Thursday, June 26, 2003
Yesterday, I wrote 1,225 words on Chapter Five. I tossed out everything I'd written on the chapter previously and started over, and it seems to have been the right thing to do.
So far, the characters don't seem to have noticed.
I tear down time and build a new history in its place. Nail up new moments, new events, and the elder, unhappened history, the alternate, unrealized architecture, goes on the rubbish heap. My black little world, at the mercy of my black little mind. My whims, my fears, my insecurities, my perversions, my selfish hopes. All writers become gods. Many gods are not sane. How many times has my life been rewritten so far?
If yesterday wasn't what you remember, how could you prove it? If you were not you, and I was not me, and so on and so forth. This is becoming the dominant anxiety of the 21st Century. It may also become the dominant theme of early 21st-century dark fantasy and science fiction. Already, in film alone, we have Blade Runner, Dark City, The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, The Others, The Sixth Sense, Jacob's Ladder, Vanilla Sky, Solaris, Run, Lola, Run, and I could go on like this for quite some time. I could also point to Threshold and its relationship to Low Red Moon. An unreliable cosmos has become a standard of our imagination. And I am a very unreliable cosmoengineer.
Cosmoengineer. That sounds sexier than "writer," but not quite so arrogant as "god."
Same difference.
Dream a little dream . . .
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