I’m getting a very late start today - I had a meeting that ran late, and now I’m eating a BL, since the sandwich shop was out of tomatoes. It’s pouring rain outside, but I borrowed one of the huge golf umbrellas from the receptionist’s desk. It was a good plan until the wind picked up to about 90 miles an hour and it started raining sideways.

I remember reading about some famous poet in jail or a mental institution who wrote his epic poem a line a day, because he had no paper and he memorized a line each day. When I’m at my current level of output, I’m grateful I’m not that guy. I’m averaging about 30 lines a day, since I figured out that for Rumored to Exist to be about 100,000 words when it’s done, each section from 0-255 would have to be about 30 lines long. I need to increase my pace, but it’s hard. Once I hit that perfect frame of mind, I’ll write a few thousand words a night of really hilarious shit. But for now, I trudge along, hoping that my future editing passes will add some life to the mediocre prose I’m putting on the page.

I did my taxes this morning. This is the earliest I’ve ever filed. I use the tele tax phone thing, and I will be getting a ton of money back. Because I do not have the ability to save a few bucks a week, I have the government take an extra fifty out each check, and then when I get it back, I blow it on computer equipment or whatever. I should have this wad of cash back by the time I go to New York (Feb. 10).

I’ve got another meeting in a few, and I need to eat. Maybe I’ll write something better tomorrow.

(my non-writing update: I’m alive and my stomach is letting me eat what I want. I still feel a little weird from my total lack of nutrient, but I’m getting there.)

Yesterday, I was talking about dreams and writing, which is a great topic right now. I think I have some kind of sleep disorder, because I sleep 10 hours and it feels like 6, and I always have dreams which are taunting me, saying “just try to write this shit down when you wake up.” My dreams right now are incredibly nonlinear, overlapping, redundant, confusing, and realistic. Because they aren’t a simple story, I can’t just write them down. (It’s also a pain in the ass because when I wake up at 4 in the morning, I don’t want to spend 20 minutes transcribing dreams, and then end up wide awake.) I find that by thinking about how I want to write the dreams down, they happen more vividly, and I remember more when I wake. I wish there was some kind of machine or hypnosis tape I could use to get closer to this goal, but most of the stuff you find on the internet is either new-age hippie crap, or a get-rich-quick scheme.

I think people have similar, cliche dreams. I mentioned this yesterday: falling, naked in front of people, forgot they were registered for a class, and so on. I find that my dreams sometimes fall into templates, but they are much stranger. Let me see if I can assemble a top five list (not in any order):

1. This really isn’t a dream, there is a nuclear holocaust, and I’m experiencing the last five seconds of my life.
2. A lucid dream where I’m able to take control.
3. I’m back in Elkhart, Indiana, and going through the same problems I did ten years ago
4. “The amalgam dream” - I’m walking in San Francisco, I turn a corner and it’s Bloomington, 1992, crossed with the cabash scenes from Naked Lunch. I run into a person I used to work with, who is drinking coffee with Jesse Ventura. Etc.
5. The lucid dream that takes place in my apartment and I’m not sure that I’m asleep or awake. Happens when I’m about to fall asleep, or on those bad nights of insomnia where I wake up and look at the clock every hour and later deduce that I’ve been up all night.

I take ideas from my dreams. For the last three years, I’ve been on and off successful with writing down things. I read about how Phillip K. Dick dreamed all of his stories, and then woke up and simply transcribed them to paper. I thought that was so cool, I started doing it with Rumored to Exist. A lot of key ideas in that book were lifted straight from dreams. I’ve never been able to fully capture the whole dream-state onto paper, but I never would’ve been able to figure out some of the stuff I use in Rumored.

Or maybe I would. I have a lot of theories about dreams, that they are simply extensions of what you feel and think consciously, mixed with a little biochemical work from what you ate before bed or how stressed you are. I wish there was a way to control that mirror from one side to the other, and maybe there will be within my lifetime…

I got a late start today, so I better split. More about this later.

(Sickness update: I’m back at work, but I’m not eating yet. I don’t know how long I can survive on applesauce; I really wish I could go to Burger King and order a bacon double cheeseburger, but I don’t think that would help things.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams lately, in the context of writing. I think the ultimate nonlinear novel would flow like a dream, and I’m not talking cliches here. I mean the entire story would unfold in the same random, surreal fashion. It would be an easier project with film, because you wouldn’t have to explain all of the visual anomalies. One of my favorite films is, of course, Naked Lunch, and it uses many of the Burroughsian structure elements and changes which could also be attributed to dreams. The movie has little to do with the book, but it was the only way they could pull it off.

