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I did not fall into music of my own accord, my dad bought me a saxophone.
\begin{ally}
As his dad bought him before you.
\end{ally}
He wanted us to be alike in so many ways.
\begin{ally}
But you already knew that.
\end{ally}
He got me a saxophone and he and my mom pooled resourses to get me lessons.
\begin{ally}
And showed you to all his friends.
\end{ally}
I played at his Christmas parties. I played at his neighbor's Christmas parties.
\begin{ally}
Once, he was going to show you off to his friends at a barbeque, and you got so anxious and upset that you bent the octave key out of shape. You could only produce squeaks. You said it was an accident.
\end{ally}
I did it to get out of playing for the party, and instead it got me in trouble for being careless.
\begin{ally}
You were anything but. You were very careful. You acted with intent.
\end{ally}
I kept playing. Sometimes it was fun, sometimes it wasn't.
\begin{ally}
Once, you told your mom you weren't sure why she or your dad bothered with you learning to play the saxophone when all life was meaningless, anyway.
\end{ally}
How old was I, then? Ten? Eleven?
\begin{ally}
Dad made you apologize to her. I don't think either knew what to do with a nihilistic preteen.
\end{ally}
But it worked, in a roundabout way. I wound up in music. I wound up playing the saxophone and even sometimes enjoying it. I moved from that to the oboe.
And not just playing. I listened to tapes until they wore out. I made mixtapes of my dad's music after he taught me how to program his six-disc CD changer. After that, it was mix CDs, which I'd listen to on the bright yellow Sport Discman I carried everywhere. I fell asleep with headphones on more than once.
Music held --- continues to hold --- this sense of mystery about it. It worked on some level below spoken language, understandable without being text, affecting emotions without the cadence of words.
\begin{ally}
So why'd you quit?
\end{ally}
I can't just say ``computers'' and beg off, here, can I?
\begin{ally}
Nope.
\end{ally}
\newpage
Okay, you're right. It's not quite true that I left because of computers. I stopped playing the oboe after I ran away and moved schools. Band was already well underway, after all, and I couldn't join in partway through. They let me play the cymbal in one concert, but I basically gave up after that. We returned the rental oboe. I wouldn't touch an instrument in all seriousness until well into university.
And really, during all that time, there was no sense of regret, no sense of loss.
\begin{ally}
Your dad bought you a pair of drumsticks after that concert, but while you played with them for a few weeks, you soon lost interest. You had moved on.
\end{ally}
I had moved on.
I was trying to square being gay with being the type of person my parents would like. I was trying to figure out how to make friends after transfering into a school. I was trying so hard to settle down and just become someone, to just be born already.
\begin{ally}
You told your mom and Jay that, when you complained about karate in the future, they should remind you that you do enjoy it sometimes, that it just comes and goes. You just wanted to cling to something and have it stick.
\end{ally}
Computers were all well and good. They certainly offered me a route to explore so much that I might otherwise have not. They got me Danny. They got me into furry. They got me into programming.
\begin{ally}
You're still a furry. You still program. Hell, you still think about Danny. Does that not count as sticking?
\end{ally}
Oh, it definitely does, don't get me wrong. Some of the things I launched myself into did stick, even if some of them did not. I was too busy getting ready to be born to focus on what, I suppose.
And then, two weeks into my freshman year at high school, a few girls stopped me in the hall during my only free period and asked me to join choir with them.
\begin{ally}
And you said yes.
\end{ally}
Lord help me, I have no idea why, but I did.
\newpage
When you're a choir kid, you're a choir kid.
\begin{ally}
The first rule of the tautology club is the first rule of the tautology club.
\end{ally}
You have to understand. There's a level of identity, a level of expression that goes along with being a choir kid. It's writ on your face. It's in the way you walk. It's an aura that emanates from you. It hovers about your head in a halo. It colors your perception, and others' perception of you.
You don't do choir. You \emph{are} choir.
\begin{ally}
Just as you \textbf{are} furry?
\end{ally}
There's plenty of comparison that can be made there, yes.
\begin{ally}
Like how, fresh out of middle school, fresh out of your mom's messy divorce with Jay, fresh after your mom's diagnosis, so soon after running away, you found yourself once again largely alone. It was more complex now, too. You weren't simply physically alone. You were a newborn and you were alone in the world. You were alone on some ineffable level. You craved a family. You craved a community. You needed to not be alone. You needed those things to grow up, whether you knew it or not --- and you didn't --- so you latched onto whatever you brushed up against, arms hard around it, and you refused to let go. You refused to let it let \textbf{you} go.
\end{ally}
I\ldots{}well. Huh.
\begin{ally}
Carry on.
\end{ally}
Give me a second.
\begin{ally}
Take your time.
\end{ally}
I suppose I was going to go on to say that when you're a choir kid and a boy, something happens inside people's heads. They go a little bit crazy.
