It's the end of the world

I haven't written anything here in over a month. Instead I have focused on fiction, and have written quite a bit, to my surprise.

So I have decided to close the shutters on the window into The Shows in My Mind. For now at least. Why keep a blog if I never write here? I may open it back up at some point, I may not. Time will tell.

Thanks to those who have read and commented, though there weren't that many of either kind.

Things change. Some things disappear, others appear.

Not only am I closing the blog, but my writing group may be disintegrating as well. For three years now there has been a core of people around which others have come and gone. Could Be King, the only published fiction writer among us, has changed jobs and won't have time to focus on much else besides writing his next novel. Finally Has A Kid finally has a kid, and will be spending most of her time being a mom.

We will try to keep meeting after the last scheduled huddle in December, and I dearly hope we can keep going. The writing class as well as the online community that followed it has fallen apart, so the huddle and my cronies are the only group I have to fuel my inspiration in the way that only fellow writers. Plus its a nice feeling to go there and feel inadequate too...

So. Bye for now. I will still be watching the shows in my minds, and I hope you will be watching the ones in your mind.

I don't have a TV now, but that's okay. The shows in my mind are almost always better.
- The Maxx, episode 1

Critics? How do they happen?

It was a fluke that got me into writing about music. Back in 1995, a friend and I walked into the local paper in Karlskoga and said “we want to review movies”. They looked at us, these journalists that had slaved away at a minor paper for twenty years, and said “Eh...you can't. The culture section does that”.

We did however get an offer to write for the youth section. It is a true sign of a great newspaper that they let just anyone walk in and start writing.

So we wrote reviews of ice cream and board games and books and the occasional text on pretty much whatever. Then, in what alcoholics refer to as “a moment of clarity”, I emailed a record company and asked for CDs for reviews. And they sent them! So I started reviewing CDs. I still have some of those first reviews, in my clippings folder, and they're horrible. Unspeakably horrible.

Then I moved to Sundsvall to go to college. I went to a Peace, Love and Pitbulls gig with some friends, and being music geeks, we stood there and had opinions on pretty much everything. A woman behind me asked if I knew the titles of the last few songs and I told her, in that condescending “my taste in music is better than you” way that I had back then (and still have, to some degree). That condescension gave me a job reviewing CDs for Sundsvall Tidning, which is a considerably bigger newspaper than Karlskoga's local rag.

After that I wrote for a couple of fanzines (this was back in the day when fanzines were still paper, made using a Xerox machine) and yet another paper in a city I went to college in. Then along came Supersatan, in maybe 1998 or 1999.

Yet another treasure from the depths of my closet

And here's a question for Hans. How did I come to write for Supersatan? I can't remember.

Supersatan was a metal site, where I wrote reviews and did interviews and such. I think I interviewed earthtone9 there, as well as P3 Rocks Håkan Persson. Writing there was a lot of fun, and we got a lot of attention and readers. Then one of Sweden's premier rock journalists wrote a column in Close-Up Magazine praising our site as Sweden's best metal site in Swedish, and specifically mentioned me as a writer with pretty much the same taste in music as he has.

About a month later I got an email from the editor of Close-Up asking if I wanted to write there. Which is an offer you don't refuse if you write about metal in Sweden. Mostly I did reviews of CDs, but I also wrote a couple of columns and did some interviews. I got to fly to London to see the first European gig Linkin Park ever did, where they played for a bunch of journalists, some record company bigwigs and a handful of fans. Business class there and back and one night in a fancy London hotel on the record company's dime, and all they got was half a page where the band answered The Basic Questions. Hardly a fair trade, but I didn't complain.

In 2002 I stopped writing for Close-Up because I had sort of a nervous breakdown (more on that some other time), and once I was back on my feet I started writing for Slavestate, which back then was an actual magazine. All of a sudden I could pretty much pick and choose which bands I wanted to do interviews with, and I got a lot more printed than in Close-Up. I've done interviews with Slipknot, Machine Head, Isis, Ministry, Cult of Luna, Type O Negative, Prong, Devin Townsend, 36 Crazyfists, Poison the Well, Burst, Pelican, etc (yes, namedropping galore, but that's what you should expect from me).

