if the events and characters in Darkness match up with those in the Inferno – I personally doubt it, but I'm not an expert, so here we will fucking improve matters. It's another modernist novel, btw (tho' nothing like as dense as Joyce's fucking giant papier mache enema) and – having read this, and the Hollow Men by Elliot – I have come to the conclusion that basically the entire fucking movement is Nietzsche's fucking fault. At least thematically. See, Nietzsche spouts Thus Spake Zarathustra – God is dead, you know the one – and everyone loses their shit. Authors and poets, coming to terms with atheism and being alone in an uncaring, godless universe, waste an entire rainforest of trees trying to unfuck themselves. “Mistah Curtz, he dead.” says Heart of Darkness, after two hundred fucking pages of sailing up a fucking shit river to find the dead fucker. See, it's all about father figures (for what is God but the ultimate father figure?) and then it turns out that dad's fucked off and died, but Satan's fucking about in the background somewhere probably, who knows, maybe the real Satan was the friends we made along the way, cue endless fucking depression and sometimes the fucking apocalypse. In short: authors are creators, they all have god-complexes, now they're suddenly atheists with god-complexes, OH FUCK I DON'T EXIST WHAT'S THE POINT brains in buckets and bricks were shat. Glorious. So, what better way to explore this than by pulling a Ulysses but with Dante? My novel suffers from the same fucking flaws as Joyce's – plotwise, it lacks structure, it's all meat with no fucking bone. What little plot it has is pretty Heart of Darkness (or Arse of Darkness, I guess), which is a basic bog-standard journey to... well, into a metaphorical hell. Into The Shit, if you will. So, by rewriting (again) and keying certain characters to their literary primogenitors, we can finally get some fucking weight back into proceedings, and I won't die of intellectual stavation. This alone is not enough, however. The original plan I had for getting some fucking allegorical mojo about this fucking thing was to use Tarot cards, and the symbolism inherent – that's how this whole fucking mess of a plan started, at any rate. See, I always wanted illustrations at the start of each chapter, but couldn't figure out a way to integrate that shit with the text. First, I thought about one of the characters being an illustrator, and the pictures were part of their sketchbook, but frankly that's first grade bullshit and we can do better than that. Then I did a couple of stain glass window textures for a doom wad. And the idea just snapped into place. I enjoyed doing these, telling a little story through pictographs – in the above example, I illustrated (through cunning allegory) the fall of Doomworld. Note the globe (well, The World tarot card, at least in my mind) at the feet of the central figure, with the sun rising like a halo behind the head. Orange and yellow, the colours of the apocalypse. The middle figure lifts a skirt, exposing a circumcised penis; in her hand, she holds a mace shaped like... well, whatever the biological symbol for female is called: Crux Gynecoloica or some shit. He/she is striking down the forum users in the lower corners, one of whom holds his hands up in futile defiance trying to save the world, whilst the other is escaping the frame, pointing his finger at the giant fucking feminine penis suspended over and ready to... um, destroy the world. See, that's the sort of allegory and quasi-religious imagery that we can all get behind; as subtle as Allah, and as fashionable as a suicide vest. And, I figured if I knocked out twenty-ish of these things, subtlety inferencing the events / themes of the novel, then that would add structure, weight, meaning, whatever. And then I thought, what if tarot cards... Well, you get the idea. And the thing about tarot cards is that they are vague enough in meaning that wrapping them around various chapter themes was not actually a huge fucking hassle – tarot and horoscope are fun like that. Even better, tarot cards come with subsequent layers of strata: colours, for example, are associated with certain cards, so rewrite the chapter to have that colour mentioned predominantly. The Wheel of Fortune is associated with Aquarius, for another example: let's add some Aquarian themes, and exaggerate those little serendipities that already exist. And Dante's devils and demons? Most are lifted wholesale from Greek & Roman myth. Guess what the tarot also steals from, and you'll get a prize (this week only, payable in the universal currency of Zimbabwean $RAPEDOLLAR$.) Then I'll pay someone to draw little pictures, and hopefully – if I do the job right, get the fucking subtexts feeling alive, and link it all together by being a total fucking modernist wanker – we'll finally have a fucking novel worth reading. Writing like this also has another effect (I discovered it first on the accidental, but consciously reusing the technique throughout the edit), which I'll go into next blogpost, where I'm afraid we'll be back at fucking Joyce again. But also, strangely, Doom. And no, we're not at the cantos yet.
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Jan 29, 2023 4:18:29 GMT -5
BLOGPIST #3 – In which dn compares himself to the Unabomber, butt-pancakes
Being a writer, you don't half meet some fucking wankers. Nine times out of ten, it's some fucking cretin begging you to read their shit, or slip them the secret handshake that will get their piss-encrusted chode into the mouth of whatever cuckolded literary agent you happen to be sharing a bedsit with that week.
These fucks, they inhabit little circles. Like Hell.
I dunno who is responsible for this plague (Kurt Vonnegut might be to fucking blame here, as good a shout as any), but these writer's workshops are the worst. At the head of the table is some third-rate failure, some slut who slept her way to 10% tenure and 90% anal haemorrhoids. Around us are the usual gaggle of co-morbidities: there will be at least three identical flavours of genderspecial, some talentless prick in a trenchcoat who listened to a Terry Pratchett audiobook once, someone with dyslexia (I shit you fucking not – can't read, thinks it can write) and a Neoclassical Post-Modern McGonagallist, who at least has the virtue of being a fucking alcoholic so you can go to the pub with him afterwards.
