Okay, let me cover the most intriguing question first–How much DNA do we share with a banana? Almost 60%. Can you believe it?
And the second most intriguing question–Eyeball bowling ball? Really? Yep! I bought it in a thrift store a little over a year ago. I couldn’t resist. It was only $4.99. Someone had painted a bowling ball to look like an eyeball (see photo). The finger holes are on the back side. You know how a bowling ball is smooth? Well, imagine running your fingers over the surface of the “eyeball” above and feeling the ridges of the red lines. It’s weird. You can feel the lines. Creepy! And what’s worse, it keeps staring at me. I can’t take it. I can’t take it, I tell you–it’s too much!
Okay, I’m joking about the last part. It might make a good story though. The thing haunting a man, driving him crazy . . .
So I’m just riffing and rambling here, once again. My mind is all over the place. I can’t settle. Am I in a manic state? Maybe. I spoke to a psychologist a year or two ago and she said that as far as she could tell I wasn’t bi-polar.
In any case, creative thoughts are bombarding me. Everything I look at, everything I touch, every thought I have, leads to an idea. One thought leads to another, which by association brings another thought to mind . . . which leads to a story. I touched on this in my book, Write Play Love, how I have the door to creativity closed, locked. Somehow I see a large chain stretched across and the door is bulging open behind me. I’ve got my back pressed against it, trying to push it closed and keep it shut. For now. It is too much. I don’t have time to write everything, every idea, etc. I think back to the days, very early on, when I would struggle to come up with something to work into a story. It would take about two weeks of thinking, worrying, lying awake nights, and then writing the story. No more.
And all I need to do is sit down and start typing and I’m totally absorbed. So why don’t I sit down? That would end the madness, or at least channel it into one story or another. I took the photo of the bowling ball a few minutes ago and connected my camera to the computer. I got it into photoshop and thought about editing out the table that it was sitting on, and the little piece of cardboard I had tucked underneath it to keep the ball from rolling off the table. But I thought, do I really have the hour or two to spare? I would become so involved, so absorbed, that I would spend too much time staring at it and working on it. Do I want to use it for something? Yes, possibly a future book cover. I’m trying to figure how to combine it with a cool photo of a spiderweb that my cousin sent me a few weeks ago. She had taken this photo of a web, just the web, no spider was in it. It is super cool looking. I want to get a spider and perhaps have him on the web, but with one of his many legs reaching out almost touching the eyeball. Something like that.
Anyway, I spent yesterday watching The Great Courses instead of writing. I was just going to watch a lecture or two while my coffee brewed. I love these courses. I own close to a hundred of them and I also belong to The Great Courses Plus (which is the subscription service–where you can stream the courses). I wanted to look for the one that talked about the percentage of DNA humans share with a banana. I couldn’t remember which one it was, but saw that Professor Indre Viskontas had a new course out called How Digital Technology Shapes us. I ended up watching seven of the lectures. I believe it was the third lecture in, “Does the Internet Make us Shallow Thinkers?” that really intrigued me. There are way too many nuggets of info to cover here, but I would encourage any writer, or reader to watch that one lecture in particular. It touches on whether reading a book you hold in your hand affects you differently than reading it digitally. There are some surprising conclusions that research has uncovered. One difference is how reading a novel changes your level of empathy. That one was a real surprise. The funny thing was that I had just written a story about technology to increase empathy in my sci-fi book, The Red Kimono (which, btw, is a free book giveaway on GoodReads (hopefully) starting tomorrow and running for a month, till the 18th of Oct. 100 digital copies to be given away. Jump over there and enter to win!).
