Synesthesia.

Okay kids, my novel is officially past the point of contrived pseudo-science for the sake of exposition! Yay!

At some arbitrary point yesterday, I decided that my novel would follow a basic three part structure. Essentially, I would write Part One as I had been (with a new narrator for every chapter) and that would serve its purpose of defining my characters somewhat, of outlining its theory and of establishing its science. It would conclude (at The Time’s They Are A-Changing) with a plot twist that essentially turns things into a bildungsroman.

Up until the end of Part One, I only have my characters talk about Iris. Iris has absolutely no voice. I didn’t like this as much as I liked it, so I decided that Part Two (From The End is the Beginning is the End to the Beginning is the End is the Beginning) would be all in Iris’ voice. This part of the novel would start from the plot twist and demonstrate the entirety of Iris’ experiences adjacent to society.

Part Three (from Sonnet onwards and skipping Zombie Prostitute) would be from the perspective of the other two sisters as they and Iris attempt to re-integrate with society.

And that’s effectively the way my novel is going to plan out. I, at this stage, mostly know exactly how things are going to pan out and I’m only a day behind par. I’m at the very top of Part Two so finishing The End is the Beginning is the End should be enough to satisfy me for today.

I’ve drawn out all of my pseudo-science in the novel now, so while I won’t dump the nuances here, I’ll still describe them a little bit.

Iris’ ability to see smells I’ve called photo-olfactive synesthesia. I’ve called the other two conditions, of her sisters’, advanced lexical –> gustatory synesthesia and echo-photographic synesthesia.  I don’t want to get into the specifics of how these girls perceive their reality, because my novel does that, but I want to share the concepts (and dump the terms in a place where I can easily find them without forgetting what they are and/or mean) with you anyway.

That’s my update for today, I’ll come back tomorrow with an excerpt of some description and some day after that with something else or other.

-- Adam ^>^

The first time I’ve been capped in the longest time.

Right now, it takes me a lot of time to do anything on the internet. This is all because a few weeks back I bought a Windows 7 upgrade and this required me to download a 2.2GB file. This file failed to download so many times that I essentially wasted 8GB before the download finished. This messed up the whole month, which ‘ends’ on the 14th, and now we’ve used all 25GB of our limit.

So now I’m running at dial up speeds.

For this reason, it took me two days to upload a podcast that you can check out here and now it’ll be a week before I have the internet speeds and resources necessary to figure out how to add our podcast to iTunes.

For that reason I was three thousand words behind on my NaNoWriMo novel, but that’s okay because I’ve caught up now. I’ll end up behind again, because of work this weekend, but I’ll catch up again tomorrow night. I’m quite happy with it. I’m not sure if it’s the type of thing that many people will enjoy reading – in fact I’m almost certain that most readers would find the text jarring – but I’d hope that there’s something interesting embedded into my prose and that there’s a cerebral side to the work that readers can consume.

My consumption of the internet is off, and will be for the next week. It takes ten minutes to download emails. I can’t even get to the Facebook home page. Thank God for my iPhone. So I leave you with this mild update as I begin my attempt to enrol into my courses for next year. It’s not going to be hard, just very, very, slow.

-- Adam ^>^

Diamond Ninja Nipples.

X-Men Legacy #228
Carey, Acuna

I picked this title up because I liked the idea of a comic wherein Rogue can control her powers: how much she takes and how long for. I also like Emplate, a pandimensional mutant vampire.

The art’s very nice. The first page is very bright and colourful, but I seem to prefer the artist’s landscapes over their characters. I appreciate the use of BLINNNG as a sound effect.

There’s a character called Hope in this, but I’m not sure whether she’s the messiah child. If she is, then I really need to catch up with my Cable. I don’t think she is. Her name is Trance and last I heard Cable’s Hope hadn’t manifested her powers yet. Plus this Hope isn’t a bloodnut. I still really need to catch up with my Cable.

Interesting little plot going on, Emplate kidnapped a girl who can potentially offer infinite bone marrow thanks to her mutation and the X-Men want to save her. Rogue ‘borrows’ Trance’s power and uses it to get into Emplate’s dimension and everything gets all pretty. We end on a cliffhanger. It’ll be a fun arc, I’m sure.

Psylocke #1
Yost, Tolibao

Just look at that cover.

The art for this was a little bit incomprehensible. It wasn’t bad, just inconsistent. Betsy looked great, very little else did. The plot’s nice, even if its asking a little bit of back-knowledge.

