Sycophancy

It's not often I post blogs. Even less do I blog about "what I'm feeling." Certainly not since escaping the teen years.

But no thing can maintain itself forever. Which is a shame.

My recent absence I will shamefully put down to my concentrating on 'proper writing,' which is a ridiculous excuse, I know, but such is my mind that it can, as yet, only focus on one of a type of thing at a time.

Something that has inadvertantly come about from a new found determination to finally get some shit done has been an almost sub-conscious thought experiment, an ethereal by-product that grows with every word I add in futility to what ever page I am unblanking. This is the worry of what to do with the results.

But I know the answer. Or, at least, I know of an ideal solution.

I may have mentioned this before but I habour an ever-expanding and unfathomable admiration for Penny Arcade and the empire that now hosts it. I imagine, to normal people, these efforts may not be all that extraordinary but I find myself struck down in awe by their progression from fledgling, Internet-based comic strip to a now fully fledged Goliath of Humour that is still based, primarily, on the Internet. This is something worthy of emulation.

But, a business is worth nothing if the "product" is worthless. Conveniently, this is not the case with the Penny Arcade strip. Now, while I appreciate the quality of artist Mike Krahulik's work in the strip, especially recently, I can't draw. I have no knowledge of drawing or the skills that go with it. I could as much tell you how Krahulik stacks up against other artists as I could rate a partiular ninja against other ninja. I confide myself in just acknowledging the ninjaship. He ninjas well. I think the analogy is beginning to fall apart.

(This is where the feeling-y bit starts. Brace yourselves.)

Being a writer, however (not the most prolific one, I grant you), I can comment fairly coherently on the wordsmith of the comic, Jerry Holkins. And I will. I will do so with much enthusiasm.

I love the man's writing. His abilities in pacing and structure can be masked by the very jokes they work to construct or the visual comedy from the art but, having spent as much time staring at his web page and gorging on the literary feasts in the news posts that accompany the strips, I could quite happily wax lyrical about the almost melodic quality in his sentence structure, the extensive and often gorgeous vocabulary like the ornamentals of one of Bach's fugues. And he does this talking about video games.

I don't really talk about inspirations. I think maybe my instinct is to be intimidated instead of inspired. That was certainly true with music. The bands I respected most scared me off as I believed I could never amount to that.

With writing, I don't seem to get that. Words are a much more intuitive concept for me. I can see almost straight away how the combination of letters and commas arranged in front of my works. There's a degree of intimidation but I can see the path up the mountain. Jerry's writing: his words, his measure, the images and insights he conjures; It's like Everest. But his writing is so well crafted, so graceful. It's hard to feel anything but inspired, to aim for that peak. Jerry hypnotises like a piper, leading the way up the mountain path.

I try to temper my enthusiasm as much as I can when it comes to literary idols of mine. I worry that I might end up simply mimicking their style rather than infusing it into my personal style. I always look over my writing and worry that it may as well be Terry Pratchett fan-fiction. I once considered writing a series of blogs regarding my thoughts on modern attempts at hedonistic living but discarded these as they looked like a sequel to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But the lust for language and description that Holkins exhudes in his writing is a state I am quite willing to live in solidly, at least for a little while. A shift in focus from the long arc of the story to the sensual immersion in the shorter moment might just be what I need to produce an improvement in how I write.

This relies, of course, on an improvement in frequency. I should probably work on that too.