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I am and have been a lot of things in my life already. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy… I’ve had the opportunity, and occasionally *taken* the opportunity to try things I would never have done had I been properly sane, and even the most tragic of accidents has proven to be the seed of something I could put to use in some capacity or another. It’s odd now that I’m looking down the barrel of something that has always been a secret fear, except I am seeing it mirrored in the work of another artist.
Art, whether it be painted, digital, written, printed, typed, mixed in a test-tube or spun on a turntable is inherently referential. When you create a piece, it is the sum of your experiences, the left hand twist to the brush you use because you learned to paint on a 3×5 palette in your lap, the irrepressible use of commas in your writing because that’s the cadence you hear in your head as you type. You use blue because the ocean was blue the first time you slammed your surfboard into the rocks, or the rotting feel of green makes your teeth itch. I like to follow the career of artists and writers. I never buy the first in a series of books, I never look just at the most recent museum offering. I am interested in the evolution over time, like reading Matt Wagner comics from the original Comico version of Grendel through Mage and into the Arielist. You can watch the growth, the inclusion of experience as time goes by. Sometimes it is the lightening of a black depression, sometime it is the revelation of life experience, but there is almost always a change.
One of things that I have always worried about is the degree of revelation, that more of me will show in a piece than I really want out there. That someone will point and laugh and that will be the end, anything else the piece might have to say is lost.
All this is coming around to the fact that I just finished reading Elegy Beach, hard on the tail of actually getting to meet the author, Steven Boyett at the La Jolla Writer’s (www.lajollawritersconference.com/ljwc) conference this past weekend. For perhaps the first time ever, I got the opportunity to meet the voice behind the text. And an interesting thing happened. As I worked my way through the journey of our old and new cast members, there were moments, revelations when that voice, not the narrator, not character A or character B, but rather Boyett’s voice itself became evident and shone through. It was an interesting look at something I had not taken into account in the evolution of a body of work, primarily because I haven’t had the chance to meet many of the creators of the works I fancy.
There had always been a bit of a buffer there, the supreme confidence that no one would *really* be able to see mirrors of me in my characters, that my experiences would translate through as an amalgam, rather than as a clear voice. That I was just being paranoid (which is not at all uncommon) and that as long as I stayed at arms length, no one would ever really be able to see *me* in there. But now I find myself looking though my pieces, both game related and written, looking for similarities to be excised.