The only thing a writer's workshop is good for is an Irish car-bomb.
At some point during the course you will be introduced to Real Writers: these will inevitably be members of Haemorrhoid's inner circle, a little incestuous clique of fucking horror with more sets of chromosomes than brain cells. Prepare your anus: what follows is a two hour workshop slash cum-guzzling session with a woman who once had a book on feminist cross-stitching published, and subsequently bankrupted the fucking company.
It's better than the seminar on deconstructionist “found” poetry, but not by much.
Fucking regardez, poop pour tete: writing is a lonely profession (it's fucking meant to be, if you can't entertain yourself then you have no fucking business trying to entertain other people). You may be tempted to assuage that loneliness by interacting with other human beings. DO NOT GIVE IN TO THIS TEMPTATION. Other people are shit, and the ones who actually know what they are doing (i.e: actual fucking talent) have better things to do with their time than listen to and assess your fucking asinine pretentious pre-school bullshit.
There is one exception to this rule: the dead writer. Not dead dead, you understand: no, the ones who were one-trick ponies, or had one good fucking idea and have been coasting by on fumes of mediocrity ever since. Palahnuik is one of these: wrote Fight Club, shat the bed, now he surrounds himself with lickspittles at “writer's workshops” who pay Chuck Palahnuik money to tell Chuck Palahnuik how fantastic Chuck Palahnuik is.
Fucking christ. And no, I'm not googling how to spell Palahnuik, use your fucking blood money to buy a better name you fucking unpronounceable cunt. I'll get back to you and your fucking grift later, bawjaws.
My point is (did I have a point? Fuck, what was my point?) you've got to be your own critic. Learn to know when you are sucking ass, learn to recognise the flavour of your own brown butt-pancakes, correct course accordingly. Relying on other people is fucking retarded because 99% of other people are fucking retarded. It's a zero sum game where all the players are retards.
Oh! Shit, no, I just remembered where I was going with this: the manifesto. Now, at some point during these fucking one-handed sewing circles, Grapes of Arse will suggest writing a manifesto. This will be yet another exercise in fucking futility, because if it can be written in less than a thousand words it probably didn't need to be written in the fucking first place. Obvious things never do.
No, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing with semtex. You want to go full Unabomber on that shit, full metal jacket, full-blown AIDS, the full 10'000 pages. Which I have, somewhat belatedly, realized is exactly what I've been doing with this fucking shitshow of a blog.
lol. lmao.
Tune in next time for fuck knows what, I don't care.
|
|
BIG DICK NIGGA
this post is a lie about my bodily proportions
Major Arlene obsessed, 100% verified freakazoid. AKA bzzrak
Posts: 2,292
|
Post by BIG DICK NIGGA on Jan 31, 2023 16:16:35 GMT -5
An entertaining read like every darknation blogpost. Please keep it up. Had to look this guy up. It's harder than you might think thanks to miss Rowling's wonderful franchise. Wikipedia calls him the worst poet to ever write in English. Your alcoholic friend seems cool.
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Feb 2, 2023 22:59:47 GMT -5
BIG DICK NIGGA I've got like, 3000 words of fucking notes tangentially related to McGonagall (in footnotes) if you're interested in how that primogenitor lowcow influenced Scottish art etc. I'll pm it to you if you're interested. Anyway, moving on to... BLEGPOST #4 – dn .plans Chapter 3 & 4Right, here we go. I realize we are jumping in media res here – we'll loop back around to the first chapters at some point, but I need to keep this shitmachine running on schedule. 1) Correspondences – Canto 5, New Colossus(C3) & Ozymandias(C4), The Lovers (C3) & Judgement (C4)On Canto 5Dante & Virgil cross the Acheron & encounter Minos, judge of Hell. They scoot past him, then enter Circle II – The Lustful. Winds buffet the souls here, scourging them, forcing them to remain forever in motion, inconstant. Virgil calls down two Italian pricks to talk to Dante; don't care who they are, it's what they *say* that is interesting. Basically, they don't accept blame their punishment – Love made them do it, Lust is a form of compulsion: they are, essentially slaves to their more animal instincts, and thus deny the free-will with which God imbued them. That's why they are damned, and that's what the winds pushing them all over the place are all about – Lust is the subjugation of reason by desire, they denied free-will, it is a perversion of the greatest gift of God, and so their punishment is to be stripped of all agency, blown about in a vortex for eternity. Application of this, adapting C3 & C4 to follow Dante is relatively straight forward – geophycological / personification of weather & place to match atmosphere. *But* we can do better than just copy+paste of weather effects: C3 concerns itself much with music (and the excruciating volume of such in the FGDJDS) – personifying that (& imbuing it with the qualities mentioned in Dante's blasting winds) it far more interesting. Re: free-will. Canto 5 could be described as anti-deterministic. This is juxtaposed against C1, which has a distinctly Calvinist tone & theme. Prot runs against free-will (in many ways our protagonist is the Anti-Dante), and so he is damned. Also pretty meta – it's a fucking story, after all, the ending for Prot et al. is already pre-ordained because I have already fucking written it. Re: Minos. Check this fucker out. That's a depiction of Minos by Michelangelo, and it's interesting for a few reasons. First, the ass ears – apparently, the face of Minos was based on a Bishop that Michelangelo disliked, hence the donkey ears, but that are also reminiscent of horns – probably a reference to Minos being the ancient world's most famous and original cuck. For those that don't know, Minos' wife fell in love with a fucking bull, because women are