Where the devil hangs his hat

I'm finding with prodigious speed -- okay, I found out aeons ago after only a few pages, but I wanted a decent opening; I knew I should have gone with the scantily clad babe -- that writing fiction is a Dick Cheney's basement of a lot harder than poetry in certain respects.

Why didn't any of you bastards tell me?

Sure, fine-tuning a few short lines into the perfect -- ha -- snapshot of the exact shade in the vast spectrum that even a single emotion contains is nigh impossible, but it can drive you to drink copious amounts of booze be ruminated upon with delicacy and thoughtful care over intermittent gaps in time. Au contraire for some inexplicable reason, I feel I can't go too long in between bouts of composing the next batch of paragraphs with something this large or I'll lose, I don't know, the narrative flow (even as it goes off on various tangents), the vibe (dull melodrama sex! drugs! absinthe! rock and roll! um, street musicians! is about the most apropos description). And since it's historical, I have to deal with the omnipresent problem of research.

Research, as one could plausibly assume, can often be tedious -- combing through piece after piece of utterly useless or merely inapplicable bits of background detail whose only power lies in cluttering an already overloaded, bloated and run-on hunk of crap -- or frustrating -- waiting weeks for an uncommon volume that you hope holds what you've been searching for, all the while assuming whether it does or not might turn out to be moot because it's in a language you're a rank amateur in, praying to Cthulhu, as us atheists do, that it's not as empty as McFossil's --








You said that you wouldn't blog about politics today.








I'm Evil Randal, dumbass. Evil.








Then let me finish the post.








By yourself? Fine, you're boring as hell anyway. I'm gonna go chat up some of the ladies. They dig twirling my moustache, if you catch my drift.

Anyway, research can also be quite enjoyable -- no, really, hear me out -- and rewarding in ways both obvious and inconspicuous. I'm a sucker for footnotes and endnotes -- you know, those bits of documentation that Regnery authors never use to back up their outrageous claims and blatant lies, thereby proving the truth since only candyass lie-bruls need to reinforce their feeble words in their pointless quest to feel good about their inadequate selves -- because a single volume can open up new vistas of information and imagery.

I know what you're thinking, "Randal, you stupid fucker, I had to use those goddamn things on papers all throughout high school and college when I actually went to class because I wasn't usually hungover on Wednesdays and sometimes Thursdays, so shut the fuck up." Mellow out, people. Give Nunly a call, maybe she's got some extra in her stash she can comp you. My point being that I've come across some of my favorite, or at the very least, highly enlightening, works through these unfairly cursed scholastic requirements, and no matter where you find your details, these particulars will lend a further gravitas to your work. Even if your reader may not initially, or ever, recognize that the crumbled-up cookie things they gloss over without a second thought are real or merely figments drawn up while sprawled out on the couch or careening over an endless chain of potholes as the bus bobs up and down like a drunken sailor fallen overboard, their presence can only help augment the atmosphere you're trying to create because you know they're legitimate, and if we don't write for ourselves, then what's the point?

Concerning research's shadowy, ninja-like aspects -- I miss playing Ninja Gaiden. But man, did those fucking birds give so many cheap deaths -- the wealth of information you've gleaned from your sources, whether they be maps, official documents, historical non-fiction, novels, music, art, cannot help but trickle, through the kinetic energy they inherently possess and fluidly display in those of us who enjoy learning and can't keep our brains on one thought for too long before jumping to another, into the writing itself. Now this doesn't mean an overt placement of an item by our subconscious, but simply the flavoring of the prose. Think of it as a palimpsest we access while writing. Sure, we might be using text A, B or C but the tenebrous remnants of X, Y and Z of a related subject continue to haunt the creative process beneath the surface, informing the words and phrases we pick without knowing it, choices we might not have otherwise made.

Lastly, it's just neat when you come across something cool. Okay, maybe this won't be cool to you -- and I won't shun you if you feel otherwise, 'cause I'm gentle -- and perhaps it's not as thrilling as finding and deciphering the Rosetta Stone or the clues to a long-buried crypt complex full of the rarest of treasures and gold doubloons and a crate of mint-condition Action Comics #1, but I wouldn't have minded being at this gig:

2e concert extraordinaire
Le Dimanche 20 décembre 1863, à deux heures précises.

Programme

1 Symphonie en la, Beethoven
2 Fragments de la 3e partie de Saisons, Haydn
3 Romance en fa, pour violin, Beethoven
4 Final du 2e acte de la Vestale, Spontini
5 Ouverture du Freyschutz, Weber

Interesting about the tastes of Second Empire Parisians, starting with the main course, and finishing up with the hors d'oeuvres. Shouldn't the foreplay be first and the climax at the end?