I'm still writing for Slavestate, though not as often as I did back in the day and not as often as I would like. Time is something that has been in shorter and shorter supply over the last couple of years. But I'm happy I'm still writing, because expressing my opinions about music is one of my favorite pastimes.

The first draft of anything is always shit

So I've decided on two texts to work on (thanks Mr Urban Army) for the workshop in San Diego I'm aiming for in the summer of 2010. I know I probably won't get in, since over 200 people apply and there's only room for 18 or 20 students, but I have to try.

The texts are “Security” and “And then there was the word”. The opening paragraphs of both texts are posted below. Please tell me what you think. And if anyone's interested in reading and giving feedback on the whole thing, let me know and I can send it once it's done.

SECURITY

The alarm by her door woke Reuben up. The motion sensors hidden in the apple trees along the garden path, roosting like white plastic birds. He would have to find another way to position them in two months, when the leaves started falling.
Yawning so hard his jaw creaked, he sat up on his folding cot and rubbed his face. Sometimes, staring at the monitors, he wondered if he ever really slept anymore, or if he existed in some no man’s land, where sleep was no longer a physical thing, but a state of mind.
He walked over to his desk. The monitors, waiting, the images there better known to him than even his own apartment. He sat down in his Steelcase Leap, and focused on the top left monitor. A carefully smoothed down piece of packing tape across the bottom. “Front door” stenciled in precise black letters.
She stood there, digging around in her black imitation alligator purse, looking for keys. Reuben carefully noted the date and time in his log, under Arrivals, without taking his eyes from the monitor. She was later than usual, but not enough to be worth further comment. With time, he had learned what mattered and what didn’t.
After a few moments she found her keys and opened the front door. As she walked into the hallway and shut the door behind her, Reuben’s gaze slid over to the next monitor. “Hallway”. High ceiling, black and white photographs of kite surfers at Mui Ne on the walls. A coat rack in one corner, the brainchild of a team of black-clad Swedish designers. Sweeping lines of birch wood, reminiscent of birds’ wings.
Reuben watched as she took her coat off and walked into the open area that was both living room and kitchen. The hallway camera covered some of that area as well. Kitchen appliances gleamed there, unused, untouched. In three weeks, he had never seen her cook. Nine restaurants on speed dial.
Reaching under the desk, Reuben pulled a bottle of water from the fridge and took a long pull. She only drank Perrier, and wine, occasionally. Now she walked over towards her fridge, a squat cream Smeg, depositing her purse on the kitchen table. His eyes moving to the monitor one row down. “Kitchen”.

AND THEN THERE WAS THE WORD

Ishmael finds himself on his knees, face down on a hard, cold surface. Gravel bites into his shins and cheeks. He is naked. A sense of otherness envelops him. The hairs on his arms stand on end, and there's a roaring in his ears. He slowly pushes himself up from the ground, and lifts his face up to see.
Words hang in the air in front of his face, on all sides of him, above him. A cage of words woven around him. A barrier that seems as impenetrable as stone. Stunned, he reaches out and lets his fingertips brush them. And howls in pain as their power tears into him, into his fingers, down his arm, into his body, into his soul. Falling back to the ground, his face strikes the ground hard.
Someone speaks on the other side of the barrier of words. A staccato chatter of sounds that are completely meaningless to him. He looks up again, slowly, cradling his aching arm. The words spoken tumble around him, like broken pieces of some arcane puzzle. Instinctively, he pulls pieces out of the air, assembles them and tastes the result, amazed that it's touch does not burn him as the others did. It tastes like a derivative of things he already knows, of things he has read about in ancient tomes. Of myth and of dust.

If the audience never understands the plot, it can be counted on to be attentive to the very end

The concepts of plot, narrative and story have been occupying my thoughts a lot lately. Not just in connection with my own writing, but more generally as well.

I like being confused. I like having no idea what the hell is going on. When I read a book or see a movie that is. I'm not talking a story with unnecessary twists and turns, confusion for the sake of confusion, but a well-crafted tale that asks as many questions as it supplies answers. Open-ended stories, or stories that end with a punch in the stomach, are my favorites.