degenerate size-queens. She got Daedalus to build her a MECHANICAL COW SUIT so the bull (who was meant to be sacrificed to fucking Zeus or some shit) could mount her and fuck her. Repeatedly. She never took her morning after pill either, so the bull got her pregnant. Whoops, sorry Minos, that kid probably isn't yours, DNA tests reveal the child is the fucking Minotaur. Lol, eat shit cuckboy. Anyway, long story short, Daedalus builds the Labyrinth to keep the Minotaur in, fuckery ensues, Daedalus & his son Icarus flee the Labyrinth on wax-and-feather wings and you know the rest. Also, there appears to be a fucking snake eating Minos' cock. First, awesome. Dante says Minos has a tail he wraps around himself (why the fuck does Minos have a tail? No idea, makes zero fucking sense, so Michelangelo decided to go the snake-cock route when depicting it). We see snakes in biblical works, we think Satan and forbidden apple trees and women doing retarded shit to get us men kicked out of literal paradise because they eat forbidden apples and fuck forbidden bulls and frankly I wish they would stop doing shit like that. Anyway, we can code the interior of the FGDJDS with Eden (biblical veg, temptation & snakey shit) & work some of that shit in there as well. The Minotaur is trickier – we do meet the Minotaur further down in Hell, but no idea how we're going to work the geneology into the plot of the novel, yet. Gambit does have a brother (Briefcase Willie) so we can make it work. Oh yeah, we're coding Gambit's mother as Minos here, judge of Hell (oh gnoes I'm gender-swapping established characters), she who kicks you off the side of the cliff and down to the Circle for the punishment you deserve. It just fits, through we're working with the Snake-cock-as-Satan-as-Judgement version of Minos here (meaning he's basically a puppet to the devil, thus removing free-will. Ironically.) On New Colossus & OzymandiasSince C3 & C4 are linked, so too is the poetry selected to illustrate. New Colossus (the verse inscribed on the Statue of Liberty) celebrates the birth of a new empire; Ozymandias, by comparison, mourns the death of a civilization. Both are sonnets, which makes the comparison even more delicious – Colossus comes first (“Bring me your tired huddled masses yearning to breathe free” etc. etc.), we juxtapose that with the idea of the Fabulous Gambit DJ Disco Shed (e.g: the liberation from draconian licensing laws, society's normal rules of conduct & decorum, etc.). We then follow that with C4 & Ozymandias (“Look on my works, ye mighty, & despair”) as we follow the FGDJDS into inevitable downfall and catastrophe. It's weird to think it, but once upon a time The Statue of Liberty must have been shining bronze (“Lift my lamp before the golden door!”) before it got all green and fugly. Fortunately, the colour of this chapter is orange (which is bronze enough for our purposes), so we're batting three-for-three here. Speaking of colours The Lovers & JudgementThe Lovers (Orange) – Inversed (we'll be working with inverted cards for the most part, because fucked up is more interesting than not fucked up). Card features a man & woman nude facing each other, the background is the Garden of Eden with an angel (Raphael, but probably change it to Michael(angelo) for the book artwork – we're working a lot with Red Right Hand imagery in the novel, so Michael is our patron here). Apple tree & snake also featured. Meaning wise, the inverted card symbolises out of sync – relationships are strained (key this to Ziggie & Prot), but also represents inner conflicts & war with yourself. Inner conflict in C3 escalates to outer conflict in C4. The Lovers are associated with Air (the Hell vortex / music in our case), Mercury (apothecaries &... well, fuck, we'll just run with Z. being mercurial and call it a day) & Gemini – so lots of dichotomies, twins, deliberate mirroring between characters. Judgement (C4, Red) – an escalation. Card depicts men & women rising from the grave in a Rapture-like sequence – key this to the Harrowing of Hell, when Jesus went into Hell to bust his Jewish homies out, Moses & Abraham etc. Dante mentions this in the Inferno, it's why the door is hanging off the fucking hinges (the “abandon all hope ye who enter here” portal in canto 2) cuz Jesus kicked the fucker down. We've got another angel featured on this card (Gabriel) – unsure as of yet how I'm going to work this in. He's blowing a horn (to sound the Rapture, I guess), but I'll probably invert that to the Horn of Jericho (OR! perhaps the horn that blows to signal Armageddon & the final battle). Judgement inverted implies past mistakes (Z & P again), fear of judgement (personified by Gambit's mum here) & shame. Really, really going to be laying on the shame factor here. *But* we also have the Gambit-Cabbage relationship ongoing, so can work with that as well. Judgement is associated with Fire (smoke, in this case), no particular zodiac sign (but Pluto, for some weird reason). Quotes (Kirkpatrick & Gray) “House of Woe” - correspond to the FGDJDS “A smaller circle of intenser pain” - correspond not to geography, but to Prot's social circle declining year on year. “His sense of sin is very fine” - Minos, use for G. Mother “Those who made reason bow to carnal desires” - Gambit & Cabbage mating dance
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Feb 3, 2023 7:27:53 GMT -5
BLAGPOST #5 – battledotplan 1
combine characters of Paul Fucking Cruickshank & Rhombus; they are basically the same anyway. Potential problems = a 17 year old Elvis fan in 1989 seems unlikely. Resolution 1 = change fixation (emulating a movie star may be more realistic – because of the higher focus on drugs in this draft, perhaps he thinks he's Scarface? OR change musician (Not Bowie, tho: don't want references to Ziggy Stardust in the text, plus unfavourable Trainspotting comparison). Resolution 2 = Rhombus origin story: his mother was a dancer (Las Vegas), she claims & told her son that he is the Son of Elvis. Rhombus runs with it. Later (like, near end of book) Old Norman tells (Prot?) that Rhombus' mother fucked an Elvis impersonator. Keks & Finis.
