Writing an entire novel in public does not rank among the best ideas I ever had. Unfortunately it gives a glimpse into the dark side of writing, the side the reader shouldn't have to be bothered with. The vast majority of writing is work, plain and simple. Instant gratification does not exist when it comes to a lengthy piece of literature, although early on I can say there was an enhanced sense of accomplishment for having been able to turn out some of the sequences I did while people came and went all around me. Now, however, with a plot foundation that will require in the area of a thousand pages to be addressed effectively, the task seems somewhat daunting. Nevertheless, this thing I have started will be finished.
My immediate family disapproves that I continued that part of the book pertaining to the victim of a kidnapping. They seem to think that I should have just dropped it, and I really wish I could have done that. The problem is that no matter how many things that can be said about it after it is finished, so many more things could have been said about that scenario being dropped from the novel. I would greatly prefer to be judged for what I have written than to be the victim of speculation.
I shied away from writing anything having to do with sexual fetishes or abnormal sexuality for the duration of my career as a writer with good reason. I did not want to provoke nonconformist sexual thought among young people. That's the nice way of saying it. A harder way of putting it is that someone who reads about abnormal sexuality can be said to have been influenced by the author, and that such work instigates deviant sexual thought. My philosophy stands at odds with such an interpretation of the stability of the readership, and for that reason I finally decided that nothing ventured is nothing gained. Not that there is anything to gained here, considering I do all of this strictly for the sake of art.
I started the Ivana Curtis portion of the project with the completely real goal of creating spiritual positivity and advancing gender education with the story. The unpleasant angle here is that her story is linked to the rest of the book. With the project rapidly approaching 40,000 words, the starts and stops in the storyline have struck me as entirely detrimental to my original goal. Whereas if someone read what I intended to write straight from the beginning to the end there would be little room for negatively impacting a reader who is not fully matured, the way it stands now I have the very real feeling that what I dreaded all along may very well take place. Instead of being an uplifting piece about a young lady who becomes a strong heroine and a deeply admired character, parts of the story may be taken out of context and deemed pornographic. Her character runs the risk of becoming a sex object for the barely literate instead of the vehicle for an enlightened message and advanced morals.
Over the summer I went out of state. Back in July I stopped the Curtis part of the project for the reasons I just mentioned. I resumed writing it for reasons that won't be mentioned. Now I have to change strategy completely to avoid the fiasco I worried about from the beginning. The portion of the project dealing with Ivana will be released in two massive blocks which will contain the entirety of the story except the finale. The finale will have to be released with the rest of the book, because it depends on the other plotlines.
Because of the days of BBS (bulletin board systems) in the mid 1980's I looked at the Internet a lot differently for a very long time. Using my own name seemed like a bad idea, considering nobody else did and one could have bad things happen to them very quickly for being too open. After setting up a home office network where we spent time on newsgroups, back around the turn of the millennium, I decided to come up with a handle. A pseudonym with fake names would have been altogether too normal.
After coming up with about fifty and finding them taken I finally had what I considered a eureka moment. I settled on Lesserdevil. "It's not taken?" I marveled, unbelieving. "And it has a sort of double entendre: lessered evil!" What great fortune.
Like many of the decisions in my life that affected my future chaotically, I did not spend very much time on it. I did not choose that handle for mischievous reasons. I definitely did not consider just how many people would have a negative reaction to it. It was catchy and it was easy. I had written a lot of poetry, and a lot of it was dark. Lesserdevil was just a word I came up with that I felt fit some of the poetry, some of which was directly based on writing with occult themes, works like Dracula (imagine).
I had a lot of other things I wanted to write here tonight, but it's getting late, so I'm going to close with this. I have often wondered how many people think my writing and the choice of "Lesserdevil" was intended to make light of their spiritual beliefs. I absolutely do not take religious beliefs lightly. I worry about every single thing. My hair turned gray before I was 30. I worry about being a good role model for a child I do not even have yet. I worry about what people will think after I'm dead. I worry about pronouns and participles. When I write I worry about future interpretations.
I have a deadline. There's only so much I can write before I'm dead, so I have to make it count. I've considered that God may not be very forgiving, at all, that maybe I should stop writing fiction, or poetry, and just write sermons if I want to get into heaven. Then I consider how we all have free will. I am so thankful for free will. In the end, what you do is your decision. If some ectoplasmic turd used my writing as an excuse to commit horrible acts, that would be heavy. It would bother me. But it would be that persons's fault. All I can do is my best.
