So for anyone who read my masterpiece I’m guessing you managed to generate enough friction between braincells (that is not how biology works, by the by) to figure out it was a strange kind of joke. A joke I spent most of a day creating and wasn’t particularly funny. Unless you truly believe that I was going to write a Metroid/Halo Crossover Fanfiction, in which case…I TROL JOO, LOLOLOL!!!1.

Oh wait…one of my friends genuinely believed in me and thought I’d finally had a good idea. Now the noose is twice as tempting.

Today, my imaginary readership, I’m talking about Twitter. Twitter is the newest craze sweeping the internet with people young and old, famous and obscure, boring and also boring, updating their mini blogs from whichever internet-capable device they can get their grubby attention-seeking hands upon. These updates are usually along the classic ‘Facebook/Myspace’ attention seeking posts amongst the teens (Jasmin is feeling Sad, Jasmin is Unhappy, Jasmin is going to Slit Her Wrists…) or from older people who see it as a genuine way to keep in touch with eachother but then become overwhelmed by the fact it requires so much attention and there really is an upper limit on how much useful information you have to impart to people around you. From there the updates will nose-dive into inanity; ‘Mum is putting the kettle on again, I drank all my tea half an hour ago.’

They’ll also encounter the ‘too many friends’ blockade. Acquaintences are suddenly all nearest and dearest, with everyone knowing the intimate details of eachothers day to absolutely no end. Vapid teenagers determined only to garner status in the form of followers will welcome the disproportionate numbers, but for the slightly more sane factions within the population it may all get a bit too much.

Clever people may have realized that Twitter is in fact the ‘What are you doing now?’ aspect of Facebook, if they’re familiar with that particular social whoring networking device. There’s a profile you can update but the barebones of the thing is ‘What are you doing RIGHT NOW?’ . No superpoking, no throwing ninjas, no event invites and no photo albums. Just a running commentary of your day sitting at the desk answering the phone, reading fashion magazines and counting the seconds until you can go home and feel dissatisfied with life. Or, you know, soap-boxing your depression so that people will love you. Either way.

There is also the factor of the most annoying question in the world being; ‘What are you doing RIGHT NOW?’ Most people really aren’t doing anything noteworthy for 90 percent of their day and if they are any sane person is going to be actually DOING IT instead of letting everyone know they are doing it. It’s in the same vein as people who feel the need to validate any activity they do with taking photos of themselves doing it, so that everyone KNOWS THAT THEY DID IT!

Of course Twitter also serves as a platform for people to announce their opinions. There are two kinds of people on the internet, generally (because I love to generalize. There is actually close to five billion kinds of people on the internet, but fuck you I’m a bigot).
Firstly you have the kind of person who encounters adversity/annoyances/humour/pain/an interesting concept and sits down to write a few thousand words in a lazy running commentary/essay format, stating their opinions and analyzing the subject.
Then you have the kind of person who needs to share the basic premise of their thought, in the third person, as it flits through their head. They will state their opinion on the subject, with nothing else, on their Facebook/Myspace/Twitter in the format of ‘___ thinks/feels/has _____ and it is _____’ or whatever.

The latter person, upon encountering Twitter, would (for sake of example) sit down and spend half an hour writing about it. And therein lies the difference.

Ian.

Hey guys! (All three of you!)
Sorry I’ve been out of the loop for so long, it’s been a crazy time. But good news! I’ve been writing a bit and things are looking great from my end. My independant stuff is shaping up nicely but I’ve taken a step back and written a big chunk of something I think will take the world by storm. Here’s a sneak preveiw.

In other news; DRUGSDRUGSDRUGSDRUGSDRUGSDRUGSDRUGS!

Yeah. Yeaaahhhh…

LAST TIME, ON ‘ANGST-WRACKED PONTIFICATIONS OF A GUY WITH AN INTERNET SOAP-BOX:’

Next time, probably around wednesday/thursday, I’ll be exploring the sudden realization that despite all being well I was not a happy person and how conversely now that things are not as ideal I seem to have found a new zest for life.

