ON WRITING
I've been writing a lot. I'm working my way through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and Le Guin's Steering the Craft. Cameron is extremely corny. She believes that anyone can manifest a career as a writer. I'm still doing her exercises, though. Three morning pages, written right after waking up. Most of the time I write about my stories, or my thoughts about my life. At the start I kept writing about the past. Maybe I needed to get that out of my system. Writing about my stories is good because the act of writing by hand stimulates my brain. It definitely got me past writer's block more than once.
Le Guin's book is for intermediate writers. It's not really a guide on how to write fiction, but a series of exercises that you'd get in a creative writing workshop. It's very exercise-heavy, which I like. Here's one of the exercises I wrote last night. The exercise is about experimenting with the past and present tense to jump back and forth in diagetic time. Le Guin makes her disciples write two versions. The first is narrated in third person, past tense. The second is first person, present tense. I've reproduced the second version here because I find it more interesting.
*
I leave the building at three. The dirty slush on the sidewalks leading to the quad have more or less melted, giving way to the wildflowers. I recognise the California Poppy, the Black-Eyed Susan, there's one that's white with tiny spots like a panda. I try to think of its name.
This is a cornflower, says Mr Stevens in my head. Mr Stevens was my fifth-grade geography teacher. Why had he taught me that? Oh, it was a school field trip. To Piatra Mare. He was always so excited about the outdoors. I can still remember how he yelled when he scrambled up that rocky mound full of wildflowers. What would Mr Stevens think of me now? A teacher, just like him. Would he be happy? Proud? Disappointed? I wouldn't be surprised. I'm on my way to be disappointed by my students' term essays. Two of them, one short, one tall, walk towards me now, probably coming from my office.
"Good afternoon, professor," the tall one says.
"Good afternoon, James. I hope you hit your word count this time."
He winces. "Of course."
"Don't worry, I checked it for him," says the short one. She gives him a knowing look. I bid them goodbye and continue making my way across the quad.
I never understood why the university built a quad there. It was inefficient, a waste of space; the design philosophy glaringly ran counter to the rest of the campus' architecture. It had to be some old colonial hangup, some old aristocrat who'd studied in Cambridge or Copenhagen and decided to replicate that style back home. Regardless, it was a poor imitation. I've never been, but I've seen the pictures. Old World universities held up by century-old Gothic walls and pointed arches and intricate bas-reliefs built with stolen wealth and stolen labour.
We built our university as an antithesis to the Old World: sparse, utilitarian, utterly soulless. Or maybe we just don't have the funds. We've been bankrupt since the feudal era. After the lords came the colonisers, who stole from us to build their universities, their cathedrals. Eventually we lined them up and shot them in the streets, but where did the money go? They promised us that it was our golden age. Us, ruling *our* land. But all we had to show for it was two million dead on both sides. I close my eyes and all of a sudden I am fourteen again and my Papa and Mama are still in this world, hiding, watching. blood running down the cobble paths in front of my childhood home. For two weeks the blood flows, for two weeks we cower in that dark, stinking cellar. Papa's skin, lit by lamplight, looks like it's melting. Like candlewax.
"Don't worry," he says. "Everything's going to be fine. It's about damn time we took back our country." His eyes are yellow and wide with fear. Mama doesn't say anything but I know she isn't afraid - she's angry. Angry at having decisions made for her. Did none of the men think to ask her opinion before starting their childish revolution? Not that it would have made a difference, but it's the thought that counts. The men of this country always want to show how tough they are. When it's all over, they'll see how wrong they were. All this violence, simply an excuse to get away from their wives. Oh Mama. If only you knew how right you were. They never stopped stealing from us, Mama.
The sun dips behind the clouds, casting a warm evening ambience on the faculty building. I am back at my office. Finally. I sit in my chair and begin to work.
*
It's pretty long. My first time writing in present tense, I think.
All this writing comes out to about 1000-2000 words a day. When the writing goes well, it feels like some higher power is touching me. When it's not, it just feels like regular life.
I've been writing a novel. It's a science fiction novel about a washed up detective 800 years in the future who tries to solve a crime together with a psychic fish, who's a colonial subject. I'm going to come back to this later, because something shows that reality is stranger than fiction. Somewhere along the line I got distracted and started another novel, which will be shorter, about a girl who goes off to college and commits some transgressive acts and gets mixed up in a murder. The second is much more fun to write.
Writing fiction is hard. It is especially hard when you have the honed eye of a critic. To write fiction is madness - all I see in my own writing is rubbish. Yet I continue, inexorable, stumbling onwards optimistically like one of Dostoevsky's holy fools.
ON READING
I've been reading a lot, too. I recently read Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart. Like many others, I loved TSH until it hit the halfway point. Then I breathed a sigh of relief. Because from the start to the murder, it was almost a perfect novel. Donna Tartt wrote The Secret History from ages 19-28. My heart would not have survived the knowledge that a teenager wrote a perfect novel. Lispector's first novel, however, is a perfect novel. And she was only 23.
I'm also reading A Confederacy of Dunces now, but I don't really like it. There is a long tradition of "holy fool" characters in Western literary fiction, from Don Quixote to Prince Myshkin (I might also count the protagonist of Sussana Clark's Piranesi), but ACoD is somewhat mean-spirited. I like when writers are optimistic. Even Kafka's novels, so revered for their depiction of modern alienation, often showed glimpses of hope and human goodness.
Next on my reading list are Men Who Hate Women by Lauren Bates and Black Sunlight by Marechera Dambudzo. I've read 43 books this year.
Last week, Jason Arday took his own life. It would be better to say Cambridge killed him [1]. Cambridge, the UK press, and some American hick fascist. I think everything that can be said about this has been said already, but Rest In Power.
NEO-SLAVERY
Today, multiple sources broke the news about a new kind of data centre processing data using brain cells [2]. Instead of using silicon chips, we're using human neurons now. This kind of technology requires no cooling and costs almost half of traditional methods.
My initial reaction to this was gut-wrenching terror. A story about human consciousness being stuck in a data centre would be right up the lane of Harlon Ellison (author of "I have no mouth but must scream"), the Wachowski Sisters or body horror in the vein of David Cronenberg.
What's more surprising is its closeness to a plot point I wrote. In the sci-fi novel I mentioned writing, one of premises I thought up was "sleep-mining", where poor people dedicate their tired neurons to mining cryptocurrency blocks in their sleep. I came up with this idea when I was envisioning how much of a worker's life a bourgeoisie or feudal lord could steal. Now we have a real-life parallel. And my novel is set in - you guessed it - Singapore.
ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY
Randokuha is celebrating its one year anniversary on Neocities! I've been working on this blog for almost 10 years now. The first post, a draft that I never posted, was written on 12/23/2016. I'm happy to tell you that the post was a lengthy diatribe about how Murakami is a bad writer, which is very on-brand.
I've been writing under the Randokuha name since I was a teenager. Since then, I've done years in the army, got my degree, hopped from job to job and travelled to 20 countries.
One thing that's never changed - barely anyone reads this! I must have had a total of 100 visitors from 2016-2025 on the old Wordpress. For a time I tried to improve the SEO and such but Google took down 60 of 70 indexed pages. But Randokuha is a passion project first and foremost. I think we should all spend more time on things that don't earn us any money. It builds a lot of character.
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