There are other identities within school, after all. There's band, of course. Band is pretty egalitarian (in some ways; obviously individual instruments have their own gender roles). There's some of the sports, too, where a girl joining the team would be quite out of place, if it's even allowed. Nerds fall along similar lines --- or fell, I suspect this is changing --- in that a girl nerd is considered something more unique.
High-schoolers, however, seem to be intensely aware of gender roles, even if they don't realize. This includes the power dynamic instilled in them in the west. A girl ``striving'' to be ``something greater'' by taking part in a supposedly masculine activity--
\begin{ally}
Nice qualification quotes.
\end{ally}
--is a curiosity, perhaps gently encouraged, perhaps the source of patronizing.
A boy ``falling back'' to ``something less'' by taking part in a supposedly feminine activity is a cause for alarm, a cause for concern, a cause for laughing and jeering and taunting.
\begin{ally}
That you transitioned later in life being, of course, irrelevant.
\end{ally}
It sort of is, it sort of isn't.
It is, because I don't think I know any other choir friends who transitioned. And not just those like me who transitioned and then dropped out of choir because boy is \emph{that} fraught.
It isn't, because in a lot of people's eyes, that's confirmation that joining choir was an early sign of my weakening masculinity. It's self-reinforcing that way.
\begin{ally}
As are a lot of social roles. Furries are nerdy because they're expected to be, and so they attract nerds. Nerds are awkward because of course they are, and so awkward kids are more likely to become nerds.
\end{ally}
When you're a choir kid and a boy and \emph{gay}, after all, well\ldots{}pff, of course. A boy in choir \emph{would} be gay.
\newpage
I tried to let go of choir when I went to university. I was all set to begin anew. I was going to live up to my parents' dreams of becoming an engineer.
That, and I heard the choir perform during All-State my senior year of high school, and they weren't that good. the All-State choirs were better. My school's choirs were better. I didn't want to tarnish my feelings on choir by having my last few years in it be less than what I was used to.
\begin{ally}
Yeah. How'd that work out?
\end{ally}
I lasted a semester.
Part of it was, of course, that I started the same year they hired Dr.~Kim, who turned the choral department around. Suddenly I had something I wanted to reach for.
Part of it was that, on graduating, one of my chosen families disappeared. I still had furry, of course, and I still had Ash and Shannon, but I was missing a core part of myself, and I wasn't strong enough to not have that in my life.
\begin{ally}
You weren't strong enough to do a lot of things, then.
\end{ally}
No, I wasn't. I wasn't strong enough to tamp down my mania or pull myself up by my bootstraps through depression. I wasn't strong enough to buckle down on my math and chemistry studies. I wasn't strong enough to treat my friends and lovers as well as they deserved. Not on my own, at least.
So I joined choir.
\begin{ally}
You did more than that. You took ownership of your life.
\end{ally}
I changed my major to music. I started taking singing lessons. I gained strength from my community, and I got better. I got strong enough to at least learn, bit by bit, how to deal with each of those things. I'm still working on some of them, but that's where I started learning.
I got strong enough to make it into voice lessons with Dr.~Morrow-King.
I got strong enough to get into Chamber Choir.
I got strong enough to go on two choir tours in South Korea.
I got strong enough to leave the music education program and move to music composition.
I got strong enough to talk to the department chair about why I wasn't getting lessons through the school.
I got strong enough to stand up to Dr.~Wohl when he was called on it and not selected to be the new professor.
\begin{ally}
Not strong enough to suffer defeat.
\end{ally}
No.
Not the one I experienced.
\newpage
My senior recital did not go well.
\begin{ally}
Understatement.
\end{ally}
It was a failure from very early on. I was commissioned to write a work for two friends in the music department. French horn and contrabass are an unlikely combination, so I figured it'd be a good challenge. It turned into a nightmare with astonishing speed.
They dictated what I wrote to a large extent, and when Dr.~David heard about it, he explained that that's not quite how it was supposed to work. I flailed and finished the piece as best as I could.
I couldn't find performers to commit to any of my pieces. When I did, they didn't practice. The two who commissioned that work from me only practiced once: half an hour before the concert itself.
The performance itself was a disaster.
\begin{ally}
You grabbed the recording and left to dinner with your mom and dad, Bob, Maurine, JD, his dad, and Diane. Diane said, as politely as she could, that many of your pieces sounded ``so dark'', and it was all you could do not to cry and say that it wasn't supposed to be that way.
\end{ally}
I gave up after that. I stopped going to class regularly. I stopped doing homework. I started programming more. I worked as many hours as I was allowed. I applied for tech jobs.
\begin{ally}
You kept singing.
\end{ally}
I did, but my heart wasn't in it.
I left music.
I stopped composing.
It took a year, but I stopped performing.
I couldn't do it.
