I have
so much
to do.
Funny. I have more time than ever, and yet I still have so much to do. I have manuscripts waiting for rewrites and ideas waiting for first drafts. I have a presidential campaign to run and a home to maintain. Like any of you, I have a to do list a mile long. In fact, I am so anal about remembering what to do that I have lists to tell me where I left my lists. My lists are full of redundancies, but they do contain some of my most concise thinking on paper.
The point is (yes, I have a point), I suffer frequently from a paralysis of will. I don't wanna. I don't wanna run the vacuum, go to the grocer's, write the next article, work on the novel. "Bunheads" distracts me. Fighting with my Internet router so I can get enough signal on the laptop in the living room distracts me. Picking up an old manuscript that was never finished and reading it to discover, yes, I know how to put words together, keeps me from putting words together,
I avoid writing like the plague. I avoid re-writing as if it were Armageddon meeting me head on.
I have said this before, because it happened before. It happens often. That's the bane of my craft, at least for me, and I feel guilt and a bit of self-loathing about it. Even writing this blog, dusting off the cobwebs of my mind, so to speak, won't help, because now I am thinking not about the book that only needs a good polish to finish, but the manuscript I read through last night that essentially needs a total reboot.
And I work on neither. Sometimes I just don't see the point, sometimes I just want to play, sometimes I just don't have the energy. Right now, I have to go get the mail.
Showing posts with label On Not Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label On Not Writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
When Ambition Takes a Walk
Ambition comes and goes like a mood. It waxes and wanes like the phases of the moon. A bit of pain, a slice of unwanted or unwelcome news can knock ambition clean out of you. They can make ambition leave the building, asking as she goes, "What's the point?"
And you're left nodding your head, if you have the energy left to nod.
But ambition never stays away too long, because the point, of course, is fun. Maybe it's the doing that matters, maybe it's the reaching out to and actually touching someone else. Maybe the only one who ever sees your words or hears your songs is you, and maybe that's the point, too. Ultimately, life is joy and the point is to do something joyful.
Like Kurt Vonnegut says, we were placed on this earth to fart around.
My ambition took a hike over the weekend, leaving me with "those things a man's gotta do because a man's gotta do them." That's a shrill excuse for not writing. I usually don't need an excuse for not writing, I just don't write. But I am in the middle of something fun and special to me, and not writing feels like the wrong option, especially because I didn't feel like it.
Fortunately, my ambition returned this morning. Until then I just farted around. And it was fun.
One good thing: I finally joined a Procrastinator's Club. Still waiting for the newsletter.
And you're left nodding your head, if you have the energy left to nod.
But ambition never stays away too long, because the point, of course, is fun. Maybe it's the doing that matters, maybe it's the reaching out to and actually touching someone else. Maybe the only one who ever sees your words or hears your songs is you, and maybe that's the point, too. Ultimately, life is joy and the point is to do something joyful.
Like Kurt Vonnegut says, we were placed on this earth to fart around.
My ambition took a hike over the weekend, leaving me with "those things a man's gotta do because a man's gotta do them." That's a shrill excuse for not writing. I usually don't need an excuse for not writing, I just don't write. But I am in the middle of something fun and special to me, and not writing feels like the wrong option, especially because I didn't feel like it.
Fortunately, my ambition returned this morning. Until then I just farted around. And it was fun.
One good thing: I finally joined a Procrastinator's Club. Still waiting for the newsletter.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Being Busy
Dear Ones,
I haven't written for two days. I needed the mental break, having just finished transcribing all my notes for Ghost Music. That's just phase one; now I have to blend that material with other material that suits it and gives it plot and development, to make it a novel. This will take time and feels like a daunting task. Part of me is digesting all that stuff and hoping it comes together into a cohesive, moving and entertaining whole.
I am also in the middle of trying to set up AMBER WAVES as a hand copy paperback book through CreateSpace. This is a bit tricky for a first time self-publisher, so I am going slowly and carefully. But the reward will be a real, tangible book for sale along with the Kindle version.
I also am trying to piece together a chapbook of poetry for Kindle. My nephew and good buddy and fellow Silly Man Erik says I should keep it to between 25-40 poems, when I was thinking 100. I now think the middle ground, around 60, will be where I settle. I am also trying to bring some of his artwork if I can to the project.
Then there is my grandson. I watched him on Tuesday for a few hours and he takes all my attention, gladly. At one point he spontaneously climbed onto my lap, grabbed me for a big bear hug, held on tightly and said, "You're so beautiful!"
He melts my heart.
Then, there is tax season to consider. Don't get me started on THAT. Or politics. At least not today!
