Sunday Un-funnies

I’m trying something new on this gray, rainy Sunday. Something I hope will lead to further writing and a greater increase in my general output…however I chose to measure it. “Output,” is such a bastardly nebulous term anyway. So nebulous I can hardly use it without falling into a philosophical cluster fuck of inane, unanswerable questions about what, in fact, constitutes “output.”

Should I measure the number of stories completed? Or the number of words on a page within each? The number of words in total for all the various projects I’ve completed, present or past? Or the number of words in each of the three stories-in-progress I currently have kicking against the placental walls of my brain?

And then there’s my damn novel, also in progress, which my colleague Col. Giddens so aptly labeled “your baby”. As a dog mother (who spent the majority of her teenage years raising her little brother, for all practical purposes) she knows a fretting parent when she sees one. And, oh, how I fret over my baby. Over all of them, really, for they are all my children…even the ones that arrive stillborn, malformed and hideous to behold. The ones I kiss before gladly dashing their heads against the nearest unyielding surface. Believe me when I say its better that way for all concerned. Especially the stories themselves.

Occasionally I get the hot idea to use this blog as a journal of my writing, a record of progress that I could look back upon with awe in those dark times when the melancholy rises like a five armed octopus and wraps its tendrils around the support beams of my frayed self-confidence. Unfortunately, by the time I wrap things up for the (day/night/hour/minute/whatever) I rarely if ever have the patience or energy to spend any more time writing…certainly not writing about my writing.

At various times in various magazine interviews, Hunter S. Thompson decried the whole business and practice of writing. “Nothing’s fun when you have to do it every day,” he said. It was a specific reference to journalism, particularly the type he practiced during his drug-fueled hay days of the late-60s/early-70s. And in this, as in so much else, Dr. Thompson had a point. There are times when this—this hum-drum magic making, this everyday necromancy, this thing that is the Art and craft of writing—is the last thing on earth I want to do.

There are times I’d rather walk down to the Southern Pacific rail lines and just lay in wait on the tracks. A train is bound to go by, sooner or later.

Now is not one of those times. Now the pensive weight of a week spent in idle fantasy (and a day [yesterday] spent in hedonistic splendor) is moving my hands with unearthly speed. The Col.’s Ritalin is certainly helping and if I hadn’t already, I’d thank her.

But now I must get back Into It, and say good afternoon to this damned, dusty blog.

Tag: Writing: personal: authorial bitching: