For those who do not know me: I am Jaen Wirefly. Harriet has been so kind inviting me to write a weekly blog entry for Virtual Writers. I feel honored and privileged to share the same space as my talented friend Flawnt. My style, subject matter and experience is very different from Flawnt. Hopefully, you will enjoy my posts, I encourage feedback both positive and negative.

When you enter Second Life® I suppose the first writing challenge that presents itself is picking out a name. Sounds easy, but it really isn’t. The name that you pick will need to convey to the Second Life® world who you are or who you want to be—all in a single word.

I decided to give my avatar a nice, unnoticeable, name, (very generic) like “Jane Doe,” fueled by my wish to keep a low-Second Life®-profile. “Jane” was a nice, simple, name “plain Jane,” but this is Second Life®, a world filled with virtual creativity and I wanted to appear slightly“ cutting edge” so I switched some of the letters around and called myself “Jaen,” pronounced— “Jane.”

However, to my disappointment, this juxtaposition of letters doesn’t always translate well and sometimes people will call me “Jean”. So my plan for a nice simple name with a twist didn’t work out so well. However, I did learn that “Jaén” is the capital city of Jaén Province in Southern Spain, which is known for olive oil and fittingly, I really enjoy olive oil.

My in-world writing so far has been primarily as a journalist for Sinatra Style Magazine, which has been an amazing experience thus far. The Sinatra’s put so much time, energy and real money into their Second Life® projects which does show a deep passion to create art in Second Life®. The magazine is looking to hire new writers and I encourage those who wish to improve their craft to apply. Writing is a field that is brimming with competition and any opportunity one has to get their work displayed should be seized. Although, I did receive my B.A in Theatre English, I still consider myself new to the writing field. However, my life has been a bit unusual and  has given me lots of topics that I can exploit.

Writing is an art that is both calming and frustrating and the explosion of blogs, on-line magazines and daily chat gives the writer lots of interesting opportunities. I welcome you to join me on my journey as I delve deeper into this wonderful endeavor called writing.

Welcome to Jaen’s World!

-Jaen Wirefly

We finished reading John Dies at the End. Our book for November is The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. We will meet on November 29th at 3PM SLT for costume contest, quiz and discussion. I hope to see you all there.

If you’d like more input on upcoming books message me here, or in-world, or visit our group on GoodReads.

www.goodreads.com

“You may delay but time will not.” (Ben Franklin)

I’m sitting outside in front of our weekend house, and it is freezing cold. I wear four layers: undershirt, shirt, sweater, jacket, and I have slung a blanket around my legs. I look like I ought to look like: sitting in front of a lifeless piece of electronic editing equipment, staring at the blank screen. I shouldn’t be here, I should be out having fun, exercising my muscles, firming up. Spending quality time with the family. Enjoying the last rays of the sun.

Instead I have committed myself (hardly anybody’s watching*) to doing this NaNoWriMo thing & write a 50,000 word novel from scratch in 30 days. Why did I do that again? One of those foul contracts the soul closes with itself, playing both devil and man, temptor and tempted. As I sit there, listlessly listening to my own blood rushing through a head that feels less than empty and more like a black hole swallowing all energy around it, I start having feelings of anger and disappointment in myself. That’s good! That’s true! Anything that’s true is good! Witness Stephen King (yes, that King, from On Writing, 2000):

“Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all . . . as long as you tell the truth.”

Now I write turning my anger and my self-loathing into a text, process into prose, stirring away from the image of myself, not pushing the feelings away but into the undefined body of the story of which I only have the dimmest idea. So dim in fact, that I’m hesitant to even call it an idea. An “ideoid” (don’t google this – you’ll get to a BBC documentary “Pedigree Dogs Exposed” and that’s not what I’m getting at…) is more like it, the fragment of an idea, a shard.

Yes, I’ve got an outline (I think I might have found it written on a hankie on the bus): dead Christmas lights are hanging off it like citizens after a lynching. I write, and I get to 617 words. My superstition motivates a singular search with the following result:

• 617 Squadron, RAF, “The Dambusters” was a single squadron formed during the Second World War to carry out a single special and dangerous task.
• Area code 617 once covered the entire eastern half of Massachusetts, and was coextensive with the Eastern Massachusetts L[ocal]A[rea]T[ransportation]A[ccess] #128.
• The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 617 represents construction electricians, sound and communications workers, and electrical transit technicians in San Mateo County, California.
• The GEMÜ 617 is a manually operated 2/2-way diaphragm valve with a low-maintenance plastic bonnet and an optical position indicator integrated as standard.

I am now convinced that I have put, through my writing, put an ink-stained finger right on the nexus of a bunch of intermingling, deep secrets. New food for thought and more words! As interesting as irrelevant!

Bloody Management, an unwritten novel by ff

Then I stop and I make my first fatal mistake of the day: I read what I wrote.