One problem I have with a lot of movies, and TV shows for that matter, is that they assume the viewers are stupid. When a character has a flash-back to something we saw only 30 minutes ago, they see the need to show that specific flash-back instead of assuming we can get into the character's head. This dumbing down, the assumption that those watching cannot think for themselves, infuriates me to no end.

And yes, this is the kinds of things I fill my head with. What I walk around being irritated about. I can't help it.

So, when I see or read something which doesn't assume I have the attention span of a six-year old with ADD, I get excited. When someone sees fit to craft a story that doesn't end the way you expect, or that simply goes against convention and ends badly, if it's an American movie, I get excited.

We're watching Stranger Than Fiction tonight. A movie that at its very center deals with the concept of narrative. If you haven't seen it, see it. It excites me.

There are other worlds than these

If I had a choice what to do with my time, I would write. Spend my days hunched over a laptop, tappin' away. Creating worlds. Crafting words.

I think a lot of people nurture dreams of writing. “If only I had the time I would write a novel”, and all that. I have spent some time wondering why this is. And I've come to the conclusion that I can only answer for myself. I have no idea why others want to write. Do you? Do you want to write, and if so, why? Tell me.

For me, it's all about worlds. A word, a phrase, a picture, a movie, a smell, can trigger a landslide of images and words inside my head. If I don't get them out, by writing them down, I think I would go mad. Seriously, full-blown, off the wall crazy.

There's a theory that every writer has two personalities inside of him, sometimes working together, sometimes in all-out war. Here's my take on that.

There's the Writer, who's the creative font, the one that can sit down and write hundreds of words without meaning, just to write. Just to see the pen move across the paper, or fingers across keyboard. He's the guy that stands up at the party and recites poetry, perhaps not correctly, but with passion and a smile on his face.

The Editor, on the other hand, is all about rules and regulations, structure and grammar. Creating something with no substance and, even worse, no form, is anathema to the Editor. There has to be a beginning, a middle and an end, and a clear path leading from one to the next to the last, preferably before he even sits down to write. Mindmaps and outlines and synopses are his favored tools. He's the guy who corrects the guy standing up at the party reciting poetry. And smirks while he does it.

For those of you that know me, it should come as no surprise that my Editor is stronger than my Writer. I'm a planner and a control freak. My Writer spends most days in a dusty corner of my mind, bound, gagged and blindfolded, while my Editor spends two weeks dissecting a single sentence, over and over and over. When he has a bad day he goes over and pulls a couple of the Writer's fingernails, just to watch him squirm.

I've read some books on writing, and discussed the craft a lot in the writing class (the good one) I've taken, where the idea of morning writing sessions has come up. This is the idea that you should get up an hour earlier every day and write. Keep the pen or fingers moving, regardless of what comes out. Even if you just write “I can't write. I can't write. I can't write” for sixty minutes. The very idea makes my Editor run around screaming in my head. Maybe that's why I have The Headache...

I need structure to write. Peace of mind. Time. Sure, an idea may come to me at the oddest moment, and I write it down, usually in my phone or in an email I send to myself, like a little treasure for me to unearth and polish a few days later. But if I try to sit down and just write, let the words flow, I feel miserable with the meaningless shit that comes out. Words without meaning have no meaning. On occasion, I've had what the class calls “a writing frenzy”, but it's a rare occurrence and even when I do, I manage to write something that has meaning and that I can edit into something worthwhile. “I can't write. I can't write. I can't write” over and over says nothing to me except that: I can't write. And I know that ain't true.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters

I haven't written here in a month. No real reason, it just kind of happened. Inspiration has been running low, and I have been focusing on other things. My fiction writing has been suffering as well, though I have managed to come up with two embryos for stories for the workshop I hope to be part of next summer (one about time travel and JFK, and one about angels, kind of).

One of them was conceived and written today, aboard the train, using Laban, my new-ish laptop. Yes, of course laptops need names, don't be silly. The other one's called Lelle. He's in love with Mah Girl's laptop Lina. We were expecting a flock of little Palm Pilots or something, but alas, they're either saving themselves for marriage, suffering from reproductive problems or practicing safe sex. If they've gone religious on me, we'll be having us a laptop skeet shoot any day now. Just as long as they don't have an STD (Serial port Transmitted Disease).

