octoberwriting Entry 1: Once Voice Silenced But Others Still Hear
So, I stumbled upon the octoberwriting community, and decided to get my brain jumpstarted again by taking the challenge: writing ten journal entries of 1,000 words each, and one Halloween-themed entry of 6,000 words. And with the first one, I'm paying tribute to a writer who inspired me
Title: "Once Voice Silenced But Others Still Hear"
Entry Number: 01
Author: matrixrefugee
Fandom: Ray Bradbury
Rating: PG
Genre: Meta
Spoiler Warnings: None to speak of. Possible warning for talk of death and grieving
Word Count: 1,136
I wanted to post a tribute to the grand master of science fiction and short story-writing in general, Ray Bradbury, on the day he passed away, but I was too choked up to do it, to put the right words together. But I have the words now, and my brain is in a clearer patch of sky to be able to let them loose.
June 6th this year was a dark day: I had a rough day that day, due to bad news about yet another Internet censorship law possibly being enacted. Work was a pain in the back. And then, It Got Worse.
I came home and went to check my messages and the entries of the friends-list on my journal, and found a dark piece of news, via Neil Gaiman's blog:
Ray Bradbury had passed away: granted, he was well into his nineties, and he was one of the last of the classic American science fiction writers of the nineteen-sixties still among us and still writing, and so he had a good, long, productive life behind him. He was among the first science fiction writers I discovered, when I first got serious about sci-fi (not in a "srius biznezz" way, but in a "this stuff is incredible and inspiring" sort of way), alongside Frank Herbert and Ursula LeGuin. Finding this news was like hearing my grandfather had died (and since I'd lost both of my biological grandfathers in the year I turned five, I have this odd tendency to look up to older gentlemen who inspire me, as grandfathers in spirit). I felt orphaned, and from the tributes which I saw pouring out from the pens and keyboards of other writers, I found that I was not alone.
I discovered "Grandpa Ray" by way of my high school literature anthology and a selection from his lyrical, magical realism-novel Dandelion Wine. His prose just sang with imagery, evoking the summer of a happy kid growing up in small town America, Norman Rockwell in prose gone weirdly numinous (albeit a little darker and stranger). I went looking for the book at our local library and sipped my way through it over the course of the summer, taking a sip at a time, a chapter every other day. The prose was too heady for me to do otherwise.
"The Martian Chronicles" was the next book I read: I found it oddly fitting that this summer, NASA landed a new rover to explore the face of the red planet. Sadly, Ray was not with us to share the joy, but perhaps now, he is watching it from the best seat in the house: from a seat beyond the stars, with the whole universe laid out before him.
The third of his books that I discovered was (ostensibly) a children's book, "The Halloween Tree"; I say "ostensibly", since Ray had this way of writing prose that transcended lines of "age appropriateness" and "grade level". An adult reading this book would see it in a different light than a younger reader, and that is what makes his books the classics that they are. I love Halloween, and the images in this book, along with the story of friendship and loyalty and dark things and sacrifices to save another person just gripped at my heart and soul.
"Fahrenheit 451" could hardly be more relevant this summer, given all the weird attempts at over-regulation of Internet Freedom in the form of SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, among so many other abbreviations. I can't help think that Ray unwittingly predicted not just the big-screen TV (at a time when TVs had screens half the size of the screen of the laptop that I'm typing this on), but also that profound exercise in absurdity known as the "reality" show.
I once had the chance to meet a real man who resembled "The Illustrated Man", a soft-spoken mountain of a man with a gallery of tattoos, and likely a story behind each one. Not sure if they come to life and tell their stories while he sleeps, but I wonder if he got the inspiration from that book, because, just like the titular tattooed gent, he had roses on the backs of his hands...
"From the Dust Returned", a later foray into what Ray called "the October Country", did not quite engage me the way that "The Halloween Tree" did, at first reading, but the second and third helped me to appreciate it more, and I have started to wish I could join the family of kind dark creatures who populate it.
Ever since reading "Something Wicked This Way Comes", I've started to look at autumn carnivals in a whole new light: there really is something deliciously creepy about them, how suddenly they come, how weird and wondrous they are and how strange it is when they depart as suddenly as they came.
I have all these books on my shelf, and I collected them together for a makeshift memorial, complete with candles and my incense burner, on a shelf in my room, the back cover picture of Ray on one book turned around, smiling out of the shadows. I kept it like this for three days, as I processed the pain and the emptiness in my literary world.
I started to find a way to release the pain, through fanfiction: not fic inspired by Ray's characters and worlds. Much as I admire his work, I can't help feeling that my scribblings, even ones built in his sandbox, couldn't really pay a fitting tribute to his work. There's some artists for whom I have too much respect, to allow me to borrow from them, even though one should steal from the best, if one is to steal at all. But I did manage to write a fanfic set in the universe of the TV series Castle, in which the writer hero and his daughter pay tribute to Ray in their own way: since his world is not entirely unlike our own, possessing the same pop culture, I could see him being inspired by Ray's writing. It seemed a fitting tribute, since Ray admitted to cutting his teeth as a writer on what might be called fanfiction (since it was fiction set in universes of which he was a youthful fan).
But I finally felt ready to pour out a more direct tribute whilst reading Ray's own introduction to a reissue of "The October Country", a piece entitled "May I Die Before I Lose My Voices". By all accounts, Ray was still telling stories and listening to the "voices" that inspired them to the very end, and so it seemed he lived up to his promise.
