Evening Addendum: spontaneous musings on writing style

The sentences were getting a little long tonight. It denotes a lack of subject matter and a lack of focus. Also a lack of practice. I need to get myself back in the blogging saddle. Having read some new blogs recently, I've come to the conclusion that blogging is a very different animal from just writing. One may certainly have a blog that is specifically intended to thrust one's non-bloggy writing out into the blogosphere. However, to truly blog, one must shift literary gears. Blogging is hyperlinked and hyperdigital and, well, just kinda hyper. My writing is much more analog. It smells of thick black ink on old, worn paper. When words come as though unbidden, each one has a rich aroma and a thick flavor, and those many flavors come together in the ancient formulae of grammatical alchemy. A synonym will rarely do, and everything must be just so. Punctuation is to taste - not just pinches but also dashes, and not just dashes but also commas colons and semicolons.

I speak of flavors in some vain attempt to capture the sensory synthesis I experience when my writing truly satisfies me. It looks right, hence the allowances for slang and vernacular and the improvisational onomatopoeia of modern speech and internet memes. It also sounds right, for I am never satisfied until I successfully speak out the words silently in my head, hearing a well-phrased line as though it were melody. The rhythms are denoted with the punctuation, so the language barrier is breached and there is a translation not just of words to notes but also of spaces and breaks and pauses to rests and decrescendos.

And now for something completely tangential.

The cooptation of cheap ad copy tricks into the world of literature has, in my ever so humble opinion, been to the benefit of the written English word. I can barely contain the temptation in every sentence to insert an italic or an underline or a word in bold, or to perhaps surround a word in asterisks or dashes, or maybe even to abuse the abundance of aside-designators: not only do we have the classic parentheses, already endowed with a fuzzy, organic place in literature, but we also have available for use the ever-present brackets. These blocky cousins to the parentheses are generally used for breaks from the default narrative voice.

The real excitement is what will come next. Who knows what use we may find for the curvy brackets? I've experimented with them in the past in an attempt to carve out a place for them. My preference so far is to use them as a means to keep track of embedded brackets and parentheses, allowing for glorious and vigorous abuse of these techniques.

Perhaps in time the greater-than and less-than signs will officially join the ranks of their parenthetical bretheren. Already I've seen them used to denote nonverbal communication, for example, telepathic communication represented as linguistic exchange, or an AI who "speaks" by entering text onto a display so that organic lifeforms can read it.

Back in the old AIM days they were used to encapsulate emotes that were not reduced to an emoticon. Asterisks were used as well, and each had a very clear place: the less-than/greater-than signs were used to encapsulate the noun, for example, "grin," whereas asterisks would encapsulate the present-tense conjugation of the verb: "grins."

I can only imagine these "rules" developed organically and virally. I'd be curious to know if they're still used today. Perhaps the evolution of language on the web could be used as a time-stamp to identify the likely age a user was in high school or college.

Dude, I gotta go to bed.