Life has been a roller coaster ride of ups and downs lately. Tuesday was one of the worst working days I've had, ever. Actually, maybe top ten or twenty crap days ever, regardless of work or other circumstances. The Friday before was also epically bad. Just horror show bad.

Then Friday, three days ago, I began three days of bliss. Barbecue on Friday with good friends and then a visit from Mah Girl's best friend over the weekend, which included beer, drinks, steaks, movies (some good, some disappointing, some sooo bad), pizza, more beer and Wovenhand live. Excellent.

Some kind of balance has been reached, then. I'm hoping the universe won't read this and decide to pummel me again.

I should go to bed. And I will, soon. I intend to write more often than once a month from now on. Here's hoping I will.

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time

I've never been much for planning ahead. This is where everyone I know go “Liar!” but we're talking about two different things. When it comes to my day to day life, meeting up with friends, etc, I do plan ahead. A lot. In fact, I'm a real control freak. If I leave the office for lunch and don't have at least an idea of where I'll be eating, I become a nuisance. A pain in the ass. A never ending tirade of questions about where, when, how, why.

When I say I don't plan ahead, I'm instead referring to life. To the bigger issues. Work, for example. I never planned on being where I am today, as product manager at Sweden's second largest telecom company. It's all circumstances that have brought me here, circumstances and knowing the right people at the right time.

I don't really have a goal when it comes to my working life. And long-term, I usually don't have goals when it comes to other aspects of my life either. I'm very much a go with the flow kind of guy, in that respect.

And so it is with writing as well. On some level I have aspirations of being published, but I think I never really considered it as a viable option, until a guy in my writing class got a book deal a year and a half ago (I think it was). However, work and life in general has, as many of you know, been getting in the way of my writing, and I haven't taken any significant steps forward in a long time.

This is about to change. I now have a very specific goal with my writing. On February 20th 2010, I need to have two freakin' perfect short stories, of 2500 – 6000 words each, ready and polished and tweaked. I am applying to a six week long writing sci fi/horror/fantasy writing workshop in the US, and need them for the application.

To put this in perspective, the longest story I've completed and feel content with, is 683 words... I do have longer things written, but not finished and certainly not good enough to send away.

So. I have a goal. And my work cut out for me.

You wouldn't like me when I'm hungry

I twisted my foot yesterday. At an Excel course I was taking. I won't hold it against you for thinking I went loco on Excel's ass. Maybe some table or formula wouldn't do my bidding?

Didn't seem like a big thing at the time, twisting it. It hurt like a mofo, but I elevated it and cooled it down and figured I would be able to get around under my own power without a problem. This morning it was a whole new ball game. As in I had a swelling the size of a tennis ball on the side of my foot.

So I went to the emergency room, reluctantly, since hospitals are Hell incarnate to me. Really, I become physically nauseous just walking into one.

Today I found out there are two emergency rooms at the hospital closest to our apartment. The first one is the regular ER, where traffic accident victims and stab victims and the dying go. I spent hours at one of those ERs a couple of years ago. Not a pleasant experience. The second one turned out to be drab and dull, but very uneventful. A crying child and a construction worker with broken fingers were the height of drama.

Finally they X-rayed my foot. Over and over and over. Twisted and turned my sore, swollen ankle. Well done, really.

The foot, dumbasses. Not the face. The foot.

In typical Swedish health care fashion I had several waiting periods, and also long walks down horribly brown and gray corridors, shuffling along as best I could, supported by a crutch. Hours passed from when I got there until I got the results of the X-rays. So I got hungry.

I'm not very pleasant to be around when I'm hungry. I get cranky and it shows. The only reason I didn't skewer someone with a random medical device is that no one was around. Maybe they were having lunch, the bastards.

They had to restrain me once my blood sugar dropped.
Things could have gotten nasty.

Nothing major, it turns out, just a sprained ankle. Supportive bandages and a crutch for a couple of weeks, at most. Annoying, but doable. And I got a lot of material for a story about hospitals out of it. Friends think I should claim a bear mauled my foot. No one's gonna buy that. I'll go with rhinoceros.