All of the work I had put into it, all of the time and effort and blood and sweat and tears, and as soon as I had something I was proud of, I was shown just how little the world thought of me. My community didn't change, and yet it felt hateful to me. I had no guarantees at all that it would get any better, so I got out while I was at least only a little behind.
\begin{ally}
In writing, you were later told, the worst that could happen if you submitted a story was that the editors would say no. This was worse than the editor saying no. This was the editor sneering at you, looking you directly in the eye, and slowly tearing your story to shreds, long strips of paper dropping from their hands as you watched.
\end{ally}
And I had to smile as I did so. I had to smile and shake hands and gesture for the performers to bow. I had to keep talking to the audience, explaining the significance and features of each piece throughout the recital even as it continued to get worse and worse.
\begin{ally}
You stopped writing music.
\end{ally}
Why wouldn't I? Life told me what it thought of me doing so. Why would I willingly continue to fail?
\begin{ally}
You were not strong enough.
\end{ally}
I was not strong enough.
\begin{ally}
You started programming.
\end{ally}
Website after website.
\begin{ally}
You started writing.
\end{ally}
I splashed around in great heaps of words.
\begin{ally}
You promised yourself you were okay with the outcome.
\end{ally}
Seven years was enough.
\begin{ally}
And now it's seven years since you got into tech.
\end{ally}
Yes.
\begin{ally}
And you started writing music again.
\end{ally}
Yes.
\begin{ally}
A few pieces. Miniatures. Stuff you can finish without getting tired of it first.
\end{ally}
Yes.
\begin{ally}
Something to try and capture the agony and the ecstasy.
\end{ally}
Yes.
\begin{ally}
You still write for choir.
\end{ally}
Yes.
\begin{ally}
Stuff that will never get performed.
\end{ally}
Yes.
\begin{ally}
You promise yourself you are okay with this.
\end{ally}
Yes.
\newpage

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This chapter of ally takes place in the git commit messages, but here are their contents for completion's sake.
\begin{ally}
I'm ashamed to know you.
\end{ally}
It's a stretch even for me, but hey, here we go.
\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{\linethickness}\end{center}
\begin{ally}
Are you having fun with this?
\end{ally}
Did you really expect me to not approach the idea of writing about software in any other way? Did you expect me to not be something of a nerd about this?
\begin{ally}
I suppose not. Tell me about software, then.
\end{ally}
What's to say? Mom decided that, since I was showing an interest in computers, it might be a good thing to let me use her copy of VisualBasic 4. From there, I just kept on going.
\begin{ally}
Well, hold on, you're skipping over a whole bunch of stuff.
\end{ally}
I suppose so.
\begin{ally}
You're skipping over your dad joking that, since you spent so much time on the computer, that he was always worried that the FBI would come knocking on the door one day.
\end{ally}
Well, he was the one who got me the computers in the first place. He bought me a copy of RedHat 6.2 on a CD at Circuit City.
\begin{ally}
Oh, my aching bones.
\end{ally}
I know. Every single bit of that sentence was ancient.
Still, it's largely his fault. We strung coax throughout the house in a simple network. He bought a file server, a copy of Windows NT, and we worked on setting up IIS together so that we could have both a file share as well as a way of getting those files from work for him, and my mom's house for me.
\begin{ally}
Very kind of him. Forward thinking.
\end{ally}
He wanted me to be an engineer. What better way to get me into the mindset? Besides, \emph{stuff} was his game. Our relationship was not yet mature enoug that we could be buddies, so instead, he did what he thought parents were supposed to do and punished, instructed, and showered with gifts. It's just that some of those were computers.
As many gifts bounced off of me as those that stuck and proved useful.
Either way, start a kid on VisualBasic and give her access to AngelFire, and you're bound to wound up with at least \emph{some} kind of nerd.
\newpage
Matthew was pretty keen on Perl at the start. Something about all the delicious punctuation, all the built-in obfuscation was appealing. Something about how you could write an incantastion that was difficult to read unless you had the proper knowledge tickled him.
\begin{ally}
He wasn't very good at it.
\end{ally}
Well, no. He was pretty terrible at it. He uploaded some samples to Perl Monks and mostly got yelled at. From then on, he developed alone, with little to no communication about what he was doing with anyone who might be able to help.
\begin{ally}
A solipsistic software engineer? Color me surprised.
\end{ally}
Right.
Perl filled high school. Dumb scripts to walk a directory (despite a module already existing in CPAN). A guestbook. A forum. A terrible website.
\begin{ally}
Was it that bad?
\end{ally}
\href{https://web.archive.org/web/20050202100148/http://ranna.babylonia.flatirons.org/}{RF!P}? Oh yes.
\begin{ally}
At least you can see the dull adherence to monochromatic web design started early on.
\end{ally}
Listen. Color is hard.
