Tips - Write it down!

Far too often we hear the phrase write it down. Write everything down, just sit down and write, no matter how bad, get it outside your head. How often do we have a great idea, and it just walks away like it never knew us? Yeah, all the freaking time.

So it's advice time again. Keep a notebook handy, so useful for a million different things. I used to keep a sketch book. They were often as full of drawings as fragments of poems, shopping lists, strange phrases from questionable states of consciousness. Mad, messy notebooks. They are great repositories that can help clear your head so you can work.

These days everyone has a phone or two in their pocket. Great if you want something small and super useful for keeping notes. I used to use mine to keep notes and then email them to myself for later editing or archiving. It was a good system. It gave me an emergency backup in case of a disk failure. In fact, Gift of Ravens was written almost entirely on a Blackberry Curve during breaks and downtime at work. I would write a bit, then press send at the end of a break and have a nice little package to look over later.

These days I use Google Keep. Now I don't have to save or email, everything is cross platform and instantly available. Having access to Docs is also super useful, but I do find editing on a phone super tedious. Not that typing on a tiny phone keyboard is satisfying. Lets call it tolerable, necessary.

Anyway, what inspired this post is sort brainstorming ideas for short stories I recalled a few way old ideas from my film days. I think both of them were verbal pitches over beer kind of ideas. You know, stuff I should have wrote down and never did.

I had recalled one story, lets call it Heart Attack for now. At least I think its that one. It could easily have been another idea we can call Werewolf.

Heart Attack was an idea for a music video, inspired by a vision I had when walking into a huge mall. It is a surreal exploration of the experience of dying. I can't say much more about it other than I had thought it would make a good adaptation for a short story instead of a music video. Well, me being the most smartest person ever, I failed to write. it. down.

Fuck.

My brain started doing its little dance trying to recall what I was thinking about twenty minutes ago and ADHD came over to play pranks on me and here we are. No story idea but struggling to remember one.

In that furious scrambling of brains I recalled another pitch from way back. This one a more traditional monster movie about a werewolf. Again I have to play the secrecy card not for fear the idea will get stolen, more so I don't lose the passion to tell the story. I knew it wasn't the right one but it sort of struck me as an ah-ha moment. It was both another idea for an adaptation for a short story, and also the idea you are reading right now.

So there you go. Write that shit down or lose it forever. Use whatever you like, apps, notebooks, stacks of paper, napkins, whatever, just put it on paper.

Now I'm off to take my own advice.

Thanks for reading,

Pete

Postscript - Gift of Ravens

Read the story here. The following is pretty spoiler free, so do what you will with order and enjoyment.


The inspiration for this story is my own beloved Telecaster. It is a 2010 Telecaster Blackout Deluxe, a three pickup variation of the venerable axe, draped entirely in black. She is a beauty.

That guitar is the reason I name my guitars. I'm not one to give them just regular female names. No, these are items of arcane ability, devices to amplify the unseen, summoners of the hidden stories.

I was playing Dawn of War 2 while I was thinking about what to name this great relic I had fell upon. In the game you can find items of great power with names like Calgar's Bane, Shroud of the Emperor, Fist of Dorn, all that fantasy goodness.

I felt that my black Telecaster needed a legend about how I came to own it. The guitar comes from the spirit world itself, by way of the trickster Raven, and I would create that legend. Naturally, the name Gift of Ravens fit perfectly.

The first line,

          "I was born Fred, son of the seventies and alcoholic parents."

is the result of trying to breach into songwriting. An abject failure as a lyric, but isn't it a great first line for a story? I thought so. Heavy on the tropes maybe, but it would work to serve my purpose, style, and the experimental parts of my story.

Telling this story in the first person present was fun. This was the prime experiment. Have back story and sub plots, but do not refer to them in any way other than a completely hallucinatory way. Some of those elements are fairly simple to decode, but others are not there to decode. They are completely hidden by the character's own perceptions. Just generally, it is a great way to go tell the flow of the story.

Working with first person allows the writer to explore the way we all lie to ourselves. Fred/Thunderbird is no different. His senses lie to him and his mind and desires lie to him. It is a dismal outlook, but there is honesty down there. I will say no more because I wish those elements withheld remain so, in service of style. The work stands as it is, for what it is.

Now, as briefly as I can a few words about how I wrote the story. I had two major scenes in mind, and a loose approximation of the ending. I write sequentially, so I held back on those scenes as I pushed my character as far as I could. This was the scene where he finds the guitar in the trash pile, and the next when he smashes it and hurls it into the river. By hanging those moments ahead they worked like a carrot on a stick. I wanted to write those scenes, but I had to get there first.