NOW, THE THRILLING CONCLUSION!!??!!

Essentially that’s not gonna happen. Aside from the fact we’re passed that little self-imposed deadline…I don’t feel any particular need to air more of my personal luggage at this time. My personal blog is just becoming so full of…ME.  So what else can I write about in this blog, The Blocked Pipe, ‘Tales in Frustration and Writers Block!’?
Ohh! I know! Author Stuff!

And so:
Scraps and Fragments.

I may have mentioned before my huge collection of note books and pads, all filled with scrawled ideas and stick men brutalizing eachother in a representation of my suppressed homoerotic-sadist tendencies bein’wacky. This collection is impressive and ever growing, but most of the ideas jotted down between doing constructive things throughout my day never make it past that point and remained undecipherable chunks of dot-pointed shorthand.

The lucky ones make it into the labyrinthine network of folders and files in my computer and back up hard drives either under their own brand-new folder or as part of an already existing project. Sometimes I just stick them in ‘Shorts’ and leave it. A lot of the time the idea is revolutionizing a previous form of the idea and so I re-make the old folder with a ‘2.0′ or whatever next to it and go from there. My oldest novel is up to version 3.3 of it’s second re-imagining.

So what I have is a whole pile of fragments and scraps. Sections and beginnings of stories that go no where and sometimes resemble eachother (and more often then not are cringe worthy piles of shit). But I never delete or throw anything out because at some stage I’ll come back to it and either still hate it or realize it’s the missing piece of a larger puzzle I’m trying to put together. Stuff that was never intended to mix can be jammed together with heavy re-writing to create a better whole.

The prime example today was my furthered attempts to construct a decent expositional prologue for a story. In this scene I basically need a character who becomes prevalent in the plot later on to be in a combat zone and left in a cliff-hangar situation, to help fuel the story later on. I’ve attempted this twice; the first time I ended up with eight thousand words of mary-sue filled shite and the second time I wrote myself into a corner then decided to get drunk and forget about it, spending the next few days brainstorming a scenario in which a lone French Foreign Legionnaire slaughters a company of African Child Soldiers stealing all the spare change from a local mall.

Today I was looking for a specific novellete I’d attempted as a companion piece of the first iteration of the longest running effort at a novel a few years ago, detailing a logistic officer’s Apocolypse Now-esque journey through a warzone. It’s intended to be the second piece of the story starting with the as yet unwritten prologue now; unfortunately I had difficulty finding it.

What I did stumble upon was a writing exercise I slammed out around the same time. It was a battle scene from the first book written from a different perspective and a different POV to the book. At the time I was finding it useful to break away and write flash-fiction in a different canon in a totally different style to break my block; switching from omnipotent third person to exclusive first person really makes you miss the ability to just cut from scene to scene. In any case I wrote this fragment from the perspect of a character who pretty much experienced the events of that scene in the book from a distance and had his own problems to deal with; it really fleshed out thebook in my mind and felt great. Then of course the rest of the book turned to drivel and I abandoned it totally.

But today I saw that fragment and apart from defacing it by replacing a few character-descriptive sentences with ‘MARY SUE MARY SUE MARRIED TO VOLDERMORT AND CARRYING A Mk.II GARY STU RIFLE’ can see real potential for the prologue I’ve been trying to make.

So what’s the story/moral here? Never throw anything away. Just because it doesn’t work or it’s shit you’ll find that later on when you’re struggling to write something else that you may have already written the proto-form of that idea.

So that’s all from me today.
This has been Ian Bell for The Blocked Pipe, asking you all WANNA TURN UP THE HEAT? SLAMMIN’!

Bye for now.

In other news; I am an incredibly sexy man and cannot understand why I’m yet again back on the market. Oh well, good news for the women of the world!

Additionally, university is eating my soul.

I’m getting into shape. Instead of a downward spiral of unhappiness and drinking I seem to have become addicted to running and lifting weights. Weird.

