taking stock

Too many projects or not enough? Until this year, my routine has been to focus on one story through two drafts or until it was clear to me it wasn't working, then on to the next story. I rarely worked on multiple pieces at once, though I was and still am not averse to jotting down occasional notes/lines. If they speak to me strongly enough, they'll hang around until I get to them.

Having decided to submit some of my work this year, the whole process has changed. First, I do not believe any of my work is near publishable after two drafts. So anything I think I might want to submit needs intensive rewriting. Which is necessary and fine, but it also means I'm working on stories I've already told and the new ones still want to be heard. So I've tried to carve some time for those as well. The net result is I've probably written more on a pure volume scale than at any time since I drafted my last (terrible!) novel a decade ago. 

Every day I question the value of my work. I've had one story in circulation since February; three rejections and that's fine. (I will be the most shocked person in the world if anything I write gets accepted somewhere.) The more important question is what am I learning from the process; am I becoming a better writer? One would hope so. I don't mind submitting my work and I don't mind going through the oftentimes hell of rewrites. It's the time spent looking for markets that I find exhausting. Most of the markets I've found are way out of my league, and the more appropriate ones are overloaded. But I go after the appropriate ones anyway. I imagine building a list over time will alleviate the problem somewhat. 

The new stuff I've worked on this year, perhaps as a result of revisiting my old stuff, is not like any of my prior work. The bulk of it, for starters, doesn't even really fit in the weird/horror category where most of my stories live. Perhaps it will as it mutates (heh) but I don't think so. This writing seems to be serving two functions for me: a)helping me creatively deal with a life that has been, truthfully, rather difficult for a while and looks to continue to be for the near future and b)bringing me back to the joy I got out of writing before feeling like it had to have a purpose beyond simply creating. 

I'll be honest: at least once I day I want to burn everything I've written. At least once I day I hate my mind and myself. At least once a day I want to run away from everything. It's easier to shine if you're standing in a dimmer light, no? I figure the doubt about the validity of the work just comes with territory. I know I'm not all that talented. And maybe that's why I pushed myself to submit work this year--not for validation (seriously, the validation has to first come from yourself--everything is else is frosting on the cake), but to ensure I'm still growing as a writer. It is not a craft you master: it's a craft you continually learn, and if you plug your ears...well, your deafness will be reflected in the work.

So I plug away, like every writer ever. I'm not much given to illusions, and these days I'm not much given to dreams. But I've got these stories I'd like to tell...

the lines on the wall look like a peregrine falcon diving after its prey (II)

A continuation of Messy Room, re-titled and growing. Writing free of pressure, writing because writing is what I do. Most of this has been composed by hand late in the evening.

Lying in bed he felt the pain in his back. A stiff shot of hurt that originated in the middle of his spine and rose to encompass all the space beneath his shoulders, like a painting of a phoenix rising. It never hurt during the day, when he was upright. Sitting was fine, standing was fine. Lying down was what flicked the pain switch from Off to On. Maybe he stretched too hard at the office when he leaned back in his chair and raised his hands over his head, a practice he did multiple times a day unconsciously. Maybe his bones were rotting. When it hurt like this he imagined steel replacing his bones. Like a Giger creation but minus the interlocking vaginas and penises. The steel would be cold. Not even the muscle, blood and viscera surrounding could warm it. The cold would replace the back pain with a deeper ache. His movements would stiffen, not that they were fluid now. Unlike bone, steel was unyielding. If he strained hard enough his skin would stretch and tear apart, like tight plastic wrap penetrated and dragged by a fork. Envisioning this helped him go to sleep before his wife came to bed, though he of course knew the pain was originating in muscle, not bone. Most mornings when he awoke he could barely move and tears mixed with the sleep in his eyes and made it impossible to see. A hot shower erased the pain and cleared his eyes. Paying the water bill was never a problem.