I guess I am telling you all this so I can give myself a break about taking a break. It's a busy life. Sometimes it seems too busy, but after all, it does beat the alternative. And even sorrow can bring me joy.
I haven't written for two days. I needed the mental break, having just finished transcribing all my notes for Ghost Music. That's just phase one; now I have to blend that material with other material that suits it and gives it plot and development, to make it a novel. This will take time and feels like a daunting task. Part of me is digesting all that stuff and hoping it comes together into a cohesive, moving and entertaining whole.
I am also in the middle of trying to set up AMBER WAVES as a hand copy paperback book through CreateSpace. This is a bit tricky for a first time self-publisher, so I am going slowly and carefully. But the reward will be a real, tangible book for sale along with the Kindle version.
I also am trying to piece together a chapbook of poetry for Kindle. My nephew and good buddy and fellow Silly Man Erik says I should keep it to between 25-40 poems, when I was thinking 100. I now think the middle ground, around 60, will be where I settle. I am also trying to bring some of his artwork if I can to the project.
Then there is my grandson. I watched him on Tuesday for a few hours and he takes all my attention, gladly. At one point he spontaneously climbed onto my lap, grabbed me for a big bear hug, held on tightly and said, "You're so beautiful!"
He melts my heart.
Then, there is tax season to consider. Don't get me started on THAT. Or politics. At least not today!
I guess I am telling you all this so I can give myself a break about taking a break. It's a busy life. Sometimes it seems too busy, but after all, it does beat the alternative. And even sorrow can bring me joy.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
The Grateful Writer
It's Chrristmas and the writing is going slowly, with so much else to do. But the thinking goes on full tilt. And the reading -- what follows comes from encountering a slim volume used on Amazon, wherein lay the following treasured remarks. They remind me that this is a great time to take stiock and counbt our blessings, and I for one feel particularly fortunate right now -- and many of you contribute to the reasons why I feel that way as I struggle, mostly with myself, to do the work.
If you can read this, consider yourself loved, fortunate, and skilled.
My all time vavorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, said the following in an interview in 1999 that became "Like Shaking Hands With God, a Conversation about Writing," with Vonnegut and Lee Stringer. I needed to read these words, to remind myself that what I am and what I do is a blessing. He said:
"And it's important to retreat from the hoopla on television, and what television says matters and what we're all supposed to talk about. And of course literature is the only art that requires our audience o be performers, You need to able to read and you have to be able to read awfully well. You have to read so well that you get irony! I'll say one thing meaning another, and you'll get it. Expcting a large number of people to be literate is like expecting everybody to play the French horn. It is extremely difficult . . . when we think about what reading is . . . it's impossible. Literature is idiocyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of only twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten Arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. And yet there are people like you who can look at the printed page and put shows on in your head--the Battle of Waterloo, for God's sake. The New York Times says that there are forty million people in the United States who can't read well enough to fill out an application for a driver's license. So our audience cannot be large, becaused we need a highly skilled audience, unbelievably skilled.. . . . Thank you for learning to do this virtually impossible thing."
The point to me is that writing is something the writer does not for an audience, exactly, but for himself. Lee Stringer added:
"More and more these days I find that people want to boil things down to something simple, something you can grab in a second. I also see that today people are very result oriented. We don't do anything because it's the right thing to do, or for the sake of art, or for the sake of anything unless we can prove that down the road, e, y, or z is going to happen. I guess in that kind of environment it is difficult for what we call literature to exist because a book is not all that practical in short term. It's probably infinitely practical in the long term. But you're not going to pick Timequake (Vonnegut's last novel) off the shelf and learn how to scamble eggs tomorrow. So, in that context, writing is a struggle to preserve our right to be not so practical."
I am learning every day. I am learning a sad truth, but an important one. I won't change the world by writing Ghost Music. I know this; so do you. All I can do is write it, or not, and to be honest, or not, is not a choice.
But I will be read. And for that I thank you. Merry Christmas!
If you can read this, consider yourself loved, fortunate, and skilled.
My all time vavorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, said the following in an interview in 1999 that became "Like Shaking Hands With God, a Conversation about Writing," with Vonnegut and Lee Stringer. I needed to read these words, to remind myself that what I am and what I do is a blessing. He said:
"And it's important to retreat from the hoopla on television, and what television says matters and what we're all supposed to talk about. And of course literature is the only art that requires our audience o be performers, You need to able to read and you have to be able to read awfully well. You have to read so well that you get irony! I'll say one thing meaning another, and you'll get it. Expcting a large number of people to be literate is like expecting everybody to play the French horn. It is extremely difficult . . . when we think about what reading is . . . it's impossible. Literature is idiocyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of only twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten Arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. And yet there are people like you who can look at the printed page and put shows on in your head--the Battle of Waterloo, for God's sake. The New York Times says that there are forty million people in the United States who can't read well enough to fill out an application for a driver's license. So our audience cannot be large, becaused we need a highly skilled audience, unbelievably skilled.. . . . Thank you for learning to do this virtually impossible thing."
