It's been a while since I sat here to write. Not for lack of desire, but for lack of time. Random life events and unexpected drama mixed with the busyness of my day to day and successfully conspired to keep me from clogging the internet with more of my meandering ruminations. But with my first breather comes this return to the screens of strangers with... what?
Nothing. Genuinely nothing. No planned course for the word flow and nothing to get off my chest or out of the grey matter. Simply a return to the improvised silliness that for some reason makes me feel better.
For someone shy and without a lot of self-confidence who chose to make a living as a performer (funny how that works), there may be a sort of symmetry in my choosing to quietly fade into the background. I've come into that point in my life where I look around and see that years have passed in what I thought were months. Friends' kids are going off to college, starting careers and building families. Some I remember as young people are now homeowners and rising corporate stars. Fans of mine have gone on to stardom. This is wild to see and also gratifying. In a strange way it feels good to be irrelevant.
At the same time realizing I am in the 21st century and that there really isn't a way out of it, I've decided to actively pursue what roleplaying game nerds and authors call world building. For the last few years I've been writing more than what appears here, on others' websites or in the magazine. In my free time (I love and loathe that phrase) I've been working on a story. Initially I was thinking it would be a novel but the deeper I get into the characters and the cosmology, the more I realize it will be a series. I like rereading that sentence because it makes the practical considerations of telling the story sound so pretentious!
To keep my heart in it and to make the rest of my life bearable, I'm scribbling away with no plans to even try and publish. That could change but right now it's just delicious to leave the concerns of the world in the flatlands and sit in a cabin where I can step into a world that's like this one but different. Different horrors, delights, truths and dangers. I don't need to worry about genres or pigeonholing or anything more than letting the characters interact and the events unfold.
So what is it? I don't know how I'd describe it. I've been telling friends it's anachronistic fiction, but the truth is that it has elements of fantasy, conspiracy, philosophy, action and even comedy. There's a bit of intrigue, but what I'm enjoying in the penning of it is the dichotomy between what happens on the page versus the unwritten, the internal life of my protagonist.
Is it autobiographical? I suppose, kind of. I'm not a good enough writer than I know how not to draw from my experience and perspective. Everything in the text is filtered through my brain as much as my hand so I suppose so. The man character is/was an artist and a hermit. He's on a literal and metaphorical/metaphysical journey. There's transformation in the tale, but I'm not going to get into that here.
Instead I'll tell you that this return to the mechanics and logistics of writing, of immersing myself in it whether or not it goes beyond the reams of scrawl in my cabin, has proven cathartic and liberating. Taking myself from the largely right brain creative process of making music to what for me is a much more left brain activity has done great things for how I see and express things. Others around me may disagree, but my inner life is the colorful one now. That's probably what I have most in common with my main character. Our worlds are changing around us, but the only thing that allows either of us to cope is through the struggle of trying to make some sense of what's within. So maybe my work is more paralleling my life than reflecting it?
Dunno. But as I work on that, as I see more gray in my hair and watch more of what I know disappearing from the world, I acknowledge the inevitability of things. I've made my peace with it. I think it's reassuring that the world has no need of me, that I have made some impact and also that the world isn't done with me. It's nice that as I become more and more invisible, I can look around and watch all those things that I can't understand and simply marvel. Then when I'm through with the surreal for a while, I can climb the mountain, close the door to my cabin and return to crafting another world and do my best to tell one story from there.
I was so terrified of change and the unexpected when I was a boy. Now these are among my sources of delight. Another symmetry, perhaps, and one I treasure.