The boxes, now those scared him. There were so many cluttering his living room now. Mostly from Amazon or other online retailers, though there were a few from the local grocery store as well. All of the boxes were empty. When they arrived they had contained things he thought he needed. Sometimes this remained true but often he found he didn’t need anything in the boxes after all. He threw these unneeded things away or donated them to friends and charities. The boxes remained. He couldn’t bring himself to recycle them or even break them down so they’d lay flat and he’d have more room. They were all over the place, in front of the windows, blocking out the sun. They were a fire hazard. They scared him, yes, but he took no action. It wasn’t actually the boxes that scared him. It was their emptiness. A container that no longer contained anything. He thought of putting something in them, utilizing them for storage. This solution would not work, however, as he owned nothing that needed storing. So they remained, neatly stacked, waiting. He largely abandoned his living room, choosing to spend most of his time in the bedroom, bathroom or kitchen, which remained free of boxes for the time being. He was also waiting.

In the breakroom at work there are paper cups with inspirational quotes and poorly drawn portraits of the person to whom the quote is attributed, clearly done on a computer by someone with minimal design skills. These cups are supposed to inspire he and his co-workers to innovate and change their mindset and other buzzword topics which ultimately translate to a directive to make the shareholders more money. One of his coworkers defaces a cup every day by adding to the quotation or crossing it out and changing it altogether. The most popular of these defaced cups features Gandhi. His quote is crossed out and replaced with a quote from Conan the Barbarian who, when asked what is best in life, replies “To crush your enemies -- See them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!” It was marginally more inspiring than the Gandhi quote but he still did his job the same way every day and collected a paycheck every two weeks as the cups choked up landfills even though they were supposedly compostable. The night janitorial staff threw them all into the same bag which went into the trash dumpster. Except for the defaced cups, which sat in a line on the breakroom counter for almost a month before disappearing. It was thought that a SLT (Senior Leadership Team) member saw them and ordered their removal, but no one knew for sure. The poorly drawn quotation cups remained, and it was gradually realized they would never go away.

fire pit

For Father's Day last year I received a fire pit. If I look out the window of my office, where I do the majority of my writing, I can see it. Of late I've been wondering what it would like to print out everything I've written the last ten years, start a nice fire in the fire pit, and burn all of it. I won't do it, of course, but I wonder if the urge is unusual. 

Somewhere around 9th grade my sister gave me a biography of Sylvia Plath, whose Collected Poems I had recently read. The biography had a large impact on me--it was the first bio of a writer I'd read, and already at that age I was writing a lot and envisioned myself becoming a writer. The book alerted me to the dangers that path might take, and the ecstasies too. One of the images that stuck with me then and that has been with me ever since is Sylvia burning the draft of her second novel, which would have been about Ted, in the immediate aftermath of their marriage falling apart. What did that feel like? How deep was her anger and despair to take such a violent step, one that could not be undone? These are questions we'll never know the answer to. At least there must have been a sense of release in doing so and perhaps a feeling of energy coming from the flames. These days most of us would only need to hit a couple of keys to destroy our work. It doesn't strike me as very cathartic. 

It's not that I've suddenly decided I hate everything I've written. I'm just wondering if a sacrifice is needed. But I've never been one to bargain with The Muse, because like all goddesses in their dealings with mortals, The Muse will always win. So I guess those boxes of papers and my external drive of files is safe for now. The real problem is that even if I burned everything, I'd still wake up the next morning and feel compelled to write. Some things you just can't escape.

messy room (fragment)

A fragment I doodled. Sometimes you have to stop the projects you are working on and just write, regardless of whether it will ever fit anywhere or not. I kinda hope there is more to this one day...

He longed for a messy room, believing it to be a sign of a creative mind, and he’d tried to create one in the downstairs rec room but as soon as there were more than two empty cans or a blanket casually tossed on the floor he’d clean it up. Don’t clean it up, let the mess grow, fester, blossom, he’d tell himself but it was as if an outer force compelled him to tidy up, forcing his hands to pick up the cans and put them in the recycling bin or fold the blanket and place it neatly on the corner of the couch. As much as he wanted to blame an outer force he knew it was something in him that was fundamentally broken and as such had to control his environment. These episodes depressed him greatly. Incapable of creating a messy room, he felt sure his mind was dull and unimaginative. His partner did not talk to him about these episodes. His partner only asked him if he was going to make dinner. If he said yes, his partner would inform him that she sincerely hoped what he made this time was better than last time. I guess maybe you should make it then, he’d say, with no real emotion. He would then retreat to the room he’d failed to make messy and put on an old David Bowie record and wish that he could have alien thoughts and sing in an alien tongue.

