continued...

well, got yanked in some directions last night. why is it so difficult to maintain solidarity, individual priority, in the wake of social functions and obnoxious events which force separate people into a unity? bah. at least it was fun.
this should be an engaging weekend, as mattress has frosting-layers upon cake-layers of time all to himself. plenty of time to read, to write, to theorize, to meditate, to focus (elusive, elusive focus). he could take or leave the superbowl at this point; no emotional investment whatsoever. he fortuitously has an apartment all to his self (plus one troublesome cat), and each nook and corner of it has possibilities to explore. currently he can think of notebooks, a kitchen, a guitar, various paints, tomes of knowledge and imagination, video games (hum), headphones of uncompromising sound-quality, and of course this laptop just here, which composes the accoutrement of many nooks around the wide world. though 'here' is not currently the house. no matter.

continued, no? m thinks that he was going off on a point about fiction. painting. on a plane recently, he was flipping through 'the art spirit' and a particular quote jumped out at him. well, it was not a quote at the time; it was raw compositional material. only now is it a quote~ it was about painting (much like the book as a theme), and it basically said that in order to effectively paint something (a nose), you must paint not the nose itself, but its essence. its impressions; its reflections inside of one's self. that is a profound point. and where fiction intersects this process, is a cautious, cupped hand....corkscrewing and curling all around each concept or character that you can potentially load into the form. each has a vastness, a potential to be utterly revealed, utterly cathartic. as long as you can reach inside of yourself and be genuine, your brush-stroke words can be as intricate and intertwined as you can visualize. they can orbit, have spatial relations, complements, antipodes...all in this completely free verse that is only contained from complete spillage by your own capacities as a writer, and, more importantly, as a person.

another point that is beginning to be elucidated is that (at least m is persuaded to believe, and will probably be the case with his own books) writers do not formulate much of a game plan. the process involves an inordinate amount of playfulness; everything is explored in the moment and, of the many possible worlds that have been conjured, one is selected for foil-stamping into reality. the process of being a writer involves many stages...firstly, there is a stage of absurdity and sorcery; this stage comes up repeatedly, but in different facets and formats. what matches did not expect, for whatever reason, is that a writer must barrier off a certain portion of himself to these lands. he must have free roam in them, such that he may map them effectively and not be worried about a leak of color from the real world altering some sleight in his tales. each small change that cannot be tracked back to its source represents myriad problems, as they escape the containment of cause and effect. a good writer must have the mental capacity to catalogue all his world; he must have an encyclopedia of daydreams. otherwise, he may lose track, may merge, rift, shatter. which, of course, is still salvageable...it just uproots the physics and the relations of a story, re-potting it in an entirely new terrain. it will find different nourishment, grow into astounding proportions, and potentially break the mind of the author who attempts to pen it~

ho hum. here is to matches' mind not breaking. or if it does, let's at least be optimistic about the outcome~

"do you count the flakes when it snows?
and can you feel the heat, or only the afterglows?
do you count the flakes when it snows, yeah?
and do you count the leaves when they fall?
and can you feel anything at all?"
~ Just Jack - Snowflakes