[hopefully not riddled with errors]
Stream 2
Discussion of some of the subculture involved with the current project deserves special consideration. Creating something that would shock reader sensibilities would be all too easy. Doing that would not require the injection of any sort of speculative fiction, which is notable in the imaginary substance "cuvalo." Shock and awe has a limited appeal in the wider scheme of reader demographics, and for that reason arguably a shorter lifespan as art with relevance to timeless considerations. Looking at the first thirty pages of "Blood Red" one may hardly believe that the goal of the work is to stand the test of time, but such is the case and has been all along. The romance and family side alone dwarfs other considerations going into the project, and those things, love for someone close and love for a family, stand at the very center of timelessness. All of the accompanying negative emotions that follow along with those positives more than account for balancing grittiness requisite in the true epic, but just to be safe there's also a very real epic going on above and beyond the romance and the small family at the center of the novel. That portion of the work involves a massive subculture that most people just won't know anything about.
I struggled with whether or not to tell the truth about some of these things. Needless to say, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction and people believe what they want to believe. Casting all of the second guessing aside and plunging to the heart of the matter, I became very familiar with drug dealing in the 1980's. I wish that I could say that it was only my father who did those things, but it wasn't. He admonished me in every way that he could not to follow that path. Nothing he could have said would have changed my mind. I idolized the man and wanted to be like him in every way, totally ignorant of how incredibly difficult his life had been.
I was a total failure as a drug entrepreneur. In hindsight it becomes clear to me that my father took a direct hand in my private life and made it impossible for me to make any money that way. I would have been murderously furious (an unfortunate use of language, that) to find that out at the time. I made it far enough to know how things worked, and it could be conjectured that simply gaining the knowledge I did is altogether detrimental to enjoying a normal life.
Decades later it's painfully apparent that the things I learned set me apart from my friends and acquaintances in so many ways. It's almost like there are two worlds. There's the safe, happy world where people raise families. In that world when acts of violence and law breaking take place those events leave ripples in a still pond. The police arrive, the system starts to work and everybody is kept safe and sound.
In the other world the safeguard is honor among people of power. Events, violent or otherwise, don't cause a stir. Family is still held sacred, but human life means a lot less. The police aren't safe or the vehicle of the system itself has turned its back, so help never arrives after a phone call, if a phone call is ever made. If everything goes according to plan, then everything is copacetic. When plans deteriorate, all along lines of communication where people are making a profit lives begin to turn upside down. In the wake of those big money substances people are left empty and broken.
There's not much left to say about it. Shortly very disturbing things will be available to be read here, and a lot of good things before the end. It's not all about shock or I would have the story set up to handle about twenty-five pages of free flowing, unanchored, no-holds-barred offensive material. Instead, meh, there's a plotline.
[There's no way to write anything biographical about my paternal ancestry, the same way there is no way to write anything autobiographical about myself. How does one verbalize glances and unspoken moments? How do people go about putting words to the unspoken? It can be done, but the truth of maters only lasts for moments, and then other pressing thoughts and histories come weighing down. What was true one moment is only a portion of the truth in the next, and then barely true at all before the end, depending on points of view. So many times I have tried to vocalize my ponderances, only to come up empty, my words snatched by a glance at a cloud in the sky, distracted in the crucial moment and left without anything to think or say. This is another one of those things. One thing that can not be said to be untrue, in any way shape or form, is that I come from a merchant's home, if by merchant one includes the barter system and the occupation of trader therein.]
I struggled with whether or not to tell the truth about some of these things. Needless to say, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction and people believe what they want to believe. Casting all of the second guessing aside and plunging to the heart of the matter, I became very familiar with drug dealing in the 1980's. I wish that I could say that it was only my father who did those things, but it wasn't. He admonished me in every way that he could not to follow that path. Nothing he could have said would have changed my mind. I idolized the man and wanted to be like him in every way, totally ignorant of how incredibly difficult his life had been.
I was a total failure as a drug entrepreneur. In hindsight it becomes clear to me that my father took a direct hand in my private life and made it impossible for me to make any money that way. I would have been murderously furious (an unfortunate use of language, that) to find that out at the time. I made it far enough to know how things worked, and it could be conjectured that simply gaining the knowledge I did is altogether detrimental to enjoying a normal life.
Decades later it's painfully apparent that the things I learned set me apart from my friends and acquaintances in so many ways. It's almost like there are two worlds. There's the safe, happy world where people raise families. In that world when acts of violence and law breaking take place those events leave ripples in a still pond. The police arrive, the system starts to work and everybody is kept safe and sound.
