I just realized how Chapter 2 must begin

I sometimes think about how dangerously random my creative ideas are--meaning that they strike me at the most unusual moments, usually when my eyes are just closing or the road is just diverging into infinity.

I know that's nothing new. Many writers, I've heard, have a sort of Buddhist, self-abnegating quality to producing. I just wish ideas came more on schedule.

I spent the last month or so incognito, playing video games day and night, much to the dismay of my longtime girlfriend, who also occasionally joins me on the couch after changing diapers. I've been playing Mass Effect lately, primarily for the purported robotalien sex scenes, and even though everyone says it's more than a game, that it's a world, an identity...for me--for both of us, really--it's just a really fun game. A new challenge, a creative take on all the things we love about immersive nonreality fantasy roleplaying.

Publishing v Publicizing (2009)

This old morning, I was listening to NPR's Off-Ramp ("CyberFrequencies on Life on the Web"), as is my wont on many old Saturday mornings, and the interview was about the New digital divide. (I can't help perking up whenever I hear of a new "New" thingy.) The point being made was that today, our digital divide is not between those who have and don't have (chinese: ta men you mei you?) internet access, but rather between those who want and don't want to participate in web 2.0 social networky communication.

The interviewee sketched out the two paradigms for communication: 2-way, which the phone traditionally functions as, and broadcast, where a radio or other portal sends 1-way communication to a legion of listeners. In our web 2.0 world, the phone, twitter, facebook etc. have functionality that bridges both these paradigms. A twitter post can be read by your handful of friends and your friends can tweet right back @ you. or a twitter post can be followed by hoi polloi, as in the case of NPR's twitter feed, which has 1 million followers.

How does this relate to anything? My point is this: I could slave away at viralizing my own social networking feeds (friend a million facebook friends, etc.), and I could have the perception (and perhaps even reality) of having a huge audience. It would surely be an ego boost. But this capitalist mindset of publication and publicity -- more is better -- is foolhardy, in my humble opinion. It's far better to have a group of friends who follow your work, who you know, than to have thousands of faceless sycophants out there.

So, friend, let's be friends, not megaphone-wielding soapboxistas.

Ideas on narrative voice

The only novel I've ever really liked that was written in plural first person is The Virgin Suicides, and the only book I can think of that uses the second person voice is Self-Help, by Lorrie Moore. I envision much of this novel taking the plural first person voice, though there will be sections narrated in traditional first person. The theory, of course, is that in order to represent the social clumpiness of my cast of characters, and to get into the groupthink mind of such a group brought together by video games, 2nd person is the way to go.

leet key!

1mh0, 7hund3r81rd 15 7h3 4850|u73 8357 m41| (|13n7 0u7 7h3r3. |)3f1n171v3 pr00f 0f 7h15 15 7h3 h4xx0r3d 4dd-0n 7h47 1'm u51n6 70 (r3473 7h15 |337 m355463 r16h7 n0w. 17 u535 51mp|3 r3p|4(3m3n7 4|60r17hm5 70 d15p|4y 7h15 73x7 45 |337. 17 (4n 4|50 0u7pu7 45 h3x, 81n4ry, 4nd 07h3r f0rm475. 1 7h1nk 1 m16h7 4hv3 ju57 f0und 7h3 (0up d3 6r4(3 f0r 7h3 3nd 0f my n0v3|.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/770
http://download.cnet.com/Leet-Key/3000-11745_4-10748579.html

"I think it’s something akin to attributed collage (sort of Deleuzian, if you’re into theory; if not, check out “Introduction: Rhizome” in A Thousand Plateaus). I’m not against documentation. But also: picture reading a mass-market Western on a fourth or fifth generation Kindle (or the iPhone as it currently stands). As you read, you toggle back and forth to various web pages and wikis, fleshing out the story. Maybe some google image searches. In fact, maybe the author - who’s paid a flat rate and wants to focus on the action - prompts you to google “free-range vs. ranching disputes” or “Jesse James” rather than fill you in on all the contextual stuff. A few artful sentences or paragraphs of choice desert description from an old Larry McMurtry novel are incorporated seamlessly into the text; clicking on them takes you to the Lonesome Dove amazon page. Now imagine this in an academic or argument paper."

I think there's something to this. It's giving me grandiose ideas of palimpsests and telescoping texts, what with that bit about "fleshing out the story," and I wonder why I, and the author of this blog post are so drawn to iterative art. Everything is intertext, one might say, in the digital age, and I recall John Mellencamp talking in an NPR interview about how he feels that anything he's heard, anything he's read, no matter if it was already written by Shakespeare or sung by the Beatles (loose paraphrase), it's fair game for him.

