…and the fields are stripped bare of all they wear.
“October” October–U2 1981.
I’m not much of a fan of the more recent U2 albums, but I do like their first five albums, from Boy through The Joshua Tree. After that, not so much. Rattle and Hum was their sixth album, and it felt like to me that they lost their raw, earnest soul from that point on. It’s hard to say exactly what happened. Perhaps a mixture of the more poisonous effects of extreme success combined with a change of perspective about God?
Pure conjecture on my part, of course. None of us have the ability to peer into someone else’s soul and definitely diagnose what’s happening within. True, you can make some pretty safe assumptions based on an individual’s fruit. “By their fruit you shall know them,” and all that sort of thing. On the extreme end of behavior, if someone is rushing about beheading people in the name of their religion, you can probably make a fairly dependable diagnosis of the state of their soul and where they’re ultimately heading if they don’t make an abrupt u-turn.
However, most people don’t behave in ways that, from the vantage point of others, precisely and irrefutably correlate to the state of their soul.
Frankly, I’m relieved that I’m not the Judge.
I’m just an aspiring writer with very little time to write. And getting older. It feels like I’m in the October of my earthly existence. If one believes in eternity–and I do–then the earthly stretch of years is quite short, and there’s really not much of a difference between January and October, let alone December. But, while we’re here on Earth, the months feel heavy and valuable with potential. Time feels important, as if there are many things that still can be done and should be done.
Speaking of that, a few writing updates.
I’m almost done with my six-year-long book project. Actually, I might’ve started it seven years ago. I can’t exactly remember. It’s basically done and I’m avoiding publishing it by spending some of that precious time fiddling with characters and details and trying to settle on a map that shows just enough but not too much.
This one is another epic fantasy. Not as serious and as deliberate as The Hawk and His Boy trilogy, but definitely not as madcap as The Fury Clock, though there is a slight bit of cross-over with The Fury Clock in terms of some similar geographical locations, a few very quick references to several characters, and some threads of shared history.
I also recently finished a job for an NBC/Universal project. A film script co-written with a small team for a pre-existing Universal property. We were paid for the project (always nice) but the powers that be ultimately decided to kill the project. I’ve been told that this is quite common in Hollywood. Studios will happily throw money around commissioning scripts and then just as happily kill those same scripts when finished.
I suppose there are many reasons for that, ranging from script quality to mental health issues on the part of studio executives, etc, but let me quite humbly say that script quality was not the issue with our particular project. No. I think the reason why they killed it was more off in the realm of the Bermuda Triangle, belief in a flat Earth, too much soy in one’s diet, and/or having had one’s brain harvested by space aliens.
Happily, I’ve been pulled back into another script project, so that’s good. What’s not good is that this means I have less time for my own projects, compounded by the fact that I’m still working a full-time job (feel free to ask me about California water policy and regulations and I will bore you to recyclable tears that must be first cleaned to drinking water quality standards before being injected into an aquifer that has any nexus with potable water supply).