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Silver Mountain Notebook

  • I read an article about how attempting to view and understand yourself and others from an outsider perspective can be life changing. One of the examples given was about reacting with anger to something upsetting, and how — if you could observe yourself from a third-person perspective — you’d probably see that anger was counterproductive and lashing out would be regretted later.

    I started thinking about that in my own life and in what I’m trying to do right now: writing.

    If there were a movie about a character who had written a novel, studied screenwriting, always wanted to write, and was writing several promising-seeming projects all at the same time, the audience would think “this person should be writing.” If that character was applying for dozens of jobs a week doing something other than writing their own stuff, the audience would think this was being untrue to themselves and their own ambitions, desires, and talents.

    So I guess I’m on the right path.

    It doesn’t change the fact that I need to make money to keep my kids and me fed and housed, though.

    So I guess the idea of shifting my perspective clarifies what I should be doing — what I want to do (and maybe what the world wants me to do). It doesn’t change what I need to do, though.

    I scheduled an interview for Tuesday, though, so for now I’ll allow myself to get to work on my pseudo-vampire thriller novel.

    perspective

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    Mar 6
  • It’s maybe the most famous line from The Dark Knight, which has more than a few great lines. In the context of the movie, I always took the meaning to be that a hero in a given era will inevitably be reassessed in light of changes over time — at best, the hero succeeds and improves things so much that looking back, the hero’s actions seem less heroic. In the case of Batman, for example, a Gotham City that changed in the way that he fought for would probably frown at all the extrajudicial vigilante beatings.

    These days I keep circling a different version of that idea.

    You die a hero or live long enough to have the downright evil shit you were actually up to come light.

    (more…)

    see yourself become the villain

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    Mar 4
  • There are a lot of things in the memoir I’m working on that just don’t fit. It’s a pretty tight focus on my first romantic relationship and how that led me to living with a cult that thought we were being followed and watched by enemies at all times.

    So I’m leaving out a lot of my other college experiences, even if they’re relatively interesting.

    One thing that’s not making the cut is my spring break writers’ workshop with Orson Scott Card — one of my first semi-professional writing experiences.

    That guy hated me.

    Or at least he hated my writing.

    As a genre writer (and a bigot), he told me that my voice was irrelevant because I was a nobody, so witty and voice-forward writing was never going to get me anywhere. He dismissed my stories that had the entire group laughing aloud with a big old shrug. He said, in a comment that has aged poorly, “if Woody Allen wrote this in the New Yorker, it’d be great, but you’re not Woody Allen. Who cares about Jeffrey?”

    It took about a decade to get over that.

    And now it’s been over two decades, and I’m finally back to writing as much as I did in college and as much as I always thought I would.

    What a jackass.

    Back to work.

    writer voice

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    Mar 3
  • Silver Mountain isn’t a real place.

    I made it up — though I’m sure there are towns by that name out there somewhere.

    It’s a version of places I’ve lived and imagined that I have already started to populate with stories. I’ll be sharing some of them here.

    Right now, I’m working on a story that’s not even set in Silver Mountain — it’s set in the real world where I really went to college and experienced a lot of strange things. Still, it belongs here because I’m writing it and because it fits the whole weird vibe of Silver Mountain.

    Unlike a lot of the stories here, this one doesn’t actually involve the supernatural. The people in the story, though (myself included sometimes) thought the supernatural was involved. I maintain that there weren’t any ghosts and there wasn’t any magic, but I wasn’t so sure at the time.

    So, even though I’m getting this ball rolling in support of a book that doesn’t really live in Silver Mountain, it still fits here.

    Silver Mountain

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    Mar 2
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