Lost Change

Listen to your users more than the press. Don’t get sucked into the gravity hole between you and your competition. Ruthlessly run your own path, not someone else’s.

That’s how My Bloody Valentine’s deeply destabilizing queasiness, amplified here to a frightening degree, has always struck me: There’s a rush of feeling inside their music so intense it creates a kind of paralysis. Music swirls and moves in and out of phase, voices float by, half memory and half anticipation, and you’re never quite sure how all the parts fit together. You get lost in it, and if you’re wired a certain way that mixture of desire and confusion is easy to map on to the wider world.

Writing a novel is like writing a computer program. The goal of this program is to create an output (the actual words of the book) of a certain nature (the theme of the book). But to generate it, you fiddle with the functions/methods within the program (characters), the order in which you call them up, and the parameters you assign them (plot, conflict, setting). The source code requires less memory than the output. It’s algorithmic, generative. And when written well, it can lead to an end result that’s wonderfully complex, that takes on a life of its own.