ideas.

From a blog post titled little bits of bone, 29 August 2009.

"Ideas happen in a frozen rush. They form always, interminable, and at unexpected intervals pop like match strikes against all of your senses. You lose track of where you are, what’s playing the radio, airing on the television, and God knows whoever and whatever else might be watching. They can paralyze or ride you to your feet, spinning, muttering as though you’re caught in an infinite conversation with the universe, with the hours, and in buckshot-like scatters of language, clips and phrases of coherency, you are abruptly speaking in the tongues of angels even if it is on the devils you are elaborating. You have lost your moorings and, aware of it, grope for both a hold as well as a hand up higher, always higher and so find a pen or cigarette, a keyboard or a drink (the very fortunate find all of these) and because the minutes are mumbling dire warnings of running out and the taste of fear in the back of your throat says sweetly this all may go pew-pew or kaboom or up, up in ashes and embers if you don’t get it out, get it down, right now, before your heart thuds another beat, you write."

Ideas have been on my mind today. Everyone asks where they come from, but what I want to know is where they go. They go to the page or the computer screen or they sit inside of you, waiting impatiently for their turn. Sometimes the last you see of them is their backs as they walk away, fade out, neglected and malnourished. Ideas can take you anywhere and the bad ones do so with elegiac smiles and beckoning hands. You don't always know they're bad until you're halfway to the end or, if you're really unlucky, not until it's all over. 

Sometimes you have to the let idea lead you where it will to find out how good it is, how good it can be. Other times it's best to get a jump on the idea, wrap it up, tuck it in and take it with you.

I'm going to go on and take the one I have now and get it down. More later. 

apropos.

It's amazing what writers will ask a person. What is even more amazing is what writers will consider to be a perfectly legit question at, say, two o'clock in the bloody ante meridiem. If the question is posed from one writer to another, then all bets are off. The questioned might not be capable of stopping herself from launching into paragraphs of tangential, so-called "answers" that might cause normal people to feel as though they've been assaulted (molested?) by an O'Brien's dreadful-to-hold-onto nothing. 


One writer needs a biochemical weapon idea to give to a space pirate. Another writer is trying to come up with an appropriate character name that will become adopted as a title (such as "Ceasar", but, you know, not). Someone else is forgetting that they are, in fact, on the intertubes and it would probably be faster to look up the name of the Union general who went against Lee in the Battle of Sharpsburg than ask you who may or may not recall that particular history class (McClellan, if you're wondering). 


These are merely some of the more recent questions, demands and/or pleas that have been put to me seemingly apropos to nothing. Only, of course, they are relevant and even the afore-mentioned endless, "nothing" answers often are. Why?


Because like I said in an earlier post before I hauled my blog here, ideas happen in a frozen rush. They form always, interminable, and at unexpected intervals pop like match strikes against all of your senses. You lose track of where you are, what's playing the radio, airing on the television, and God knows whoever and whatever else might be watching. They can paralyze or ride you to your feet, spinning, muttering as though you're caught in an infinite conversation with the universe, with the hours, and in buckshot-like scatters of language, clips and phrases of coherency, you are abruptly speaking in the tongues of angels even if it is on the devils you are elaborating. You've lost your moorings and, aware of it, grope for both a hold as well as a hand up higher, always higher and so find a pen or cigarette, a keyboard or a drink (the very fortunate find all of these) and because the minutes are mumbling dire warnings of running out and the taste of fear in the back of your throat says sweetly this all may go pew-pew or kaboom or up, up in ashes and embers if you don't get it out, get it down, right now, before your heart thuds another beat, you write.


Ideas are fond of ambushes. Everything is apropos, even nothing.