I am incredibly wracked with guilt over the cessation of my daily flash-fic series, Doomed, but rest assured this was an unplanned hiatus. At the end of the day uni work, money earning work and the odd things I feel the need to do to stall the temporary urge to jump off a high ledge  these daysdo tend to supercede small projects like this.

Next time, probably around wednesday/thursday, I’ll be exploring the sudden realization that despite all being well I was not a happy person and how conversely now that things are not as ideal I seem to have found a new zest for life.

For now, bye.

Ian.

It was Terry Pratchett, in his description of the not-so-tortured genius of Leonard of Quirm ( a fictional character parodying the real-life renaissance genius Leonardo De Vinci), who defined inspiration in one of the most efficiently evocative ways possible. He stated that inspiration is essentially individual ideas, represented by particles, which moved through the universe completely unseen by the naked eye or any kind of scientific instrumentality.

These ‘inspiration particles’ then randomly intercept with peoples brains and trigger their minds, causing them to create and invent. In Leonard of Quirm (and presumably his real-life equivilant) this happens on a regular basis, whilst others less fortunate might spend a lifetime with a single idea springing to mind. Other ideas never intercept a mind, whilst still more will grant visions of cold fusion or the precise manner in which the higgs boson can be acquired

It’s imaginative, as with everything else that Pratchett does, and brilliant. Whilst complete nonsense, of course, it does give a kind of pagan reasoning to the arbitrary process of creative genius. Why does one person come up with a hundred ideas in their particular field (and others) before they’ve even brushed their teeth in the morning, whilst the guy next door couldn’t come up with an original thought if he was locked in a room and given a small army of keyboard proficient monkeys to work with? It’s the arbitrary process of the particles, of course. With that in mind, of course, anyone with a basic knowledge of mathematical probability will tell you that true random patterns tend to form clusters. An artificial one with have an even distribution, whilst dumb luck will cause a roulette table to spit out twelve blacks in a row, over half of which are even.

So what? Inspiration is well represented by a pseudo-scientific theory that bears no real relevance to reality nor gives anyone a useful outlook or pro-active action to take (other then inventing some kind of ‘inspiration particle magnet helmet’ or to begin running around bobbing their head madly to catch errant particles, screaming ‘eureka!’ every few minutes)? Well, it’s something that stuck with me. Whilst I’m no Leonard of Quirm – in fact I could more be considered the equivilent of the simple-minded native islander who looked up from his hunt one day and realized he’d figured out the perfect method for giving enough propulsion to produce lift without creating too much mass – I do find myself with an over-abundance of ideas. And it’s further compounded by the fact that these things come at random times.

Just this evening, prior to writing this, I was sitting down reading a Ben Elton novel and drinking quietly when the ticking components of my subconcious mind suddenly clicked together in an alarming pattern. Like the spring and cog mechanism of a cuckoo clock it all clunked into place and spat out an alarmingly obnoxious figurehead whilst the event was marked down and the cog all resumed their infinitely complex movements. Whilst nascent in form this new idea is completely out of tilt with everything else I’ve thought of so far and will continue to grind it’s way through the mental processes of my mind; at that point pen will meet paper and it’ll all be downhill to a half-finished story from their.

The cool thing is that can actually trace this particular idea back through the hazy recollections of my subconcious mind. A particular mental image from an expositional, scene setting sentence in the book I was reading connected with a picture I saw on the internet (a gun, to be specific; a flintlock pistol with an axe-head at the end of the barrel and the grip overly long to create a handle for the axe function of the weapon. Very cool.). Like a puzzle being solved or a formulae being worked out, my background thoughts took these two chunks of ‘that’s cool’ and began working them against eachother, filling in the blanks around them until…it clicked. The cuckoo sprang forth, X = Y and I found the corner piece.

People often ask me where I get my ideas, or how do I find inspiration. Short answer; I have no idea. Shit just springs to mind. The realistic simple answer is that my brain works differently from other peoples. The paganistic pseudo-science answer is that my brain is an Idea Particle magnet.

Either way, it’s cool.

Ian.