This is a duplicate entry from the makingwings journal. Thought it would be interesting anyhow.

Oh, and if anybody is of a mind to give me money/support my pet project, makingwings could sure use a Gold membership. It is the holiday season, eh?

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So I ended up watching a portion of the behind-the-scenes on the Two Towers extended DVD. My roommate was watching it, and when I went out to get a bite to eat, they were showing how they had made Theoden's throne and designed all the cultural trappings of the Rohirrim, and I was captivated.

WETA Workshop is a company after my own heart.

I mean, they made everything; these were not just props. There was so much care and reality to the production. They made real swords, real chainmail and suits of armor; and the armor was made to suit the culture from which it came, and it was decorated with frescoes of the culture's history; into every design went ideas of utility--specialized helmets for different soldiers of the Uruk-Hai army. I was awed and inspired and stunned by the level of detail and reality they put into Everything. My god, my god--watching them take a description from the book, and sketch it out--design it--realize it--was like paradise.

It was everythig I love about being a writer and an artist. Finding a piece of imagination and living in it to the degree that it becomes empirically real to you. You think of the situations your characters are in and design their life as if you were living it--down to the tiniest detail, because life must have detail. To the point where it seems that you're not imagining it--it's too rich--that you are instead discovering it, traveling there, living there and have always lived there. That is what I love about Tolkien--he has the main trilogy, or perhaps foursome (including The Hobbit); but there are books and books of background, myths, origin stories, histories, and geographies. Any story must take place in a world, and most people take the easy way out and put it in this one. But the ability to fully visualize and make real an entirely different world--that talent is one that I possess, and by god, it is the one that I love most! And I am doing it in my writing, but they do it for real! Like, literally, they build it! ACH! ORGASM!

Look, look:
Sam's Backpack
The Scrolls of Isildur
Theoden's Battle Armor
and Legolas' Knife.

Yes, that level of detail is needed, yes, that is the only way, the only logical conclusion to the birth of the imagination! They took one of my favorite stories and made it real, to the level that I saw it. To that very level.

I feel a longing in the deepest part of my being to do this kind of work. I mean, I guess I am doing this kind of work--they are the latter half of the steps that Tolkien took. He was a writer, not a blacksmith--but he might as well have been. I might as well be, for all that I can feel the weight of a weapon when I write a fight. That I know, as Toni Morrison said, "the kind of soap my character uses."

These wings, who knows, maybe I've been writing about them all my life in one form or another; I'm taking on the second half, that's the euphoria I feel--the realization. I love that word. That logos.

No wonder I'm putting so much into this; all the detail and the planning. We shall see. What if I didn't have to save the world?

2:23 a.m. 2003-12-11