I wrote this before knowing that I have ADHD. I'm not sure that is amazing in and of itself, but it is important. Those of us with ADHD have no trouble coming up with ideas like these, but we do have great difficulty in completing them. I have countless stories I got well off the ground, but couldn't sustain flight to a safe landing. This piece is a demonstration that it is possible for me to make the waking dreams real.

Hope is a real town in BC. I find it a romantic little place, a relic of the British Columbia gold rush. Its not much more than a truck stop theses days. A little tourist stop on the way to better places up the Fraser Canyon. It was always a fuel stop for us as a family when we would road trip to the Cariboo. Still is. We always stop for a bite or fuel, maybe a short break to stretch legs.

It always struck me as a town that has always been a sort of place you never go to, always you just pass through. Up the river a couple kilometers is the town of Yale. Yale was once the largest city on the coast, larger even than San Francisco at the time. This would have been long ago in the mid 1800's. I fancy that little Hope has always been second fiddle to some other nearby town, Chilliwack, Merritt, Princeton, Manning Park. Everyone is always going somewhere else.

Legends beget legends, and this one should be no different. In a past life I was involved in film. One project we did was a movie within a movie (a legend in its own way) called "Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan." it was a crazy silly thing we shot up in the woods near Hope. The gang of us, 16 or so. actors filmmakers and friends stayed at a motel in town for the long weekend. A legend started to crop up.

A few things started to go missing. Our DOP had his brand new iPhone stolen. What made it so strange is that it was with like ten grand worth of camera gear, none of which was missing.

Other stories piled up, sweaters missing, I thought the maids had taken a good pull from the bottle of whiskey in my room. Most of it was just us misplacing things. The iPhone never turned up but I'm pretty sure everything else did. The whiskey was probably my imagination.

Well, imaginations being what they are I kind of ran with it. Hope itself is jealous of all the people who just pass through, so she takes a little souvenir from whoever passes through. So they will maybe stay to look for it, or so she will be remembered. The whole town is haunted by this jealousy. It only served to amplify the romantic notions I have for the town.

If you ever make it over to our little corner of Canada, please stop in Hope. Have some lunch, take a walk. Leave her a little souvenir of your visit.

Thanks for reading
Pete

How I Write

Writing is always the result of some other endeavor. I pick up my guitar to craft a song and a short story comes out instead. A drawing of a character becomes an essay on why the person wore corduroy in a time of denim and leather. Even poetry slips away to prose sometimes.

It wasn't always like this. There was a time I couldn't write. There was this bottleneck that I just couldn't force an idea past. Drawing made more sense to release a vision. Careful lines to craft a feeling upon a page. It was something, but never enough. So much remained in the bottle.

I remember walking home one day. I had dropped out of school and drifted a while. On one cloudy headed cold night I decided I would start journaling. I began to let myself open up and dump words. It feels like a long forgotten epiphany, now.

It led to learning a few exercises that I still use frequently. The easiest and most useful is the timed session. It works best with pen and paper for me at least. I'm not much of a typist. Its simple, anyone can do it anywhere. All you do is pick an allotted time and write whatever you can as fast and smoothly as possible. Always moving forward, ignoring everythig, grammar, spelling, punctiuation, and logic. Do not stop until the time is over. Do not stop to think about what to write, just write whatever pops into your head. It could be the same word over and over, just random words, or the thsounds you can hear. Anything. Mostly what you will find on the page is gibberish, but the point is not to create a work, it is to engage your wordsmithing brain with your arm or your finger. The exercise is to program a connection between thought and physicality.

It is something like meditation. Meditation is a practice that can help still your mind by keeping it focused on something physical, like breathing or a yoga pose. By linking your thoughts to an activity, you will become more present in the moment. I used to practice something like this on my bicycle. A trackstand is that trick you see bike couriers and commuters doing where they stop the bike and remain upright without moving. Its easier than it looks and it functions a lot like yoga. Its a nice way to force your mind on to something physical.

I highly recommend anyone with anything to do with writing spend some time with an exercise like this for several months. It will greatly improve your ability to produce what you envision. Even for non-creative trades this is a remarkably useful practice.

Part of the reason I have been silent for several weeks must remain secret, unfortunately. A neurotic element of writing for me is that I must write it, not talk about it. I have to hold the excitement inside only to allow it out as writing. Otherwise, that power is lost to conversation. So that has consumed some of my time.

