3/23/2021

i have been really tired... i came back from work yesterday, and basically napped the entire afternoon away. i ate dinner, and after that, did a bit of reading and listening to salman rushdie. but then after that, i kind of collapsed into sleep again. i got up at about 3 or 4 in the morning, and although i had planned to get up at this time to do some taijiquan and work out, i had a hard time surfacing from sleep. even right now (it's about 6:30), i'm having a hard time restarting...

in any case, i did listen to salman rushdie. he spoke about using the tricks and techniques of "old stories" (myths, etc.). he mentioned, in particular, the "arabian nights" (1000 nights in 1 night)... he talked about frame stories, basically a story that houses other stories within them, like rooms within a house. he also mentioned techniques used by oral storytellers... some techniques i recall were switching between several narrative streams (a complex interweaving of different plot lines)... when it works, and how it can fail... as well as embedding stories within stories (not exactly like the frame story, but more like the nested russian doll). i like how he sort of shoots down the conventional understanding of telling a story (start at the beginning, and end at the ending)... that actually rarely works...

i currently am writing a piece that has a somewhat complex plot line (at least far more complex than what i am used to). it sort of evolves as i go. i have a general idea of where i want to get to, but as the plotlines develop, my ideas of things keep changing... even with regards to characters: their motivations, their abilities, etc. i think part of this is a result of my "schedule" of writing... i write about 4 pages a week (at least once a cycle)... during the week, a lot of ideas pop into my head... a lot of questions... like, why would this character do that? does that match with what the character did or felt at the start? things like that. sometimes ideas come out of nowhere. like this idea i had of this one character being a "spy." i don't know why i chose to do that. it definitely wasn't something i consciously considered when i created the character...

*****

it is actually now 5:52 in the evening. i got interrupted (as usual) by life...

i just came back in from cutting one of the ficus trees from hell. i laid a ladder onto the side of the tree, and even with that assist, i needed to use my extension pole saw ("halberd") to attempt to cut this branch. my strategy currently is to cut off as many of the hanging branches as possible so as to take the weight off the main trunk(s). that way, when i work on cutting those parts off in segments, it won't be a gamble as to where they will fall. right now, i'm just stacking everything in a pile by the side of the wall...  

for once in my life, it only started raining AFTER i had come back inside the house. usually, i'm out of sync with nature, such that whenever i start to work outside, then it starts to downpour HARD. i felt so fortunate. maybe things will go my way from now on, ever after, forever more. HAHAHA!

*****

okay, i guess i'd better post this before i get "out of sync" with the universe again. see ya later!