Anyway, I digress (as usual). The Great Courses are, well, great! And especially Prof. Viskontas. I already own two of her courses: 12 Essential Scientific Concepts, and also, Brain Myths Exploded. Her courses are neuroscience related. Another neat course is one by Prof. David Kung (who is also fantastic) called Mind-Bending Math. There are a lot of other courses. Quite a few directly relating to writing, and for writers (of course). I did watch a lecture from a course on writing the short story, which I just stumbled upon last night. The professor talked about first lines. It was okay. By then the battery on my tablet was about to die, so I stopped. I then flipped on my old ipad and opened the kindle app, just fumbling through some books I had downloaded and halfway read the first bit of a sci-fi story or two. By then it was late, and I was still distracted and restless . . . And then a line or two hit me and I thought, well, let me write this one or two lines down before I forget, just so I’ll have it to maybe do something with later. And here’s what that turned into:
Annabel
Her aptitude astounded me. Her lips amazed me. Her beauty I adored. And don’t get me started on her eyes. Her eyes . . . even in death they were stunning. She lay on the ground, looking up into the sunny blue sky. What would she have done today, that she hadn’t done yesterday? Or the day before? Something amazing, I suppose; Something profound and special. But she did not. She will not. She could not. She just lay there, staring upward. There would be no tomorrow. I longed to lean down to her, to have her whisper to me, to reveal to me who had killed her. I leaned toward her purple lips, her pale face, her dark brows that rested calmly above her glistening eyes. I leaned in close. But she didn’t speak. Nothing was revealed.
“Andrew.”
“Hm?”
“Andrew,” said Professor Burke.
“Yes Professor?”
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Just taking her in,” I said.
“Just what?”
I rose up. There was no field, no open sky. She lay before me on the table, naked and exposed.
“Shall we begin?” said the Professor. It wasn’t really a question.
He continued. “Now, you’ll make an incision just . . .”
And so I cut into her cold dead body. She was just a cadaver. Now . . . now that was all, just a lump of cold meat, nothing more. There would be no tomorrow, not even a today. Well, there would sort of be a today – she would be a participant in the world today, but no longer an actor upon the stage. Shakespeare’s line rode through my mind; the one about all men being no more than actors, merely players strutting about upon the stage. Women too, I supposed. Yes, women too. She no longer strutted about. Annabel, that was her name. She had grown up two blocks from where I had grown up . . . and she had strutted, oh how she had strutted as a girl of five . . . five, six, seven and beyond. I hadn’t seen her in years. She had been an adult when last I had seen her; just last week. And she had strutted even then. I had admired her, yes. And I had even been in love with her once. And even last week I was in love with her—just last week.
I would have to ask Parker—
“Andrew.”
“Yes, Professor?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, Professor.” I glanced up. He looked at me strangely, then glanced at the clock on the wall. He reached beneath his coat and pulled out his watch from his vest pocket, checking the time there also. I realized then that I held the scalpel up against the cold hard flesh, but hadn’t actually cut into her.
“Get busy, young man. What ails you?”
“Nothing sir. It’s just–”
“Just what?”
“Professor,” someone called from across the room, “this one’s bleeding. This one’s–”
There was a scream, a flurry of commotion. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cadaver sit up. I heard a thud. Jensen had fallen to the floor, fainted outright. The cadaver, the Lazarus, was screaming. The mouth hung open. The scream shot out across the room in one elongated stretch of sound, the sound turning to light in my mind’s eye. I heard it no more. I looked down at Annabel, her open, glassy stare. Rise, I thought, rise up . . . may all of your sins be forgiven. I stared. For a long time, I stared; while the scream stretched out across the room in a beamlike fashion. I simply stared at Annabel. She didn’t move. Death was upon her. She lay in the open field, staring up into the wide expanse of pale blue sky. I looked up. Birds circled above.
***
“But you found her,” I said.
Parker had pulled on his coat and now placed his hat upon his head as we left the building. “Correction,” he said. “Young James Timmons found her.”
“But you saw her, you observed her laying there.”
“Yes, yes I did.”
“And you can’t tell me anything more?”
“No, no I cannot.”
“Why? Why not?”
“Because there is nothing to tell, nothing more.” He was moving swiftly, pounding along. I was trying to keep up. He stopped and placed an arm out in front of me, halting me. A carriage passed. And we were moving again. “Besides,” he said. “It’s an ongoing investigation.”
