Ken Can't Write

Happy birthday to me!

(But also to a great organization who is doing some really important work in Portland, Oregon!)

www.facebook.com/donate/11616...

Beach on the Oregon coast with Haystack Rock in the background.

Beautiful, powerful day out at the Oregon coast. I don't remember the last time I felt the wind blowing that hard. #oregon #oregoncoast #haystackrock

"Calling bigotry an opinion is like calling arsenic a flavor." Jack Cameron

A list of various Birmingham brand fountain pen inks: Tin Type, Washed Lavender, and Turkey Feather.

Ordered a sort of Halloween palette of fountain pen ink. Not entirely on purpose, but I'm delighted with the result.

Birmingham inks are really excellent, BTW. Highly recommended.

www.birminghampens.com/collections/...

"Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams."

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

One of my abs favorite inks. Intense and strangely difficult to pin down with regard to hue, and a bright, metallic gold sheen to top it off.

This color is part of Sailor's "Ink Studio" series, where each ink is given a number instead of a name. That said, I think of this one as "Disco Era Pink".

💥

At least the pen & ink aren't crashing.

Wearingeul "Shoot the Moon" in a Kakimori dip pen on Cosmo Air Snow.

(Solved. Hint: Delete your font cache.)

#photoshop #photoshopsucks #TomChalky #fonts #type

Happy #caturday from Xander!

A peaceful & contented #caturday to you.

Also, consider adopting a black kitty, they're wonderful & too often looked over.)

Kinokuniya Portland, Oregon

Spent some time at Kinokuniya in downtown pdx this evening.

Is it just me or are writers some of the neediest people you'll ever meet?

(And I mean "Is it just me" in multiple senses of the phrase.)

Oh good GRIEF!

TikTok, take a freakin' chill pill!

David Lynch, Visionary Director of ‘Twin Peaks’ and ‘Blue Velvet,’ Dies at 78 Director David Lynch, who radicalized American film with with a dark, surrealistic artistic vision in films like 'Blue Velvet,' has died. He was 78.

Thank you for thrilling and mystifying us in the best way imaginable. Rest in peace.

variety.com/2025/film/ne...

Yep, 100% 😊

Ivy And Neet - Remastered This Mortal Coil · Filigree & Shadow (Remastered) · Song · 1986

One of my favorite songs to write to for some 35+ years now.

open.spotify.com/track/7aKZzF...

What are you using for inspiration right now?

#amwriting

This association with folk tales and #folklore is why I've taken to calling this style "folk realism". It uses many of the same techniques as magical realism, but it has different ideological & geographic foundations.

If this sounds at all interesting or if you write in a similar vein, let me know!

There's no moment at which someone sees them and thinks, "Wow! The legends are true!"

Because I think that's how it would really go. And because it's often how things went in old folk tales. People encountered the strange and the inexplicable. And then they very often went home and made dinner.

My stories have characters that are hundreds of years old. One character is a sort of proto-dampir, something peculiar but mostly benign that existed long before all the stories we tell.

All those characters trudge through life the same way we all do. Brush their teeth, listen to music, get bored.

I like weird things to happen in my stories. Twists & turns that don't happen in "real life".

But also, I don't enjoy fantasy. Magic systems & the like. I don't like it when characters are surprised to learn there are elves or monsters in a world just beyond their closet.

#writingcommunity

I've taken to seeing this as how I get to enjoy the twists in my own story. It's the closest I'll come to being my own reader.

Which naturally makes it difficult. But difficult in a good way. It's satisfying to let all these bizarre, otherworldly things walk right through the front door. And instead of flipping out, my characters offer them a place on the couch, make a pot of coffee, & sit down to chat. #amwriting

This is the thing that makes the writing challenging. It's very easy to start thinking of this place as a "Dark Narnia". In that case, he'd be wondering how to find it again, how to get back.

But this isn't that kind of story. In asking, "okay, what next?", I need to focus all the ordinary things.

One particular aspect of my story is a place I'm calling "The Night Country" (yes, I know about the show; I coined it first ^_^;). Having suffered terribly, my MC escapes into this other place. It's empty and sad, but somehow comforting, and he wanders.

And so when he comes back, what to do?

Rather, it's crucial that I focus on the humanity in their reactions. The things that pull them forward in the story aren't attempts to resolve the fantastic, to find its source and either capture it or somehow live within it. Their problems are our problems: broken relationships, trauma, and so on.

There's more to it than that, but that's the important bit for what I'm working on today.

Because one aspect of that is that when something really odd happens in the story, I don't want my characters to respond the way they would if this were straight-up fantasy. No one is awe-struck or surprised.

I'm calling it "folk realism" to avoid the well-established history of "magical realism" primarily being a means of speaking out against the history of colonialism.

But many of the mechanics are the same, or similar.

Elevate the mundane, make it mystical.

Present the fantastic as ordinary.

&c.

I'm cultivating an approach in my writing that's counterintuitive in a lot of ways, but I'm still fully committed to it.

Here's the deal...

Sitting at a local coffee house with my wife and daughter, trying out a new bluetooth kb with my phone. #amwriting #wobkey75 #thok