Either way. There was a brief PHP phase toward the end of high school, and then it was off to university and John Wright teaching him about Python and Django, and he was lost.
It made it so easy to start projects.
\begin{ally}
Too easy.
\end{ally}
Yes. They littered his computer, his \href{https://github.com/makyo-old/}{git repositories}. Started and abandoned, sometimes even before any code was written. There exist more than one project which is simply a skeleton of a Django application with a name. No code. No documents. No info.
\begin{ally}
No motivation.
\end{ally}
Or maybe only the false motivation that comes along with hypomania.
\newpage
At some point in late 2005, I got my first job in computers--
\begin{ally}
Well, hold on. What about that summer job at Rational?
\end{ally}
That was before birth, remember. That happened to someone else. That happened somewhere else.
\begin{ally}
You have nothing to say about your mom getting you a job testing software with one of her friends? You have nothing to say about learning the boredom of menial tasks? You have nothing to say about the time you found a rendering bug in Java, some part of the windowing system, but you couldn't file it because the bug was that characters from the PuTTY screen showing your MUCK connection showed through, scattershot? You have nothing to say about bagel mornings, about the breakfast burritos you still think about, about stopping at the hot dog cart on the way home and getting to know Mikey, who sold them, about the countless jokes you shared about how awful ketchup was on a hot dog?
\end{ally}
Clearly you do.
\begin{ally}
You thought it was great at first. No restaurant work for your first job, but something in computers. Something you could be proud of. That pride your dad taught you. Then you learned about what goes into a QA tester's job. Then you learned about how boring computers could actually be. Then you learned how to resent them for how much of a mistake they were in the first place.
\end{ally}
Bit harsh, but true enough.
\begin{ally}
``Computers were a mistake'', right? That's how you put it?
\end{ally}
Yes.
\begin{ally}
So you got your first job in computers shortly after you were born --- don't try to tell me it wasn't. It was the summer after your Freshman year. Your metaphor won't always hold up.
\end{ally}
\ldots{}Ah. Right.
\begin{ally}
And then you never got a summer job again until university. You kept looking, but there was little for you to do that would hold your interest if computers were so spoiled for you. You applied at coffee shops. You applied at Blockbuster. You applied at the YMCA.
\end{ally}
And every summer, I disappointed my mom further.
\newpage
Well, then I suppose my second job in computers was in late 2005, when I got that job at the library. That was far more comfortable.
\begin{ally}
Or you were far more mature, perhaps.
\end{ally}
Maybe. Either way, it was something that I was able to actually focus on, do a good job on. There was downtime, and sometimes it got crazy. Sometimes we'd come into the library long before it opened and blast music while we installed or reimaged whole swaths of computers.
Sometimes we'd dick around. Nerf footballs, library cart racing. One time Josiah locked the surplus filing cabinet we had but did not have the key for and we had to drill out the lock. When we got it unlocked, the first thing he did was to lock it again. We hollered and chased him from the room as we struggled desperately to unlock the cabinet once again.
\begin{ally}
It was fun.
\end{ally}
For the most part, yes. I did some development for them, too. It was my first software job as well as my first job in computers. I did the Atmospheric Sciences Reading Room site. I did some campus mapping. I was enjoying it.
Enjoying it enough that, when my future in music burned down around my ears, I was ready enough to jump on any job offer in tech that I could manage to pull off.
\begin{ally}
Whether or not it was something you might actually enjoy.
\end{ally}
Yes.
\newpage
At least I enjoyed it at first.
\begin{ally}
You did, yes. You worked ten, twelve hours a day.
\end{ally}
I was doing something. I was actually producing something, and it was being recognized by people. Music was fine, sure, but no one really paid it much attention.
\begin{ally}
Is anybody paying attention to your writing?
\end{ally}
You are.
\begin{ally}
If you say so.
\end{ally}
A few others, maybe.
\begin{ally}
If you say so.
\end{ally}
Don't be cruel.
\begin{ally}
If you say so.
\end{ally}
\newpage
I enjoyed it until I didn't. It turned into a grind, it turned depressing. I started getting angry. I tried to commit suicide --- we'll get to that later, just to preempt you distracting me.
\begin{ally}
You know me too well.
\end{ally}
Do I?
\begin{ally}
Don't lose focus. You left UHG for Canonical, and started all over again.
\end{ally}
I lasted longer this time, in terms of burnout. I was productive for a lot longer. I liked the job a lot better. Even after I left, I think I liked it better at its worst than I liked IA at its worst.
\begin{ally}
And at least you did rather like some of the coworkers.
\end{ally}
But we can talk about that later. Distraction, remember?
\begin{ally}
Sure, sure.
\end{ally}
But it's been seven years, and it appears that's all I'm good for. I was good for music for seven years. It's been seven years, and I'm not sure I'm good for programming. Will writing fade from me, too? Seven years down the line?
