It's a process

Recently I've been reading Solar, drawn away from my other book "The Illearth War" by it's easy flow. Each scene is like a bunch of reflection and introspection. New information slides in randomly to tie together a portrait of Michael Beard at each stage of his life. It doesn't give you the whole story, just the need to know bits. The next turn has been strange, but I'll explain where the book was heading around half way.

This book is one of the most courageous I've read. Michael Beard is bordering on a rational, socially acceptable psychopath. He treats most people like tools and shamelessly puts up fronts to the public, seemingly unaware or dismissive of his own flaws. The book is written in a way that takes his past into account on all occasions. Each thought is an amalgamation of himself, and yet he still makes decisions so localized in time. He bases every action on the immediate circumstance and then does his awkward way of regretting it later. His 'regrets' don't affect him on an emotional level. They are just there, he's unable to change it but enough of his life is working that he doesn't have to.
The courageous part is that he totally acknowledges that he's cold and inhuman in his uncommon careless attitude to his wife or lover (he chews through many). That's not something that I've ever considered writing about (mainly because I'm not a cold person) but it's easy to think in those terms the only barrier is how socially unacceptable the content is. If anyone like Beard exists, then they keep it a closely guarded secret or else they would probably find people like his most recent wife, Melissa, reaching out to them.

That's the next stage of the book, where it turns. He truly does appear to be changing, learning what it's like to be a father and being considerate of other people. I still have a long way to go to finish the book but it feels like a requiem nevertheless. I'm interested to know how it finishes. That's the weird part. I'm not excited to read it, but have to because of the nature of the book. It must flow from page to page and so I must not leave a significant gap in-between sessions. This book has a soul, no wonder so many people are reading it.

My Kick-Ass day

Couple of nights ago I had one of those semi-break-down moments after a weird day where I started raging about nothing (a lost game of go) early, and then had to live through the aftershocks. Strangely enough during that time I was able to effortlessly speed read. I need to keep that in mind next time I have a stack of books waiting (oh wait, I always have that).

I went and saw Kick-Ass at the movies on Thursday. It was fucking awesome! The casual violence is so drastically different from most movies and tv shows. It's definitely on the forefront of that shift in values. The storyline itself was imbued with moralistic considerations and emotional motivations, even so it was dumbed down for a movie-going audience. I'd love to get my hands on the comics! I was amazed at how well the story flowed, all the elements linking quite naturally together (with a little bit of assumption in the use of media broadcast as an effective messenger to the other main players in the story, along with the weird role his gf plays).

Anyway, I had an awesome day hanging out with Albert at the mall. We had so much to talk about, neither of us have very strong opinions so we just flowed from one topic to the next. It was very free-flowing and relieving. I wish I had more friends like him. :)

Screnzy

Look! I have Frenzy juice xD Now I have all the bubbles I need to write amazing script.

Mariana and Impressionism

I like making up words. I need to be in the zone for it to work though. And even then I have a limit of about 6 - 8 good new words before all the creative energy fueling the process runs a different channel. One of the best things about Script Frenzy is that I get to make up words all the time. The place that I've set my script is around 2000 m deep, under the ocean, so it a lot of speculative thinking is involved in the world building and new words help explain much that is difficult. That's right I've chosen the most memorable place the Mariana Trench. I'll have to change them to something else later for the sake of popularization but for now just leave them and hopefully come up with a few more. For example I dislike most of the standard names that I have chosen for my characters. They shouldn't have common names imo. I need to invent some new ones, especially for the really scary deep sea creatures. But mostly my new names encompass all those scientific processes that don't read well on screen. I still like bioluminescent so I'm keeping that one but there are a lot of different things such as the bacteria the chemosynthesis coral and the weird creatures.
Actually I had to make most of these names up because I hadn't yet done my research. I spent a lot of last night reading about the Mariana Trench ecology and it was a blast. It's so much fun to learn about something that crazy. All is factored into my ever expanding useless information catalog but this time I'm going to use it for the purposes of good and not simply curing boredom.

Yesterday we went to Canberra. They are showing an exhibition of art from Musee D'Orsay in Paris, a lot of impressionists. The artworks were stunning and inspiring. I couldn't help but pay so much attention to detail that I may have lost sight of the real benefits of viewing. Nevertheless I intend to download decently large images of the paintings and display them on my desktop (or possibly get them printed etc.).
Many of the paintings were very psychological. They played coherent tricks with the mind to create the effect. I appreciate that.

Wah this coffee is strong!