Isn't this fundamentally how we think? We take an idea and build on it and jerry-rig it for whatever purpose we need -- a word, a game, a computer function. So too, in art?

"Masturbating and Making Money"

"The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize that you only ever lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the world fought and kissed, you sat in some dark room, masturbating and making money." -- Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction

I spent the evening at the library, among tired bookshelves and bums and forlorn legged kids who, like I did when I was their age, find the pubic library to be one great playground. I had planned to write some poetry. Instead, I sat reading about computer programming and, more often, staring off into space thinking about my novel. I loved it.

Five minutes before closing, I ran into a former roommate, and as he talked and talked and talked as he always does about the most fascinating and simultaneously mundane things, I gazed at his face, sizing up proportions, shapes, emotions. I caught how his eyes would dart from contact with you to pondering the labyrinthine sky above, checking in with your eyeballs as if to make sure you were still listening. I saw how his mouth hung down at the corners, though still smiling. I noted how he hardly ever answered my yes or no questions with a simple yes or no, a masquerading litigator wandering the streets of Fort Ord, California.

I suppose I was deconstructing his face so much because I continue to draw sketches for my upcoming novel. The latest are below.

I'd just like to add that I love the sound of Palahniuk's quote above, yet I do not--at least not at present--share his fear in the least. I think that means I'm living.

by Origin Games

I think I had an idea. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was an idea.

Since this is, after all, a game novel, it sort of makes sense that the 'author' should be a videogame company. Therefore, instead of putting my name on the book cover, I think it would be playful (if also a terrible marketing move) to put "Origin Games" (or somesuch) with a logo as the author on the cover of the book.

You describe your writing as Deleuzean. Explain.

transcribed from a book reading, July 29, 2009, at Megatokyo Cybercafe.

George Crumb: You describe your writing as Deleuzean. Explain.

John Cortland: It is Deleuzean in two regards. On a simple level, Gilles Deleuze's philosophical tracts were not simply aimed at redefining the relationship between desire and the self (as opposed to the Lacanian argument that desire is founded on a lack). Instead, the tracts themselves are meant to make the reader viscerally experience a shift in his/her understanding of desire. In this sense, my novel is Deleuzean. I don't simply want to have the reader question the repetition of self and virtual self and the multiplicity of reality. I want the reader to experience the schizophrenia of the video game virtual identity. Hence, Part 3 is written in a style which overtly aims to subvert the reader's sense of self.



In this sense, what we see going on in leet dialect is an organic reproduction of deconstructionist thought--wordplay and substitution.

Who Needs Epigraphs When You Can Have Fragments?

Survey to all writers out there: is it possible to intuitively play with theorizing your own work in the act of creating it while not killing its core transcendence (the thing that makes it art and not acadaemia) in the process?

I'm not going to pretend I understand Deleuze and Guattari. I do know that my mind generally tries its best to reduce these types of theories into digestible tidbits, but I'm not going to even try. Nevertheless, I do believe that my novel will be, on some level Deleuzean (even though I can't yet articulate what that means).

It's funny how the writing process works. For me, for this work, it's all about telescoping. I start with a standard idea [[wouldn't it be cool to put some kind of epigraph at the beginning of each chapter that alludes to the intellectual underpinnings of the story I'm trying to tell?]]

Then, from somewhere, some intertextual memory bleeds into consciousness: [[I really liked how Stephen King used those pseudotextual fragments in Carrie to add a dimension of both realism and complexity to the narrative]]

Then(!) my brain starts making analytical sense of that kind of thing: [[If I did something like that, my text would be multivocal--I could spew all the theories in scholarly discourse while also writing a depraved potboiler novel!--And! it would be, well, Deleuzean. Rhizomatic, destabilized meaning, meaning created between textual interactions]].

Beyond that, since we're on the topic of Deleuze, I have to identify that I believe my plot is Deleuzean. As well as I, John Cortland, as a product of a writer am also Deleuzean.

Of course, when you take a step back, this is all academic hodgepodge, and all I'm really trying to do is tell a story. I don't want to overthink the creativity. So, the final question for this post I open to all writers: is it possible to intuitively play with theorizing your own work while not killing its life in the process?

One Week Annyversary: Writer's Thoughts

One week into my chronicling (and researching for) my new novel, I keep on wanting to proclaim at the bottom of my lungs, "The creative dam has burst." And, damn, has it burst. I even almost want to put an exclamation point at the end of that statement, except for the bad form exclamation point rule.