Ages, main plot. Need to resolve this: Z needs to be 17 (4/5 in 1989), making G & P 22 / 23, Rhombus 29ish etc. Explain age range with “smaller circle of intenser misery” (tightens like a noose, etc.)
Combine 1st Gambit & 1st Ziggie chapters into one – now characters are attending funeral in church (this means Z is no longer from Dundee, as mentioned in Dundee chapter. Resolution = Brick tag now features travelling teams like football clubs, people from Alyth go to Blairgowrie to batter them etc. etc.)
Change Speiros name to Spraffer Stu in chapter 2 onwards, apply contraction in future chapters (“Spraff”) to hint at (a) the passage of time (a good five years pass between C2 and C3) and (b) degradation. But (c) main purpose is to hint at Z's real name (actually, add something re: Z identity in C1 as well – lisp or some shit)
Change facilitator of C2 from Rhombus to Spraffer Stu (but imply business linkage between the two). Orbiting characters need to be fleshed out & not just names, & the change from Paul into Rhombus means that he's already got more than enough screen time.
In that vein, change Arran McGregor to Arson Fisher – Arson to imply psychopathy / childhood trauma, reheat old “fireman” story (Redford #2, burning granny to the ground, bad boys school etc.) as explanation. Still the son of (Rev.) Willie Fisher.
Reminds me, need to tidy up religion. Prot no longer Catholic – doesn't fit with overall themes of predestination. Presbyterian is better: retains Catholic trappings (Eucharist etc.) while introducing a more Calvinist outlook (the school of hard Knox, kek). Rewrite church chapters, Willie Fisher now the minister running service. Remove trenchfoot segue from beginning of new C4, rework into C3.
Rhombus combine = problem, re: Rhombus Post. Think of resolution (driving licence removal post-Gambit, only recently got it back). Andrew-James now postman? Rhombus could work for council, pushing one of those ridiculous dog shit bins, working with AJ to run Rhombus Post? Hmmm.
Preacher Man segue (Arran / Arson in desert story): write it, work it in somehow to show religion (we have copious Dante parallel's & character encounters to work through, each with their own wee stories. This segue will work.
Fatmandu = Cerberus. Work Z into the Virgil role (“...with her palms extended, took from the fridge, and with her fists well filled blah blah”)
Minos. Remove all references to ANY word / metaphor deemed snake-like that does not apply to Gambit's mother. (instances include serpentine, coiled etc.)
Introduce Trenchfoot prescience earlier (prob in C3) as explanation (amongst at least 3) for sections of novel where we noclip through walls and generally cheat 1st person narrative. (Kwiatz Haderach theory: “By the pricking of my toes, something wicked this way hoves,” re: Minos approaching.)
2nd explanation – Cantos 10, the way the dead perceive time (Everybody is Dead theory).
Ten Inch Dave now = literal midget. Use Redford #3 segue to resolve Rhombus temporal instability problem (i.e: he's in two fucking places at once at one point). Introduce his drug of choice being amphetamine earlier in the novel (he keeps his stash in the boot of the car): he's asleep during C3, have him doing hyperactive laps during C4 as he medicates himself.
Charon imagery of ambulance: girdle covered in grease, Six of Swords card (medical lancets?), the “bearer of the dead.” Headlights like burning wheels etc.
Canto 1 prayer: integrate into C1 at Z father funeral.
Acheron now = River Ericht (has to be, Charon ferries them over). This means that Tay = Styx? Isla – Lethe? Ford Orion is now Rhombus' car (called the Rhomulan kek).
Remove ALL BACKTRACKING from novel – this is important Heart of Darkness shit, always need to be moving forward into Hell. So Shed – Irish Mo – Caravan in new running order, followed by Alehouse 1 & 2 (Dis, Circle 5) then Exodus – Dundee – Jail 1 & 2 etc. Move Shed into Fergie, move swamp from Shed to Mo's for better Dante correspondence. Prot now lives in Woods of Suicide (circle 6), Jail now circle 8 (Malborge / 8th Lock)
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Feb 16, 2023 21:59:20 GMT -5
BLIGPAST #6 – In which dn discovers Justice Card works better for C4 than Judgement, causing fucking hassles. Also the ballad of Wee Steve.
There once was a dwarf of my acquaintance called Wee Steve.
He belonged to the same family of nutcases who, in order of fuckupishness:
(a) the brother burned his granny's house to fucking ashes playing “fireman” (and, while playing with some hellish blank-firing gun, decided to see how strong the mechanism was, promptly shot himself in the fucking mouth, knocking his front teeth out)
(b) Marti, the sister, whose exploits stealing cars, getting drunk, and stealing cars whilst drunk are the subject of another of this novel's wee stories, and
(c) Wee Steve, a dwarf with a chronic amphetamine habit.
Glorious.
Now, Wee Steve is a fucking legend. He's sorted himself out now (the little fucker has two kids who are probably taller than he is at this point, plus a 9/10 bongland wife. The only explaination for any of this is that she must have a midget fetish, I shit you not) but he was WILD in his youth.
I've already made an account elsewhere of the day he attacked a two story tenement block: if you've never been trapped in a house that is being laid siege to by a dwarf, you've never lived. Little bastard was running back and forth across the road at 11pm at night and taking flying jump kicks at the door to the close for a good half an hour, that's how fucking pissed he was, like a fucking midget battering ram. But before that (tbh, the siege-dwarfing was justified) Wee Steve has a fairly severe drug problem.
He's... if not exactly famous, then he moves in famous circles. He's been in at least one movie that I know of (one of the fucking Harry Potter movies, if you can believe that), he circulates his CV under the title of “Professional Dwarf”. Not just fucking Snow White pantomime shit: should the notion take you (and you can afford his exorbitant fees) you can hire Wee Steve for your bachelor party, you can organise a round of dwarf tossing with the little fucker. This is London, and shit happens in London that makes the Wolf of Wall Street look like a fucking documentary.
The side effect of this was Wee Steve was making cash hand-over-midget-fist. And, because he was partying 24/7, he developed a *little* bit of a speed problem.
So, he's back in Scotland for a few days, seeing the family, out for a rager at night. And he scores some amphetamines in a club, thinks it's mostly chalk and Ajax powder in the fucking tabs, and eats most of the fucking bag.
This is a mistake. The speed probably *was* cut, granted, but the jury is still out on whatever the fuck it was cut with.[/i]
The end result of this is Wee Steve has what the mental hospital later described as an amphetamine-related psychotic break. First, the fucking club became some absolute Grecian hell in which Wee Steve was trapped, suffocating. His mates carried him out (easy, cuz dwarf), then Wee Steve decided that his mates were trying to kill him, so he started biting.
So far nothing hugely out of the usual.
Where things get REALLY out of hand is, as Wee Steve takes off into the night, he decides to flag down a passing car. A young woman – seeing a dwarf in distress – stops and opens the door, at which point Wee Steve scrambles into the passenger side like a stabbed rat and demands she take him directly to the police, because his mates are trying to assassinate him. Also, he then threatens to stab the woman unless she takes him directly to the police station.
This somehow made sense to him at the time, although the knife he was threatening her with was entirely imaginary. Still, it's a psychotic dwarf threatening to murder you, so best believe the shaking, crying woman did entirely as requested. About twenty minutes later, walking into the police station, Wee Steve has what can only be described as a junkie's epiphany – what if it's actually the fucking POLICE that are the assassins, that his mates have anticipated his ingenious kidnapping-and-theatening-woman-with-GBH scheme, and the boabies are the ones who have been paid to kill him?
The interior of a police station is not the best place to be having such thoughts, especially when you are vocalizing your inner monologue and attempting to chew your own tongue off. Wee Steve is dog-piled by an entire station worth of feds and promptly tossed into a cell to chill out figure out WTF is going on.
Whoever was in charge of night shift obviously decided that fucking psychopathic, drug-fiend dwarves were beyond his paygrade. So he (or she) phoned for the men in the white van and told them to bring the funny coat with the long sleeves.
And so, Wee Steve was sectioned under the mental health act. Which brings us to the second act of the evening, inside the fucking state hospital. And leads us to an interesting fact: apparently, the Murray Royal is *not* dwarf-proof. Exactly how Wee Steve managed to fit himself through a window smaller than a fucking catflap remains a mystery to this day: what can be said is that for the next hour Wee Steve was hiding in a bush on the hospital grounds with a stick he was desperately trying to sharpen with his teeth.
Impressive stuff.
* * *
Right, problems re: C4. Can't use Judgement for the chapter – While the Plutonic references, re: Minos were comfy, the problem is it's a fire card, and Dante is very specifically using Air in cantos 5. Plus, after a few days of trying to force a round peg into a square hole, the follows occurs to me: Minos is NOT the Judge of the dead, that job belongs to God. Minos is a fucking turnkey, nothing more, hence the Justice card being a better fit all round.
JUSTICE – Green, Air, Libra
Card – Judge on throne, sword upright, scales in other hand (scales = snake metaphor? Might make it work). Sits between two pillars (will make this two titans in illustration, New Colossus & Ozymandias) – pillars are also found in Hierophant & High Priestess cards, so need to work in connections there (no problem – the titans return after 8th Lock anyway). Figure is crowned – will add horns & ears here for Midas imagery.
Meaning – Justice, Fairness, Truth & Law, and the search for them. Inverted – denying accountability, blaming others, dishonesty (even with yourself). Ego blinds to the lesson. Prejudice & bias inform bad decisions.
The colour is the colour – working this into the narrative (which has been very predominantly red / yellow so far) is a bit of a scunner. Works for Colossus, tho, so at least there is that. Solution – lean heavier into Garden of Eden imagery inside shed, use the serpentine nature of G. Maw to work colour into it, the usual. Christmas Tree from attic = useful for the above. (add: “single red bauble” to tree).
The air metaphors are resolved, continue with the music shit & atmospherics.
Libra – Venus rules this planet (works for plot, actually), and apparently the “body part” associated is “lower back & kidneys” no I don't know why either. Obviously it's a sign about doubles and partnership, teamwork etc. (so we are definitely inverting that - “every man for himself” etc. at the end, but relationships are key during this chapter anyway). We're talking balance, harmony etc.
Associated with the Goddess Themis, ruled over justice and law. Daughter of Uranus & Gaia, connections to Venus & Aphrodite in Greek / Roman Myth. (work with this, this is total “subjugation of reason by desire” shit). Saturn (Z's ruling correspondence) is exalted by Libra, which already works.
