I want to focus inwardly lately. I’m deleting all the RSS news feeds I usually follow, and just sticking with the ones by my friends and the ones that regularly contain inspiring ideas.
I’m sick of the news. I do feel like I should stay connected with the Scottish news, but it’s done so badly. Every day, the same few story templates are used over and over:
- Crazed motorist hits man/mother and child.
- Dog bites man/boy.
- Man/boy hurts dog.
- Man kills wife.
- Nurse (policeman, other trusted figure) kills unsuspecting client.
- Innocent person mugged/knifed/shot/abducted while minding his/her own business. If it’s a child, they will be referred to familiarly (“Little Rudy”, “Little Rebecca”) and be turned into a constantly-visited media cash cow until they recover/are found/die.
- Government has new plan that will make life much better.
- Government plan fails, costs taxpayers millions/billions.
- War in far-off place gets worse. “My son just came back in a box.” We should never make this mistake again.
- Far-off place is acting up and really asking for it.
And always this template is applied with the suggestion that this is some alarming new trend, when this is historically, statistically untrue.
Meanwhile, I’m up to chapter ten of my novel and am completely enamoured of the world I’m exploring in my imagination — not because it’s a nice place, because it’s not particularly, but because I’m constantly amazed that anything I need for the book, anything I might hope to find, is already in there.
I find myself focusing on books, movies, and ideas with fantastic themes — and they’re out there to be found right now. Maybe this is a reaction to how badly the world sucks at the moment… That is, as a story we’re telling ourselves through the collective apparatus that is our media.
I went to see the limp remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers the other night. It’s pretty bad when the world the invading aliens make seems better than the brutal “normal” state the characters are fighting to restore because “this is what makes us human”. I kept thinking, “Nicole, honey, just go to sleep. The aliens are right.”
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p>Tonight I worked on the bookbinding tutorial I’m presenting on the 28th. While gathering ideas, I think I may have discovered the next advancement in my own process. Last year I was surprised by the hunger for this material, so this year I hope to give away even more useful ideas to help people publish themselves. I want to make more aliens.
