GOBLINZ: THE FIRST GROTESQUERIE

There are more creatures in the Lost City besides the half-naked wraiths. There's a group that I call the Grotesqueries: goblins, ogres, horned women--well, and even more oddities. They tend to lurk in the corners and crevices of the city. Some of them may have some importance in the movie: I want to make a four-breasted woman, for instance, who will have a few things to say, I am sure. She appeared in one of my dreams, and seemed quite insistent that I pay attention to her. But for now, here's the first of the Grotesqueries: Goblinz, a little wizened green man. You can see him here...

THE ORPHE PINUPS

I've been stalled for a while on the novel--there are actually other things happening my my life, like preparing some of my other novels for publication. The image above is from Orphe, which I recently produced as an e-book for both the Kindle and the Nook. I am also turning it into an illustrated paperback book, which will be a long and arduous task. This image is one of a series of "pinups" inspired by the story. You can see the others at my personal website: http://dnstuefloten.com/novels/orphe.htm along with a short video, all done in Poser...

AND E-BOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

I've been sidetracked again, the last couple of weeks, this time while formatting two of my novels as e-books: Orphe (my fourth novel) is now at both Amazon's Kindle store and at Barnes and Noble as a Nook. I also re-formatted (that was a chore) my illustrated novel, Hag, for the Nook. You can see all my published books at my author's page at Amazon.com here, and the Nooks at B&D, here. Take a look...

MORPHING INTO THE FUTURE

I recently purchased the ++morphs for DAZ's Victoria 4 figure, who is the basis for most of the females in Evidence. Well, these morphs make quite a difference. Above is Enoja, with the ++morphs applied: much more realistic and interesting than the un-morphed version. Now I am gritting my teeth and facing the re-rendering all the scenes that show Enoja. The second chapter of the movie, in which Enoja is the main character, is almost done--but if I re-render her, I'm looking at a couple week's delay, at least . But I think it must be done. I'll post a few bits and pieces here as I preogress...and of course, I'll be changing the other characters too...

CHANTILLY'S CAFE SAVED MY LIFE

Cafes seem to hold a special attraction for writers. I've been musing over this the last several days, after reading Sharazade's response to Wal-Mart eating my novel, Part 2, below. When I was young, I didnt use cafes to write. I wrote on a giant old Underwood typewriter at home, or wherever I lived. I spent many years hauling that machine around the world, from Borneo to India to Africa. In my 30s, I traded it for a hardy, though heavy, Hermes portable. I still have both machines: they sit in my adobe room, like hungry, prickly animals. I remember using the Hermes in Australia to write Metropolis: I'd awaken in the morning, in my flat in Henley Beach, make a pot of tea, and start typing. In the afternoon I often got on my bicycle -- an old French racing Follis that I'd converted for touring -- and hit a nearby cafe, where I'd count up my words and make notes for the next day's session. Cafes then were very much an adjunct to my work. I didnt write in cafes, I just mused. I wrote where I lived.

Some years later I rode my motorcycle into Mexico. It was a rather desperate journey: I'd been living in the U.S. for seven years, and found myself unable to write. I resolved I would either write again --  or I would die. I loaded some clothes and the Hermes typewriter into my paniers and headed south. Near Manzanillo I found an abandoned house on the beach, in a coconut grove, just below a lagoon. I jury-rigged a room to make it secure. I set up my typewriter. On the first morning, not sure what to do, I rode to town, saw Chantilly's Cafe right there on the plaza, sat down, took out my pen and notebook -- and immediately started writing on what became The Ethiopian Exhibition. This to me was a miraculous event. In three months the first draft was complete. Chantilly's Cafe saved my life.

That was 1986, I believe. I spent most of the next twenty years writing my books in Mexican cafes. Maya appeared in bits and pieces, scattered all over that country, from Lagos de Moreno to San Andres Tuxtla. I remember cafes in Xalapa, in Merida, in Morelia. In Patzcuaro, in the mountains of Michoacan, I found The Queen of Las Vegas. It was written entirely in the cafe in Los Escudos Hotel, on the big plaza. Eventually I found myself settling in Aguascalientes, a colonial city near Guadalajara. I wrote Orifice, Autobiography of a Wanderer, and most of Hag in Aguascalientes. In the mornings I would walk from my $3 a night hotel, Amuebladas Mina, to the Excelsior Cafe in the El Parian shopping center. In the afternoon I did a second session in the cafe at the Casa Teran, one of the Casas de Cultura. It was there I met my wife, the Mexican poet Jacqueline Lizarraga. About five years ago we came to Hemet, California, where I still own the house my father built. There are cafes here, too, of course, including the ubiquitos Starbucks, but the work is rather more problematic. I shall write about this another day. But meanwhile it is pleasant to think of writers and their cafes, whether Joyce in Trieste, say, or Hemingway in Madrid....