When will you fade?
\begin{ally}
When will you fade?
\end{ally}
\newpage

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Today, my therapist asked what the plot was to this new writing project.
\begin{ally}
Me!
\end{ally}
Pretty sure you're just the antagonist.
\begin{ally}
Come now, don't say that about yourself.
\end{ally}
Right.
I stammered something about how it was more about overriding themes. I wrote about alcoholism. I wrote about dad. I wrote about all those little side-quests. ``It's about the way creativity affects and is affected by all these different things in my life,'' I said.
``Were you not creative when you drank?''
``Certainly not as much as I am now that I've stopped.''
``This sounds exhausting,'' she said.
``Well, it is, in a way. It's very easy to write. It flows onto the screen far easier than any fiction or article I've written before, but it leaves me totally beat afterward.''
\begin{ally}
You're really good at wearing yourself out. You spin in circles around the smallest things. You wind up exhausting yourself on the daily.
\end{ally}
I suppose I do, at that.
\begin{ally}
Well? You sound unsure of how you answered her.
\end{ally}
This project is sort of ill-defined.
\begin{ally}
You are ill-defined.
\end{ally}
Not going to deny that.
I'd say a lot of this project is accidental, unintentional. I stumble about at the end of your lead and, as you say, spin circles around the smallest of things. It's hard to come at this with some sort of idea of a plot. I can't even work chronologically, because if we work from the beginning of Matthew's life back in 2000, we keep having to double back and look at proto-Matthew's life before that, and to understand that, we keep having to look at all these other people.
\begin{ally}
There are too many of you.
\end{ally}
Says my ally.
\begin{ally}
Point well taken.
\end{ally}
All the same, I'm not sure that I answered her incorrectly. The core conceit of this project is one of creativity. Not anything so guided and structured as \emph{writing} or \emph{composing} or \emph{programming}, but that raw, primal thing from which the others spring.
\begin{ally}
Or seep, depending on the day.
\end{ally}
It's about the ways in which this idea, this entity impinges itself upon various things in my life. It's about the ways I shape and am shaped by it. It's about turning it back in on itself, as much as I can, and applying creativity to the idea of creativity itself.
\begin{ally}
Using words.
\end{ally}
Well, mostly words so far, yes, though I'm slowly incorporating bits of other things in there, too.
\begin{ally}
There's another metaphor to be made here. Remade, actually. You keep winding up stuck on these very abstract concepts. You keep talking about your complex feelings on your dad or on the way Margaras' death affected you or on mysticism, and then you circle them again and again, now narrowing, now widening, in an attempt to triangulate some imagined center.
\end{ally}
Writing, composing, programming, those are all inexact tools to apply toward inexact goals, though. Is that so wrong? Is it wrong to try and focus through words? Is it wrong to try and figure out more of how you think through something creative?
\begin{ally}
No, but it \textbf{is} important that you be cognizant of that fact.
\end{ally}\newpage
All of writing, all of creativity is selfish. To take some idea or some concept and to set it down on paper and say, ``I made this'' is selfish, of course, but to then take that thing and show it to others with the expectation that they might get something out of it as well is taking that several steps further.
To sit down in front of the keyboard and to say, ``I am going to write a story about a person who runs away from home to escape her fundamentally unhappy life'' and to then take that story, post it on the internet, submit it to anthologies, publish it in a collection and attempt to get others to read it, is selfish. It's an act of improvement for the writer, sometimes on a very real basis, if there is money to be made in the process.
To sit down in front of the keyboard, however, and say, ``I am going to write a story about me when I ran away to escape my fundamentally unhappy life'', well, now we're up to three levels of selfishness. I try and nail down an idea to paper or screen and say, somehow, that it is \emph{right} and \emph{good}, I make that idea about \emph{myself}, and then I try to show that idea to \emph{others}\ldots{}
\begin{ally}
Is there no good to be had from memoirs, then? From any autobiographical content?
\end{ally}
There's certainly good to be had for the writer, for the creator. On my end, I'm making something that I both feel proud about and am learning from. I'm learning more about this art, I'm learning more about all of these problems I'm tackling --- I didn't know, for instance, just how conflicted I was about my dad until I started writing that section of the site. I though, \emph{oh, I'll write about my past and make the final point that I've had to accept that there's a certain amount of my dad that I'm comfortable having in my life, a certain level of relationship that's acceptable}. I was not expecting to learn, through writing, just how conflicted I am about him still.
\begin{ally}
And for others? Is there not enjoyment to be gained from that which you create?
\end{ally}
\emph{Disappearance} was good, I thought. I got a lot of good words sent my way from some folks that mean a lot to me for it. The story left an impact on them, they came away from it with some sort of enjoyment, or at least some level of emotional resonance.
