Monday, August 25, 2003
Yesterday, I did 1,262 words on Chapter Eight of Murder of Angels.
10 down, 4 to go. I'm actually quite impressed at how well I've stuck to this mandatory 1,071-words-a-day-for-fourteen-days-straight thing.
I awoke at the ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m. and was unable to get back to sleep. Hell is most likely something like that. Lying very still, watching the day grow brighter through the slats of the blinds, listening to the ticking clock telling me how many seconds I'm losing, the sound of Spooky's breath as she sleeps oblivious of my wakefulness and of the dreams that made me that way, thoughts of the coming day and the day just past and days from the Pre-Adamite murk of my distant past. Finally I gave up and had two bowls of Count Chocula. It's one thing that actually tastes better than when I was a kid, Count Chocula. It used to leave a bitterish aftertaste, from whatever vile chocolate flavouring was being used. Now they're using Hershey's (says so right on the box, so I know it's true) and it tastes much, much better. And I love the chocolate milk it leaves in the bowl.
I've been getting some great e-mail at the new lowredmail@mac.com addy. Thanks. It helps more than you will probably ever know. I'll print a couple tomorrow, perhaps.
Most of my friends are not writers. They do sensible, necessary, adult things, like sell computers or teach preschool or evaluate insurance claims. They are systems analysts and hair stylists, psychiatric counselors, college professors and so forth. There are a few musicians, but let's not go letting them muddle up the issue. I only have a handful of close writer friends. In general, writers bore the dren out of me. People in general are dull, but I find most authors about as dull as Cream of Wheat. That's why I finally began to shy away from the big fantasy/sf writer gatherings: World Fantasy, World Horror, WorldCon, etc. Of course, it may be that I'm the one that's dull as Cream of Wheat, and they're all extraordinarily fascinating individuals. But that's not the point I was going to make. Digression is one of my superpowers (and I'm not going to try to find an "authoritative reference" to tell me whether or not "superpowers" is one word or two). The point I was going to make was that I am a writer, a fantasy writer, and while most of my friends have "real world" jobs, I sit here, day after day, making stuff up. There's really no distinction between what I do now and the "pretend" play that most of us practiced as children.
But most of us stop. Not all of us, but most of us. Or, at least, we fool ourselves into thinking that we've stopped. There's a whole list of socially acceptable adult "play," most notably the Cult of Sports, wherein we (this is the royal We and excludes me) are permitted to play vicariously through a handful of first-hand players. But it's still the stuff of childhood. A huge number of us (and this us does include me) who play videogames, which I find more respectable than sports if only because the player at least has the decency not to employ a surrogate. There's theater and literature and, far, far more popularly, film, which are also all examples of vicarious "pretend" play. I am the writer and I am the one who actually plays. The rest of you watch after the fact, by reading reading my fiction, which is a poor record of the fantasies that I have allowed to unfold in my mind.
But there's a fine line. A grown woman might spend most of her every day "pretending" all manner of absurdities and writing them down for others, but this is, as I've said, an acceptible, socially-sanctioned act of adult play. Besides, I get paid a lot for it, and money is the universal test of social acceptability. Take actors, for example. They're paid to engage in what is essentially a controlled, practiced, and recorded form of conscious schizophrenia. That old joke about a sanitarium filled with Napoleon's, but no one laughed at Marlon Brando. That he was being paid, and that he was enacting the role of Napoleon for the benefit of adults bogged down in those sensible, necessary, adult things who were only permitted this vicarious form of pretending, divides Brando, and all other actors, from the lunatics. Little else does. Don't cite diagnostic distinctions to me. I find them worse than suspect.
Anyway, back to the fine line. Because there are socially unacceptable (or at least suspicious) forms of adult pretend, as well. An obvious example would be role-playing games, and espcially live-action role playing. Here, we're right back to sanitariums and multiple Napoleons. What does the average American make of D&D, or Vampire: The Masquerade, or any number of other such games? I can't count the number of times I've been in the company of authors who find only profound absurdity and humour in the thought of role-playing games, even though they do the same thing themselves, day in and day out. They perceive a fundamental (and, I fear, hypocritical) distinction where none exists. They would argue writing is art, or at least a trade for which one may be paid. Hence, socially acceptable.
And then there's costuming, which I began dabbling in last summer and soon found myself hooked. And now I have a whole assortment of friends and acquaintances who regard this "pretend" play with a good deal of suspicion, and, in a few extreme cases, outright contempt. Never mind that I spend my life pretending to be other people (and that is what I do when I write, else I would never begin to undestand a character). They find my fiction vicariously thrilling. They find my costuming vicariously embarrassing. They can grasp the campfire tale, but have "outgrown" dress-up. Except on Halloween, and then only if you don't take it all too seriously. That I have spent, literally, thousands of dollars on costuming, that I would spend four hours in a make-up chair, that I would endure the discomfort of the costume, and actually appear in public in character astounds and confuses them. Of course, were I Angelina Jolie and someone in Hollywood were paying a few mil for my trouble, it'd be a different story. Then socially suspect play would become socially acceptable play. Add a movie star's contract and we admire the lengths to which someone might go to in order to become another person or another sort of creature entirely.
I'm only going on about this because it's been going round and round in my head. Round and round and round. And because people do have a tendancy to say things that they think are being said in my best interest. But they do not, I think, stop to think of the tens of thousands of hours I've spent playing pretend since writing became my vocation back in 1992. They see that as a Different Thing, primarily because society has conditioned them to see such a difference. And, most of the time, I just find it sort of unfortunate and funny, this knee-jerk double standard. Sometimes, though, it actually annoys me. Sometimes it even pisses me off. I used to make fun of the Klingons and Stormtroopers, too, if only so others wouldn't look at me that way, and then I gave it a shot. And it's fun. A lot more fun than sitting in this room writing my stories. A better, more immediate game, you might say. And I see this has become a long, long entry, and i have to write, so I'll stop before I get into the potential psychological benefits of actual adult play vs. vicarious adult play.
Unless something I've just said has made you negatively reevaluate your fondness for my writing, please proceed now to the Great Egress and buy something.
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