OLD STEAM ENGINES, CHUGGING ALONG: A Progress Report

There's been a bit of a delay to this work of mine, a result of my laptop computer dying on me. I had to re-configure and re-load my old Pentium 4 desktop. I used the down time to focus again on the written version of Evidence, and finished the second chapter. The book will be composed of five long chapters, so there are only three more to go: they are like three fields, already plowed and planted, waiting for fertilizer and water and sunlight. I'll get to them soon.

The computer breakdown happened during work on the movie's second section--let's call it, like the novel, the second chapter. With my programs installed, I've finally resumed working on it: the old computer is rendering a ten-second sequence now, as I write these words. Since it is a complex scene, with many figures, it will take the desktop about two and a half days to render it, chugging away like an old steam engine. The scene consists of a near-nude woman (Syrah Black, one of the wraiths) strutting across a rather industrial room, past other wraiths, to a door which slides open. Behind this door is Enoja, the first guide, dancing in a tight red evening gown. There will be several sequences mixed together: Syrah walking, the dolly camera following her; another camera swooping by overhead; a wide-angle shot of Punk, quite naked, leaning back against a pillar; Menthe, in a transparent dress, crawling along the floor: a montage of images, all leading to the opening door where Enoja greets us.

And this is just a small part of the movie's second chapter. There's the Interview, five or six encounters with Young John, and--since Enoja is a dancer--a couple of dance sequences, just for the hell of it. This is all very time-consuming work: remember, I am a single man doing all this myself: there is no army of animators, no "rendering farm" of computers like the studios have. My desktop chugs away, I chug away, old steam engines, both of us....

Oh, and if anyone has a fast computer they want to sell--or donate!--a duel core, say (which my laptop was, a snappy critter till it died on me), or a quad, let me know....

WAL-MART ATE MY NOVEL: PART TWO

Of course, a day after Wal-Mart ate my novel I got it back. I'd gone to Customer Service, described the notebook, and left my phone number. The next day a rather cautious voice called to say they had a notebook--"something to do with, uh, Evidence of a Lost City?" "That's it," I said. Someone had turned it in. So my pages of notes and typed out pages are back.

A couple days later, my cat Mini, who had been with me nearly 15 years, vanished. That morning she had curled against me, as I set out her food, rather more insistently than usual. I spent a little extra time petting her. I never saw her again. How is that possible? She never left the back yard. Had she crawled off somewhere to die? I searched through all the area, in my underground room, in my piles of spare lumber. She wasnt there. There has been no sign of her since.

A couple days after that, at the cafe, my fast laptop computer suddenly died. I took it to the shop. The motherboard is kaput, they told me. I cant afford to replace it. I've fired up my old Pentium 4 desktop and am using that for my Evidence movie any my websites. But it is not nearly as swift, as capable, as my laptop was.

So what does all this mean? If this were a dream--if these events were nightmares--what would they signify? Perhaps Wal-Mart has indeed swallowed my novel, plus my cat and my computer, and what has been regurgitated are no more than dregs....

WAL-MART ATE MY NOVEL! (Part One)

What a feast that must have been! Imagine the Goliath of American Retailing gobbling up these pages, and then—what? Spitting them out? Suffering indigestion? What an indignity!

We had gone to the Goliath to pick up a few things for the week ahead. As usual, I let my wife and her daughter do this work while I went to the built-in McDonald’s to sit in a plastic chair with a cup of coffee and my manuscript and big black notebook. This is a strange thing for me to do: I despise the arrogantly commercial atmosphere of both Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. Years ago I would occasionally force myself to go to our local Wal-Mart to just sit and watch the people: a fascinating, and horrifying, experience. But this was America. Wal-Mart was the American Dream, personified. I had to see it, look at it, study it, in the same way one studies the artifacts in a museum. My wife points out that our weekly journey there is a practical matter: the huge Wal-Mart has everything from shoe laces to cinnamon rolls. One stop takes care of our major needs for the week. And this is true, of course. As a practical matter it makes sense to go to Wal-Mart. But I am not a practical man, so I sneak off to the McDonald’s, get a cup of their coffee—it’s only 75 cents with the senior discount—and sort of crouch down in a plastic chair, spread out my notebook, and do some work. The perversity of this arrangement actually intrigues me. My novels are truly un-American. They are built on an entirely different value system. They will never be sold in a Wal-Mart. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people who shop at Wal-Mart would hate my novels. My way of life grinds against the Wal-Mart interface. In Wal-Mart/McDonald’s I hunker down, duck my head, sneak over to a table at a far corner, and using whatever poetics I can summon, make a subtle foray against the Wal-Mart way of life.

