So, at the advice of members of my writing group, having put together an outline of my novel, I am writing the last chapter up front. To put together where I am headed, this serves as a way of giving myself a destination and also aiming at the resolution, which, seeing as how stories are conflicts, different melodies and strains of thought… knowing what one, in the end, is trying to say, is a good bet for being able to say it. But boy, the other day, as I was outlining a tarot card reading for this last chapter, I was in a state, as I navigated some very heady concepts. Hard to describe, but it started when I listened to this Nerdstalgic video essay on whether Iron Man 3 is a Christmas movie. Yeah.
It points at screenwriter Shane Black’s repeated use of Christmas, the time of year, the setting and themes, as a way to heighten emotion for characters as it is a time that people tend to want to feel more connected, so can understand when a character is alone or in stress or danger at this time, it amplifies things.
Now, considering this on a walk in the cold, on Christmas eve, while contemplating my own story, which is highly personal though abstract about a child prodigy obsessed with virtual worlds, which dovetails nicely into the Tony Stark character arc in Iron Man 3 ‘Am I a superhero- or is it the suit?’, and thinking that the world is in this mess of contemplative befuddlement of technological surrounding while needing a breath of the wild to come storming in though the saturation levels and contrast is so off in my own experience that it feels like my body in its unhealthy state is just driven pure snowblind in unnatural senses of what makes life life and what hope I might have to pull out some future from this barreling world, trained on calamity and noise…
Ozymandias. The first card in the spread is the two of wands. It is a man looking over a battlement, holding a globe. The interpretation reads that he may be in the mood of Alexander weeping over no more worlds to conquer.
I am discovering the point. Where one finds a consensual argument inside oneself. Where satisfaction with one’s view simultaneously wraps itself in contentment and argues with dissatisfacition – maturity. And the man suit starts to fit. But one wonders if the man is mud. Or joy.
Wish me well, there is work to be done, and I am a sick man.
The Haunted Typewriter 