Jason F.C. Clarke

Okay, so I lied. I didn’t finish “Leoht Unfaeger,” but only after realizing there were fundamental problems with the story as it stood. It was essentially a rewrite of a previous story I’d started using different characters, a technique that always fails for me. My writing style tends to be organic—the entire story comes together in my head and flows onto the page—and trying to cannibalize one story into another one usually makes me feel too detached and removed from the story until I end up hating it. The same thing happens when I edit too much. My stories are best when I write them all in a rush, do an editing pass on them maybe a week later, and then leave them alone.

Also, I became unhappy with the overall concept of “Leoht Unfaeger.” It involved my main characters (namely Eron and Joe) encountering a modern-day Grendel in Denmark. But the conceit of bringing Grendel back to life just didn’t mesh with the world I want to construct for Eron; it was too simplistic and too pulp. Plus, as it stands the entire Eron concept is too much like Hellboy; so it’s back to the drawing board for Eron & company.

However, I do want to keep at it. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about where I want to go with my life, or more specifically my career, and I’ve had a lot of conversations with DottyGale about this. The truth is more that I’ve brought the subject up to DG on countless occasions and she’s sick of it, to the point where she compared me to Hamlet, saying I do all this talking about what I want to do and very little doing. “Kill the damned uncle,” she told me, and suddenly I had my life’s dictum, the phrase I would turn to in moments of indecision, the phrase I would pass down to my children–“Kill the uncle.” Not literally, of course—fortunately, I have no brothers so it won’t be a problem for my kids, unless my wife has a brother, but DG doesn’t, so for now I’m safe—but I don’t want to be seen as advocating avunculicide to anyone, even if one’s uncle secretly kills one’s father and then marries one’s mother (in that situation, don’t resort to vigilantism, but rather report said uncle to the authorities and find another outlet for your anger, such as writing a disturbing one-act play).

Morality of slaying one’s uncle aside, the essence of DG’s bromide is not to spend eternity debating all courses of action before finally making a move. Hamlet couldn’t decide one way or the other on whether to kill his uncle, and when he finally did it was in a moment of near-insanity, so who knows if that was really what he wanted to do. His mother had just died and he’d just learned he’d been poisoned—anyone might stab their uncle in that situation.

Hamlet’s indecisiveness also caused a lot of collateral damage, including the deaths of Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia and Laertes. (I won’t count Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because Hamlet killed them deliberately, and he might have done so even without the whole setting-him-up-to-be-murdered thing; they were rather irritating, after all.)

My point, if I have one, and I think I did, is this: one needs to get on with it at some point or another. That appears to be the point at which I am now.

On an unrelated note, I found out today that the expression, “If you think X, you’ve got another thing coming” is properly “If you think X, you’ve got another think coming.” Here’s some information. I’m sure it came about because the “k” gradually weakened to a “g” sound over time, but I’m always fascinated by linguistic trivia like that.

Well, the upgrade to Movabletype 3.2 went far smoother than last time. I sat down to do it yesterday, expecting to spend three or four hours at the computer, but I must have done something wrong before, because it took perhaps ten minutes. The result is a more efficient system and much better spam comment blocking.

I watched A History of Violence yesterday. Like The Road to Perdition, it’s based on a graphic novel, which suggests that graphic novels are beginning to get the same attention as regular novels. The graphic novel market has also been a growing segment of the publication industry, so it seems this “original American art form” may finally be getting its due. That said, I don’t know anyone who’s read the graphic novel of Violence, including me. Regardless, the film is good, and it provoked a few interesting thoughts for me, e.g., what is the price of maintaining the American dream? and can Americans as a whole achieve that dream only at a heavy cost of blood and soul?

I’ve enjoyed updating the blog this frequently, but in an effort to keep myself writing, I’m going to hold off posting again until I’ve finished a first draft of “Leoht Unfaeger.” Fingers crossed that you’ll see another post this year.

Okay, so I didn’t finish the story this weekend. In fact, I didn’t even work on it once from the moment I wrote the last post.

Now, you all have a job to do. In order for my shaming scheme to work, you must hit me with as much scorn and derision as you can muster. Only with your well-deserved blows to my self-esteem can I possibly hope to finish writing anything. Oh, I know that many of you are loathe to point out my flaws, but you’ll just have to make yourself do it somehow. You can do it right here in the comments section–public humiliation is probably the most effective–but feel free to email me directly, to call and harangue me if you happen to have my number, or to simply make fun of me in your own blog. I deserve it.

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DG and I have been playing a lot of Scrabble lately. I once considered myself something of a decent Scrabble player, but I’ve been very much relieved of that misapprehension over the last few weeks. I think my record is something like 2-12. I had to print out a chart of two-letter words just to compete. DG prefers to play with the rule that you can look up words in the official Scrabble dictionary to see if a word exists before playing it, resulting in an average turn length of approximately fifteen minutes.

I find that an extended vocabulary from a lifetime of reading is fairly useless when the strategy involves looking at the board, looking at my letters, and asking myself, “does the word ‘skoog’ exist?” DG hit me with “skeg” last night, which is allegedly a stabilizing fin located at the rear of the surfboard, according to Wikipedia. Personally, I suspect a conspiracy between the authors of the Scrabble dictionary and the surfing community to create random words for use in Scrabble.

That’s the only sane explanation for why I keep losing.

I’ve started work on my first short story in quite a while. I’m mentioning it here because I’ve read that a good way to stop procrastinating is to tell a friend what you’re doing and when you intend to finish it–the motivation being avoidance of shame and humiliation when you fail to meet your goal.

The story is titled “Leoht Unfaeger,” and it features a paranormal investigator named Eron. Eron evolved from the “Jon Shade” concept I was developing last year (though Shade himself has now become a secondary character with a different name). The story draws heavily on my study of Beowulf during college.

In order to motivate myself further, I’m going to state publicly that I intend to complete the first draft of this story before the end of the weekend, and that the first draft should be at least 6,000 words.

I’m also considering starting a blog-exclusive serial story, perhaps featuring Eron & company. I was initially toying with continuing “Zombie!”, but decided that tale might be a bit too violent (though given “Johnny Sniper and the Cave of Fear”, I’m probably already beyond the pale). Of course, feel free to let me know if you have any particular preference as to what sort of stories you’d like to see in this space.

I’ve fixed a bug in the comment system where, when you hit “Post,” the main page reloaded in the popup window. Now the window will reload just the comment listing. If you have any problems, let me know. Eventually I’ll suck it up and take the time to upgrade to MovableType 3.2–that, or pay someone more experienced to do it for me.

Of course, it now falls to me to produce content worth commenting on.

Some weeks ago I promised a review of V for Vendetta, but I’ve decided I’d rather not do full-length reviews. I don’t feel particularly qualified to provide the sort of movie reviews I’d like to–that would require a master’s degree in film and at least one viewing of The Godfather. So instead, I’ll just offer a few pithy comments on the various movies, books, and games I encounter.

Today I finally started reading The Da Vinci Code. I reached page seventeen before deciding it was time to fix the commenting system. Perhaps the book’s overexposure has made reading it seem like less of a pleasure and more of a formality to be observed prior to seeing the movie. That said, the book does seem interesting already; I just find my attention tends to wander in the late afternoon and early evening.

More to come soon, including, perhaps, some new fiction.