So what?


My wife hugged me yesterday and asked in a very sweet voice, "So, what makes your new blog different from your old one?"

"It's about me writing."

"Well, I see an essay. I see you linking to another article. You said you went going to do that anymore," she said.

And like an expert chess player, she nails me in a bare minimum of moves.

She's right in all sorts of ways. She can see what I do like footprints in fresh snow. I said I was going to talk about writing more in on this new blog. I'd drop all the ranting, all the hit-and-run linking of stories that plagued my first blog.

I told her that I would regret the linking of the "organic billboard" story in the morning. Something in it just spoke to me, though...something neo-Dickensian, and I'm very much in a neo-Dickensian state of mind as of late. That, and thanks to the virtual seas of "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker," I feel myself swaying as if I'm on a boat rolling up and down in the waves.

So what. Or, so what now?

My wife is reading "On Writing" by Stephen King, a book I steal glances at while my wife is in the bathroom or doing something artsy-crafty, like making a quilt for a friend. The book is a part-memoir, part-writing guide and it's equal parts insightful and the boasts of a self-aggrandizing asshole. My wife reads aloud from King's tome that a first draft of any book should take three months. That's it.

And then my wife pipes up that Donna Tartt took 10 years to write her follow-up novel. Ironically, King recommends Tartt's decade-long ordeal in the back of his book, so either he values the hard work she put into it, or he's talking out of his ass. With King, I don't know, so I'll say both.

As a side note, I enjoy when my wife pops in a good riff on something an author wrote, especially if there's a snarky commentary packed in there somewhere, springing open like a menacing jester from a overwound jack-in-the-box.

What gets me about King is a comment (that my wife relays) he makes, something like "a thousand pages about Hobbits isn't enough." An obvious crack at Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," which took Tolkien 10 years to write, brewed up from source material he'd been studying and writing up in some form his whole life. Definitely not a three-month binge at the ol' workdesk.

But here's King, a guy who wrote a thousand-page tome about a plague, the end of the world, and the survivors...and he has the gall to take on "The Lord of the Rings"?

And it's not like King is anorexic with his books after "The Stand." Oh heavens no. Drop by your local bookshop and glance at King's hardcovers, the size of dictionaries. Granted, the guy can turn out a lot of books of sizable length, but there are vast wastelands in King novels that just drag. At least in Tolkien's epic, you meet the Ents and Gollum, witness the siege at Helm's Deep, watch Gandalf smack Saruman off his evil pedestal, enjoy the friendly barbs and an evolving kinship between polar opposites Legolas the elf and Gimli the dwarf. There's the ring's oily corruption spreading over Frodo, and Sam faced with a terrible choice in the caves of Shelob. Something's always happening in Middle-earth. Kick over any rock and there's history under there...the site of a terrible battle or the outskirts of some dreadful swamp where the dead glow with sickly little lights. In King's world...well, it's marking time for the Big Ugly to rear its head in Final Boss Battle form, picking off main and subcharacters until the Precious Magical Device/Personality Quirk established midway through Act 1 is used for its proper, divine purpose.

(On edit: "The Lord of the Rings" also does this, if you think about it, but you know...that's the whole point of the story. It's a quest. It's all laid out what's supposed to done to the Precious Magical Device. How it's done is hidden in shadow, with the ring nearly its own character. King, IMHO, practically holds up billboards with objects or quirks, telling the reader "THIS WILL BE USEFUL LATER!")

King also says people want a good read to take with them on airplanes. Um. No, Stephen. Don't go blaming the invention of airplanes for what you write. I want a story, densely packed, fine with nuisance, telling me something I didn't know before whether it be good or foul. I don't want a distraction on a mid-morning arc from Seattle to Chicago. I want a slice of a writer's soul. something crafty and honest and hearffelt. King's great in novella or short story form, and I'm grateful he survived his horrible accident with a van a few years ago, as well as his torrent of alcoholism and drug abuse.

Yet, I get more advice on how to write from Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird" or by (what King even suggests) Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," along with taking it upon myself to be an avid reader. His book, in the brief sideswipes I make of it is a well-crafted but ornery dissertation (occasionally repetitive and self defeating) on how to write and what it is to be a writer. Or, better yet, what it's like to be Stephen King (in the beginning, it sounded like really shitty work). Stephen King's a great airplane read, I guess (if that's what you really want to aspire to becoming), but I would love to hear tips on writing from, say, Chuck Palahniuk, whose forthcoming "Diary" pulls off what Stephen King does but with only a visceral third of the page count.

Either way, I felt a strange pull with "On Writing," and then realized that my blog was nothing more than a real-time version of King's book, which spelunks deep into the grind of writing, a grind I found a bit self-indulgent and whiny when I could finish a paragraph and look over my shoulder to survey the terrian.

So what?

Thanks to Mr. King and my far lovelier wife, I have to (again) figure out what I'm doing with my blog. In my heart I know I have been pussyfooting with the text here. I should stop whining about time and distractions and give you all a brief update on the magic going on behind the curtain. I'm sorry.

Another vow

No links.
No goofy pictures.
No politics.
No whining.
No more rants/essays/ramblings (as above).
Just writing, from me or One Word or updates.

But before the vault door closes

I do have to mention this Internet error message I got today, if just for its inherent, fortune-cookie philosophy.

You have requested data that the server has decided not to provide to you. Your request was understood and denied.

I'm gonna be thinking about that one all day.