Anyway.

 Update: I'm looking at this and I can't figure out who wrote it. Aparrently it was me. It reads like a sixth form essay on writing, except the writer hasn't done enough revision on writing, so he's making it up, padding, desperate for a C grade. Oh well.


It was quite an eye opener for me, discovering all these beautiful OSR blogs. Essentially, after years of comparing my imagination to the lukewarm talents/idea-by-committee-camel-fluff fests of the major publishers, I thought I was perhaps in a higher imagination tier than many. How wrong I was. Without going on record like a gushing fan boy, I saw a constellation of greats. Some more successful than others, but all undeniably brilliant in their own way.

A surplus of raw idea stuff suggesting minds tapping a flow, a source, that in the main, remained plugged for me.

I'm a musician...in general...most of the time. That source I was talking about? Let's capitalise it...let's call it 'The Source'. I'm of the shakeable opinion that the brain is a kind of radio, picking up on signals that are kind of bouncing around the aether in some unfathomable fashion. To me (TO ME) it's possible to orbit 'The Source' from an infinite number of positions, some nearer, some further, some forever locked apart. I'm good with melody. I can take something and make it feel like you haven't heard it before. Lyrics come eventually. They're usually good. Not always though. Sometimes they're the worst kind of banal posturing and so with songs of that ilk, I keep them mutable, struggling to find the right phrase. But it comes. The melody is my river, is my way of orbitting The Source.

And yet, the imagination and its castles...that is my playground and my arena. I see things...and I have the fierce desire to document them. To make other people see. To give them a taste of my own happiness. And yet... that goal remains unreached. I can't really write in the way I'd like to be able to write. I think part of it is to do with patience. I enjoy reading...but given the option, I'll reach for an RPG product, something I can immediately put to use, rather than the enriching prose of say, Baudelaire. And I believe that depth of reading gives sanctity to both the written word and definition to the vistas of the imagination. Before I paint myself a Philistine, I've delved deeper than many of my peers into various literary catacombs; but recent times seem to stave this occurrence from happening with any frequency. In fact, more often than reading, I'll feel the compulsion to create music RIGHT NOW. Even when perhaps I'd be best served fuelling my mind in some other fashion.

And yet, my greatest suspicion, is that I am not seeing the wonders and horrors of 'the other' in the way many of the OSR writers I laud, see wonders and horrors. There is a boiling prismatic sea of incoherence. A hand gripping a sword I'd seen pictured in a book; a thousand faces, so many as to be all and one; imagined companions, striving, suffering, victory; all of it...as soon as I close my eyes. What kind of fisherman would I have to be to reach into that chaos and withdraw something I could bring to the table and say "Here is a fish. Please enjoy my fish?" Evidently, the kind of fisherman that I see writing with ease and assurance as I flick from blog to blog (and not just in the OSRverse).

I think I'm doing it wrong. How can I translate the natural flow of melody, into written word? Never mind faculty with the English language...I'm competent enough to bury meaning, that much is certain. But ideas...how can one ride close enough to The Source and feel the ebb that inspires one to create in a certain fashion...and let it flow out via a different medium? Am I fighting a losing battle?

We shall see.