The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will

Back in the real world after three days of writing exercises, workshopping and hanging around intensely creative people. In the real world, I'm battling a cold that sent me home early today, and trying to wrap my head around a lot of stuff going on at work. The next 12 months are going to be extremely interesting, work-wise. In a very positive, and positively exhausting, way.

Physically, I sure wasn't energized by the weekend, but my mind is in overdrive. All that creativity rubs off on me.

Here's some stuff I wrote this weekend.
- Three, four, sometimes five times a month, I spend the afternoon on top of the water tower, watching people through my telescopic sight.
(the above was the result of a writing exercise. And on some level inspired by a Strong Like Bear song)
- Dreams are the fragments of other worlds, trying to push through the veil of reality, to be born.
- For some reason, I always fantasized about dismantling that refrigerator.

I bring a lot of fragments and disjointed sentences back from Västerberg. Ideas, embryos, just words. The best stolen idea this time around was of a memory morgue (Livia's term), as in an actual morgue of memories, where they are dissected and autopsied. For what reason, I don't know. I might find out later. The other one was of a man that makes himself different people depending on who he meets (sort of Katti's idea). Both of them sound promising, at least to me.

Oh. I also learned that a crutch can look like it's been constructed by Heckler & Koch. Who knew?

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment

We're a much depleted Creative Writing class at Västerberg Folkhögskola (check out the beard pic here!) this year. Yesterday we were 14 students and our teacher/mentor, as well as a guest lecturer. Some more people are expected in tomorrow. Two years back we were 30+, and considered splitting the class into two groups for workshopping. So maybe less than 20 is a good number.

As always, the atmosphere here inspires and energizes me, and I get lots of ideas for new stories, or parts of stories. We didn't workshop that much yesterday, so today and Sunday will probably bring more story seeds or at least the opportunity to steal more words and sentences.

Yes, I steal words and sentences. And ideas. See, if someone reads their text I might get caught on a single word or a turn of phrase, and all of a sudden an outline for a story or a character or a place or whatever springs to life in my mind. So I write it down. I always ask before using them though.

I find it interesting that such a wide variety of people are involved with the class. We have writing in common, but apart from that, we're quite a motley crew. The age of participants spans from twenties to I would guess eighties or at least seventies, and there is a scattering of Americans and Germans amongst us Swedes. Occupations vary wildly.

We come together around the act of worship that is writing. Because there is something near-religious about the way many of us approach the written word. For me, it's sometimes a very spiritual experience, when the words seem to have a life of their own, just pouring onto the page. I can't really describe it, that state of near-disconnect, when it's not so much me writing something as just being an outlet, a conduit, for words and worlds.

This approach to writing, the uncontrolled way, is something I can only give in to if I already have something written. I tend to be very structured about writing. If I get an idea I might jot down a phrase or a few words in my phone or on my laptop, and then I usually construct something, an embryo of a story or a short scene, in my head, over days. When I sit down to write, I have at least an idea of where I'm going. Later, once this is down on paper (or in most cases, hard drive), I can do “writing frenzies”, as they are termed within our class, which basically is all about just writing, no matter what comes out. My frenzies, however, are an extension of what I've already written.

So maybe it's not so much about totally relinquishing control as it is about writing uncontrollably but with direction. Sort of. Again, hard to describe.

In many ways I'm still immature as a writer. I think I know what works for me, but I still have a lot to learn. Too bad I didn't start writing seriously sooner...

Fuck you, you fuckin' fuck

Fuck. F U C K.

It's really the only word that fits. My headache is acting up. Tiny, tiny men run around inside my head, between my right temple and my right eye, and play with teeny tiny jackhammers.

Go here for more info on the headache of headaches.

This week is one of contrasts. On Thursday I go north for three days of creative writing with my class, which is always inspiring and fills me with energy. The same day it's two years ago my friend Henrik took his own life. Again...fuck.

I've only had to deal with a handful of deaths in my life, so I don't really have a frame of reference, but I do know that his death affected me harder than others have, and probably will. The main reason why is probably that he was like me, in a lot of ways, and if I can see myself in him, then chances are I could probably recognise at least some of the reasons why he decided to end his life.