Don’t, cries my inner writer, who’s just only been unleashed and has barely begun to sniff around gathering fantasy animals round an imagined camp fire to tell stories. But I don’t listen, I bring in the inner critic instead, the hunter, whose step is thunder – and all the animals immediately scatter and when the hunter lifts his rifle ready to shoot, there’s nothing but a few hundred wispy words in the middle of a clearing, sad words, sad because the spirit that brought them to life for half an hour or so, was scared away.

Don’t read yet, I write on a post-it note and glue it to my forehead. Have a Schnitzel instead, wipe your mouth with dark chocolate, lean back, admire the wilderness around your writer’s cabin in the woods. Have a shag, bury your head in the pillows, plant a tree if you must, do whatever – but don’t read before you’re done. And perhaps not even then. Let your words compost, let them grow warts and hunches before you think of harvesting them.

Have someone else read your piece if you need it to be read but don’t let them tell you about it. Let them write their views in water and wash your mouth out with it every November morning. Just stay on the page.

Virtually yours,

Flawnt Alchemi

(writing about NaNoWriMo throughout November until exorcised)

* a link to the Virtual Writers, Inc. Facebook group page. If you’re not on Facebook, this will do nothing for you.

Well, Burning Life is over for another year and all that remains is the memory.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, Burning Life began back in 2003 as a mirror of the real world Art, Fire and Community festival in California called Burning Man. Each year revellers arrive in their truckloads to claim a part of the blank landscape to create and build on.

To quote from the official Burning Life website ” Art Cars and Mutant Vehicles are rolling extravaganzas of creativity and transportation. Costume is outrageous. Nudity is accepted. Fire and explosions are common. Art is interactive and built by large groups of volunteers. At at the end of the week, the Man is burned amidst a huge party. The last night, the Temple is burned with solumn reverence. Then everyone cleans up and goes back to their Default World, Leaving No Trace on the desert, of the city that was just there.”

So, without further adieu here is a series of videos that show the scope and magnitude of this fiery festival. Remember these creations are made by non-techies and techies alike. Second Life itself is not just created by some nameless gamer but the world the avatars inhabit is conceived of their own imagination. If you join us, you too will become a creator.

“Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade.” (Benjamin Franklin)

I must admit that I’m a little lost in thought today, lost in translation between the world I know and I’m used to, the world of flash fiction, and another world that I would like to enter, but I don’t know if I can get my fat head through the door: the world of the novel.

It’s NaNoWriMo, and as a regular religious reader of Virtual Writers, Inc., you know, as a matter of course, what I’m talking about: National November Writing Month will shortly be upon us. Last year, over 100,000 writers of all shades endeavoured to break through the invisible barrier of 50,000 words that separates the mere mortal, who is able to wield a pen pleasuring his contemporaries, from the novelist, a different person altogether, quite possibly not purely human.

I cannot help but think in this hour of need of the many things clever men have said about the novel. Like John Gardner – some of you may know him not only as an essayist, but as a marvelous writer’s writer:

“Successful novel-length fictions can be organized in numerous ways: energetically, that is, by a sequence of causally related events; juxtapositionally, when the novel’s parts have symbolic or thematic relationship but no flowing development through cause and effect; or lyrically, that is, by some essentially musical principle- one thinks, for example, of the novels of Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf.”

Puff. There goes the dream…I understand the novel needs to be “organized” – the very notion I hoped to escape from when writing. My life away from the pen is already sooo organised. Even my virtual life is, by now, beginning to look awfully organised: meetings, readings, locations…what about the freely roaming spirit that elevates, as if by magic, above the text, that doesn’t even know of text? All crap, if we believe Gardner, or Dorothea Brande, who wrote in a similar vein thirty years before him.

Marcel Proust [maʁsɛl pʁust] I can understand, of course, I’ve lived with him, as we all have, one breath at a time, one croissant every morning, searching for things lost under the sofa, like time. And Virginia Woolf – I know her well: we used to live in the same lighthouse until she left to grab a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

I like the lyrical waxing, but I also like energy, though I dislike cause and effect as too mundane a relationship which cannot bring forth rainbow-coloured flowers, or love. I adore juxtaposition: later, I will lie down next to Ms. Flawnt, who completes me and who might agree to spoon me. There you have it: either I allow myself to disorganise the novel, or I won’t ever write one.

Huckleberry Hax explains NaNoWriMo at Milk Wood

But, you know, I will do it anyway, no matter what kind of defences my inner critic will throw at me: I listened to Huckleberry Hax’ excellent introduction under Milk Wood last week, and I picked up the gauntlet that Harriet Gausman threw down, and I wrote a synopsis (after looking the word up in my father’s fat Latin dictionary – hint: it’s not the race horse that won the Prix Millet in 2007). I slept badly for two nights afterwards, waking up in the small hours sweating and swearing because I felt that my anticipated characters were too tall and too handsome, and I’m going to do something about it, energetically juxtapositioning, with lyrical music, yes I will. Be my guest and check out our NaNoWriMo tree in Gypsy Camp.

Throughout November, my views will be dominated by the writing of a first novel. I may not finish, but I’ll put up a fight. I’m a serious writer after all.

Virtually yours
Flawnt Alchemi