The Vineyards

The fan in my power supply box is making funny noises.

Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah!!!!!

I am cursed. These power supplies will probably drive my sanity off faster than anything else. Given the irony of life, I am likely to suffer an accident and get hooked to life support machines, and then I die because the machines' power supply boxes all fail.

And my CD burner will only recognize a CD in it in one out of each fifteen attempts, more or less. And when it does, it will only record at 8x, when the maximum is 16x. And it keeps failing and retrying during burning. But HP's support site enjoys being cyclic and not telling me where I can take it for repairs.

But hardware problems are not the subject I chose today.

I have three ideas for fiction texts. Short stories. The first one that I thought of was "Wind Chimes", the most fantastic one (fantastic in the sense of "fantasy realm"). It would only make sense in Portuguese, though. The second story should be titled "Shutdown". When I first thought of it, it depressed me instantly. I was in fact scared. But to fully reach that effect with a story I would need to do some research and put a lot of effort into it, and probably rewrite it a few times, which I hate doing; therefore, "Shutdown" is not coming out anytime soon.

The third idea is what has been echoing in my mind the most lately. "Ambulance", it dawned on me while driving back home from work one day, when an ambulance came rushing by, I made way for it and noticed I would go through the same street it did. It would, however, need a tremendous psychological side to it to even touch what I want it to be. Therefore, "Ambulance" is the hardest of the three: I keep thinking about it all day and get nowhere.

All in all, these three stories are unlike anything I have ever written. "Dream Debris", "Fireflies", "Elise", those were easy, linear, obvious: I just created the characters, put them in that long gone world of Temuair and said "go, do what you must"; there was next to no intervention from myself - and where I did meddle, it shows, for the quality of the narrative drops - really, two suicides? crying for three days and nights? lesbian incest? "I did it for love"!? I thank the gods for "Four Far From Formidable Fables", which were short enough to prevent me from ravaging them.

"Wind Chimes", "Shutdown" and "Ambulance" could be nowhere near the Temuair three. They are closer to real literature, the kind that I have not read enough of to do it myself. Poe, Salinger, Machado de Assis, all masters of short stories. I have not read nearly enough of them. It is a shame, a shame.

Yet this goes on, unchanged. Maybe soon I will have another idea to archive and regret not putting to paper.

By the way, I am tired of listening to "Thanatos - If I Can't Be Yours", the ending theme of "The End of Evangelion". Yet I can find the will to play no other song. This should not be so.

But the night waned and he sat upon the rock.

Posted by Etienne at October 4, 2003 03:01 PM