Visual Input

Confession: Walked about ten miles today. There was chafing.

Reading:

• "Pa's Darling," by Louis Auchincloss

Writing:

• Untitled Dark Fantasy Project

Revising:

• "Cora and the Sea"

Today I went to the Met, specifically through the Modern art and Oceania sections. (Also I went to the roof where there were giant metal balloon animals. This does not relate at all to this post, but was still fucking awesome.)

In an earlier post, I mentioned my plan to take trips to the Met as a way of getting story inspiration. This was my first opportunity to put that into practice, and I have to say, I was satisfied with the outcome. For archival purposes, here are the notes I jotted down over the course of the afternoon.

• Brother & two younger sisters
• Set in lighthouse?
• Cow skull
• The universe through the portal of a bone. "Bone doors"
• Silent fall
• Woman in white pants, brown shirt, flowing green jacket. Alone. Stark & bare landscape. Once had companions.
• Disapproval - isolated school - children rise up? (Why?) Stark woman wears red, wears self-deprivation like a badge. A little enclave in the wilderness.
• Nic's writing desk. (A sketch of it) - built himself by hand
• D- Colors duller, but shapes & forms stand out. Energy aura - tension & potential, just before a spring. Heat looks angry. Chemical reactions feel like falling off a cliff. Sea-waves pulse with energy.
• Can't directly affect living creatures - resisted by their life force.

So the question is... was that worth the $20 admission? I think so, and here's why. I'm not sure how much sense that makes to anyone else, but here's what I got out of it:

• What sort of dynamic is there between multiple siblings? In particular, I'm imagining a girl of about ten forced through circumstance to take care of her older brother (about twelve) on a journey, while simultaneously caring for her younger sister, who is about six. I'm not sure what got them in trouble or where they're going, but there's a potential for some interesting conflict.
• I saw a painting of a lighthouse. It was beautiful but isolated, and this sounded like a good setting for a story.
• Thanks to Georgia O'Keefe, I saw a number of cow skulls. They have such a distinctive shape... where could I go with that? Dunno, yet.
• "The universe through a portal of bone" is a phrase in a description of another O'Keefe painting called "Pelvis II," which I happened to find just now online. It sounded interesting, made me write the phrase "Bone door." I imagined a story concept in which travel to other places/worlds/times/etc was possible, but required the use of bones in some way, either to construct the door or activate it. Magic, as they say, always demands a sacrifice.
• I saw a picture of someone falling, as if from a cliff, and it struck me that no one else was around to watch him fall. I picture him as not screaming, but silent as he fell, and the world around him just as silent. It was a vivid image.
• The woman in question was a self portrait of an artist whose name I've already forgotten. It wasn't the woman that caught my attention as much as it was her clothing, which seemed both utilitarian and dramatic at the same time. Her expression was odd too. I pictured her as the last person left of a once larger group, who had progressed out of the greener places and times in her life to a place where she was alone. But she was driven. There's still some job that needs to be done.
• In another picture, I saw a story fully formed. There was a stern looking woman, probably not old in retrospect, but in her demeanor. Behind her was a building which in my imagination became a school. I saw it as a place in the wilderness that this woman had turned, through her force of will, into an enclave of civilization. Perhaps it's a British school in India or South Africa, and within its bounds, no one could tell save by the weather that they're not in the English countryside. For whatever reason, this woman has become hardened, and believes that anything good is a luxury which should be rooted out and dispensed with. She's proud of depriving herself. She does the same to the students she cares for. Ironically, she does care for them, and is doing as best she can, as she sees it. I imagine the children rising up against her somehow. But what would start it? Children are going to assume that what they experience is normal unless something happens to disturb that equilibrium. I imagine a stranger coming to the school while they're in their playground, perhaps a native of that foreign country, and he or she is found by the children before their teacher. What transpires? I don't know, but it would have to be major.
• The remaining points have to do with Dairhenien's Library, my perpetually in-progress series of novels. I saw a writing desk that would be a perfect accessory for Nicodemius, an old adventurer-turned-scholar. I can see him making it himself by hand, not using his magic, just to demonstrate that he can.
• One painting I saw, a Picasso, caused me to wonder how perceptions alter for Dairhenien while he's using magic. It's a magic of seeing structures, but since the human body is only capable of perceiving certain sensations, a kind of aphasia takes place in which perception of magic is mapped to the other senses, as well as emotions.
• The final point is a solution to a problem of balance that has been bothering me. Of the two forms of magic in my story, one had long felt far more powerful than the other. By posing a restriction against its use on living creatures, I believe I've evened the playing field.

So that's what I got out of my price of admission. Nothing really concrete, just snatches of character and place that might pop up later, or might not. But they'll be there now, if I need them.

Publication Status:

• Submitted: 2
• Accepted: 1
• Rejected: 1