So what are the elements of dreams that would have to be captured? I could write about all of the stereotypical dreams, like falling from a height, being naked in public, finding out on the last day of the semester that you were registered for a class you didn’t know about, etc. I think if I did that, the story would resemble one of those “we’re making fun of horror movies even though we’re a horror movie” movies, like Scream, Urban Legend, or whatever.

The first thing about dreams is that they are incredibly nonlinear. It’s normal for me to wake up after a dream, remember two pieces of it, but not remember which one was first in the dream. Then, other pieces filter in, some fitting in the order of the story, and others confusing it further. But how the hell do you do this on paper? One solution would be to NOT do this on paper, and work on some hypertext project. My personal bias about this is that it’s not possible to achieve suspension of disbelief while sitting in front of a CRT. Plus hypertext is more of a choose-your-own-adventure experience, which isn’t non-linear, it’s sort of multi-linear. Maybe someone will do further research on this and make a hypertext novel that captures the nonlinear feel of dreams.

I don’t know how this would work with just regular HTML though. I think dreams may be a phenomenon other than natural thought, like something with a more chemical basis or using parts of the brain we don’t use when reading a book or shopping for groceries. When you remember three or four parts of a dream but don’t remember the order, or each part makes you remember more parts, it’s like when you try to remember something that happened ten years ago - the parts are all in your mind, but with varying quality, and they don’t “come back” in order. When you read a book, you start at page 1 and read until the end (unless you skip around) and the story is placed in your brain in a linear fashion, even if it is nonlinear. If you think of the book later, and the various pieces of the book are not as clear in your mind, the plot might appear to be more dreamlike. I re-read The Grapes of Wrath about five years ago, and I don’t remember many of the specifics with great detail, but I remember the part where the grandmother died and they pretended she was really sick so they could get past the border guards. It’s almost like a dream, but it’s not that Steinbeck wrote it that way - it’s a function of my memory. The question is, how can you write a book that imitates that function when the reader has to read it from start to finish?

It’s time for my daily plug for Raymond Federman. His books are so nonlinear, they can be unreadable in places. They’re all great, and funny. He has a lot of different stuff going on in his experimental works, but one thing he uses to obfuscate the linear plot is repetition and derivation. In books like Double or Nothing, he’ll tell a piece of a story, then later change the story, tell an earlier segment, and so forth. It’s not as easy as just reading the story from A to B, but it plants little subliminal facts in your memory, so when you hear a derivative of the story later, you wonder if you’ve already heard it, or if it was new. Irregardless of Federman’s technique (which is beyond the scope of this one time journal entry) it shows that it’s possible to work with non-linear dream structures on the linear page.

I want to talk about this more, but maybe I should wait until tomorrow to start a new topic about dreams. As always, let me know your thoughts and help me keep thinking about this.

I want to talk more about writing, but today’s been weird. Not today, or the events of today, but some biological anomaly. Maybe I’m depressed, or maybe it’s poor diet. It’s one of those weird in-between states where I’m talking to someone about something and it reminds me of a movie, and it takes me 7 years and 3 Leaonard Maltin books to remember that I was thinking of The Godfather. Or whatever. Not the time to start discussing weird literary theory.

I finally found the expansion pak for the Nintendo 64, and also picked up a Rumble Pack. I’m still trying hard to finish level 4 of Star Wars: Rogue Squardon. Last night, I managed to get a tow cable around an AT-AT three times, and the fucking thing stumbled to its well-deserved death. Then I found out that you have to kill two of them and do some other jerking around before you clear the level. I read some FAQs and found that I’m not alone here - it’s one of the hardest levels of the game.

I don’t know who reads this, but I’ll say this in case some people deeply embedded in the journal scene do read this: I am really looking for journals similar to mine, or similar to what I want this journal to be. I have been falling into this rut of “I went to the mall. I bought some new socks. I ate a grape. I looked at the inside of my fridge” sort of journal entries. I wish I knew others who were writing about writing, instead of writing about their lives as writing. If you know of any, let me know.

Writing Rumored has been hard lately. I wrote two pieces last night, both marginal in quality, and finished working in some edits Marie did on the first half back when I was in NY. And it’s hard to procrastinate. I feel so guilty watching TV, and I’m so sick of the shit they have on there. I spent 40 minutes out of the hour watching commercials, and think about Asimov writing a book every 14 minutes during his career. I know that eventually I will get motivated and a long string of writing will suddenly hit the page. Until then, I’m poking away. I am at part #133 of the book, and it would be nice to be at #150 by the end of the month. I really hope to get this fucking thing done by the end of March. That doesn’t mean a final draft, but just something that has parts 0-255 and doesn’t require me to go back and junk 40 or 50 of them because I wrote them all in a night.