I am at this moment frenetic, feverish with Write, and I feel the urge to take stock of all that's happened:

1) The scope of the novel has been telescoping all this past week, unfolding new layers of possibilities. I set out to write an honest to goodness novel, and now what I've got on my hands is a video-game tie in, a revolution in Kindle publishing, the rebirth of hypertext theory--hell, I've even started writing bookjacket blurbs for myself ("1337 is a literary novel masquerading as MMORPG action adventure..." "1337 is both a novel about videogames and a videogame about life...")

2) I'll be honest. Last week, I had no idea how to write a novel. I mean, I've read plenty, but to write one? to write one like an artist prepares a canvas? I once heard a story about how Thomas Mann prepared his stories using color coding and index cards. Now either it's my personality to do as Mann did, or I'm just terribly frightened about having no idea how to write a novel that I'm feeling desperate to grasp onto some semblance of manufactured structure. In either case, I'm learning to understand the novel form. Of course, with this understanding goes the knowledge in being able to break that form (we are in a postmodern century, after all, no?). Now, since it's only been a week, I'll freely admit that I still have absolutely no idea how to write a novel, but I'll explain what I have been learning:

• Reading David Mamet's The Village. Not the best model for the archetypal novel, but I do have an ear for cool Mamet-style dialogue and better yet, was reminded of a sense of character-based set up. In The Village, there's this girl, Maris, who all the boys gawk at. This, in fact, is an archetype for the novel--taken very freely of course.
• This morning I woke on the floor of my room (I've taken to sleeping on the floor) realizing how my novel had to start. It's funny how that happens. But for me, it's not about forcing the novel to do a certain thing or be a certain way. Now, I just know how this novel must start. Every time I write this is what happens: the story writes me.
• Have been remembering what good old Horselover Fat used to say about the construction of his sci-fi novels (I have the notes, somewhere). About how "protag" is introduced in chapter 1, how to name, etc., etc. & am thinking about picking up whatever handy Fat-authored book I've got on my floor tonight.

The ideas are flowing, and I must remind myself to quiet the creeping voice of criticism that struck last night in the midst of a million brilliant ideas. Wish me luck.

The Possibilities of Interactive Reading

An electronic text is a necessarily different medium from a printed page, and a novel can and should adapt to the new form. What textual possibilities does the Kindle open up?

• What can subscribed blogs do?
• How to publish on Kindle?
• Could you publish a Facebook novel?
• Check out LiveBook's take on the Facebook novel.

Interactive isn't quite the right word here, and I'm not quite sure what is. I guess the concept I'm trying to get at is 'what is the possibility of a reader being written into the text of a novel?

Users allow a Facebook apps to access their profile information. Could it use that profile information to fill-in-the blank parts of the novel? The author would have control over the structure and style of the story, but the details would be rewritten for each reader.

A new serial novel!

Dear reader,

So this is it. The inauguratory blog post. (By the way, I don't believe "inauguratory" is technically a word, which is a bad sign, since I've heard that blogs tend to use, um, words to get their point across. Beware of more debatably real words, such as trealism, fictuary, and suckoholic.)

The saying goes: if words are food, then novels are five-course meals, short stories and bedtime snacks, and blogs are diarrhea. Nevertheless, I can promise you that my diarrhea will be extremely noble and upstanding. And full of trealism.

I'm sorry. I don't think this blog is starting out all that well. At my count, I've prerequisitely made up five nonsense words and used the word "diarrhea" --well, now that's three times.

Mission Statement (0r s0mesuch)
This blog will chronicle my research and drafting of "1337," a novel about gaming in the 21st century. (By the way, the title is pronounced "leet," but we'll get to that in good time.)

It will also be the proving ground for the novel, which will be released in serial format, one page at a time (click on the label "the novel" to follow the book's progress).

I can't tell you much about the book just yet, partially because I don't know much about it, myself, just yet--but more because telling it defeats the point of experiencing it. I'll simply say that it begins with a narrator who's at the bottom rung of the gamer totem pole (sorry for the fictuary mixed metaphor)--he's the social outcast in a sea of social outcasts. In other words, he's a real suckoholic. In any case, he'll introduce us to a cast of characters (college students mostly) who spend upwards of 30 hours a week playing MMORPGs. Their lives will be completely boring (they're all a bunch of suckoholics, really), a story premise which I've always considered a sure thing.

After all, there are plenty of exciting, fantastical, romancey-schmomancey novels out there, and do we really need another Danielle Brown? I think it's high time a novel was written that is more boring than real life. And I'm confident I'm just the writer to do it.

Yours affectionately,
John Cortland