Last Saturday I joined my wife at the checkout counter. Her cart was filled with colorful, cheerful things. Each thing passed through the scanner with a little beep. She paid with a rectangle of plastic. We went outside, pushing the cart, to our car, a nice black ’97 Honda Accord with a V-tec engine. All the bright, cheerful things were put in the trunk. I drove us home, feeling rather cheerful myself—I had written a piece of dialog for the Evidence movie. When we unloaded the car, however, I couldn’t find my notebook. It wasn’t there, in the trunk, with our groceries. In horror I realized I had left it in the shopping cart, in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. I jumped into the Honda, fired up the V-tec engine, and raced back. The notebook wasn’t there. The carts scattered around the area were empty. I went inside to Customer Service, waiting anxiously in line as people returned packages they no longer wanted or which they had found, in some way, lacking. The packages were all cheerful looking, the people all drab and angry. No one had returned my notebook. I went home drab, angry, depressed, alarmed.

I am accustomed to look at events as though they were dreams. If this were a dream, I asked myself, what would it mean? I had lost my novel at Wal-Mart. My dreams had been devoured by the monster. I staggered into my house like a beaten soldier. (More later)

A TIN SHACK IN THE JUNGLE

I once lived in a tin shack in Kudat, a town on the northern tip of Borneo. In those days this part of Borneo was still a British colony: British North Borneo. I had been smuggled into the country by Moro pirates from the island of Sibutu in the southern Philippines. I found a job as operations manager for Borneo Mineral Developments, a grandiose name for a few stone crushers in the jungle, making gravel. Aside from my paltry salary, I was given an Austin motorcar for my own use, and—to park my body—a tin shack. This was place—which of course a novelist always needs. A place performs two vital functions: as a kind of anchor, where your story is fastened; and as a kind of inspiration. Things can arise there, in that tin shack and its environs, that cant naturally arise elsewhere. I visualize the shack, and immediately events begin to occur: not just memories, but things entirely new: the face of a Bajao woman, for instance, with her betel-red mouth. She slides beneath a white shroud of mosquito netting. This occurs effortlessly. This vision leads me to something more. I dangle myself over the scene and watch it unfold. With just minor shaping it becomes a part of the novel…

I could, of course, place this woman—in the book I call her “Nemesis”—anywhere I wish. I could place her in an American suburb, or a Mexican desert. I have a few times crossed the northern Mexican deserts on a motorcycle. I slept in a cave one night, another time in a dry stream bed, watching the moon float overhead. I can imagine myself there once more and something will, again effortlessly, arise, perhaps an old farmer with his gnarled hands. I could transport him to Borneo too, if I wished. But the point is—each place is redolent with different images. A good place is rich with imagery. Mexico was always wonderful in this way. It is a country filled with contradictory images. I found my novels there, littering the streets. But Borneo was rich too. I never wrote much about it—bits have appeared in some of my novels and a few stories, but only bits. In this new novel, however, in Evidence of a Lost City, my tin shack in Borneo seems to have acquired some importance. It has inspired a whole chapter. I am intrigued by this, because the inspiration of “art” has always seemed mysterious to me. Mostly I have been inspired by women. Something about a woman will set off a strange conflagration of imagery. A story grows out of a woman’s smile—or sneer. But here, my tin shack seems to be the source. For me there is a real richness to this shack, and the jungle around it. The shack of course—for this novel—has two appearances: the diurnal shack and the nocturnal one. The nocturnal version sprawls deeply into the jungle: this single-room shack

“...became a kind of ramshackle palace, with rooms stacked upon rooms, corridors meandering off into the forest, dipping into streams, doors that opened onto other passages or onto balconies which overlooked more rooms, all of them of rusted corrugated metal, against which loitered creatures, some humanoid, female, others animal, fierce dogs, slinking panthers, crocodiles glimpsed through screened windows—a labrynthine edifice in which he was alternately lost or imprisoned, seeking tickets, passports, guides, sometimes attacked, assaulted, etc., etc., his dreams as endless as the endless buildings….”

The woman Nemesis is here too; it is an appropriate place for her. I am very curious to see what she will do.

CAGED MEN, CAGED WOMEN

There is something primal, I suppose, about men fighting. In this case they were fighting in a cage, which has its own primal connotations. My wife and I went because her daughter's boyfriend was one of the fighters. There were eight fights in all, each composed of three rounds of two minutes duration. A couple of the fights were rather fierce, with evenly matched, strong competitors. The others were quite one-sided. The occasion sparked a few conflagrations in my mind. Evidence of a Lost City, of course, attempts to uncover something primeval: it occurs mostly in an archetypal, Jungian underworld. A primitive battle between two gladiators would not be out of place. Does masculinity, at its deepest level, always display itself as battle? Let us suppose for a moment that it does. In our modern world this urge is sublimated, as a rule, into such pesky competitions as who makes the most money or drives the toughest car or scores the most women; but we still have athletic contests, which are mostly male and overtly physical, especially sports like boxing and wrestling and this cage fighting. But why fight in a cage? It is not to protect the audience, not like the cages in a zoo which separate the beasts from the tourists. It seemed to me the cage was a kind of emblem: society takes this masculine fierceness and isolates it, encages it. This is what culture does. That primal urge to do battle is dangerous. This urge, uncontrolled, erupts occasionally, sometimes in nationally approved ways--Bush's war in Iraq, for instance--but more often in irrational angry outbursts: husbands murdering wives, dissed gang members exacting revenge with a pistol. We do our best to keep these emotions caged, quite properly, and offer some symbolic, safe ways to channel and express them.

The audience, as we can see from the photo, was sparse. It was composed fairly evenly of men and women. We can understand what the men are doing here, but what about the women? Let me suggest that women's primal battle has to do with attractiveness, and is expressed most obviously in beauty contests. In their everyday life women collect suitors in the way men collect conquests. They vie for the priciest gems, the most desireable designer outfit, the wealthiest husband. Occasionally they murder an errant lover or a too attractive competitor, but in general their rages are channeled just like those of the men. We are a safer world because of this channeling. At this event, I wondered if I would see--well, lets call them primeval women, attracted to a primeval battle. And there was an official "primeval" woman: the round announcer, in this case a young, slender black girl who paced within the cage with a placard announcing each round. She wore very short cut-off jeans and a halter top, and bounced around quite happily. Within the ring she was barefoot, but outside she wore high-heeled gladiator sandals, which I thought were quite appropriate. But she was the only woman thus dressed. Well, my wife's daughter wore high-heeled boots and tight pants, and looked quite charming, though not overtly sexual. Otherwise I saw the usual flip-flop sandals, baggy clothes, graceless unisex outfits for both the men and the women. You could hardly tell the genders apart. This, I mused, is the result of a great cultural shift that has been occuring in our world. The line between maleness and femaleness is largely erased, or at least turned into a vague gray area. We are no longer men and women, we are consumers (which reflects the triumph of the Corporation) and wage-earners and practical people, and we all dress alike. In a perverse sort of way this gives rise to some interesting channeled effects: women can covet and buy some very expensive high-heeled shoes, for instance, designer shoes, even if they never wear them. I know women whose closets are filled with designer dresses that never see the light. This primeval femaleness is closeted, encaged, just like the fierce maleness of our cage fighters, and--alas--is seldom given an opportunity to express itself.

I am old enough to remember when women generally wore dresses. They kept one eye on the men: what would a man like to see? Tight skirts, high heels, makeup were all more common years ago. Stockings, too, which I particularly like. Girdles and corsets: a whole underwear/underworld convocation of primeval desire. I acknowledge that I miss that world. I would have liked to see, at the cage fight, primeval women: bright red lips, slinky dresses. Silken legs. Which leads us to my novel-movie: Evidence of a Lost City is filled with these women. There, at least, the primal can still exist.

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL

I watched this Bunuel classic last night, and was struck by a few musings. Technically the movie seems rather old-fashioned: the camera work, for instance, is graceful and slow: none of the quick jumps, fast cuts of the modern directors. This gives the film an appropriately elegiac feel. To enjoy the film one's attention must be more than superficial. This, of course, would pose too great a demand on most viewers. Modern movies, like modern novels, are more flash than substance. They are designed for short attention spans and a kind of adolescent mentality.

The ending of The Exterminating Angel made me wince a bit (the gathering in the church, the flock of sheep), but except for these couple minutes the film explains nothing. The guests at the dinner party are unable to leave the room. No one tells us why: there is no Freddy in his mask and steel fingernails standing guard at the door, no special effects aliens with gore-dripping mouths. Everything is internal, I told Jacky, my wife's 20-something daughter, who was rather lost and bored. It is like a dream. It occurs beneath the surface of our normal life. The movie requires you to look deeper into yourself and deeper into the reality around you. Why cant these dinner guests leave the room? Well, why cant you leave a bad relationship? a job you hate? a life-style you despise? The guests slowly degrade. There are suggestions of savagry. Isnt that what happens to us, when we are trapped in a life we cant leave? We become brittle, angry, sour. Our shirts are stained with sweat, our collars dirty. We smell of defeat, rot, despair.

But this message is implicit, not explicit. We are told nothing. It is like life itself: there is no teleprompter, no narrator with a portentious summation, no easy solutions.

Art requires something, I tell Jacky. Art looks beneath the surface. There is a kind of archetypal reality lurking beneath our paved streets and gypsum walls. Something rather primitive, primal. The job of art is to suggest such things, whether in film, or novels, or dance, or music....

Into the land of Google Blogs

I've shifted my "blog" from the Evidence of a Lost City website--into the land of Google blogs. I copied/pasted all my earlier comments below this, a single long row of them. From now on I'll be adding comments here, which will allow readers to make their own responses at the end of each entry. And you want to respond, right? Throw out a few caustic sentences, an occasional bit of mouldering praise? Give it a go...I wont bite....

MAY 17, MONDAY: DANGEROUS PLACES

Our local library is a rather grandiose building, somewhat Romanesque, set at an angle to the street and large enough for a substantial collection of books. Sitting there the other day, however, I felt a vague sense of disappointment. I remembered the local library when I grew up here, in what was then an agricultural town. The library was a small building, built with Dale Carnegie funds, and presided over by Miss Violet Tapper, a toad of a woman who sat in her own little cage near the entrance. Her half-closed eyes watched everything. I always felt a little thrill, passing her scrutiny. The library then was a dangerous place: full of adventures, perils, romances, a world, therefore, entirely different from the more "normal" world around me. Tip-toeing past Miss Violet Tapper required courage. Her reptillian eyes followed me down the packed shelves. But once inside, surrounded by those stacks of volumes, I found heroes and villains, beautiful women, exotic landscapes, great mysteries. These were secret worlds, forbidden worlds—dangerous worlds. I wanted to live there.

Now, however, when I go to our library, I feel something entirely different. The library is no longer dangerous. It is safe, mild, bland, comfortable. The books somehow seem more—conventional. Less adventurous. Most of the books I read as a child seem to be gone. And of course there is no Violet Tapper, either, no reptilian presence guarding a strange world. The Hemet Public Library has become boring.

This complaint is not entirely a jaded older man recalling the thrill of discovery that a child can experience. Our books have become bland. Later perhaps I will enlarge upon this idea. Here, today, I only want to add this: Evidence of a Lost City is reminescent of my childhood exploration of the small Hemet library. I want this novel—and this movie—to recreate that sense of adventure and mystery. I want dangerous places. I want courage and heroism and exotic beauties....

APRIL 5, MONDAY: A REVISED FIRST CHAPTER, AND THE HAG...

Time seems to stream right past me, dislodging most of my plans.... First of all, I took time off from Evidence fo finish my earlier, incomplete novel, HAG. Then I had to format it for publication—including 161 photographs—at Amazon's Create Space. Then I re-formatted it into a Kindle e-book. All this took more time than I expected. But the HAG, in all her manifestations, is now available--

HAG, the movie
HAG, the illustrated paperback novel
HAG, the e-book

Take a look if you are interested in the old girl.

Finally, with the HAG put away, I got back to Evidence: I revised the first chapter, which is now more than 6,000 words long. You can see an excerpt on the Scenes page, and even download the pdf version of the whole chapter. This week I'm trying to begin the second chapter, which will be constructed around buildings: ruins, ancient brothels, tin shacks which extend into the jungle...endlessly....

DECEMBER 16, WEDNESDAY: THE FIRST EXPLORATION

This novel, and this movie, will consist of several explorations. It is amusing to me that I spend considerably more time on the movie than the book. It was the book that worried me: I havent been able to write in this country—the US of A, I mean—for more than twenty-five years. Instead, I've been going to Mexico, first on my motorcycle, then on buses, holing up in cheap hotel rooms with my Swedish Hermes typewriter, staying for months at a time. My last five novels were written this way. Returning to America, living again in the house my father built, presented me with a challenge that was quite intimidating. And in fact it has taken me two years of effort to finally make a genuine start on writing this novel. But now that the book is moving—well, it is moving with some ease, some fluidity. It is the movie that now requires an enormous effort.

Some of this is simply technical: it takes a long time to maneuver these digital characters, to set the lights, position the cameras. It still amazes me to see this happen on the flat screen of my computer. But it consumes great chunks of time. Each movement requires careful editing: arms can flail through bodies, positions slip into awkward convolutions, walks can be stilted and unnatural. And then, of course, when the sequence is actually done, it has to be rendered. Each segment has thirty frames for each second of animation. Each frame can take several minutes to render. I often leave the computer running all night, just to acquire ten seconds of animation by the morning. As I write this, my computer is rendering away: a 450 frame scene, fifteen seconds of action, with a woman I call Enoja simply standing there, her face and upper body moving a bit from one side to the other, speaking just a few words—"Youre late, everyone's gone, there's only me." This simple sequence was begun yesterday: first recording my voice, modifying it in Cool Edit Pro, then running it through Mimic to create the lip movements, then adding the lip movements to the V4 figure in Poser, changing her posture, tilting her head back just a bit, etc., etc. By morning I will be able to take the series of PNG files, turn them into an AVI, and add them to the timeline of my editing program, Adobe's Premiere Pro. And of course then I may not like what I see. Perhaps the lighting will seem wrong, or a movement too unnatural. In that case I'll need to return to the original Poser document, and revise it, re-render, and so on.

Which leads to the next issue: How should a movie look, with all these digital possibilities? This is not film I am using. There are no live actors. With HAG, I used my camera, floating it around the actors. The lights were real. I was witnessing everything, as it happened. But this movie is buried in the bowels of a machine, and nothing is real. How does this affect the telling of this tale? I can do amazing things, things impossible in the real world. And I work against limits that did not exist with my real camera, my real actors. What effect should this have on the look, the style, the movement of this movie? This question both baffles and excites me. I awaken some times in the middle of the night with images spinning in my head. The next day I render out a sequence, and then suddenly understand it is irrelevant: the story cannot be told in the normal fashion of a movie: this movie is not normal in any way: it requires a new way of telling a story: I am no longer bound by the constraints of gravity, of convention, of plotting and characterization. But this freedom is—intolerable, impossible. Oh, where are the old verities, the tensions of contending forces, the slow mounting of suspense and epiphany? Ah, the possibilities...oh, the limitations...it is fascinating...and confusing....

Well, a section is almost finished. I hope, in a few days, to post it here. We shall see....

NOVEMBER 3, TUESDAY: VOICE SYNCHRONIZATION

One of the technical things I've needed to learn is voice synchronization. Until now I've tried to do this by tediously opening and shutting mouths, lips, setting phonemes for each sound. But I've now acquired Mimic, a DAZ program, which will do this automatically. So I created a new scene, with Old John and Mina talking about his adventures in the dreamworld. I see that it works rather well, a lot better, at least, than my hand manipulation, though I'm going to see if I can fine-tune the process. You can see the result on the Scenes page. My intention was to use this scene as the second chapter, shall we say, which follows the opening; but I think I will try something different. I've started a new animated sequence, using Young John, which I rather like. We shall see how that goes....

SEPTEMBER 25, FRIDAY: SOME PROGRESS

Oddly enough—oddly to me, at least—I am finding it easier to write the novel than to put together the movie. I've added another couple chapters: I found a kind of entrance, a secret doorway, and waltzed right through it. I can easily see another chapter, just waiting for me. But the movie—well, it remains a struggle. I have been putting together a scene: a place, two characters—Mina and Old John—and the lights, the cameras. I am getting better at this, I can see that. But now I wish to add voice, and use the Talk Designer of Poser, and another program, Mimic Light, from DAZ, to synchronize the words with lip movements. Well, I can do this, I can see how it works. But there is something odd here: the words dont seem quite—organic—coming from the mouths of these characters. Something is wrong. I have tried using my voice—for Old John, of course, but also for the female wraiths (altering it in Cool Edit Pro, trying to "feminize" it) and also the voice of Jackie, my wife's daughter. In the next few days I'm going to try Jacqueline herself, and her younger daughter, Thalia, hoping that something in their voice will resonate with the character of Mina. But I may have to look for an actress, perhaps a student from the local college's theatre department. I remember reading long ago about some famous director—was it Fellini?—who would choose one actor for his looks, but use the voice of someone else: dub it in. I can understand that. The right timbre, the right lilt and eccentricity of tone....

AUGUST 27, THURSDAY: A FEW MORE WORDS

It's been slow, getting any writing done. Some day I'll have to write about not-writing. But meanwhile, I have finished another chapter of this odd little novel, and have posted a couple excerpts on the Scenes page: Something about how Young John meets his wife. Take a look....

JULY 18, SATURDAY: A NEW OPENING

This has been a slow process, a kind of struggle to discover the visual tone of this movie. After several attempts I have finally put together what I believe are the first five minutes of the film. It opens on the contents page, here. The video of the wraiths, which has been the opening page video for several months, can now be found on the Scenes page.