I have a dinner getting cold here, and I should probably try to get in the right frame of mind to work. More later.

I’ve been thinking more about content, which I babbled on about yesterday. There are a few conflicts involved in all of this, so bear with me.

Yesterday, I talked about content and method versus character and setting and plot. It might be helpful if you read yesterday’s entry, but for now, I’m going to ignore everything but content. A typical, writing 101 short story or Hollywood screenplay contains content - a protagonist, an antagonist, a dark and stormy night, a football player and the cheerleadr who loves him, and so on. The distinction that I would make between a typical story and something experimental or literary is that the purpose of the content is different, so the content is different. For example, the purpose of Dr. Benway in a William S. Burroughs book is different than the purpose of Dr. Niles Crane on the TV show Frazier. The former can develop in different ways because he’s not supporting this typical entourage of characters in the typical plot A/plot B sitcom script. More focus can be put on the characters (or the settings or objects) because they aren’t simple plug-ins to a prefab storyline. I think that’s the big distinction in literary fiction, and it’s what differentiates something like The Subterraneans and Weekend at Bernie’s.

So where do these heightened characters and places and objects come from? Writers write what they know, for the most part. This has been the major stumbling block for me and my writing career. I’ve read books by Bukowski, about his years of drinking, meeting different women, betting on the horses, living with almost no money and writing for an underground newspaper, living in roominghouses. I’ve read Burroughs, the trips into the jungle to find Yage, the travel all over the world, the Beat Hotel and Tangiers. And I’ve even been jealous of Henry Rollins, sleeping in the back of a U-Haul, a different city every day on the road with Black Flag. All of these people lived adventurous lives, while I haven’t. The closest I’ve been to being on the edge was maybe in college, but that’s nothing like On the Road. So part of my muse has been telling me that I need to go out and live to collect this content - to do like Hemmingway and fight in wars and fight bulls and drink 20 shots of whiskey for breakfast and everything else. And granted, if I could play the guitar or I found some gig that got me out of the house and all around the country, maybe I’d try it. But I’ve thought that the collection of content was a major deterrant in my writing career. I wrote one book called Summer Rain based on a summer in Bloomington, and it was fun to write (well, it’s still not done yet…) but I realized that there would never be a second book after this one, because if I stuck to this genre of autobiographical fiction, every book I wrote would be another Summer Rain.

But you don’t need to live it to write it, do you? Several of my favorite writers, most notably Mark Leyner, write stuff that never really happened. It’s all based on a mix of research, pop culture, current events, and sheer insanity. Someone like Leyner is pulling his content from the air, and it’s commendable work. When I mess with this, I find that the fictional content you create is only as good as the random junk floating in your head. I took a few weird college courses on music theory, cancer, third world politics, and astronomy, and I have a weird laundry list of interest and topics I like to read about, too. But when I do my best work on Rumored to Exist is when I do my best homework. I pick things up from other people, from newsgroups, from websites, from odd shows on the Discovery channel. And when everything works good, and when I’m saturated with this useless knowledge, the content flows. But other times, it doesn’t. And that’s what I’m trying to improve.

I just got interrupted, so I lost my train of thought. But what I think I was going to say is that I feel a need to research and challenge myself to look at new things and ideas, specifically for Rumored to Exist. I find that I need to look for a starting point for new and weird topics, and once that happens, everything snowballs and I’m doing plenty of good writing. My friend and fellow writer Michael Stutz recommended Robert Anton Wilson’s book Everything is Under Control, so I ran and got a copy of last night. He was 100% right - it’s this encyclopedia of weird conspiracy theories and secret societies that’s somewhat tongue in cheek and probably not even 10% correct, but it’s an excellent read. And now I’m thinking about Freemasons, Men in Black (not Will Smith), word virus theories, germ warfare, and a ton of other cool stuff. I have enough research material to keep me busy for a while.

The application of this material is the second part of what I talked about yesterday, the method. I don’t think I am going to be able to crack out a good explanation of this, since I haven’t even begun to think about it. But that’s a good discussion for later.

As always, I’m really looking for comments about this babble, especially since this self-discussion is becoming somewhat important to me. So please email me if you have any thoughts on the subject.