Maybe he's not alive to keep listening to those "voices", but he showed many of us writers how to keep listening, and I pray that, in whatever form I work, I keep listening as well.
Title: "Once Voice Silenced But Others Still Hear"
Entry Number: 01
Author: matrixrefugee
Fandom: Ray Bradbury
Rating: PG
Genre: Meta
Spoiler Warnings: None to speak of. Possible warning for talk of death and grieving
Word Count: 1,136
I wanted to post a tribute to the grand master of science fiction and short story-writing in general, Ray Bradbury, on the day he passed away, but I was too choked up to do it, to put the right words together. But I have the words now, and my brain is in a clearer patch of sky to be able to let them loose.
June 6th this year was a dark day: I had a rough day that day, due to bad news about yet another Internet censorship law possibly being enacted. Work was a pain in the back. And then, It Got Worse.
I came home and went to check my messages and the entries of the friends-list on my journal, and found a dark piece of news, via Neil Gaiman's blog:
Ray Bradbury had passed away: granted, he was well into his nineties, and he was one of the last of the classic American science fiction writers of the nineteen-sixties still among us and still writing, and so he had a good, long, productive life behind him. He was among the first science fiction writers I discovered, when I first got serious about sci-fi (not in a "srius biznezz" way, but in a "this stuff is incredible and inspiring" sort of way), alongside Frank Herbert and Ursula LeGuin. Finding this news was like hearing my grandfather had died (and since I'd lost both of my biological grandfathers in the year I turned five, I have this odd tendency to look up to older gentlemen who inspire me, as grandfathers in spirit). I felt orphaned, and from the tributes which I saw pouring out from the pens and keyboards of other writers, I found that I was not alone.
I discovered "Grandpa Ray" by way of my high school literature anthology and a selection from his lyrical, magical realism-novel Dandelion Wine. His prose just sang with imagery, evoking the summer of a happy kid growing up in small town America, Norman Rockwell in prose gone weirdly numinous (albeit a little darker and stranger). I went looking for the book at our local library and sipped my way through it over the course of the summer, taking a sip at a time, a chapter every other day. The prose was too heady for me to do otherwise.
"The Martian Chronicles" was the next book I read: I found it oddly fitting that this summer, NASA landed a new rover to explore the face of the red planet. Sadly, Ray was not with us to share the joy, but perhaps now, he is watching it from the best seat in the house: from a seat beyond the stars, with the whole universe laid out before him.
The third of his books that I discovered was (ostensibly) a children's book, "The Halloween Tree"; I say "ostensibly", since Ray had this way of writing prose that transcended lines of "age appropriateness" and "grade level". An adult reading this book would see it in a different light than a younger reader, and that is what makes his books the classics that they are. I love Halloween, and the images in this book, along with the story of friendship and loyalty and dark things and sacrifices to save another person just gripped at my heart and soul.
"Fahrenheit 451" could hardly be more relevant this summer, given all the weird attempts at over-regulation of Internet Freedom in the form of SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, among so many other abbreviations. I can't help think that Ray unwittingly predicted not just the big-screen TV (at a time when TVs had screens half the size of the screen of the laptop that I'm typing this on), but also that profound exercise in absurdity known as the "reality" show.
I once had the chance to meet a real man who resembled "The Illustrated Man", a soft-spoken mountain of a man with a gallery of tattoos, and likely a story behind each one. Not sure if they come to life and tell their stories while he sleeps, but I wonder if he got the inspiration from that book, because, just like the titular tattooed gent, he had roses on the backs of his hands...
"From the Dust Returned", a later foray into what Ray called "the October Country", did not quite engage me the way that "The Halloween Tree" did, at first reading, but the second and third helped me to appreciate it more, and I have started to wish I could join the family of kind dark creatures who populate it.
Ever since reading "Something Wicked This Way Comes", I've started to look at autumn carnivals in a whole new light: there really is something deliciously creepy about them, how suddenly they come, how weird and wondrous they are and how strange it is when they depart as suddenly as they came.
I have all these books on my shelf, and I collected them together for a makeshift memorial, complete with candles and my incense burner, on a shelf in my room, the back cover picture of Ray on one book turned around, smiling out of the shadows. I kept it like this for three days, as I processed the pain and the emptiness in my literary world.
I started to find a way to release the pain, through fanfiction: not fic inspired by Ray's characters and worlds. Much as I admire his work, I can't help feeling that my scribblings, even ones built in his sandbox, couldn't really pay a fitting tribute to his work. There's some artists for whom I have too much respect, to allow me to borrow from them, even though one should steal from the best, if one is to steal at all. But I did manage to write a fanfic set in the universe of the TV series Castle, in which the writer hero and his daughter pay tribute to Ray in their own way: since his world is not entirely unlike our own, possessing the same pop culture, I could see him being inspired by Ray's writing. It seemed a fitting tribute, since Ray admitted to cutting his teeth as a writer on what might be called fanfiction (since it was fiction set in universes of which he was a youthful fan).
But I finally felt ready to pour out a more direct tribute whilst reading Ray's own introduction to a reissue of "The October Country", a piece entitled "May I Die Before I Lose My Voices". By all accounts, Ray was still telling stories and listening to the "voices" that inspired them to the very end, and so it seemed he lived up to his promise.
Maybe he's not alive to keep listening to those "voices", but he showed many of us writers how to keep listening, and I pray that, in whatever form I work, I keep listening as well.