Fall, Fallen

"Why am I restless?" he asked. "Why do I have this feeling in my blood?" 

 "Wait and see," she said mysteriously. "Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after...." 

- T.H. White, The Once and Future King 

We passed beneath the thick overhanging urban arbors of Third Street, down-slope from the park. The sky was so blue as to almost pass into purple, and the wind carried the slight spice of browning leaves in its chill breeze. The streets were mostly weekend quiet, until we walked by a particularly noisy, bird-thronged tree that rattled with a riot of squawks and twitters. The whole block echoed with constant conversation, all the birds flitting back and forth, quarreling and laughing at one another, searching for their friends and flock-mates, making plans and executing complicated test flights above the brownstones. I could hear the restlessness in their voices, in the way they seemed to be gathering momentum for a great journey.

I could picture the moment, maybe not today, but tomorrow, perhaps the day after that, when they would rise up, without any one leader giving the signal or calling a vote. At first one at a time, then in groups, then, suddenly, en masse, up into the sky they'd go, impelled by something they did not know and could not understand, a giant cloud of them, all of one mind, heading south, fleeing the coming cold, knowing-without-knowing where they were going, turning the wheel of the seasons on into fall.

In direct contradiction to the title of this blog

Taking a cue from this guy I've decided to write here more. In the post, he's talking about writer's block, which I don't exactly suffer from. Logorrhea might be more the issue, most days, though there are occasions when the muse is a bit balky. Seth basically says we should write like we talk, and I've been noticing the more I write the more I get to write the way I sound in my head, which, let me tell you kids, is WAY wittier and more awesome than you can even imagine.

So writing today was like fighting through a fog. I'm coming to the point where I know that I'm going to have to come up with a structure for this book I'm writing, or else it's going to meander and wander away from me.

It's a book about gentrification, the energy and movement of urban spaces, race relations, and wizards. Really, it's just about wizards. The rest of it is sort of incidental, primarily because, as a young-ish (feeling) white man, I don't feel I can do the issues real justice. By putting it into a fantasy context, it feels like I can talk around it, address it without having to tackle it head on. Maybe that's cowardly, but there are precedents - George Romero talking about race with his zombies... well, that's the only really good one I can think of right now. Oh! A Canticle for Liebowitz! That's two! I'm practically in the pantheon already!

So, I've finished watching Game of Thrones' first season, and I'm terribly disappointed that there isn't more right now. Right NOW! I want it. I dream about these characters. I'm enjoying the hell out of this weird little sword and soap opera. I seem to remember reading somewhere that GRRM wanted to write a little ditty about the War of the Roses, and I love how adding zombies and dragons tips the dynamics all over the place. It's exactly the kind of thing I've always wanted to make myself.

I promise to write more tomorrow. It's blathering, but I'm going to make it mean something, I just know it.