In the other world the safeguard is honor among people of power. Events, violent or otherwise, don't cause a stir. Family is still held sacred, but human life means a lot less. The police aren't safe or the vehicle of the system itself has turned its back, so help never arrives after a phone call, if a phone call is ever made. If everything goes according to plan, then everything is copacetic. When plans deteriorate, all along lines of communication where people are making a profit lives begin to turn upside down. In the wake of those big money substances people are left empty and broken.
There's not much left to say about it. Shortly very disturbing things will be available to be read here, and a lot of good things before the end. It's not all about shock or I would have the story set up to handle about twenty-five pages of free flowing, unanchored, no-holds-barred offensive material. Instead, meh, there's a plotline.
[There's no way to write anything biographical about my paternal ancestry, the same way there is no way to write anything autobiographical about myself. How does one verbalize glances and unspoken moments? How do people go about putting words to the unspoken? It can be done, but the truth of maters only lasts for moments, and then other pressing thoughts and histories come weighing down. What was true one moment is only a portion of the truth in the next, and then barely true at all before the end, depending on points of view. So many times I have tried to vocalize my ponderances, only to come up empty, my words snatched by a glance at a cloud in the sky, distracted in the crucial moment and left without anything to think or say. This is another one of those things. One thing that can not be said to be untrue, in any way shape or form, is that I come from a merchant's home, if by merchant one includes the barter system and the occupation of trader therein.]
Water for Blood
The sci-fi collaboration Water for Blood never got finished. The notes for the book were lost after a noteworthy incident in which three entire computers, including the main server, vanished into thin air out of a private residence. After a not-so-subtle nudge from the co-author, D. M. Grouchy II, I have decided to go back to work on the project.
I settled on naming my current serial novel A Mist of Blood Red Goauche. I didn't want to name it too soon. After "Mist" is finished, "Water" goes back on the table. It's only been dormant for 7 years. Jack Full-On, Grief and Lissa have not been forgotten. Previous plans to scrap it have been overruled.
I discussed Water for Blood at great length in emails when the project started. If I still had those emails they would certainly help restore the work to its original stature. The surviving content was only placed online after I discovered the original documents on a computer in another state. I believe I forgot full credits at the time.
Just as soon as I get some extra time I plan to put together the last poetry compilation. It's here, and very finished, but not assembled. It's called Falls' Idylls.
I learned Spanish from my grandfather, John Samuel Day, who was born in Cuba, before I learned English. The conflict in languages led to an impairment in my communication ability. I developed speech impediments at a very young age. Every now and then when I'm not paying attention, if I start to type very fast, I lapse into sing-song bad grammar English. When I find it later I am usually flabbergasted by my absent-mindedness. Anyway, there was a bunch of that here, in a history of how many times I have been the victim of robbery and burglary.
--
Blood Isn't Worth Enough issues resolved - written in front of witness. I agree I wrote it, and powers beyond my control prevent edits. So much for password security. UPDATE: I found a hard copy of the very first draft. It suuuuuuuux.
I settled on naming my current serial novel A Mist of Blood Red Goauche. I didn't want to name it too soon. After "Mist" is finished, "Water" goes back on the table. It's only been dormant for 7 years. Jack Full-On, Grief and Lissa have not been forgotten. Previous plans to scrap it have been overruled.
I discussed Water for Blood at great length in emails when the project started. If I still had those emails they would certainly help restore the work to its original stature. The surviving content was only placed online after I discovered the original documents on a computer in another state. I believe I forgot full credits at the time.
Just as soon as I get some extra time I plan to put together the last poetry compilation. It's here, and very finished, but not assembled. It's called Falls' Idylls.
I learned Spanish from my grandfather, John Samuel Day, who was born in Cuba, before I learned English. The conflict in languages led to an impairment in my communication ability. I developed speech impediments at a very young age. Every now and then when I'm not paying attention, if I start to type very fast, I lapse into sing-song bad grammar English. When I find it later I am usually flabbergasted by my absent-mindedness. Anyway, there was a bunch of that here, in a history of how many times I have been the victim of robbery and burglary.
--
Blood Isn't Worth Enough issues resolved - written in front of witness. I agree I wrote it, and powers beyond my control prevent edits. So much for password security. UPDATE: I found a hard copy of the very first draft. It suuuuuuuux.
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