The point to me is that writing is something the writer does not for an audience, exactly, but for himself. Lee Stringer added:
"More and more these days I find that people want to boil things down to something simple, something you can grab in a second. I also see that today people are very result oriented. We don't do anything because it's the right thing to do, or for the sake of art, or for the sake of anything unless we can prove that down the road, e, y, or z is going to happen. I guess in that kind of environment it is difficult for what we call literature to exist because a book is not all that practical in short term. It's probably infinitely practical in the long term. But you're not going to pick Timequake (Vonnegut's last novel) off the shelf and learn how to scamble eggs tomorrow. So, in that context, writing is a struggle to preserve our right to be not so practical."
I am learning every day. I am learning a sad truth, but an important one. I won't change the world by writing Ghost Music. I know this; so do you. All I can do is write it, or not, and to be honest, or not, is not a choice.
But I will be read. And for that I thank you. Merry Christmas!
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Last Blog of November
My dear friends and followers,
I anticipate that this will be my last blog for a short while. As the season progresses my time diminishes, and I fear I have too little for blogging, at least for the foreseeable future. So I want to impart some words of wisdom as my Holiday Gift to each and every one of you, for what they're worth.
First, I got quite a nice response to my most recent blogs regarding spending and celebration. My dear friend Joanne put it most succinctly: "If we spend our time loving the life we have, not obsessing about what we don't have, we don't need Black Fridays or day-after-Christmas sales. We just need one another. After all, all we take with us when we leave for the last time is the love we have inside. Me? I want all I can get so I can share it with Jim when I see him again." Jim is Joanne's loving husband who passed away suddenly eight years ago. The point is clear: we have to love one another and hold on tight.
So that is my Christmas Wish: love one another. I didn't say it first. But in a world consumed by material things -- and that's another subject for discussion down the road -- Joanne is so right: those things remain of this world even when we move on. They're nice. I like my stuff. But they all could go away tomorrow, and if I still have the love of my wife Diane and all of you, I will be fine,
Now, as to the ghosts in my head, they have been stirring things up even as I have neglected them on paper. I love that -- the writing is going on at full tilt inside my head, mapping out the course it wants to take me; the characters are writing their own stories THROUGH me now -- and that is as it should be. The great William Goldman, author of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, once quipped (I'm paraphrasing): "If the writing is going badly it won't matter if you are in the most idyllic, quiet, peaceful setting in the world, and if it;s going well you can write in an elevator."
When it's the latter, life is exhilarating.
The ghosts have added a few things, They've been talking. They say, "It's well and good that you want to write about us, remember us. But what about your own ghosts?"
I was stunned. Of course! All of a sudden the book has unfurled like a family banner and I realize that all these people are connected --= to me. The story has layers that belong together, while I have been trying to figure out ways to keep them apart. It is a revelation. And when I think, in realistic tones, that this may be my last chance at a really good novel, I start to believe that Ghost Music may be the book I was meant to write all my life, whether anyone else reads it or not.
My favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, once said regarding his best known work, Slaughterhouse Five (and again I am paraphrasing): "Sometimes a writer writes about one thing so he can write about something else altogether." He meant, in his case, writing a SyFy novel based on the idea of a single person unstuck in time so that he could relate his own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, where he was being held as a POW. Now I think the same thing may be happening to me, and I am excited as hell!
The ghosts are talking. Listen . . .
Finally, it occurs to me that one of the themes of this book needs to be stated somewhere, so here goes. How much guilt does a person lay at his or her own feet for things they could not stop?
Thank you for listening, for caring, for being there. And if I don't see you, hear from you, or blog to you again -- or even if I do -- have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
I anticipate that this will be my last blog for a short while. As the season progresses my time diminishes, and I fear I have too little for blogging, at least for the foreseeable future. So I want to impart some words of wisdom as my Holiday Gift to each and every one of you, for what they're worth.
First, I got quite a nice response to my most recent blogs regarding spending and celebration. My dear friend Joanne put it most succinctly: "If we spend our time loving the life we have, not obsessing about what we don't have, we don't need Black Fridays or day-after-Christmas sales. We just need one another. After all, all we take with us when we leave for the last time is the love we have inside. Me? I want all I can get so I can share it with Jim when I see him again." Jim is Joanne's loving husband who passed away suddenly eight years ago. The point is clear: we have to love one another and hold on tight.