One of my techniques is thinking of these conflict moments, these big emotional key frames, and working the words towards that. Some flow a little easier than others. I am not the sort of writer to just ramble away then whittle down to a plot. I must have a very clear vision and that takes considerable development.

I will put up Gift of Ravens in the next few posts. Its fairly large so I will look at how to split it for readability. Two or three parts, and if you're lucky an alternate ending.

Thanks for reading.

Pete

The Oath of the Shadowblinder v0.2

Here is an update on the progress of Shadowblinder. Stay tuned for more soon!



Intro - crushed under lies

Go fucking practice!

3/4 time fresh tendrils 6/8

F# A C 2 4 7 focus on rhythm
Em F#

Transition - theme of the light

    '     '      '      '
. . . . . . |. . . . . . |


Riff theme - justice

I. am. . .luminous.
The wave, and the mote.

I hold the eye,
The fang, and the claw.

Sparks of glaring rage
The flash, and the flaw.

Stain night in glimmer
In red, in the bright!

Turn light upon the lie.
Come the Shadowblinder.

//Break

Guitar solo - theme of the light

Shadowblinder light my eyes
Save me from deceit and lies

Apparition turn your rage
Take this darkness from this age

//Falter and fade face of charm

Riff theme - apparition of lies

Theme - Justice repeats

Theme - The Oath

Render, in the glare
The shadow sightless;
In blinding everbright;
the morning nightless.

Solo 2 - dawn's justice

Refrain - theme of the light

Out on the ash of shadow.

_________________________

Below this is rejects, cuts, temporary storage
_________________________

//Shine the everlight of morning


Place upon the truth the morning stare
To render, in the glare, the shadow sightless



We are the light
Together shows the way

We are the light
That blinds this darkness

What bends crystal light?

What breaks under light? LIAR!


With
eye to read and
Claw to rend for
Fang to ravage
What's hidden inside.

Be they
Preacher /break them!
Charmer /
Taker /







The light belongs to us all



So true that every lie falters and fades
We hold it in our hearts, this light.

The light belongs to all of us.
Such power that all life is lit
Such

The light is inside us.

Shine on in words,
The pen, and the code.

Praise this breath of sight
The wind, and the wings.

Beneath my glaring rage,
It cracks, your fault.

Background Inspiration - Shadowblinder

As promised, here is a bit of the inspiration for Shadowblinder, and a little update on the progress.

The Shadowblinder is my Ibanez Gio that I stripped and upgraded. I bought it as a project to see if I could take a shit guitar and make it something special. It wasn't an awful guitar but it was a cheap Chinese beginner model. The neck was straight and the fret wear wasn't too bad so all I needed was some new pickups, tuning machines, and a coat of paint.








Since the concept was to make a metal shit-kicking drop-tuned monster I chose Lace Sensor Drop and Gain pickups. These are made specially for way down tuned crunchy riffage and are fairly unique seeing as everyone rides Seymour Duncan and Dimarzio pickups for everything these days. The Lace pickups kill. Super tight, full frequency, and output for days.

I chose some Planet Waves auto trim tuners for the headstock. These are pretty neat. Besides the really nice 18:1 gear ratio, these tuners are a breeze to string up. There is no guessing about how much slack to put in the string, you just feed it in, lock it down, tune to pitch, and it snaps off excess string. Perfect every time. They are rock solid staying in tune as well.

In thinking up a name for this beast, I was thinking about some of the problems I was seeing all around me. In my work and in the world it seemed that too often, people were just dishonest. Hiding something, holding things back, folding the truth under layers of shade and darkness.

Being the huge fan of Robert Jordan that I am, I wanted something like what would be the name for one of the myths in his world. In The Wheel Of Time saga, the overarching fight is between the light and the dark. The dark lord has many names, one being Sightblinder. He is a taker of light. I wanted this guitar to be a bringer of light. A hero of truth, bane of darkness, the cure for the deceived. Shadowblinder was born.

Now, the song Shadowblinder has been a long time coming as is normal in my process. I think I first crossed some themes about four years ago with the line:

Shadowblinder light my eyes

A punch into a chorus. The Shadowblinder is one you can call on when facing down deception. It will help you see truth where it has been hidden and it will reveal to you the liars.

The most recent spate of inspiration was to imagine this being has sworn an oath. This piece was lingering near the surface. Originally I had wanted something like this painted on the guitar somewhere. Like Tom Morello's many guitars. A pledge to the light, to stand against lie and liar.

I will share the next iteration as it appears in my notes in its entirety and without much comment in a few days. I don't normally like to share and speak about works under construction as I feel it can purge the emotions I am feeding it.

