Work in progress

I have been drying to dig in, but am finding myself hopelessly distracted which causes a high level of irritation. Had a bad bout with food poisoning late on Monday night and spent yesterday recovering. Yelled at a couple at a scooter that almost ran me down on Tianjin Road. Of course, they understood none of it, which perhaps only fueled my anger.

Working now on the adaptation of a short story from Soul Mountain into an expanded dramatic work. Thinking about character development and motivation are things I do not spend a lot of time thinking about, but they seem to fall under "voice" and "credible narrator."

At the beginning of the original story, a messenger from a local shaman has sought out a carpenter to commission a carving of the Goddess Tianluo on a very tight deadline. I am going to have the messenger first visit a number of master craftsmen - a stonecarver, a woodcarver, etc. - all of whom specialize in the production of a specific image/deity using varied materials - i.e. the notion of your artistic practice as your spiritual practice - brush painters who paint nothing but daruma over and over again, a thousand times over. No one the messenger talks to does Tianluo and further, even if they did, no one could make her on deadline before the New Year. Finally, the last master carver the messenger talks to recommends a carpenter in a local village known for doing fast work that might be able to get the job done. This is all to delineate that the carpenter (which is also what Jesus happened to be) is simply a carpenter, one with a set of skills/abilities that have not been fully actualized. He will carve anything for money and has only once carved a figure approaching the spiritual - once he had a commission of Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy who grants childless women the birth of sons. Still, his carving of Guan Yin is totally perverse as is shown later in the story.