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Feb 18, 2023 7:39:57 GMT -5
BLARTPAST # 7 - Sketching shit for tarot cards.No major update, but fed up of posting textwalls. So been working on the tarot card design for chapter 4. I need two pillars in the background for the (Justice / Minos) figure to sit between - figured that the pillars could be statues of the main characters (harkening back to the Ozymandias / New Colossus imagery, etc. etc.) who are being sentenced. This is all rough work, but I'm finally pleased with the facial design of Z. I was fucking about with colour, but the final cards / chapter illustrations will be in black and white, so meh, just did it for fun, it's just a close-up of the face so I could get a feel for what the image would look like when it's finished. In truth, I'm only doing these as a backup - chances are I'll hire a proper artist when the time comes, but I figure it would be useful to have reference for what I want the fucking cards to look like / all the imagery I want to include. As for the sphere... again, just playing with ideas. Could be Mars, could be a pentagram, could be a bloody ovum, could be to be all three. Dunno what the crown is about - was looking at Mike Mignola for ideas on how to get extreme contrast in a B&W image while still being readable to the eye (Protip: you don't) and the crown just kinda fell from his pocket into mine. Anyway, that's been the work for today. Woo.
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Feb 18, 2023 10:00:01 GMT -5
Finis. Reasonably pleased.
|
|
BIG DICK NIGGA
this post is a lie about my bodily proportions
Major Arlene obsessed, 100% verified freakazoid. AKA bzzrak
Posts: 2,292
|
Post by BIG DICK NIGGA on Feb 18, 2023 10:40:32 GMT -5
Looks cool
|
|
|
Post by ass-Klappin superfreaK enjoyer on Feb 19, 2023 11:11:21 GMT -5
BIG DICK NIGGA I've got like, 3000 words of fucking notes tangentially related to McGonagall (in footnotes) if you're interested in how that primogenitor lowcow influenced Scottish art etc. I'll pm it to you if you're interested. Anyway, moving on to... BLEGPOST #4 – dn .plans Chapter 3 & 4Right, here we go. I realize we are jumping in media res here – we'll loop back around to the first chapters at some point, but I need to keep this shitmachine running on schedule. 1) Correspondences – Canto 5, New Colossus(C3) & Ozymandias(C4), The Lovers (C3) & Judgement (C4)On Canto 5Dante & Virgil cross the Acheron & encounter Minos, judge of Hell. They scoot past him, then enter Circle II – The Lustful. Winds buffet the souls here, scourging them, forcing them to remain forever in motion, inconstant. Virgil calls down two Italian pricks to talk to Dante; don't care who they are, it's what they *say* that is interesting. Basically, they don't accept blame their punishment – Love made them do it, Lust is a form of compulsion: they are, essentially slaves to their more animal instincts, and thus deny the free-will with which God imbued them. That's why they are damned, and that's what the winds pushing them all over the place are all about – Lust is the subjugation of reason by desire, they denied free-will, it is a perversion of the greatest gift of God, and so their punishment is to be stripped of all agency, blown about in a vortex for eternity. Application of this, adapting C3 & C4 to follow Dante is relatively straight forward – geophycological / personification of weather & place to match atmosphere. *But* we can do better than just copy+paste of weather effects: C3 concerns itself much with music (and the excruciating volume of such in the FGDJDS) – personifying that (& imbuing it with the qualities mentioned in Dante's blasting winds) it far more interesting. Re: free-will. Canto 5 could be described as anti-deterministic. This is juxtaposed against C1, which has a distinctly Calvinist tone & theme. Prot runs against free-will (in many ways our protagonist is the Anti-Dante), and so he is damned. Also pretty meta – it's a fucking story, after all, the ending for Prot et al. is already pre-ordained because I have already fucking written it. Re: Minos. Check this fucker out. That's a depiction of Minos by Michelangelo, and it's interesting for a few reasons. First, the ass ears – apparently, the face of Minos was based on a Bishop that Michelangelo disliked, hence the donkey ears, but that are also reminiscent of horns – probably a reference to Minos being the ancient world's most famous and original cuck. For those that don't know, Minos' wife fell in love with a fucking bull, because women are degenerate size-queens. She got Daedalus to build her a MECHANICAL COW SUIT so the bull (who was meant to be sacrificed to fucking Zeus or some shit) could mount her and fuck her. Repeatedly. She never took her morning after pill either, so the bull got her pregnant. Whoops, sorry Minos, that kid probably isn't yours, DNA tests reveal the child is the fucking Minotaur. Lol, eat shit cuckboy. Anyway, long story short, Daedalus builds the Labyrinth to keep the Minotaur in, fuckery ensues, Daedalus & his son Icarus flee the Labyrinth on wax-and-feather wings and you know the rest. Also, there appears to be a fucking snake eating Minos' cock. First, awesome. Dante says Minos has a tail he wraps around himself (why the fuck does Minos have a tail? No idea, makes zero fucking sense, so Michelangelo decided to go the snake-cock route when depicting it). We see snakes in biblical works, we think Satan and forbidden apple trees and women doing retarded shit to get us men kicked out of literal paradise because they eat forbidden apples and fuck forbidden bulls and frankly I wish they would stop doing shit like that. Anyway, we can code the interior of the FGDJDS with Eden (biblical veg, temptation & snakey shit) & work some of that shit in there as well. The Minotaur is trickier – we do meet the Minotaur further down in Hell, but no idea how we're going to work the geneology into the plot of the novel, yet. Gambit does have a brother (Briefcase Willie) so we can make it work. Oh yeah, we're coding Gambit's mother as Minos here, judge of Hell (oh gnoes I'm gender-swapping established characters), she who kicks you off the side of the cliff and down to the Circle for the punishment you deserve. It just fits, through we're working with the Snake-cock-as-Satan-as-Judgement version of Minos here (meaning he's basically a puppet to the devil, thus removing free-will. Ironically.) On New Colossus & OzymandiasSince C3 & C4 are linked, so too is the poetry selected to illustrate. New Colossus (the verse inscribed on the Statue of Liberty) celebrates the birth of a new empire; Ozymandias, by comparison, mourns the death of a civilization. Both are sonnets, which makes the comparison even more delicious – Colossus comes first (“Bring me your tired huddled masses yearning to breathe free” etc. etc.), we juxtapose that with the idea of the Fabulous Gambit DJ Disco Shed (e.g: the liberation from draconian licensing laws, society's normal rules of conduct & decorum, etc.). We then follow that with C4 & Ozymandias (“Look on my works, ye mighty, & despair”) as we follow the FGDJDS into inevitable downfall and catastrophe. It's weird to think it, but once upon a time The Statue of Liberty must have been shining bronze (“Lift my lamp before the golden door!”) before it got all green and fugly. Fortunately, the colour of this chapter is orange (which is bronze enough for our purposes), so we're batting three-for-three here. Speaking of colours The Lovers & JudgementThe Lovers (Orange) – Inversed (we'll be working with inverted cards for the most part, because fucked up is more interesting than not fucked up). Card features a man & woman nude facing each other, the background is the Garden of Eden with an angel (Raphael, but probably change it to Michael(angelo) for the book artwork – we're working a lot with Red Right Hand imagery in the novel, so Michael is our patron here). Apple tree & snake also featured. Meaning wise, the inverted card symbolises out of sync – relationships are strained (key this to Ziggie & Prot), but also represents inner conflicts & war with yourself. Inner conflict in C3 escalates to outer conflict in C4. The Lovers are associated with Air (the Hell vortex / music in our case), Mercury (apothecaries &... well, fuck, we'll just run with Z. being mercurial and call it a day) & Gemini – so lots of dichotomies, twins, deliberate mirroring between characters. Judgement (C4, Red) – an escalation. Card depicts men & women rising from the grave in a Rapture-like sequence – key this to the Harrowing of Hell, when Jesus went into Hell to bust his Jewish homies out, Moses & Abraham etc. Dante mentions this in the Inferno, it's why the door is hanging off the fucking hinges (the “abandon all hope ye who enter here” portal in canto 2) cuz Jesus kicked the fucker down. We've got another angel featured on this card (Gabriel) – unsure as of yet how I'm going to work this in. He's blowing a horn (to sound the Rapture, I guess), but I'll probably invert that to the Horn of Jericho (OR! perhaps the horn that blows to signal Armageddon & the final battle). Judgement inverted implies past mistakes (Z & P again), fear of judgement (personified by Gambit's mum here) & shame. Really, really going to be laying on the shame factor here. *But* we also have the Gambit-Cabbage relationship ongoing, so can work with that as well. Judgement is associated with Fire (smoke, in this case), no particular zodiac sign (but Pluto, for some weird reason). Quotes (Kirkpatrick & Gray) “House of Woe” - correspond to the FGDJDS “A smaller circle of intenser pain” - correspond not to geography, but to Prot's social circle declining year on year. “His sense of sin is very fine” - Minos, use for G. Mother “Those who made reason bow to carnal desires” - Gambit & Cabbage mating dance The person next to the Bishop/minos looks like the mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot: Funny thing about the bishop depiction, is that the bishop pleaded with the pope to have it taken down. But the pope refused, because he believe the artists were inspired by the divine.
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Feb 20, 2023 2:50:15 GMT -5
She really does, heh. Probably a thyroid problem causing her eyes to launch out of her fucking skull in an attempt to establish a geosynchronous orbit.
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Feb 27, 2023 19:10:11 GMT -5
More from the sketchbook in glorious PotatoVision. Design of card is pretty much finalized now: next step, vectoring. Really need to get my copy of PSP 5 working again, this MSpaint shit is doing my nut in.
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Feb 28, 2023 12:02:50 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by ass-Klappin superfreaK enjoyer on Mar 1, 2023 10:00:59 GMT -5
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Mar 1, 2023 10:42:03 GMT -5
Better to rule in Hell than serve in Chicago imho.
|
|
|
Post by use3d on Mar 3, 2023 13:04:04 GMT -5
Stoked to see you writing again DN, and on someone else's dime no less. Perfecto! Feel free to email me anything you'd like a more detailed critique on.
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Mar 5, 2023 6:54:06 GMT -5
use3d glorious man. I should have the first 12k finished by the end of the month, will send it to you then. Hope you're doing ok, last couple of months have been shit. Dm me if you need to vent.
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Apr 19, 2023 20:28:26 GMT -5
"It is finished."
Well, part 1 of 4 is done, anyway. Whew lads. Near 25'000 words pretty much locked down, ahead of schedule as well.
So, who wants to proofread and feedback?
Don't all rush.
|
|
Lobo
Doomer
Posts: 556
|
Post by Lobo on Apr 20, 2023 9:11:36 GMT -5
I'd read it for sure, but cannot make any commitment to proofreading: don't have time to wipe my arse after taking a dump these days...
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Apr 20, 2023 10:19:30 GMT -5
Proofreading was a poor word choice: I've been an editor for published works before, I'll catch those fucking typos later.
At this point what I'm mostly interested in is if the damn thing works, if the syntax comes across as well as I hope it does, if people (non-language spergs) pick up on at least one or two of the thousand fucking references and inter-textual shenanigans I've been adding to the mix.