The voice in his head was not alien. Maybe it had been, once, long ago, but the familiarity of it and the fact that it had been part of his life for as long as he could remember rendered any sense of strangeness nonexistent. The voice told him what the voice considered to be important things, such as when he should go to bed and whether he should have a salad or spaghetti or both for dinner. The voice reminded him that the wheels could fall of his car and that he was old enough to have a heart attack. He could understand why the voice considered these things important, especially if the voice were truly part of him, which he wasn’t actually sure of. It was a chicken-and-egg question and like many things in his life, it didn’t actually matter. The voice was flat and unemotional most of the time, but every once in a while it teased him with a random line like “the silence of forgotten landscapes” that he was sure must mean something, something profound and important to his sense of spiritual well-being, which could use a buff and shine these days. He’d walk around in a semi-daze, repeating the line, humming it, letting it conjure pictures in his head that were impossibly far from the reality of the objects surrounding him. But he could never make the connection, he could never take the line and do something with it, write a grand novel or paint a grand picture or make a grand movie. Like the attempt at a messy room, this effort was doomed to failure. He didn’t blame anyone for this, though in his more bitter moments he’d make a list of everyone who had ever wronged him and pretend he was assigning blame. This sometimes made him feel better for a moment but he knew it was folly. Things were as things were, and the rec room remained ordered and spotless.

intricacies

What does the wolf see?
The wolf is busy reading Bolano and listening to New Order.

What does the lamp see?
The lamp prefers Bordeaux and finds whiskey disagreeable.

What does the common cold see?
The common cold would remind you that common is not a derogatory term.

What does the bed see?
The bed has the sheets pulled over its eyes and prefers the weight of two over the weight of one.

What does the milk see?
The milk is lonely, everyone it knows has some degree of lactose intolerance.

What does the cat see?
The cat has no need to tell.

What does the air see?
Loneliness and regret, sadness and one-sided conversations.

What does the wolf see?
The wolf is not a wolf. The wolf is over-used. Backwards the wolf is flow.

what's up doc(x)?

As I prepare to actually, seriously submit some of my stories, I'm noticing that there are still publications that insist on .doc submissions instead of .docx. I find this kinda weird--one doesn't have to keep up on the most recent technologies, but Microsoft Word 2003? Is there a reason publishers still use a decade+ old version of Word? It's no big deal from my standpoint, I just find it rather strange. But hey, if that's what they want...

purple

The whole room smells of purple. That's the only way I can describe it. You would have understood what I mean. You would have made a crack about it, something to do with The Color Purple and bad Spielberg films. All Spielberg films are bad, you insisted, but I always made you give the man Indiana Jones. He gave us that, you gave me more.

I sometimes imagine this room, so maybe I'm not walking in it right now. Maybe I'm dreaming the whole thing. These words--dream, reality, room--they are ambiguous. Too big, too loose. That's something you understood too, giving me a hard time for my obsession with words. Words never mean anything, you teasingly said over and over, while I stubbornly insisted that they did. I knew you were riling me up but I never minded. I'm ok being the serious one, the fool. I never laughed much before you, or after you. 

Funny that this room smells purple. Purple has been showing up a lot lately. So has red, but I'm so tired of garish red, red that can't put it in back in its pants or stop slobbering over every idea. Red wants to be beautiful and goes to clumsy extremes to get there. Blue is serene and the color of the water behind the door at the edge of our bed. Yellow is nausea, black is the void, white the stars. Purple is all of these things and none of these things. Purple dress, purple underwear. Purple glitter and paint.

I want to believe you are teasing me again, tempting me to step through the door. Maybe the water won't be blue. Maybe it will be purple. Maybe my eyes can't see color anymore. I tell you I can't do it but you aren't here and I'm just talking to the dust. Ask the dust, sure. I'm not really in this room. This room doesn't exist. Nothing exists. End of story, beginning of words. But it smells so strongly of purple. Purple that dresses these words, teases them to life. Like you used to.