fiction-writing

I missed a lot of messages when I first came to DeviantArt ... OK, for my first few years on DeviantArt ... because I didn't know where everything was. But I'm catching up. On January 18, 2012 at 5:03 pm Chicago time, Luz Tapia wrote

"Can you put the credits of the photos please? "

and looking around DeviantArt in the photomanipulation groups, I find that this question keeps getting asked: who produced the "stock" used to make the image. The stock is the original photo that gets manipulated, I take it? If so, then for all photomanipulations currently on this page, and probably all that ever will be, the stock credits go to me. I took the photos that I then manipulated. I don't see any reason to do otherwise. I live in Chicago, and the images you see in my gallery are of places in Chicago, so why would I not take my own photos? Doing that is the easiest part of what I did when I created those manips, and having done so myself means that

1. when I look at the photo I'm about to alter, I can remember the place where I was when I took it. I can connect to that place in my thoughts, remember the sensation of looking around. If I was using somebody else's photo to do a manip, I'd lose that.

2. when I'm shooting my own stock, I get to choose the shot. I get to do my own composition, with my own purposes in mind. If I were to borrow stock, I'd have no control over what was on screen when I started playing around.

3. I have a great excuse for being outdoors and hiking around. I like being outdoors.

4. I don't have to worry about intellectual property right disputes. The copyright is unambiguously mine, and failing unforeseen complications, it will remain provably so. I make a point, not only of holding onto the original unaltered photos, but of a number of intermediate images created as I manipulate the images.

The choice to me seems so clear, that until I saw that question, I never even thought of it as being a question. I was surprised to learn that people borrowed stock so often, that one's viewers would assume that one had done the same. I guess I could start citing myself in the credits, which in a sense I will be (using links to this post) just to put an end to what seems to be the usual question. Doing more than posting that link, though? "I'd just like to thank me for giving myself permission to use my own photo" is a joke that I believe would wear very thin, very quickly.

 



Physically, some of the time I've been over at the Pig, scribbling dialogue that is going to have to be tightened, and may not be posted on DeviantArt. Not if I want to keep this account. It is going to be posted on Tribe, where the Terms of Service tend to be far more lenient than those on DA.

I had been writing the first draft of Supplicants, when I took a look at the dialogue I had just jotted, and thought "this is the worst piece of garbage anybody has ever written". In a first draft, this is forgivable, maybe, but Meg was being just too precious for words, and was drifting out of character. Some of this could be, and was, remedied by the insertion of a little background, that changed the context in which some of the responses were taking place, but much of the dialogue was completely artificial. I could see the source of the artificiality - I was starting to mimic the style of some incredibly bad fan fiction I had just wasted my time reading. I wasn't doing that deliberately, or even knowingly, but that author's style started creeping into my own, and I absolutely should have seen that coming. What was the basic theory of the exercise I was engaged in, at the time? By gradually mutating one of Kafka's stories until it was a new one, I would absorb a little of his style, which would certainly work to my benefit, even if I do have to settle for reading him in translation. Where's the surprise? I read terrible literature, and the same thing happened.

I needed to shake that bad influence off, and work on my dialogue. What I had found to be really bad was a tag team style of dialogue that I had picked up, something that read more like a monolog that was being delivered in pieces by the two parties, than like a real discussion. It proceeded too smoothly to where it was going to sound or feel real. Real dialogs do not and can not go in a straight line, because while an author can know where everything is supposed to end up, real people don't know that, because there is no unique place where an ongoing discussion should go. Real discussions just happen, evolving organically, and like any living thing, a real discussion is going to be messy. It's going to wander around, run into points of confusion, and sometimes get sidetracked by a variety of personal issues. Even characters that are absolutely friendly to each other - and how many people do you know who are always friendly to each other - aren't going to function like cogs in a machine, because like real people, they can't see the arc of the plot, either, and probably would fight against it if they knew it was there. What to us would a story arc would, to them, be Fate, and it is in the nature of Man to fight against the very concept of Fate, as he tries to put his own destiny in his own hands.

No, I needed to work on that dialog, and so I have. The first step has been to take some free writing done by somebody else, and build a story around that, choosing something published by somebody who would push me out of my comfort zone, and force me to do something different. One of the annoying quirks of my fictional world is that nobody ever seems to fall in love in it, or show any signs of having a libido. This is a deficiency that I knew I needed to work on, as I'm not writing science fiction, and can't say that my characters have been reproducing by budding or mitosis or whatever. They're human beings, and if they're never holding hands, or whispering inanities into each other's ears, what results is going to look fake and stupid. I could go into some detail about a puritanical Midwestern upbringing that leaves me uncomfortable with the thought of writing about certain subjects, because they're things I would never do myself in public, but my characters are not me. My excessively reserved nature is not their nature.

So, what I did was take a piece in which somebody talked about his sexual longings, which seemed to be fairly well developed. You see where this is going, right? The characters are going to end up either having sex, or coming very close to doing so (at least in their imaginations if not in reality), enough so that were I to make a film about this encounter, it would have to be R rated. It won't be X rated. I don't see the need to describe every stroke of a finger or tongue, but to set the scene at all, I am going to have to give enough detail that the violation of one of the DA community guidelines will be inevitable. It's hard to imagine a rationale for having the male lead completely overlooking that part of the female lead between her shoulders and navel (use your imagination), so, there you have it. The story in question, which will not be safe for work, can't be posted here.

I will say that I am squirming as I write this first draft, which I am not letting anybody in the Pig see until it is posted, although they'd probably be almost as amused at my discomfort as I should be, myself. While I am currently saving up for a video camera, I have no present plans to make any version of this story, to be named later, into a video. While it would be better suited to that than Supplicants, because so much more of the story takes place out in the open, outside of the character's heads, there is no getting past the fact this would be, yes, R rated. Having the characters do ... interesting things is one thing, asking a pair of volunteer actors to get naked on camera and start simulating "activity" is quite another. I know that there are people who would personally feel comfortable doing that, I just wouldn't feel comfortable being in the room with them at the time.

So, bringing this up to date - posting of draft one to Tribe is probably about two weeks off, after which time I'll be able to post to DeviantArt. I have a few things floating around in my journals (hard copy books, offline) waiting to be worked on and uploaded. I might be able to get some short pieces that way. I might post a few "alternate reality" pieces showing different turns the plot on something I uploaded elsewhere might have taken - yes, keeping it brief and clean. Photo uploading, however, remains hampered by the fact that the piece I use to connect between my camera and the computer is lost, and keeping spare parts in stock is no longer in fashion. Much looking to do before I can upload anything, some of it for people to go hiking with, because traveling alone with a camera in some of the less fashionable neighborhoods in Chicago is a great way to get mugged.

As it is now 3:11 am my time, I think that I can be forgiven if I close this up and go to bed, now. Good night.