/me taps fingers on desk
Ok, best example of what I'm talking about: the novel is following the path of Dante as he trips down into the inferno. Ergo, we need a door (Through me you go to the grief wracked city / Through me to ever-lasting pain you go / Yadda yadda yadda / Abandon all hope ye who enter here). Everyone knows the line, and the novel needs the door reference.
Now, it would be easy to add in graffiti above a door somewhere in the opening chapter, but I want more subtlety than that. What I did was focus on a couple of lines, re: the actual moment in the novel where things go to shit for the main characters (Gambit gets run over by a car). I figure (a) this is the start of the metaphorical descent into Hell, and (b) things get a little... meta. The reader is in Dante's position at this point: me, the writer, am taking the part of Virgl, leading you by the hand into Satan's domain: we have literal writing on the page acting as a stand in for the writing on the door. (in some translations: to other minds, the door is fucking sentient and actually speaks) which, again, raises some interesting metaphysical ideas about the nature of the book you are reading.
All of which is interesting (at least to me) - but it wasn't hitting as hard as I wanted. So I changed this:
My memory always pauses when presented with this picture; it lingers over the lines, the finger cold with accusation. Here on the page it taps twice, it speaks with grim authority. —This is the moment where you could have saved the boy who will be Gambit. A word, a cry, a warning scream. Anything to give the boy a second's grace and spare him from a cripple’s fate.
into
My memory always pauses when confronted by this page; it lingers over lines, and then a finger taps three times and says: —This moment is the moment out of all moments. You could have saved the Boy who will be Gambit. Shout a word, or call to stall his pace! A shriek or warning scream, cry out! You'll give the boy a second's grace, and spare the man a cripple's fate.
Now, this looks like a fuck-all pointless syntax change - in fact, the second version probably reads weirder on the page. *But* what I've done here is important, re: The Door, because I've written the speech in terza rima, which is the poetic meter Dante uses throughout the Comedia.
My memory always pauses when confronted by this page; it lingers over lines, and then a finger taps three times and says:
—This moment is the moment out of all moments. You could have saved the Boy who will be Gambit. shout
a word, or call to stall his pace! A shriek or warning scream, cry out! You'll give the boy a second's grace,
and spare the man a cripple's fate.
It's just an example of the sort of shit I'm pulling throughout, and frankly I doubt it will be of technical interest to any beyond sperging spergs sperging about spergato, spergatory. and spergadiso. But I'm hoping there will be a cumulative effect for the casual reader, that enough of this shit will pile up so it elevates the writing onto a higher plane than the fucking 40 Shades of Shite knock-offs that are my immediate competition.
I guess I'm trying to write literature; I wonder if anyone even reads literature any more. Regardless, I'm curious about the effect (if any, other than mild irritation) it has normies.
I'll drop you a pm tomorrow.
|
|
BIG DICK NIGGA
this post is a lie about my bodily proportions
Major Arlene obsessed, 100% verified freakazoid. AKA bzzrak
Posts: 2,292
|
Post by BIG DICK NIGGA on Apr 20, 2023 14:34:48 GMT -5
dn speaking of publishing, did this go anywhere? Actually, I just finished editing a Dundonian street rapper's first volume of poetry, which ought to be released mid-september, barring no fuckups from the publisher*. I'll probably pimp pretty hard for it when the time comes.
|
|
Lobo
Doomer
Posts: 556
|
Post by Lobo on Apr 20, 2023 15:10:05 GMT -5
Sounds a bit high-brow for me. I read a lot, but not classics as such. I've never read The Divine Comedy or Marcus Aurelius Meditations for example. I do have enough of a level to know that 50 shades of grey was utter shite, written completely in the present tense, with the grammar and vocabulary of a seven year old. So for me your book may be a case of "fiddling for water buffaloes", but what I can do is tell you if it's readable and enjoyable at least
|
|
dn
Body Count: 02
the motherfucking darknation
Posts: 1,724
|
Post by dn on Apr 20, 2023 16:03:28 GMT -5
dn speaking of publishing, did this go anywhere? it got released today, apparently. Though I can tell you we worked on more than a hundred pages of poetry - someone took an axe to the work after I'd finished. If I was a cynic I'd say the publisher wants to milk the subscription model.
|
|
Gokuma
You're trying to say you like DOS better than me, right?
R.I.P. Aaron Bushnell and over 30,000 genocided Gazans.
Posts: 1,008
|
Post by Gokuma on Apr 21, 2023 10:19:47 GMT -5
Congratulations on the release! I finally decided to sit down and read your first three blogs so far. I never read Ulysses but damn that spreadsheet looks like stuff I've seen and have written making sense of ancient writing systems listing the various meanings, attributes, and other details of each character. The Doom stained glass texture with all its connotation gave me a good laugh.
I read Dante's Inferno but literally over twenty years ago as I see the original version of a C&C Red Alert map I named "Frozen Shards of Caina" was dated 2002. Can't remember if I read Heart of Darkness before or after it. So not sure how much I remember out of them and I would possibly get more out of a re-read being less dumb and young now. I had some Chuck Palahniuk books, but a shit excuse for a friend lost Fight Club, and then I didn't care enough to remember which I gave to a shitty GF as a gift or lent, and left all the rest of them behind. While the movie Fight Club shied away from some jokes and details of book, I like how they improved the ending in the movie. In the book, Project Mayhem's end goal was literally the same as some retarded Antifa shit wanting to destroy museums in a pitiful attempt to erase history.
|
|