That Was The Weekend That Was
Sep. 13th, 2015 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSo yesterday we hosted an impromptu writeathon, here at Murphy Acres. If a thing can be impromptu when you've been talking about it three years already. But midweek Karen said "Let's do this. Let's do it on Saturday," and so we did; and half a dozen folk came with laptops, and after we'd raided the farmers' market for hummus and chips and fruit (for I was forbidden to spend all day in the kitchen; I had to write too, she said, my mean wife), we sat around for hours'n'hours in the cold grey bitter chill of a Bay Area September day* doing working. And me, I didn't actually write much, but I edited more than 20K of extant work and worked myself back into the T E Lawrence-on-Mars story; and so today, when not idling on the sofa etc, I have been writing.
I suppose there must be a philosophy of cartography, but - except of course for "The map is not the territory" - I do not know it; philosophy generally is as closed a book to me as it was to Peter Wimsey**. Still'n'all'n'nevertheless, that is I guess what I am exploring here: what a map means, and how it can represent a state of mind, a state of racial understanding. How a Martian map would differ from a human map of Mars. In point of fact, I am trying to write something cleverer than me; I feel sure that there is a whole level of revelation beneath what I am actually describing, and I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. At the moment, perhaps the map really is the territory, and somebody (else) needs to fling the curtain back to show me the land that waits outside.
In other words, I am insufficiently grown-up for my story. But that's a common sense. I am always a disappointment to my fiction, letting it down at the last. And yet, and yet. I do keep doing it.
*Note: not ironic. We've been having a heatwave, but the temperature dropped thirty degrees between Friday and Saturday. I had to wear long sleeves, and was seriously thinking about socks.
**And you should not try approaching me via Aristotle, either.
I suppose there must be a philosophy of cartography, but - except of course for "The map is not the territory" - I do not know it; philosophy generally is as closed a book to me as it was to Peter Wimsey**. Still'n'all'n'nevertheless, that is I guess what I am exploring here: what a map means, and how it can represent a state of mind, a state of racial understanding. How a Martian map would differ from a human map of Mars. In point of fact, I am trying to write something cleverer than me; I feel sure that there is a whole level of revelation beneath what I am actually describing, and I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. At the moment, perhaps the map really is the territory, and somebody (else) needs to fling the curtain back to show me the land that waits outside.
In other words, I am insufficiently grown-up for my story. But that's a common sense. I am always a disappointment to my fiction, letting it down at the last. And yet, and yet. I do keep doing it.
*Note: not ironic. We've been having a heatwave, but the temperature dropped thirty degrees between Friday and Saturday. I had to wear long sleeves, and was seriously thinking about socks.
**And you should not try approaching me via Aristotle, either.