As a novelist, I am accustomed to thinking long term. I have written a couple of my short novels in as little as three months—the first draft, at least—but most take considerably longer. You have to live with a novel, to accompany it on its journey, and it is really the novel's decision how long this journey will take and indeed where it will go. I follow along, talking to it, listening to it, complaining and praising, whatever it needs. This movie, however, is making even greater demands on my time. Now, I did the HAG movie in a couple of years, but it was basically live action. It is a lot easier to shoot ten minutes of live video than to create ten minutes of animated action. For HAG I mostly hired actresses in Aguascalientes, Mexico. I was lucky: they were all easy to work with, daring, professional. They also had a knack for improvisation: I could put them in some dark, decrepit rooms, give them an idea of a scenario, and let them work it out while I slipped around them with my camera, throwing out an occasional command. It was pure delight, watching the movie come alive. I would stay up late into the night, in my tiny hotel room, hunched over my computer, playing with the images, utterly enthralled.

Evidence is a different dog entirely. I have characters—Mina, Old John, Jacaranda—and I can place them on these dark, decrepit streets. Where they stand, motionless, until I activate them. Improvise! I command. What are you thinking? What do you want to say? They stand there, dumbly. They will not move.

So the improvisation is entirely in my mind. I take them with me to the café—I ride my bicycle, my laptop in the basket behind me—and lay them out, in my imagination, before me. They begin to stir. They look at me, sometimes, as if I am crazy. A few gestures, some new expressions, interactions, emerge. But then I have to go to the computer, open Poser, import the figures, the lights, the streets, the buildings—and laboriously, tediously, desperately slowly, create the movements. Which often surprise me. Oh, that doesnt work, I discover. That doesnt look right. So I improvise again. I change an image, alter a movement, shift a light. Each alteration requires more alterations. These programs, like Poser, amazing though they are, and these digital people, even Old John, who should know his way around, are idiotic. I could shoot five minutes of this movie in an actual five minutes, with the help of Jacqueline, or Cristiana, or Laura. Stand up and walk across the room, I could say. Smile—yes, evilly. Five minutes of video, easily. Instead I spend hours, posing, shifting, dropping this or adding that, and then more hours as the computer renders, renders, often overnight, sometimes several overnights, then import the image sequences into Premiere Pro, where they may—or may not—come to life as I had imagined.

Yes, tedious. And yet quite fascinating. The strange world of Evidence, and its strange people, are coming alive. I am creating a world. There is something awe-some, and intimidating, about this....

FEBRUARY 6, FRIDAY: JUDITH

And now there's Judith—a new eight second video, the first off what will be several little movies of this character. I'm thinking now of creating a whole section in both the novel and the movie built around these characters. Vignettes, picaresque episodes, small adventures. Chamelea has a longer video now too, and even says a couple things ("Why?" and "Good-bye"). I need to start experimenting with the Poser Talk Designer, which promises to synchronize words with lip and tongue movement. I want these characters, these creatures of the night, to talk, and talk well....

JAN. 26, MONDAY: CHAMELEA

I've been enjoying myself with Chamelea, a new character. She struts around on her ten-inch ballet heels, naked except for a tracery of images on her body. Today I uploaded a video, a minute long. I'll be adding another ten or fifteen seconds of animation, than sound effects and dialog, probably in about a week. She's a chameleon, of course, so I will attempt to give her skin some interesting effects—see if I can make her blend, swirling, into the background, at the end of the video. I can see doing this with several characters: short videos, some odd bits of action for each one, and make them all part of one section of the movie.

JAN. 12, MONDAY: THE CREATION OF CHARACTERS

This novel and movie present me with some peculiar problems. The characters who represent the "real" world are easy enough for me to imagine. As usual, they are based on actual people I have known, even though I alter them for the purposes of the book, and I can understand quite well how they behave. But the "underworld" characters are a different breed. I can say they are Jungian, and need to be drawn from myth and from characters who appear in my dreams. But they need to have some sense of individuality, too. I need to understand them, or at least to have some idea of their purpose. Their behavior needs to make some kind of sense, even if it is a dream-sense. So I have begun another page in this website, the characters page. I believe I can use this page to play with the strange individuals from the underworld, the mysterious women, the odd and sometimes semi-human males who wander in the city. I will use photos and short videos, perhaps text also, and experiment for a while, to see what happens.

You can check out the page here.

DEC. 2, TUESDAY: IT'S LIVE!

I've now approved the DVD for sale...finally. You can order it at Create Space, the publishing subsidiary of Amazon. So please browse through the HAG site—hagmovie.com—and check it out, and if youre interested, grab a copy...and let me know what you think: don@hagmovie.com.

Nov. 25, TUESDAY: THE HAG PROOF

The test DVD of HAG arrived today:

As soon as I get a chance, I'll run it through our DVD player and make sure it all works. Then...activate...and see how the marketplace reacts....

