Thought-Drive

Searching my closet for things that I could throw away with little regret, I happened upon one of the lost journals from college. I forget when, but sometime through my matriculation, I stopped taking notes in helpful ways. It might have started as far back as high school, but flipping page by page was like looking into my thinking life as it was at that time. One page had brief and confusing class notes scribbled in a rushed hand, then the next was a diary entry of sorts, naming my demons and listing their predilections, which was followed again by half a page of notes from a completely different class than the first. Only the journal entries had dates, and none of the class notes had titles. Occasionally, there would be rough drafts of poems written on the back of flyers for events on campus. I poured over it with a friend, and he repeated a quote I gave him earlier about how bad authors publish such things and good authors burn them. Mine is sitting beneath a dusty box of quiet noth...

I missed a whole week, and have little excuse, except for maybe that last Monday came around and things were solid, stable. Then, I lost hold of time like someone had played a prank on me, and the concept as a whole became greased and slippery. And then suddenly, like the joke had ended, it was Monday again. Questions about the nature of reality occurred to me, and only partly because time and space recently played havoc on my mind. A sci-fi show I'm an on-again off-again fan of impressed me the other night, and then the day following I had cause to hang out with a scientist friend of mine. I asked him about what science was to him, and what he thought about when he saw the mad doctor cutting up patients with finely explained reasoning or not. "Whenever I see morally reprehensible stuff like that," he said, "it offends me as a scientist." He went on the explain that the whole point of science, to him, was to do the impossible. If a doctor felt he had to test h...

I'm to the point now where the first handful of outlined chapters are practically chapters themselves. It is relatable to a term taught to me by a friend steeped in screen writing. I forget the name of the term, of course, but it basically is a summary of what happens in a scene before its actually written out. So I'm feeling good. The introductions went well enough, thus completing the first week of writing; after looking them over, I asked myself the same old questions. Do they catch the reader up fast enough? Do they include the most pertinent details (that the reader wants to know) of the immediate and of the distant (that the reader needs to know to make sense of the story as a whole). Sometimes I wish I was the type to be able to write a whole book, throw it away, and then write a better one. Along with those things cramming my brain pan, I've also found myself reading two other books. One, I'd say is for a friend and colleague, the other is for a colleague who ...