This project, though? I don't know. there are bits that I've tried to make enjoyable. I had fun with the koans and birds. I put a lot of emotional investment into the bits about Margaras and my dad. I tried to do some fun mixed-media stuff with the fursoña animations and the mysticism stuff. I can see those being enjoyable.
\begin{ally}
And the rest?
\end{ally}
I don't know. Honestly.
\begin{ally}
What about applicability?
\end{ally}
I\ldots{}hmm.
\begin{ally}
You came into this page thinking, ``Ah yes, time to dunk on myself again'', didn't you?
\end{ally}
I guess I did. Self-deprecation runs deep in queer lives. Self-doubt plagues artists. Self-deception runs in the family.
\begin{ally}
Selfishness is defensible when it leads to entertainment, applicability, or self-improvement.
\end{ally}
To an extent. At some point, it's just narcissism. At some point gets so ``treat yourself'' that one loses sight of collective improvement.
\begin{ally}
Of course. Are you really in danger of such?
\end{ally}
Constantly, feels like.
\newpage
The first poetry I remember writing was back before high school. At some point I picked up the poetry bug and decided I was going to try my hand at it. Finding it hard, I quit after the first poem I wrote. It was something really, \emph{really} bad, too. Something where all I knew about poetry was that it should rhyme, so I sacrificed\ldots{}well, everything in search of a rhyme. Readability. Sense. It was horrifying.
\begin{ally}
You find a lot of your old stuff horrifying. Play can be creative.
\end{ally}
Sure. Play teaches us how to be creative. A lot of creativity is playful.
This went a step back from that. Play is important, sure, but it didn't make anything I'd actually call a poem. It was an innocent mockery in the same way as a boy trying on his dad's shoes and blazer.
I suppose it's a good thing that a lot of my early works are lost to time.
\begin{ally}
You filled reams of paper and countless blank books with drawings and doodles and words. You drew maze after maze on copy paper. You grew exceptionally fond of creating parabolic curves with straight lines. You went through a phase of drawing elaborate worlds of ramps and springs and houses for tiny spherical creatures with horns for mouths. Do you miss none of that?
\end{ally}
In a cute sort of way, I suppose. It was fun. I would laugh at it now, but I wouldn't find anything new to build off of it. After all, this project is built off writings after I was born. All that is from proto-Matthew.
\begin{ally}
You drew an entire comic set in the world of Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, except the main characters were foxes. You filled a few notebooks with furry art, too. You kept a diary well after your dad destroyed the first one, intended originally as letters to send to your friend. You called it Julene. You later feared that would be creepy, and changed it to Kai. Do you miss none of that?
\end{ally}
I kept some, of course. Some of it is irrevocably online. I couldn't remove it if I wanted to.
I burned the journal, though. It was a remnant of proto-Matthew. It was from before I was born.
\begin{ally}
At what point did play cease being just play, then? At what point did creativity assert itself?
\end{ally}
When I started singing. When I first heard Madrigals sing during my first choir concert. When I stopped drawing and started writing. When I realized that there was more to art than playing at art.
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\begin{ally}
I assume you went looking for one of these execrable poems of yours?
\end{ally}
I did. I wasn't really able to find much from The Before Times, but I found a few from shortly after while prowling through my LiveJournal and archives of my old site in high school.
\begin{ally}
\href{https://web.archive.org/web/2005*/http://ranna.babylonia.flatirons.org/}{RedFox! Productions}, right?
\end{ally}
Gah, yeah. I was a kid, alright?
\begin{ally}
If you say so.
\end{ally}
September 26, 2003:
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Borne through air, Close my eyes. Wind ruffles hair Soul sighs, Heart flies; I'm the wind.
\end{enumerate}
I flow east: Over the plains, Over land creased. Current refrains, Cloud stains As I build.
Trees bow at my Will To move drives me Onward I push through Mountains Do nothing but Divert The rain as I Flow.
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Borne through air - Rise up high - Driven there, Earth nigh, I sigh; I'm the wind.
\end{enumerate}
I flow west: Past the lakes, Water my guest; Thunder makes Noise, wakes, As I storm.
Sand flies at my Force Builds as I Push Across the Land Flows beneath my Self Means nothing to Wind.
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Borne through air, Through the night And dawn fair. No fight, Only flight; I'm the wind.
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I flow south On the ocean, On delta's mouth My motion Just notion As I breathe.
Waves break as I Drive Past the thin Sands Lift themselves to my Body Waxes as I Press Through the stillness of Night.
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Borne through air, Around the world And forests I tear; Ferns furled, Trees burled; I am the wind.
\end{enumerate}
I flow north, Across the ice; I roll forth Past spice -- So nice -- As I change.
Men bask as I Warm Drops of rain Fall Colored leaves Shiver Because of the Chill Wind blows on Past.
\begin{ally}
It's not without its own sense of charm.
\end{ally}
I suppose. It's crude. It's a bit heavy-handed.
\begin{ally}
Your others are not?
