Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
The muse stirs
I was listening to NPR this morning . . . something about Obama and Afghanistan and Iraq. And the muse stretched and yawned:
Imagine an America even more polarized than our own, where the wealthy have no use for the underclass unless they are also a servant class; and imagine an America which has decided to spread its “permanent interests” from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. Military is too expensive, so the US decides what’s really needed in those areas are citizens. And so the wealthy class have transferred a couple hundred million US citizens to the mountains of Afghanistan and the oil fields of Iraq and points beyond. But that’s not the fun part.
I’ve worked out a clever system of taxation whereby the non-filthy rich either have to emigrate or stay at home as permanent indentured servants. Of course, there are a few who live in the cracks, refusing to pay the National Tax and refusing to emigrate, and our protagonist would necessarily be one of these. An outlaw, equally disdainful of the uber rich and the proles who do their dirty work. Someone who takes from the rich and gives to himself. Who chuckles whenever he gets a post card from his older brother, an invitation to join him in the golden poppy fields of ‘Stan. Who (as needs must happen in a piece like this) starts out in a world of trouble and only sinks further and further into the shite.
A story like that lives on its setting and doesn’t take much of a plot to drive it onward. It’s a rich world, or at least I have a feeling it could be if I gave the muse the time she needs to create it for me. But there’s the rub: time.
If only I could drive and write at the same time. Heaven knows I have plenty of car-time. Dictation, perhaps?
D.
Could you ask your muse if she’s seen mine hanging out somewhere? I seem to have lost it about a month ago, and there’s been nary a peep since.
Do you think you could use one of those mini-cassette recorders to talk into while you drive? But I suppose that would be just as “distracting” as talking on your cell phone while driving — which we’re no longer supposed to do up here. Don’t know if you could get away with it, or if it’d even work for you, but it’s a thought, yes?
And my muse is hiding from all things wedding and all things new house and all things work. It’s a sad, sad state of affairs.
It needs blimps. With giant TV screens blaring the joys of living in the colonies.
Oh, wait. Sorry. I think that’s been done… 🙂
Srsly, I think it has promise. As does the previously-suggested recorder, only I’d go digital so as not to have to deal with changing micro-cassettes that don’t hold all that much data. SD cards FTW!
Sounds like some of the examples I used when applying for state and federal grant funds. Grant writing is a lot like fantasy writing.
This may sound crazy, but is there anyway you can cobble together a public transportation commute? Park and ride to an entry point and then use the time on the train/bus/tram to write? Adding time to the commute might be worth it, if you can then use the time for something other than listening to NPR and getting stressed from traffic. Or maybe there’s some sort of private bus (DC had these where there would be an express bus that collected people at a suburban location and dropped them to a certain point downtown. Yes, more complicated. May not be cheaper, but you could use the time for your writing and not just waste it.
BTW, guess who indeed does have ADD and got a Ritalin prescription! Let’s see if it does any good…
nox: mine’s been silent for a while. I think she takes pity on me since she figures I couldn’t do much with any cherry ideas anyway.
Kris: Wedding? Wedding? I really haven’t been ’round your blog much! Congratulations.
ps: combine it with Dragon Naturally Speaking and I wouldn’t even need to pay a dictation service. It has potential. Oh, and yeah, I was thinking about not Blade Runner but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, wherein the colonies figured in a lot more prominently. Were they even mentioned in Blade Runner? Anyway, my weak claim for originality is: these are earthly colonies, and the situation is far more coercive than in Dick’s universe.
Lucie: I know. I did a fair amount of that fantasy writing myself, back in my academic years. But I never managed to write a sufficiently convincing universe.
Kira: interesting idea. I wonder how close BART could get me to work? I guess I can hit teh google . . .
Yeah, the off-world colonies were definitely being advertised by the advertising airships. But they were more of an atmospheric element, like the rain and flame vents, than an actual story element. Sort of like how the whole artificial pet thing also wasn’t expanded upon.
The artificial pets more than the colonies. I think they retained the stuff about animals in one or two of the Voigt-Kamp questions (sp?) and there was that snake scale that gave Decker a clue. DADOES was a lot richer, of course.
I wonder if there’s room for another version — keep Dick’s title, go for a vision more faithful to the original? I’ve always felt that Ridley Scott changed the meaning of the story.
I’ve been using a digital voice recorder for years. While driving, while walking, while sitting under a tree. The trick is to record short segments (< 10s) that are easy to review/transcribe. I considered trying voice recognition, but the background noises can vary so much I doubt it would work very well. I can’t even recognise some of the stuff I’ve recorded, why would I believe a computer could do a better job?
@Edwin — recognition software has come a long way over the last few years. Four or five years ago, I wrote some public health software to survey gay men in bath houses & sex clubs; many of these guys are drunk, stoned, strung out, or what have you. We used the handwriting recognizer built into Windows XP’s tablet version to record and parse their open-ended responses, and wound up with a 90+% recognition/accuracy rate – and this is without being able to ‘train’ the software, or differentiate between righties and lefties, never mind drunk and sober.
Background noise can definitely be a killer on voice recognition, and I don’t know if it’s gotten as good as handwriting, but it still might be worth a try.
Does anyone else have this problem? After so many years of writing using Word, now I have a terrible time trying to write by hand.