Now, I've never contemplated suicide, but as far as anyone could tell, friends, family, everyone, neither had Henrik. Then again, they do say that people that do commit suicide never talk about it, but that might be a cliché. Put together with the fact that no one knows why Henrik killed himself, I find myself faced with the possibility that things may surface in my life that sends my thoughts in that very dark direction.

I know this is unreasonable. But feelings often are.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self

Jesper gave me some grief about not writing enough, over drinks on Friday night. Fair enough. See, I'm more of an editor than a writer, really, in the sense that I'm very bad at writing sprees and can't put anything to paper or hard drive without thinking it through over and over.

First thing's first. Writing spree? I'm not sure where the term originated, but it's used within the context of my creative writing class, where it signifies the act of putting pen to paper and just writing, writing, writing. The point of a writing spree isn't to write anything good or worthwhile, the point is writing. Anything. Any words that come to mind, even if it's just “I can't write for shit. I can't write for shit. I can't write for shit”.

Now, as I said, I'm not a writing spree person. Why? Because I can't live with writing something that I don't like. Everything I put down must be worth something to me.

In some ways, I can find the essence of this in a quote from Stephen King's “On Writing”:

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

I don't come lightly to the blank page. I need an idea, or a character, or something, ready in my head, to be able to sit down and write. Usually I turn this one thing, maybe a paragraph or a plot or something, over and over in my head for days before I commit anything to actual words. I over-analyze everything.

I have maybe two or three dozen embryos of stories sloshing about on my laptop. I'm going to let you people decide which one of the following I'm going to finish and polish and try to get published. Yes, published. Not here, on my blog, but for a literary website of some sort.

The stories are:
- Love at Stake. A man believes his new-found girlfriend is a vampire.
- Aquarium. A guy buys an aquarium that includes a miniature Bermuda triangle.
- The Weird and Wonderful Hair of Mrs. Atkins. A woman, with bizarre hair, finds magic in her attic.
- Roof Top. Two strange men meet on a rooftop on New Year's Eve of 1999.
- The Word Thief. A man kills another man, because he believes he is stealing letters and words from the world.

Right. Which one then? Or rank them. Or whatever. Let me know.

Something I wrote

Some people expressed an interest in reading something I've written. Below is one of the few fictional pieces that I'm actually happy with. There are others, but this is the only one I will post, for now. I'm too tired to fix the formatting, unfortunately...

I MET A GIRL

I guess I have always had problems with women. That’s a typically male thing to say, I know, but it goes both ways. Any woman who claims to understand men is a liar. I’ve always been misunderstood, on some level. And I wouldn’t be surprised if women have problems with women as well, and men with men.

The whole man-woman thing has to be in a different league altogether, though. At least it is for me. Women are from Venus, men are from Mars, and all that crap. And no, I don’t live at home with my mother, and no, I don’t wear Star Trek uniforms all the time, and yes, I have a steady job, and no, it’s got nothing to do with computers. But all that is just a façade, attributes we think matter but that don’t, really. If you have a problem in your relationship and think you can solve it by changing jobs or something mundane like that, then the problem isn’t yours, but your partner’s.

Anyway. Now I’ve met this girl. She is a real looker, and I want to do things just right. Fix the problem, break the streak of no-hitters, to use a typically male term. That doesn’t even sound right. I hate sports. Not hunting though. That’s a man’s pastime. My uncle used to take me hunting when I was a kid. Taught me how to appreciate the skill required and the loneliness of it all. Just you and your prey. Still, that’s the whole damn point of hunting. Doing it alone.

So I have a date with her this weekend, and I don’t want to mess things up. I went shopping for it today. I’m a sucker for planning, and I basically had the activities for the weekend planned on Monday. Hell, I’ve been thinking about it almost two weeks. How could I not? She seems to be just the kind of girl I’ve been looking for, and I want to make the right impression. Get the proper “wow” effect.

So I went shopping. Two rolls of duct tape. Ten feet of half inch rope. A roll of plastic bags. A pack of latex gloves. A new hacksaw. She sure is a looker. I hope she’s a screamer too.

Writers are made, not born

A few years back, I took a creative writing class in Swedish, online. It was horrible. Awful. Pathetic. No criticism from the teacher, at all, just encouraging words for everybody, about everything. How the hell are you supposed to learn anything that way?

