Douglas Coupland. I enjoy his recurring themes and his search for more meaning to life, more purpose, the sense that we are not all doing what we would want to be doing and yet it is never too late to change ourselves or try to be what we want to be. It’s the assload of hope. I don’t know if I still have assloads of hope or not, but I hope I do. I also like that his worlds are not exactly the same as ours, they are close enough that you could imagine those things happening here, to you, but then there’s some flight of fancy and suspension of reality that kicks in at the end, which couldn’t happen in your life, but you really wish that it could, because it would be awesome. So for just a brief moment you are in another world, where anything could happen.

I wish those assholes would shut up. And I wish you would edit. And if you’re not going to edit you should write that book you’ve always dreamed of writing. Really. You should. But here’s the thing. I don’t want to write about what my life is like. But this morning I was thinking about some of the books I like to read and what I used to write when I was a kid, and I used to write fantasy stuff, stuff that couldn’t happen in real life, but it was fun to imagine that they could. And I just wrote, and I don’t know where it came from. In retrospect the ideas are pretty silly and the stories are probably not very good, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I wrote something, that I started and finished writing it and I did like it at the time. I don’t even think I had outlines of the story. I think I just started writing and then it went wherever. For one of the stories I think we were supposed to finish off the story. I think we were given an opening paragraph and we had to expand upon it. I remember I made it as long as possible and didn’t really like it in the end. In order to be able to do that you need characters, you need to have a feel for them already, so that they can go somewhere. You don’t want to spend all your time describing the characters, they should already be fully formed and then after reading about them you can go back and see how they were already in character with their actions. I read a small book of Elmore Leonard’s 10 writing tips. It was a pretty cute book.  

I’m sleepy. What if this girl slept and lived. What if her entire existence occured while she was sleeping? that doesn’t seem like a particularly new idea. 

There’s a book waiting for me at the library.