Different kinds of writing

I have 'suddenly' discovered that there are two, possibly separate, different kinds of writing.
There is emotional writing, where you have the scene in your head and are living it and the words come tumbling out and you just go with the flow and hope to capture enough of the feeling on paper and come back afterwards and tidy it all up without losing the original fire. With luck.
Then there is literary writing, where you are putting one word in front of another across the page, and you know pretty much exactly what is going to happen next and what the nearly right word is but it all feels like not much fun and a lot of effort and far far from inspired or inspiring. I think I was able to combine the two when I was younger, but now after a gap of some fifteen years I seem to get the literary, smart-ass word play stuff far more often than the inspired driven automatic writing (or typing as Truman Capote is supposed to have said of Jack Kerouac).
The inspired stuff can be a bit frightening because it gets a bit like method acting where you are actually living the story, and in that situation you really shouldnt be operating heavy machinery or interacting with people on an emotional level, accidents will happen in which people will get hurt and you may not be paying attention -- perhaps this may be why there are so many unhappy writers!

The illiterate age

I despair of some of the technical magazines I read -- the rise of sloppy writing seems to be unstoppable. This of course is where I should go back and carefully re-read all my own blog posts, because I'm sure I am guilty too. Pedantic and all as it sounds, there is an awful lot of English As A Second Language type stuff going on, and mostly it is from English as a First Language people who are just being lazy or rushed and not checking. It is even in books. I have just been reading part of "Mao The Unknown Story" and the sloppiness is astounding at times. I would not be a Mao Tse Tung fan, in fact I am well able to accept that he was a complete monster, but allegations are thrown around in a not always believable manner and not backed up with much evidence. Admittedly as China is still offically in the toils of the Communist Party the evidence wont be forth-coming, but as a person from a scientific background I would prefer if the wild stuff was toned down in that situation. Lack of evidence is indeed not evidence of lack as we used to say in college, but you have to be careful to point out where the gaps are in your theory.
Also, the English is very sloppy at times. It is a big book, and an enormous editing challenge and Jung Chang is a non-native speaker, but I believe Jon Halliday is, and really at times the wording is so obtuse as to throw the meaning of the sentence into doubt. The most glaring example is (to paraphrase) that Mao has series of enormous identical houses built -- at least I think that is what is meant, the word repeatedly used in the book is 'Identikit', which if I remember correctly is the sliding puzzle thing the police used to use to make up pictures of suspects in the days before computers ... Eccentric as Mao was, I very much doubt that he had any desire to live in houses built in the style of a police wanted poster. This is just the worst example, there are plenty of other places where your brain is left hanging trying to figure out what you just read.

Greyness

Sometime in the last five months or so my hair has made the transition to looking grey as opposed to having a lot of grey. Light indoors makes it still look brownish, but outdoors and in other better lit places I look older. Pity I cant pin it down beyond somewhere between age 43 and 43 and six months!

The Minstrel Tensions

A tongue-in-cheek concept for the story of the rise and fall of an all-girl band,
We are the Queens of Pain would be there big hit, although it would be different from the Shawshank one ...

Shawshank the Musical

I see the Shawshank Redemption is now a stage play, pity they couldnt leave it alone -- since there is no redemption in the movie (and its kind of hidden in the play, Red does admit to remorse)
But anyway, I think there should be a musical -- Enter the Killer Queens, who do ballet high kicks as they go to rape Andy Dufresne:
We are the Queens of Pain /
We go to the laundry to do do do
Andy do do do Andy Dufresne