Monday, October 03, 2005

Bathed in a blue glow, this radiant goddess formed

My wife has a blog. Go there, damnit.
Mission Unclear: Awaiting Update

So, yes, I've been busy. And you?

The fact of the matter is, for about two weeks now I've been digging myself out burning hot metal as the structure my novel seems to corrode and melt around me. I've been distracted, trying to write and finding nothing but text slip through my fingers. Try painting with Jello sometimes. You'll get something on canvas, but it'll smear and roll off to the floor. I'm lacking the focus I need to get going on this damn thing, and I get swallowed once in a while by terrible notions of vapidity or obsolescence.

The game of Russian Roulette you play when writing speculative fiction is that the world seems to evolve and spin faster, overtaking you with a hot-rod acceleration, leaving you in the dust as your imagined future comes to pass. So you sit down and rewrite, trying to get ahead just a little more. You try not to fall down the rabbit hole of endless Web surfing, holing up in digital corner bars instead of the painful extraction known as wordsmiting. You just find out that there is not enough time to write. You can't carve you enough time, when if fact you can. If you really wanted to do it. If you were serious. If you had a well-thought-out idea. If you can tear yourself away from "Morrowind."

It's times like when I'm not kind to myself, when I can't stop comparing myself to other writers, when I struggle to get through the day and now beat my coworkers with my keyboard. Good Lord, can't you people see I'm busy and I don't want to overhear your conversations. I mean, Christ, I have an iPod turned up to 11 and I can still fucking hear you people mumbling to yourselves. Shut the Christ up. Thank you.

But this, all this is transference. I'm angry at myself, unable to turn lead into gold as I sit, thinking I knew what my novel was about. Imagine the words being stuck, jammed at some junction between fingertip and keyboard, a virtual swelling of content and creation just under the skin of the fingers, where the fingerprint swirls in snowflake-unique radials. I wonder if I have a voice as unique as these prints, and is it out of me or still buried under the flaming metal wreckage of a half-constructed novel with wings attached. Icarus as a writer.

It's been about two weeks and I haven't been able to churn anything clever out, and I fear it has to do with the recent dissolution of a writing group I've been a part of. I think I used them (over the summer, as well as the previous year when they were in my writing class at the University of Washington) as a sort of lead dog measure, tracking along side, challenged by the ebb and flow of everyone else's juice turned into pages. I dug the reaction from the writing group, ranging from baffled to supportive. Without them, I'm confused, without bearings. I was writing to conquer them, and not for myself. It's a shameless way to create text, but it got the job done.

So, I'm here now, wondering when I'm really going to build momentum. I can't leave this job because, well, I need to it pay bills. I need to find focus. I need to get my writing shit together. I need to believe and make those sacrifices. I start a novel immersion class on Thursday. I hope that'll get my heading North, into the great musty beyond, where my novel lies, ready to be sculpted again, from flaming wreck into flawless entity.