first off, i’ve decided to turn off auto caps on my phone, and i’m gonna be real lazy about it, so the blog’s gonna look a little crooked. which i very much like.
pictured first!:
working on a soft sci-fi novella about an enby girl named Mud who’s living on a dying mining colony with her grandfather, Josiah. Mud’s going to hitch a ride off-planet on a space train—i get to use the word pantograph in a silly cosmic-to-quantum context, which is perhaps my favorite thing ever—and find herself caught in the crossfire of a robbery. when her traincar is detached, she’ll be cast adrift at near-lightspeed, and will turn her head and have herself a kaleidoscopic view of spacetime.
used to be i would scoff at using italics for an epistolary form, but then i reread No Country For Old Men—which, if i’m being frank, seems more like it’s about how the US is controlled by shitty old men than anything; it’s not as if violence is this unbegotten force, rather than a means of control currently held in monopoly by white men and the state. but that’s beside my point, which is that at the start of each chapter there’s a monologue by sheriff Ed Tom Bell, and they’re totally italicized, and McCarthy is notoriously too pretentious to even use quotation marks, so fuck it! Josiah’s father’s letters to him are in italics. yeet or be yoten.
ALSO, on the other half of the screen, i’m rewatching Train to Busan, which i friggin love. its violence is never too over the top, but it still manages to make its zombies terrifying in the way they rocket recklessly toward the nearest human they see, 28 Days Later-style. also, like 80% of the film takes place on a single train and isn’t boring? super impressive. even more impressive is that, among the small cadre of survivors we find ourselves rooting for, each and every one of their deaths is just gutwrenching, emotionally speaking, which i’m not sure any zombie movie has ever done for me (the death of Shaun’s mom in Shaun of the Dead notwithstanding).
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the second photo!:
sometimes i’m not near my computer or i’m just too anxious to open it (been getting way better about that, though—thanks, D&D!). this note happened during one such instance, and became a little spitball session for Mud’s novella, in which i roughly sketched some of the weird shit that she might see as she’s spaghettified. it’s nice to do that kind of thing in a note—i don’t often feel as though i have my own permission to just write without constantly reworking what i’m looking at, but when i’m on my phone, that’s just not nearly as true. granted, that leads to way more half-baked (or, let’s be real, definitely all the way baked, LOL!) and/or mistake-ridden ideas. no matter; the iron hammer of the editor shall temper what the editor’s sickle does not slice away.
much love as always—
easy