Cruisin' the fantasy highway

[degringolade]

 

Impressionism / Stefan Dimitrescu/ Houses in Mangalia

Cruising along today.  Had a good night’s sleep and feeling pretty good.

Mike sent me some wisdom yesterday:

“Since most of the stuff we learned in school was either wrong or misleading; so what your English teacher taught you about outlines might be the reason why potential novelists end up being English teachers. Not that there is anything wrong with being an English teacher. I do not see how the creativity put into an outline could possibly equal the creativity put into an evolving mess that you make up as you go along.”

Now, I can’t really say to much to contradict this statement, I have to put on the patented (and highly attractive) “Half-Truth spectacles”.

I am thinking about maps right now.  Since I am trying to write fiction about an alternate universe, I need to better imagine the universe.  A great deal of the work has been done mapping this particular universe by such folks as Lovecraft, Maachen, Chalmers and Greer.   So you can’t say that this particular Universe is un-mapped, all of the interstate system is laid down.  What I need to do is start filling in county roads in the area I will be working on.

So I am going to spend some time reading a style of literature that really doesn’t appeal to me much anymore.  I read Lovecraft when I was a kid, and ate it up.  After all the banality of a suburban Utah existence in the sixties and seventies, it kinda worked for me.

I enjoyed the heck out of the pleasant trashiness of Greers “Hali” series and have some ideas of how to insert my own flavor of trashiness into this universe of opposing views.

That requires studying a map.  But since a map of this odd place isn’t available, I suppose that building one isn’t out of the question.

Mrs Lake would still call it an outline.