M. David Hornbuckle

Author: mdavidhornbuckle

  • Story Ideas

    Story ideas:

    Two feuding authors who both specialize in paranormal/alien myth who both live in the UWS and argue when they run into each other at the Fairway.

    A patriarch with children by several different women. On Sundays, the women and their kids get together for picnics and swap stories about the patriarch.

    M is working on a book that compiles front pages from every NYT ever printed. She sent me a couple that actually included Hornbuckles in them. Beyond that, there’s tons of interesting source material on virtually every page. Makes me want to set something in the 1850s.

    Feel like I need to take LSD. I haven’t felt like that in years.

  • Critic’s Perspective

    I was thinking about how one of the ways I use this journal is to get a critic’s perspective on my own work. If I see trends or themes emerging, I can start to move toward them or away from them. If I get too involved in it, though, I start to delve into metafiction, which a lot of people see as a bygone phase. However, I think to a certain extent it’s inherent in the written word. Other art forms don’t have that. Movies and plays are almost entirely voyeuristic. Life is just happening in front of you. With literature, someone has to have written it, and the author has to decide: do I want to be upfront about the fact that I wrote this, or do I want to put up a pretense that someone else wrote it? Or do I want to play with that uncertainty?

    Sometimes I think the critic’s perspective is none of my business. But then I start writing stuff that nobody understands at all, including myself. Or I’m just transcribing sex fantasies.

  • Excuses

    I have no progress to report, either emotionally or literarily. The heat wave hasn’t helped.

    I feel like I’m always making excuses for why I’m not writing. I have too much other work to do. It’s too cold. It’s too hot. I’ll be able to concentrate once the stress of moving is over. Every excuse feels real at the time.

    Truth is, when I look at my work on paper, I’m so hypercritical of myself that I get discouraged. That seems to be the main problem. To get anything done, I have to get beyond that. Anything that’s weak can be fixed later. The important thing is to get it done! Damn it!

    Really, it’s like I’m cursed.

    Anyway. I’m in the middle of a musical project. I was asked to write a theme song for a children’s traffic safety program using the catch phrase, “STOP (See The Other People).” I asked George to write some lyrics, which he did, and I set it to music easily after tweaking the words only slightly. I need to record it this weekend.

    Meanwhile, I can’t stop thinking about sex. I have all these stories about sex, and when I start editing them, I get all worked up.

  • A Little Disappointing

    I’m very depressed today, but I’ve found that whenever I look under the depression or the anger, it’s really about fear. The fear I’m feeling is largely about my creative life, as it almost always is. I’m afraid that I’m really not good enough, that I’ll never produce anything really worthwhile. In a more general sense, it’s a fear that I’ll never DO anything really worthwhile, that everything is basically pointless. It’s a standard, run of the mill, existential crisis, and to be honest, that realization is a little disappointing.

  • Dreamlog

    “She was as brave as a widow’s daughter.” I dreamed this phrase last night, and it seems significant somehow. But then I also dreamt of Liz Pulos cleaning houses dressed as a superhero. In my dream, she was cleaning Sarah Fische’s apartment, which was much nicer than I imagine Sarah’s apartment is in real life, though I’ve never been there.

  • Live and Learn

    I’m remarkably chipper, considering I just had a sudden bought of projectile vomiting, inspired by some bad Pom I drank earlier in the morning. It happened so quickly, I didn’t quite make it to the bathroom. The Pom had been in the fridge since my birthday party in November. But I had some a couple of days ago, and it seemed fine. Live and learn, they say.

    I’ve been having a lot of crazy dreams lately. Last night, I had a lot of dreams about the supermarket. In the dream, I ran into an old friend, Samantha Jones, who apparently was working there. She morphed into another old friend I haven’t seen in a long time, who then became my ex-mother in law. The things I was buying were things that are actually on my RT grocery list.

  • Chords, Lyrics

    GGFGFGGFGFGGFGFGG

    D Eb C Bb

    You give me no choice because you’re unable

    To hear my voice when we’re at the bargaining table

    In an abandoned mind.

  • BWC Notes, Metafiction

    I’ve been taking a writing workshop and showing them pieces of BWC as I rewrite it as an independent piece. Next week is the last class for the semester, and they’ll be reading some sections near the end. My guess is that they won’t get what I’m trying to do.

    Although it’s been a comically long time since I utilized this journal in any way, I figured this would be the place to clarify, for my own purposes, just what that is. I’ve held back from explaining it in class so far for two reasons: (1) it might give away too much too soon and (2) it will probably sound incredibly pompous. Nevertheless, here goes…

    I don’t think there’s anything experimental about metafiction at this point. There’s not much more it can say about itself and the nature of narrative. But it is now, in my opinion, an established tradition, which can be used for whatever purposes an author sees fit.

    Within that tradition, there’s an idea of the author or artist as a kind of god-like figure. One of the things I’m trying to do in this piece is have a character, Thom, who believes in that rather literally – that he is a character in a book, and that his every thought and motion is subject to the whim of some author, and he carries a deep resentment about that. Maybe he thinks that BWC is somehow that author. I’m not quite there yet.

    The point, though, is that I’m not trying to use this technique to say anything about the nature of narrative, at least not anything particularly new. Instead, I’m hoping to use that established tradition as a foundation for making a statement about the nature of God. Because to me, that’s what all art is about at its core.

    With BWC, we have a counterpoint to Thom – an artist in a state of spiritual crisis, which is solved through meeting Jennie Mae and thus shedding that layer of solipsism that isolated him. Through Jennie Mae, he is able to become an active member of the human race and to become the artist that before was only an insular fantasy, one of a thousand possible worlds, none of which were reality.

  • Southern Detachment

    Something I noticed growing up in the South. Often, left-leaning young people have a way of casually mentioning that they or someone they know participates in an alternative lifestyle. “My friend Brandy, who’s a Wiccan, was at my house the other day…” “People don’t realize that I’m bi, and I don’t know why they’d care really.” Etc.

    This serves two purposes. One, it makes a great show of how little it affects them, that it’s no big deal. Two, it tests the interlocutor for a reaction, which could be shock, disgust, or a similar faux jadedness.

  • Kazoo

    This is an actual conversation I had with someone in my writing workshop. He’s a retired antique bookseller. I’d mentioned previously that I play guitar in a band.

    – I don’t play an instrument myself… Although sometimes, when my wife isn’t home, I play these old 78s. There’s this instrumental interlude, and I like to play along with it on the kazoo. Only when my wife isn’t home though.

    No response from me.

    – What’s that instrument that Louis Armstrong played? Not the trombone… is it the trumpet?

    – Yes, trumpet.

    – Yeah, that’s what it is. The kazoo sounds really good with that. And sometimes, I take the lid from a sauce pan, and I hit it with a spoon like a cymbal.