Dollhouse - One Drug Makes your larger and one makes you smaller, just ask Alice...

[Got Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter in the mail yesterday - bought it used from Amazon for about $3. Good condition too. But won't be reading it until I finish Kim Harrison's White Witch/Black Curse - which I'm enjoying a great deal, more than anything else I've attempted to read in the last six-eight months.]

As noted in my previous post, Dollhouse as of yet has not engaged my emotions. I watched it twice, partly because the first round was with a friend, and you miss things when you watch tv shows with other people - you can't rewind, and are distracted. You also tend to have your opinion of the episode shadowed a bit by their reactions to it. The friend commented that while Dollhouse engaged him intellectually, it still failed to engage his emotions. He wanted to love it, but just couldn't - he felt oddly detached. I realized that this described my own feelings towards the series, quite well. There are shows that engage only my emotions and not my intellect - such as Grey's Anatomy (which does not hold up under any analysis whatsoever, in fact if you do analyze it - you realize how illogical the story is), or Desperate Housewives, Brothers & Sisters, and Ugly Betty - these are tv shows that do not engage my mind. Neither does about 85% of the procedurals on tv for that matter. But I prefer my brain dead tv shows to not include dismembered and tortured bodies in just about every frame, it's a thing. Also, serial killers are so passe. (please imagine a grinning emoticon at the end of that sentence).

That said, Dollhouse does engage my brain, and plays games with it, feels a bit like a puzzle-box. So I find myself intriqued and feeling anticipation based on that intrigue. Sometimes the shows that engage my brain and not my emotions fill me with more anticipation than the opposite. I disagree with people who think that only those cultural items that engage our emotions are worthwhile - this is not true. Sometimes, the ones that engage our brain are the ones that motivate us to do and try different things. It's a bit like the discussions I've had regarding mathmatics. For years, I was, admittedly, negative regarding the study and practice of mathematics. But, within the past few years, I've discovered that math and numbers are not less because they lack the ability to engage emotion. Or resonate emotion. Also, you can actually swear in math, you can get angry with math, you can sing in math, math does have a voice. We hear the sound of numbers in the chords strummed on a guitare or the notes plucked out on a piano. Music is math. Music with lyrics is math put to words. And when math is turned into music it does engage our emotions, just not always our intellect. I write this while listening to my downstairs neighbor pluck out chords below on a guitare - composing a song.

But back to Dollhouse. This week's episode was titled "Echoes" and it is within this episode that we are introduced to Caroline and the Rossum Corporation - the entities behind our lead character, Echo, and the Dollhouse.

From a critical non-spoilery aspect, this episode felt a bit of a hodge-podge of old sci-fi/conspiracy tv and movie tropes. What follows is not really a critical review - I'll leave that to others - so much as a meta. The reason I'm writing about Dollhouse as opposed to Sarah Connor or BSG - is that everyone else is writing about Sarah Connor and BSg, but very few (on my flist) are writing about Dollhouse. I like to write about things that others aren't writing about or at least in a different way, as opposed to just adding more fuel to an already blazing the fire.

( Dollhouse: Echoes. Cut for Spoilers. One Drug Makes you Larger One makes you smaller... )

Is Writing Easy?

liz_marks had an interesting post today on "writing", to which she referenced a humorous essay by Steve Martin entitled "Writing is Easy".

What hit me about the post, is for years I did not consider writing easy. I don't now, if I were to be honest. Not entirely. It's hard work pulling words and pushing them into place. Making sure they make sense to people other than me. Drawing was easy. Painting was easy. Weaving was easy. Running and swimming - easy. Writing? Hard. But I couldn't stop myself from doing it, I felt driven to do it. What was easy was coming up with the stories, the tales, the characters, and the ideas. What was hard was figuring out how to put them onto the page in neatly drawn letters. Grammar did not come easily to me, any more than reading did initially, I had to work at it. My gains in the discipline were hard won. I learned to read and write well because I desperately wanted to. I spent hours at it. Days. Months. Years. The ability to do it - was not innate, it was not a god given talent. The desire to do it was, that was innate, that was god-given.

If you want something badly enough you will achieve it, and by wanting I do not mean that casual urge you feel to eat a piece of chocolat or watch a tv show, but true wanting, compulsive need, that itch that keeps you up at night, that drives you, that is the reason you breath.

Ever since I can remember, I've written. Whether it be in my diary, or in a notebook or a typewriter, or a computer. Ever since I can remember - I told myself a story, threaded a plot together, and once upon a time told it aloud to an audience of trees and bushes, maybe a few robins and blue jays in attendance. Most of what I wrote was admittedly crap on a stick. Unpublishable. Not meant for any eyes but my own. A good percentage of it sits hidden in my parents attic, or in a wast paper bin. I have written at least five books in my life time, of the five, only one, my current one, is publishable. I have written over two million words in stories and novels and plays. I write for a living, but it is business writing, railroadese, meant for the eyes of an auditor. The writing I am driven to do, that I have to do, appears either on my livejournal or in my novel. And only the novel is carefully proofed, edited, and rewritten a million, zillion times, before it leaves my hard drive.

Writing for me, has never come easily, but at the same time? I guess it does. It is like breathing, I feel better when I write. And I find I communicate better through written words than oral ones. I trust them more for some reason. I also find that I enjoy writing, for me it is fun. I like the feel of my fingers picking out the words on the keys. I like seeing the sentences form across the page. And I like the surprise of seeing my thoughts spring to life, reading them back to myself, and knowing others are reading them too, my words, my story, my thoughts in their heads. The love is not the same as reading. It does not fulfill the same needs. In some ways, it feels, at times, more selfish than reading does, more self-serving, at others more altruistic. My best writing, I think, is not always thought out ahead of time, but comes only as I type, as I look at the page, my thoughts taking form as my fingers pick out the letters - brain and hands in perfect harmony much like a musician picking out notes on a keyboard as they compose a song, deleting the discordant ones.

Writing in of itself was not always easy. It is work. But it is also play. The drive to learn how to write well was the gift and possibly also the curse. And I think it is different for everyone. I've noticed reading my livejournal that people write differently. No voice or style is quite the same. And people appear to think about how and why they write differently.
But all share the same odd passion for it, or they wouldn't be doing it day after day, week after week - they'd be doing something else. They wouldn't be stealing time to write. Sneaking in a few hours here and few there outside of their regular working hours. And those who write for a living, would not also be writing on a livejournal.

For me...writing is both a joy and a challenge, a pain and pleasure, it makes me happy and cross. I worry over it, and revel in it. It is easy and it is hard. All at the same time. And when the writer's blocks come...they aren't about the writing but the stories that get backed up in my system, blocked mostly by my own fear that what will be transcribed will not live up to the time and effort it took to transcribe it - the hours that I stole to do it, when I could have been doing something more worthy, more important along the way. That what finally ends up on the page will be a mundane waste of my time and whomever happens upon it. It is fear that stops the words, I think, not anything else. Fear of failure, fear of being untalented, of being a rank hack. Fear and vanity. Little else.