Oct. 27, MONDAY: A NOVEL'S VOICE

Novel-writing is an odd experience, for me at least. I feel a little nervous when people say I am so creative. The reality is that I create nothing. A novel presents itself to me as an organic thing, a small tree for instance, a rose bush. I struggle to keep it alive—I may water it, say, or add fertilizer—while I struggle to describe its growth: the spread of its limbs, the gnarling of the bark, fruit oozing from flowers like alien creatures. Sometimes I use this metaphor of trees, which sounds pleasant; and sometimes I use the metaphor of cancer: a growth that is disturbing, vicious, dangerous. One may thus survive a novel, doused with chemotherapies and radiation: a primitive survival at best, prone to relapses: the cancer reappears, a crabby, hungry mass that feeds off of me. I am hag-ridden, I sometimes say, another metaphor, one which I used for my movie, HAG. The witch wont let go until the work is finished. Or—which is worse—she lets go prematurely, stunning me with her sudden absence. A novel dies, then: the hag gone, the tree withered, the cancer miraculously cured. Such loses are devastating.

Between novels—I listen. And watch. A novel will approach, in bits, from several angles at various times. These bits may be composed of people—a face, a way of walking—or a notice in a newspaper or magazine, an image glimpsed on tv, a sound, a strange memory that suddenly surfaces. These bits accumulate over time. The trick is to recognize them, and store them, in some fashion, in some nook in my brain, where they congregate, mill about, mate, slide from one form into another, until finally a critical mass is reached, a certain density: a place, a few characters, some underlying themes, an emotional resonance, and a voice. Plus something else, which I call the simulacrum, and which I'll discuss later.

But first, voice. Each of my novels—and my stories, too—has its own voice. This voice is a complex thing, and sometimes, even with the other elements assembled, it can take me a while to discover it. This voice, roughly speaking, is a style—a syntax, a certain grammar, a way of forming words into sentences and then paragraphs, chapters, episodes. It is not a sound, exactly, although I often read aloud what I have written, in an effort to get this voice just right. It is a certain tidal flow, or way of moving—the conjugation of verbs and adjectives, harmonies and dissonances. I experiment, often, with voice, writing one page, then another, long sentences, staccato sentences, until eventually something feels right, the collection of bits I've assembled echoes correctly. The voice is there....

Oct. 21, TUESDAY: WAITING ON THE HAG.

I'm still finishing up duties with HAG, my previous movie. Right now I am designing the illustrations that go on the disk and the container. Here is the disk:

...and the front and back cover:

In another day or two, it all goes off to Amazon for publication...and I'll be free, at last, to devote all my time to Evidence. Meanwhile, if you are interested, check out the HAG website.

OCT. 4, SATURDAY: THE TWELTH NOVEL

Evidence of a Lost City will be my twelth novel, and second movie. Presuming, of course, I actually manage to finish it. One should never be presumptuous when dealing with art. These creatures, I long ago discovered, have tortuous lives of their own, and I can never be certain if they will embrace me and carry me with them, or not. My past is littered with fragments of novels, some quite lengthy. I revisit them sometimes. Holding their pages in my hands is a strange sensation. I see remnants of my life there—like the bones left by some animal. Well, I must avoid becoming too fanciful. In any case I wish to write here about the new work. Its themes have become increasingly significant to me, for reasons which will doubtless be explicated later. I wrote the first couple thousand words over the winter, an agonizing few at a time, and then spent months re-working them. This is not my typical procedure. Eight months to write 2,000 words? That is crazy. Normally I leap into a novel and write a couple thousand words a week. I immerse myself in it. I carry it with me wherever I go. For the last twenty years I've been doing this in Mexico. I wandered all over that country. I found bits and pieces of my novels in the streets, the buildings, the faces of the people. It was a strange experience. Yet I produced only five novels during this period. And one movie, of course—HAG. For a man who prides himself on his discipline, on his ability to focus completely on his work, this is a paltry output. My argument is that a novel has to be discovered. I dont simply sit down and decide to write one. I search until I find it, and its entrance. My life has been a search in a very concrete sense, that is, I have wandered through the world, one continent to the next, across one ocean and then another, a kind of exploration. I lived with Moro pirates in the Sulu Sea, hitch-hiked down Africa, took a canoe along jungle rivers in Guatemala—well, and much more. Buses, trains, motorcycles, ships. Nuku-Hiva and Tai-o-hai, Alice Springs and Carnarvan, Pulcallpa and Manaus. This physical search has been the metaphorical equivalent of my search for novels.

So. Evidence of a Lost City. I find it lying just in front of me. I believe I have stumbled upon its entrance. What will I find here? We shall see, indeed, if I discover anything....