Loving Life and Getting Away With It!

     "Do you feel pressured twenty-four seven?  The news getting you down?  Reading comments on YouTube videos and becoming depressed due to the spelling and grammatical errors?  Would you like everybody to stop using abbreviations?  Are illegal immigrants living peacefully in your city and working factory jobs you would never apply for?  Are mass shootings a reality TV series?  Is the War packaged for palatability to general audiences, causing them not to think about how their tax dollars are spent on killing people, while the packagers (mainstream news media) focus on good-for-the-body-politic life-saving measures like Medicare for All only to make that seem unacceptable?"
     A lot of my writing is out of left field, a baseball term confusing me because even less throwbacks come from right field, a facet of the diamond hit to by left-handed batters.  So, out of right field do many of my ideas come.  Around 2007, when I was writing my second novel, Cryptopraxis, a police investigation story with interstellar criminal conspiracies and corrupt law enforcement in a city on Jupiter's moon, Callisto, I got into the practice of summoning metaphors and similes to my mind's eye by letting the first image popping in be that metaphor and simile.  Say a child's block game appears on my mind screen.  I work it into the metaphor or simile.  Some attempts proved difficult, others were impossible.  I still do this sometimes but during the third or fourth draft of that long science fiction novel, I was in the habit of using it in my writing, creating some really unusual visuals metaphor-wise.
     A metaphor is a frame from a film, in a sense.  You can look at stills from movies (the website FilmGrab is fun: films presented as stills, go through one and you can get a sense of the movie), perceiving moments you can take out and put into any context.  I could, for instance, take a scene from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a film I've seen at least ten times and studied; translate it to a look, an inspiration, in my novel.  Once around 2007 I concentrated on Jane Russell's role and performance, her dark-haired look equally gorgeous in impact compared to Marilyn Monroe's blonde goldenness.  I made Russell into the model for a character, Thomasette Tate, gave her Russell's mannerisms, gestures.  Tate's an actress, star of Showdown on Pym's Planet and Stampede on Bellatrix 9, entertainments I'm assuming have lots of action, quickly sparked romances, death, and hope.
     My writing, fragmenting into unrelated pieces, is a problem for those who don't tend to see things in a jumbled way.  Memories come every day and night to our minds, not arriving in the chronological order of one's experiences.  Why should novels, essays, films, always use linear chronology?  Our perceptions exist in many different times and places through memory, speculation, imagination, emotions, and dreams.
     100 years ago, 1919, Picasso had already explored cubism, a visual artistic form not seen, except in montages featuring many dissolves, in cinema even today.  An exception is Ingmar Bergman's blending of the smaller halves of each of the faces of Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson in Persona, but who cares.
     Go back to 1819, a year after Mary Shelley put out the first version of Frankenstein.  Said to be better than the revised edition, the one polished by Percy Shelley, pushing back on, maybe, words of a woman, the daughter of a premier feminist of the eighteenth century, a time when there weren't enough of them.

                                                                            Vic Neptune