So it was with some doubt that I signed up for Creative Writing in English, at Gävle Högskola, the year after. I shouldn't have worried. It turned out to be an excellent writing community helmed by a passionate and knowledgeable teacher/mentor, with so much talent among the writers I experience a dizzying combination of inspiration, awe and inferiority complex every time I meet them.

The class is completely online, aside from one meeting per term, and has moved to a folkhögskola (kind of like a community college, for any non-Swedes out there) since I started. I have completed my four terms, but still hang around, as do many others.

If anyone is interested in participating in our community, let me know. The term is in full swing, but you can sign up for next year. There are four deadlines each term, with a selection of reading and writing, some obligatory, some voluntary.

In three weeks, it's time for this term's meeting, at Storvik outside Gävle. I really look forward to it, since it's always an inspiring (but exhausting) weekend, but I'm also dreading it, since it will be two years since my friend Henrik passed away on the Thursday when I'm supposed to go up there. Perhaps I'll use the feelings that day will no doubt spawn as some sort of inspiration too.

And all the sweet serenity of books

I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs right now. I was supposed to be reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, but I couldn't read it. It was too powerful. The grainy image of a man falling from the Twin Towers on 9/11 was just too much, right now.

So it will have to wait until another time. Because it was a very interesting book, and the main character, Oskar, is fascinating. I don't recommend it to the faint of heart or...whatever it is I am right now. Stressed out? Depressed by the fall? Angry at the world in general? All of the above? Probably.

Klosterman has some interesting views on pop culture in the 90s. I'm not even halfway yet, but I think I like where Cocoa Puffs is going, though I have some issues with Klosterman's use of the word “fucking”. I'm not against it as such, but I see no need for throwing it into a text just for the fucking sake of it *grin*

What are you people reading right now, and what do you think about what you're reading?

My plan for the coming week is to write. Maybe not finish but at least start two separate texts, one to post as part of the second fall deadline for my creative writing class, and the second to bring to said class' meeting at Storvik outside Gävle in early November.

I wish that just once people wouldn't act like the clichés that they are

I'm a bona fide TV junkie. I'll give most shows a chance, and I can watch some stuff over and over and over.

I acknowledge that TV is a real time stealer. I acknowledge that perhaps it numbs my soul. I don't care. It's entertainment, baby! and sometimes that's just what I need.

The Best Show Ever is, of course, Six Feet Under. I watched it sporadically when it was shown on Swedish television, and was always drawn to it's dark humor and flawless dialogue. I've since bought it and watched through it all with Mah Girl a few years ago. It's awesome, in the true sense of the word. Spectacular.

I want this on a t-shirt

Shows of that magnitude, that are that well-written, transcends entertainment. They become something more profound, a mirror in which we see something of ourselves reflected back. That might sound like pseudo-religious ramblings, but it's the truth, at least for me.

As I'm writing this, Grey's Anatomy is on. That show has become a real train wreck of soap opera intrigue and drama that is completely uncalled for, filled with completely one-dimensional characters. And just like Prison Break, it had such promise, that it never delivered on.

But really, I shouldn't be watching that much TV, or spending that much time slouching around on the Internet either. I should be writing. I should be structuring that novel I so very much want to write, or resurrecting one of the countless short stories that lurk in the depths of my hard drive.

One of my favorite authors, William Gibson, said (or wrote, not sure):
I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.

I should listen to him.

This blog was supposed to be an inspiration for me to start writing again, after sort of a hiatus. It has helped in a way, since I'm writing here more than I've done in a long time, but it hasn't really helped me finish any stories. I need to get my bearded ass in gear and write more.

I thrive on chaos

It’s been a hectic week. We launched new products on Wednesday, and I had to work my bearded ass off to fix all the minor (and some not so minor) glitches that always appear before, during and after such a launch. Monday through Thursday, as well as a few days in the week before, were intense.

On Wednesday I met two friends, who’ve never met before, for dinner and a beer or two. A fine time was had. Meat was eaten, though not by all. TV shows and politics and work were discussed. It was a very unpretentious get-together. I need to meet more of my friends outside of the usual circumstances in which we meet.

