The quote above is from Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland. I have to admit, I haven’t read the book since sophmore English in high school. However, that quote has always stuck with me. It draws one’s attention to just how inadequate our memory is in terms of helping us in the present. So often we are anchored by our memory to things that have already past and that we can do nothing about. Wouldn’t it be great if memory served the present?

The subfictional site has had many half-assed incarnation over the passed five years. However, since beginning a zen and yoga practice, I’ve felt more motivated to also maintain a writing practice. I’m hoping this blog and my business blog as well as a private journal will faciliate this practice.

I want subfictional to be a place where I share my thoughts on the following: daily practice (both zen and yoga), living here in portland, learning how to develop my professional life and learning how to develop my family life (which, right now, includes polyamory).

Why subfictional?

I created the handle subfictional a number of years ago, maybe as far back as 2001. My handle previous to that, and I’m embarrassed to speak of this but I’m going to anyway, was Vash, from Star Trek TNG. She was one of my favorite TNG characters because she was an adventurer who followed her own rules. Plus she got to shag Picard and go gallavanting off with Q. How awesome is that?

But I digress…

I think I must have been feeling too “old” to have a handle based on a Star Trek character (I had, after all, just become a college graduate). I knew I wanted a handle no one else had, so I figured I needed to make one up. I’d always liked the term metafiction, meaning (from Wikipedia):

a literary term for a type of fiction that systematically and self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, including the relationship between fiction and reality and the uses of irony and self-reflection.

Then I thought of turning the word into an adjective which yields metafictional. And meta is from the greek that means “after” or “beyond”. At the time I took this to be synonymous above. Well, I wanted something that meant underneath. I’ve always been fascinated by what’s underneath a story. What is it’s subtext, it’s history, etc. What makes it tick. So that’s what lead me to changing metafictional to subfictional.

Um, okay, but what’s with the “studios” part?

Well, subfictional alone didn’t sound like enough of a title. I like alliteration and I like the idea of a studio as a workplace for exploring the creative. Practice, to me, is a creative endeavor, so I like to think of this blog as an extension of my studio.