Inspired by Madness

Oct 17, 2009

My ambusher found this site yesterday (See, the Facebook section of my About Me page for details). I say ambusher only because stalker is such a loaded word.  I wasn’t hiding exactly. India Drummond is, after all, my real name. So, hiding in plain site. Apparently my crimes include de-friending people on Facebook and having an email address she didn’t know about.

This led me to the realisation that my life has truly become surreal, almost like a slipstream novel. (This isn’t the only factor, of course… simply the most recent. And to be fair this is more petty than surreal, but add to that the hallucinations and it really does get weird.)

From Wikipedia:

Slipstream is a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction/fantasy and mainstream literary fiction.

The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, July 1989. He wrote: “…this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.” Slipstream fiction has consequently been referred to as “the fiction of strangeness,” which is as clear a definition as any others in wide use.

Now I will admit that the occasional hallucination adds to this feeling of unreality that pervades my daily existence. Whether it’s because of the disease or the cure, I really don’t know. My Sweetheart says that I definitely shouldn’t tell my doctors, because they might make them go away. I think he’s just saying that because there’s nothing good on TV these days and might as well ride the ride, right?

One dear friend (one of those friends that’s dear no matter how long it’s been since you’ve spoken) writes the most amazing slipstream novels. I read a wonderful story of his maybe ten years ago, and those characters still live in my head. Among other things, he brought to life the classic gross-out children’s rhyme Great Green Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts.

Living such a strange life as I have been this year has made me want to write about it. Not in an made-it-through way either. I don’t know why, but I don’t like reading about people who have come through tragedy. I mean that’s life: we all get sick, friends leave, relationships end, we hurt, and we die. I dunno, maybe I’m still too cynical to find that uplifting. We cope or we don’t, right? But exploring the sheer weirdness of it all, that I can get behind.

I thought about writing to John to ask him how to frame a story based on weirdness. I could begin at the beginning, which would be the most natural but maybe not the most artful. Then there’s the end, show what happened to my heroine (let’s call her Trixie) and then show when she started noticing reality no longer applied. The middle is a good place, at a climax or crisis. Flashing back and flashing forward and just plain flashing might be fun.

No matter what else is going on in my life, good or bad or just plain strange, it’s inspiration… the stories in my head and the process of developing and moulding and melding them… that gets me from one day to the next. Besides, the best writers are half-crazy anyway, right? RIGHT?