\end{ally}
Well, okay, fair. I like to think that I've improved nonetheless.
\begin{ally}
Are these old ones not creative? Are they still just play?
\end{ally}
The more I think of it, the more I think it's that they're just too\ldots{}work. They're not creative, because they're too mechanical. I had realized that writing wasn't just play, so I stopped playing altogether.
\begin{ally}
Wrong answer.
\end{ally}
Tell me about it.
January 11, 2003:
What hath man wrought! When faced with the question of love Or seeking peace with the answer thereof, Or faced with life peril-fraught, Created a god, or several, to satisfy Some need to fulfill or deny A lacking - A slacking On someone else's behalf, Or his own behalf - And on the world a question of faith brought.
And when a man, endowed With the ability to make his own God, Does so with nary a nod, And finds the god shan't be cowed, What does he then? And when a group of men Make their God With nary a nod, And cow him easily, rightly To them, and find him tightly bound, what then, with a god bowed?
What then, indeed, should a God, Now lesser than his creators, do When his creators move to gods new? Is he then still a God? Or is that when God dies, Not bloated with swarms of flies, But forgotten? Not rotten, Forgotten and immortal, what then? Does he hope to come again, Rising a second time, perhaps again to be God?
One would hope that the God, being omniscient Would realize he was no longer, otherwise Might he become destructive? Likewise, A god, waiting patient Could become restless, Try to leave his creators breathless, Again, But then, Be pronounced a heretic By all but the hermetic And others of the new God ignorant.
So hence a people divided Those of Whispers and those of Nanon, Fight to the tooth and fight to the bone, Until over Whispers Nanon presided; And when those of Nanon took Speech from the Whispers so as to look And not hear, They here Those of Whispers with Supposed powers of myth Of creation with speech's remnants provided.
So it was before the fall of Whispers that Faith of most all lay in technology, Remnants of religion lay in astrology And superstitious fears like the black cat. Only after the fall did the faiths Of only the Whisperers turn to mysterious wraiths And gods, But the odds That one of the gods was taken more seriously Than the rest was small, and not mysteriously, The small bit of Faith quickly passed as society's scat
Now, it's come that those of Nanon have all but forgotten Those of Whispers except perhaps in myth Maybe portrayed as consorting with Black cats or something equally rotten. But for the Whisperers, the city Of Nanon is very real, also denial of pity Of sunlight, For sunlight Is blocked by the city directly overhead And the Whisperers know of only shadow instead; Only death out from beneath the city to be gotten.
The magic that's spoken of those Of the Whispers, is often made Out to be more, but because of their stayed Speech, only whispers remain in quite prose. So through the long stretches of time, The Whisperers, through long stretches of rhyme Can make - Only make - What they wish, with words divine, Benign, or malign, And in their creations complete trust repose.
So begins a story, often told but never yet writ Of a divided people still the same And the rise and fall of a god played like a game. While not true itself, it is truth lit: As men continue to create and live under gods, What would happen if the gods, at odds, Warred and fell, Raising hell In the process? What would happen In a society misshapen If a wrathful god fell and no one cared a whit?
\begin{ally}
Ah yes, your Keats phase.
\end{ally}
It was a mixture of Keats and Larry Niven, I think.
\begin{ally}
That is intensely Madison.
\end{ally}
Thanks.
I had recently read \emph{The Ringworld Throne}, so I was thinking about vertically stratified cities, and had also been on a Keats kick ever since reading \emph{The Hyperion Cantos}, so I decided I would write a sci-fi epic poem to support my conlang.
It's a mess.
\begin{ally}
Could be worse.
\end{ally}
Could be better.
\newpage
\begin{ally}
If you went from a mockery of creativity to a mockery of play, when did you settle down and just write a damn story?
\end{ally}
I think it wasn't too long after, actually. I wrote \href{https://writing.drab-makyo.com/fiction/all-of-time-at-once/}{\emph{All of Time at Once}} in April of 2004, and that was the first time I started to think, \emph{ah-hah, okay, there's a rhythm to this, a pace, a set of mechanics as well as an art.}
And from then on, I basically dropped writing in favor of music for months. Sure, there were a few others scattered around there. \href{https://writing.drab-makyo.com/fiction/tu-pater-et-mater/}{\emph{Tu pater et mater}} in May of 2003, and \href{https://writing.drab-makyo.com/fiction/light/}{\emph{Light}} in June of 2004, but other than that, I kind of just dropped it.
\begin{ally}
Why?
\end{ally}
I graduated. I left language arts classes behind. I went to school for an engineering major.
\begin{ally}
One you were supremely unhappy in.
\end{ally}
Right. And then when I started writing again, it was music.
I wrote a few essays I was reasonably proud of, but it took another four years before I decided to actually sit down and give writing a go in a more structured setting, and then only because of NaNoWriMo.
\begin{ally}
Ah yes, your ``boy meets girl with a twist'' story.