On Thursday I had my creative writing group (“crony huddle” being the term our teacher uses). Another fine time was had. Stories were read. Stories were discussed. I always come away from those meetings with a mixed feeling of inspiration and terror. There are such good writers in the class and in my huddle that I sometimes feel like I should format my hard drive and stop playing at being a writer, but at the same time the energy that I bring with me from the huddles is so powerful that I couldn’t live with myself unless I channeled it into words on a page.

And last night was the annual party at our company. Over 1000 people, a Russian mafia theme and plenty o’ drinks.

Yes. It's a boa.
The hat is several sizes too small. 99.99 percent of all hats are.

A very good time was had. Perhaps too good, judging by the size of the scrap metal salvage yard that decided to open shop inside my head today. I blame the co-worker who managed to score I don’t know how many bottles of wine. I never drink. Wine.

And not really never, but rarely. I’m more of a beer person. But the wine was there, it was free and it fit the hat and the boa and the whole theme of the evening. Though the champagne and caviar we had during intermission between the information part and the party part was even more fitting.

Some great urban voodoo

OK. This is getting cree-he-he-heeepy. Earlier I pointed out that I had three headers starting with “A”. The last three headers begin with the letter “B” *cue stunned silence from readers, segueing into the X Files theme*.

Should the trend continue, I need one more header after this one not beginning with a “C”, and then three in a row starting with a “C”. Suggestions?

Further reference to the header: I recently finished The Best Book Ever. For the third time.

I’ve been quite the William Gibson fan since first sinking my teeth into Neuromancer (which is now required reading in some English college courses here). For those of you that don’t know, he coined the term “cyberspace”, and is considered one of the most influential science fiction writers currently active.

However, with Pattern Recognition, and more recently Spook Country, he has moved away from sci-fi, and into some sort of pop culture pornography thrillers. Pattern Recognition centers around Cayce Pollard, who works as a cool hunter for various clothing labels and is sometimes called in to determine whether a new logo for a company will work or not. She’s always right. In her spare time, she posts on a website dedicated to odd snippets of movie footage found hidden in various corners of the Internet.

I won’t say anything else. No spoilers. Read it. When I feel cocky about my own writing, I read the first page, which is available here, under “Excerpt”. The language is so good I go numb.

For more pop culture porn, check out Gibson's blog. Now, back to meatspace.

A Clockbeard Orange

I find myself fascinated by the concept of clockwork mechanisms and automata. I’ve wanted to write a story featuring those for quite some time, but haven’t found the time or the inspiration for it.

To find that inspiration, I keep coming back to this. The first known mechanical computer, dated to about 150 B.C.

The Antikythera Mechanism in all it's rusted glory

The idea that the ancient Greeks (or whoever built it) possessed the know-how to construct a mechanical computer almost 2200 years ago is mind-boggling. The degree of mind-boggledness (new word) depends on who you ask, though…

I read Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods about ten years ago, and found it to be a combination of interesting maths and facts, and absolute madness. is theory is that there was some kind of ur-civilization from which all the ancient civilizations (Egyptians, Mayans, Sumerians, etc) sprang. There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I need to reread it soon.

Write while the heat is in you

This morning on the train I sat next to a sleeping old man. He had a big white beard and his arms were wrapped protectively around a briefcase, cradled in his lap. He looked very serene and calm, the eye of the storm of stressed commuters.

Seeing people like that always gets my imagination going. Where was he going? What was in the briefcase? Who is he? Stuff for at least a short story, right there.

Passed the locker. Still counting away, and will most likely be opened and back to zero again sometime during the day. I won't pass it on my way home today, I think, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow to check. If it's back to zero, then it's definitely Mondays.

I suffered from the heat this weekend. All our rooms have south-facing windows, and have direct sunlight from around noon until sunset. It's not an apartment. It's a furnace. We went outside to buy food and pick up a package on Saturday, and it was like being hit in the head with a sledgehammer. I hate the heat. I am so not a summer person.

The sky outside our place this weekend

And people look at me like I'm an alien when I explain this. It's biology. Nothing I can do about except pray for cloudy skies and winds. Though who to pray to I really can't say...