Betsy was a Brit, she died. She had telepathic powers, she put her mind in a Japanese assassin. Recently in Uncanny X-Men, Madelyn Pryor resurrected the English Betsy's Body, and that body died again. Betsy went to Japan to bury that body, the Hand exploded it by order of the man who originally killed Betsy. So now Psylocke wants revenge.

I like Psylocke, (not just for the boobs) so I’m going to stick with it. I’m not sure I’d recommend it.

In the back of the issue, though, is a short story re Cable and Hope in whatever-future-they’re-in-at-this-point. Art’s a bit horrible. It was an alright read, but it wants me to buy Dark X-Men #1 to read part two. They’re lucky that I was going to read that anyway.

This being issue one, I’ll recommend it to Psylocke fans, but I dunno about otherwise. It might not expand itself into the most fantastic read. Or it might. I’m not willing to submit myself to either option.

-- Adam ^>^

A synopsis and the reason why I haven’t written twice as many words as I have.

I think I’ll start with a synopsis.

So my goal is to write some form of a bildungsroman. But because I’m not very fond of preconceived structure and narrative rules, it’s not going to be an exact bildungsroman. For that same reason, my novel won’t follow to its end with a single consistent voice. (okay, that’s also partly because I failed to plan things out enough to run in with a single fully characterized narrator; stop judging me). I’m not yet sure if I’ll give my character her own narrated chapter. So far I’ve only had other characters talk about her and I like that certain ambiguity if gives her personality.

My protagonist is an eight year girl who can see smells, by the way. But my text so far (two chapters through) doesn’t know that yet. Her name is Iris. Her sister’s name is Claire and she’s a mute four year old who can taste colours. There’s a third child, but I haven’t named her yet. Or even written her birth.

Upon reflection I realise that this isn’t really a synopsis, but anyway. I’m 5,700+ words into the novel and I’m quite happy with it. Will other people like it? I can only hope. (I am pretty awesome, so I imagine that everyone will :D). I’d have liked to have been a little bit further along, to be honest, but I’ve had a busy couple of days. And I will now show you why.

Arbitrarily Assigned Narrative Structure.

I’d decided, in an attempt to thwart potential writer’s block as I attempt to write a novel in a month, that I’d make a Genius Playlist out of the song that inspired my creative ideas for this project.

So I fed Iris by the Goo Goo dolls into my iPhone and the Genius Playlist generated is thus:

Iris – The Goo Goo Dolls.
She Is – The Fray.
Open Your Eyes – Snow Patrol.
She’s So High – Tal Backman.
Overkill – Colin Hay.
The Times They Are A-Changin’ – Bob Dylan.
Fuck You – Lily Allen.
The End is the Beginning is the End – Smashing Pumpkins.
Bitter Sweet Symphony – The Verve.
One of the Boys – Katy Perry.
The Way You Make Me Feel – Michael Jackson.
Land of the Dead – Voltaire.
Over My Head – The Fray.
You Could Be Happy – Snow Patrol.
I’m Your Boogie Man – K.C. & The Sunshine Band.
The Fear – Lily Allen.
Happy Birthday (My Olde Friend) – Voltaire.
The Beginning is the End is the Beginning – Smashing Pumpkins.
Sonnet – The Verve.
I Kissed A Girl – Katy Perry.
Thriller – Michael Jackson.
Zombie Prostitute – Voltaire.
How to Save a Life – The Fray.
Hands Open – Snow Patrol.
The Sound of Silence – Simon & Garfunkel.

Man, if this is any indication, I’m going to be writing a pretty gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that) novel thanks to a very gay(not that there’s anything wrong with that) iPhone.

I stress that I have very manly songs on my iPhone, such as Metallica and Evanescence.

The idea is that these titles define my narrative structure in that they become assigned chapter names. I will not use all of them, probably strip it down to about fifteen, but I’ll remove them as I go. I like the idea of The Sound of Silence being the final chapter, and some of the congruencies throughout. Pretty good, considering it’s totally randomized.

And now I boot up my laptop and begin with the writing. :D

-- Esoteric ^>^

Addendum: I forgot to point out that you should disassociate the lyrics from the song titles, they have no impact on my narrative.

Happy Halloween!

-- Esoteric ^>^

Academia II

Just a couple of links in this post, of my last three assignments. They weren’t actually my last three due, but they’re the last three that I’m sharing.

Here you’ll find a contrived blog and here you’ll find a mediocre website-base hypertextual essay. They’re both for Networked Media. Below you’ll find my radio project. I didn’t like the radio project. At all. But listen to it, tell me what you think. I think that it turned out pretty not-as-good-as-it-should-have-been-y.

 

-- Esoteric ^>^