\end{ally}
Yeah, \href{https://writing.drab-makyo.com/fiction/consequences-of-dissonance/}{\emph{The Consequences of Dissonance}}.
\begin{ally}
You originally named it \textbf{Coming to Terms with Being a Terrible Person}.
\end{ally}
I did, yeah. I was fresh off my relationship with Kayla and well into a relationship with Kanja, and had a head full of hatred for who I used to be.
\begin{ally}
And who you were becoming.
\end{ally}
Well, it wasn't \emph{Coming to Terms with Having Been a Terrible Person}, was it?
\begin{ally}
Fair enough.
\end{ally}
It wasn't a bad story, really, nor even that poorly written. I've even thought of revisiting it sometime. It was sort of a coming out story, but a coming-out-for-the-second-time sort of thing. Gay boy starts dating a girl and has to go through the social process of coming out as bi.
\begin{ally}
As Madison?
\end{ally}
I suppose. I went through my own series of comings-out, so maybe I have more insight into that now.
\begin{ally}
And you're less of a terrible person.
\end{ally}
Doubt.
\begin{ally}
There are perfectly cromulent reasons for you to think of yourself as a terrible person in the past, and even as a terrible person in 2008. Or even one now, really. You're just less of one.
\end{ally}
Always improving, I guess.
\begin{ally}
How did it feel to come up with a schedule, a goal, and a plan, and then to stick to it?
\end{ally}
I never finished the story.
\begin{ally}
But you won NaNoWriMo that year. You went over by eight thousand lines.
\end{ally}
I guess.
\begin{ally}
And you're dodging the question.
\end{ally}
That's why, though. It felt good while it lasted. It felt good during that hypomanic rush to actually complete something, to come up with an outline and actually work through it.
Then I finished NaNo with several hours to spare and tried to keep going, but there was something missing. I felt rudderless. I kept trying to poke at it, but I think I was working as well as I was because of the deadlines. I was still trying to balance the work with the fun that go into a creative endeavor.
\begin{ally}
Did you stop having fun, or did you stop doing the work?
\end{ally}
I think it's more complex than that. There was fun to be had in the race to the finish line. I think that's why NaNo is so popular. And doubtless it was work, of course.
But with the fun of having already won gone, I was faced with the fact that I had less outline than I had originally thought. Pantsing, as the community so eloquently puts it, may work well for some folks, but I was mostly left feeling uninspired and unmotivated once December hit. The same thing happened with \emph{Getting Lost} and \emph{Inner Demons}. I started strong enough with the basic idea as I tried to write by the seat of my pants, but without a direction or even any goal, I lost steam and wound up disheartened.
\begin{ally}
Do you not do well without goals, then? You don't seem to have one for this project.
\end{ally}
It's not necessarily that. More that, the shorter the project, the less planning that's required. I do much better with articles and short stories than I do with novels. At least so far, given the amount of planning that goes into each.
This project is working as well as it is because of my heavy reliance on these side-quests. I can break a story down into manageable chunks so that, by the time I might start losing direction, they're about overwith anyway.
Besides, I have you to help.
\begin{ally}
Me? Little old me?
\end{ally}
Yeah. It's much easier to have a conversation than it is to plan out a story. You keep taking me in directions I don't mean to go.
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\begin{ally}
So if the goal of this project is to write about the ways in which creativity interacts with various facets of your life, what are your goals when it comes to creativity itself?
\end{ally}
Huh.
I'll have to think on that one.
\begin{ally}
I'd say I'll be patient, but you know I won't be.
\end{ally}
Yeah.
I think the goals for my creativity are to find a happy medium of entertaining and applicable for others to consume as well as enjoyable for me to create.
\begin{ally}
Vague.
\end{ally}
I guess. I could list specifics, but I don't think that's quite what you're asking after.
\begin{ally}
No, vague is good. It's good to have something you'll always fall short on, because that'll always give you reason to strive for improvement.
\end{ally}
That ``if you hate who you were in the past, it's a good sign that you've improved as a person'' sort of thing?
\begin{ally}
In a way. If you hate your old work, it's a good sign you've improved as a writer, musician, developer, whatever.
\end{ally}
That makes sense.
Though I do have concrete goals. I'd like to write a book. I'd like to finish some outstanding music I've still got hanging around. I'd like to maybe work toward getting a job in something other than tech.
\begin{ally}
So what you're saying is that you'd like to be happy?
\end{ally}
I suppose so.
\begin{ally}
Good luck, kid.
\end{ally}\newpage
Autoplaying music
\begin{ally}
If this is about creativity, then tell me about composing.
\end{ally}
Shall I do so in song?
\begin{ally}
Please.
\end{ally}
No thanks, but I'll tell you all the same.
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