Shadowblinder has taught me a few things. One is that in the rush to complete something, you should try to take your time or you will just barf out any stupid idea and run with it. Case in point: I was struggling to add something to the guitar like a pickguard. I found some neat grating that looks a bit like the Chaos Cross. I feel like the results are less than stellar. So it needs fixing. I've got a good idea, but my compulsion is to keep it secret until it is finished. As I mentioned above, sometimes speaking about it might feel too much like it is done to my mind and the motivation will be spent.

Often, I am reluctant to open up a project again for revision so long after I've named it complete. No longer. It may mean my process gets extended for great lengths, but if it serves the results better I should do it. I will explore this further when I present Gift Of Ravens, a short story that needs a new ending, and maybe a few small touches.

Further, this and these projects have showed me that learning is a very purpose based path for me. I learn far more when I cease practice for the sake of practice and focus on learning to clear a hurdle. For example, learning to solder so I can swap our some pickups, or learning how to use high gain clipping stacks and which amps and settings work with such effects so I can make the brutal riffs I require.

Come back soon for the aforementioned update to Shadowblinder. Follow the progress as I learn to combine several disciplines to achieve my goals.

Thanks for reading.

Pavlov's Dog postscript

Pavlov's Dog is a piece I wrote for my high school writing class. The challenge was to take the line, 'A man shot his neighbour's dog.' and turn it into a story. It was a group brainstorming lesson, with the only requirement being a short pitch to the class. Of course we did great, Corinne, Jay, Jason and I. Unfortunately, I do not recall who had what suggestions for the story.

I had every intention of writing that story, but sadly, school was not my place. I dropped out shortly after this.

The reason I would like to share this is because this whole story taught me many things. It was one of my first artistic successes, following a great fall. Later, it both stroked, and tempered my ego. It also showed me a path forward.

Dropping out of high school was a major turning point for me. I wasn't really into the way things were taught there so I was better off on my own. I did my thing. Smoked some pot, worked, read, slacked like no one's business. Freedom was good to me. But I had to go back. I knew it. I wouldn't be happy with myself if I didn't graduate high school.

I fought my way to a writing class with Kay Levings. I apologize if that is spelled incorrectly. She loved creative writing of all kinds. She was one of those teachers, proud of her 'if you can't do it, teach it' mantras. Remembering her, that joy she had, her bubbly passion for everything words. Our final assignment was a short story.

I struggled with this. I wanted to present something unique and original. If any of you write, you'll know, forcing it just doesn't work. I had this opening line for a story, but nothing more. I still remember it.

Deimos, servant of Mars, ever tumbling.

I still kind of like it. Needs something good to follow it though. At the time though, that's all I had. No story, no conflict, no structure, nothing. I had to scrap it.

I knew Pavlov's Dog was there, but I was reluctant to use it. I feel like I cheated sometimes, borrowing from my classmates like I did, but in the end, they could have easily taken the idea and ran with it. Honestly I wonder if they even remember the assignment. That being said, I took this premise from memory. There are no notes of that lesson as far as I know.

In my memory, once I landed on revisiting that outline, the story almost wrote itself. I'm proud to say it is a huge part of one of the only A's I ever got in school. I know now that it isn't much. But at the time is was a major victory for me. Things like this don't come easy for me. Following through with great ideas has always been a struggle. It showed me what perseverance looks like. It is probably responsible for getting me into art school in a roundabout way. The way it taught me to push hard to follow through, to really think a story through so all the parts come together in the end. To keep on towards a goal.

Funny thing this art school thing. One of my classmates at Cap College (now university) was taking a creative writing class as his English requirement. One day he came up to me and asked my last name. "Pete," he said, "your last name is Speers, right?"

"Yeah," I say, not knowing what he's getting at.

"My English teacher is teaching a story you wrote."

Turns out Crawford Kilian had got hold of my story and was doing something with it. Still not sure what, but having my name mentioned by a published writer and college professor was huge. Of course, I had no idea what to do with that other than to wear it as a badge in my heart. I've told a few people here and there, but I generally keep it as a little private spot of inspiration. In hindsight, I should have gone to talk to him. I suppose it could have lead somewhere. But then, I was never into networking.

My process was built on this story. Now a day, it start with some kind of vision, a moment, a few words and builds outwards from there. Sometimes it is a song I'll try to write, or a drawing that just needs more. A poem that just doesn't work. They all end up as stories. I'll share more like this as time goes on, so please, stay here with me.