“But you’ve already told me–”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve already told you too much.”
“So what’s the harm?”
“The harm is that if the Chief Inspector knew, that I’ve already told you what I’ve already told you . . .” Parker stopped and turned toward me, making a slicing motion across his throat.
“So, it’s not related to the other murders?”
“No.”
“Well,” he stopped, grinning. He shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”
“But I’ve seen the body, her body.”
“Yes, so you know.”
“Know what?”
“She’s dead.” He grinned at me, ever wider. I shook my head. My heart sank. “What?” Parker continued. “Are you working for the papers now? The Times?” We pushed on through the crowd. “Don’t you have enough on your hands with your medical studies?”
End of story, for now******************* End of story, for now.
I’ll probably change the word ‘aptitude’ in the first line. It’s kind of weird. I don’t know what triggered this. Probably the discussion of first lines of a short story. My favorite first line for a novel has to be the first line of The Martian, by Andy Weir. But of course, whatever triggered this little bit of writing is not the issue. Writing this sent me off in another direction. I was now thinking of this piece and thinking of writing a novella set in Victorian London, which means more time, more research, and more writing . . . Don’t get me wrong, I love it. I do! It is just that I had been thinking about the noir chunk that I wrote (off the cuff) in my last post. And I need to get back to the novel I was working on the week before (the one with the murderer out on bail), which I had been deeply involved in writing until . . . well, you know that story.
In any case, now I was in the mood to go back and reread The Yard, by Alex Grecian, just to absorb the atmosphere of Victorian London, to get me going on this little piece. But wait, I have the first three books by Will Thomas that I haven’t read. The first one is Some Danger Involved. So I pulled it off the shelf and read the first two chapters.
And I’m still in the middle of rereading The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, and I have to write my blog posts while ideas are fresh, and I have to market my books, and work on getting reviews.
So what do I do? What, or which, project should I work on? And what about my 500+ page novel that I haven’t worked on in forever, that I’ve got to figure out which of the huge files (that have significantly different word counts), which is the right one? Help. And more thoughts and ideas keep hitting me. They just keep coming.
I’m picturing The Great Courses’ graphic for physics where they are discussing whether light is a particle or a wave. And the graphic has the yellow balls (like tennis balls) flying toward the two slits in a wall . . . and these are my thoughts, the thoughts and ideas that are bombarding me. And of course, this graphic image reminds me of Unreal Engine 4, which is software for game creation that I downloaded a couple of years ago and –and that’s another rabbit hole that I could find myself going down. I’ve only dabbled with it (which takes hours, still). But aren’t the yellow balls what comes out of the robot-looking man’s gun in the first person shooter game they offer up, the one where you can change the design of the environment, and the man, etc.? And what about The Great Courses, all the lectures I still want to watch? And what about all the books I still want to read? I’ll need three lifetimes.
So I need to focus on the writing, of course. But again, which project? And I do know that all I have to do is sit down and start typing, working on one of the projects and I am totally absorbed in it. And that solves everything. If I am busy with one, the ideas aren’t hitting me as fast. Oh sure, I get some, many, but these ideas will mostly be related to the project at hand. Some won’t be, but anyway . . . So why don’t I just sit down and start?
So this post is way too long, as they always seem to be. I still have to cover True Case Crime, which I couldn’t fit in the last post. It will have to wait a little longer.
So the question remains . . . is there such a thing as too much creativity?
In my case it certainly can be debilitating if I let it. And then the question is how can I control it, channel it? How can I actually get something done?
WOW! I’ve had the bowling ball for a whole year and never noticed. I just wrote out this whole post and still didn’t notice. I went to GoodReads, and then sync’d the blog post to there. Something in the photo made me look closer. I didn’t see it until then. There are figures, faces, etc. in the iris . . . look close. That is really cool! Somebody is super talented! Or am I just imagining this? Maybe I am losing my mind . . . Do you see it? I had to come back and update/edit the post. WOW!