Cities and suburbs, real and imaginary.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Going into biscuitness

I would rather go into biscuitness than business.

Eating biscuits, lots of them,  drenched in butter and jam, perhaps cheesy or with jalapenos, perhaps dribbling with maple syrup, perhaps as a sandwich that crumbles even as it is devoured. This is more appealing than going into business.

If business more closely resembled eating biscuits, we wouldn't even notice that we were working.

In this, writing what you love and care about comes in. Writing is a business. Business is very boring. But, being passionate about what we write smoothes over the rough peaches of the job. I write what I care about.

What part of MAZE is the biscuitness, for me? It is an interesting thought experiment, on the one hand, to send myself into the labyrinths of genre, and to face the unknown things there.

Also an interesting thing, learning about unicellular life forms and their interaction with human natural defense mechanisms as reference. Integrating them into horror tropes.

Also interesting, recreating a version of rural Chinese culture, streamlined, and slammed into the Maze's walls of stone, where outside voices will occasionally pass through. (Note: a random sample of humans over forty thousand years will be a strong Chinese majority... Human history can be seen, in some ways, as Chinese history with occasional noisy blips at the fringes of their eternal, ever-populous empire.)

Also interesting, handing the boring bits off to a small press. I have self-published and will do so again in December with a book-length work. It means handling the boring stuff and not just eating all the biscuits.

And, I write other thing that aren't fun, and struggle against the conformist space. I really dont have willpower. Place all the biscuits in front of me and tell me, eat only half of this one in only this way, with the approved topping... It keeps me up late, stressed that I couldn't just eat all the biscuits however I thought them best.

I am stretching this metaphor a bit too much. MAZE was such an interesting biscuit. I hope I get to write another interesting biscuit like MAZE soon. In the mean time, read MAZE and share it with others that the odd taste of biscuits particular to my pallate spread around a little.

I am going to go bake a little biscuit, and I hope I enjoy it as much as Maze.

I dont want to be involved in the business of writing. All I want is the biscuitness. Biscuits are tasty. Metaphors are fun to stretch until they pop.

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