So that is my Christmas Wish: love one another. I didn't say it first. But in a world consumed by material things -- and that's another subject for discussion down the road -- Joanne is so right: those things remain of this world even when we move on. They're nice. I like my stuff. But they all could go away tomorrow, and if I still have the love of my wife Diane and all of you, I will be fine,
Now, as to the ghosts in my head, they have been stirring things up even as I have neglected them on paper. I love that -- the writing is going on at full tilt inside my head, mapping out the course it wants to take me; the characters are writing their own stories THROUGH me now -- and that is as it should be. The great William Goldman, author of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, once quipped (I'm paraphrasing): "If the writing is going badly it won't matter if you are in the most idyllic, quiet, peaceful setting in the world, and if it;s going well you can write in an elevator."
When it's the latter, life is exhilarating.
The ghosts have added a few things, They've been talking. They say, "It's well and good that you want to write about us, remember us. But what about your own ghosts?"
I was stunned. Of course! All of a sudden the book has unfurled like a family banner and I realize that all these people are connected --= to me. The story has layers that belong together, while I have been trying to figure out ways to keep them apart. It is a revelation. And when I think, in realistic tones, that this may be my last chance at a really good novel, I start to believe that Ghost Music may be the book I was meant to write all my life, whether anyone else reads it or not.
My favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, once said regarding his best known work, Slaughterhouse Five (and again I am paraphrasing): "Sometimes a writer writes about one thing so he can write about something else altogether." He meant, in his case, writing a SyFy novel based on the idea of a single person unstuck in time so that he could relate his own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, where he was being held as a POW. Now I think the same thing may be happening to me, and I am excited as hell!
The ghosts are talking. Listen . . .
Finally, it occurs to me that one of the themes of this book needs to be stated somewhere, so here goes. How much guilt does a person lay at his or her own feet for things they could not stop?
Thank you for listening, for caring, for being there. And if I don't see you, hear from you, or blog to you again -- or even if I do -- have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Friday, November 18, 2011
The Ghosts Are Waiting
It is almost six pm Mountain time. I spent two hours shoveling snow off my driveway and walkways and porches this afternoon, after spending the morning first at work (4 am to 7 am) and then in Kalispell during a snow storm. My first experience driving in real winter conditions besides back and forth from my house to my or Di's work. The snow scares me -- I am not used to it. And the road to ouyr house goes pretty far up the hill, so I am always worried that I might get stuck climbing it. But the last two days have boosted my confidence greatly -- I can navigate snow covered, icy roads, and I can shovel snow for as long as it takes to get the job done. And I can drive down the hill at four in the morning in snowfall. Wow. I went into this week's work schedule frightened and anxious, and tonight I feel like maybe I can do it after all. Like I said, Wow.
But the ghosts have to wait. My energies have been elsewhere most of the week and will continue to be elsewhere much of the next holiday season. I have to mnake allowances. The first one is less writing for Helium, poems and reviews and such. Any spare time I find will go to my ghosts, and knowing that, they seem to have plenty of patience. Well, they're not going anywhere.
So happy Thanksgiving a few days early, and when you give thanks, remember your own ghosts with a smile.
But the ghosts have to wait. My energies have been elsewhere most of the week and will continue to be elsewhere much of the next holiday season. I have to mnake allowances. The first one is less writing for Helium, poems and reviews and such. Any spare time I find will go to my ghosts, and knowing that, they seem to have plenty of patience. Well, they're not going anywhere.
So happy Thanksgiving a few days early, and when you give thanks, remember your own ghosts with a smile.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Today's Entry
Went shopping!!!
Did not write today. But a ghost I was not expecting began to sing to me and I had to stop and listen. Sometimes you write best without moving the pen.
My blogs are becomming a sort of journal of my progress or lack of it. And even when I don't write at all, I still feel like I am making a bit of headway. Truth be told, Saint Nicholas Day is coming up fast and we have to prepare. It's a big thing in our household, and even after being out of the home for literally years, our kids would be disappointed if we did nothing to makr the Feast Day of Jolly Old Saint Nick. After all, I have a job app at the North Pole for whenever he retires.
Did not write today. But a ghost I was not expecting began to sing to me and I had to stop and listen. Sometimes you write best without moving the pen.
My blogs are becomming a sort of journal of my progress or lack of it. And even when I don't write at all, I still feel like I am making a bit of headway. Truth be told, Saint Nicholas Day is coming up fast and we have to prepare. It's a big thing in our household, and even after being out of the home for literally years, our kids would be disappointed if we did nothing to makr the Feast Day of Jolly Old Saint Nick. After all, I have a job app at the North Pole for whenever he retires.
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