Most importantly, get my nose, and bollocks, to the grind stone with an extensive rewrite of my novel, then called Everyman's Memory, but now called Autumn and The Fall (meanings galore and not bland, unlike most of my titles, or a study in what not to do when naming a work [From Eve Till Dawn: The Human Experiment . . . long enough for you?]). Gave myself far too much to chew with that alone.
Good thing I didn't decide to try and make a worthwhile story out of my first novel (the aforementioned one with the ludicrously long title); in that case, I would actually need to scrap the entirety of the novel, cherry picking some of my darlings, massacring the majority of the characters (including myself; got my narcissitic streak from Stephen King, I guess), wiping away the shit smears I called symbolism (it is wrought with my so-called symbolism, like my character's name being Mephistopheles spelled backwards: Selepotsihpem, or, as my friend Charlie Kane called him, Selling-Pots-And-Pans), etc.
Autumn and The Fall was not much less daunting a rebuilding project. Two characters became, essentially, figments of my main character's imaginations. Another character that had endeared himself to me dwindled into obscurity and disappeared, a dully named, but not dull, character, Bill Adams, taking his spot and then some. My genre changed for the second time (was a joke of a science-fiction frame story, then was a pseudo literary mainstream story, and now is on its way to becoming a horror story). So on. So forth. Distractions are all they've ended up being. I've become the author I never was, wasting time tinkering with character names, titles, endless edits of everything I write. My story has been in park, stalled inches outside the starting gate, for the longest time. I find I have an inability to force another sentence out unless I get the go-ahead from my fellow Absolute Write forumers. By that I mean I want a better response than, "You have a way with words, but I am not exactly sure what the hell those words are saying and if even half of them are needful ones."
What's worse is that I went from improving, incrementally, with my novel's opening to moving back to square one with a clusterfuck of a start that is confusing and off-putting to readers. Guess you could say that's to be expected with writing that is entirely new and without enough polish to at least hide the blemishes instead of removing them entirely, but it still irks me enough for me to not feel guilty about taking breaks from writing so often.
Yet even worse is that I justify all of this with bullshit like, "I need a solid foundation from which to build, or all will collapse and fall apart," and, "What's ahead is only hazy to me right now, so by pushing on I'd only be toiling in pages of nothing happening as I try to pry some sort of inspiration out of my ass."
Maybe all of this would be okay if I had anything to show for it, even an appropriately tidied up version of the opening scene of my my first chapter, it only approximately 500 words, or headway in any of those other things I planned to get at. My Japanese knowledge consists of the basics that kids in Japan barely out of the womb probably already know: the numbers, yes and no, how to say my name, a handful of words I looked up to replace profanity in my vocab, et-farking-cetera. Due to my desktop computer and our Embarq DSL being the picture of unreliability, resulting in endless computer reformats and ages spent recouping the media I lost in the process, I have little more than three episodes of The Wire and some films to show for my media viewing of the summer. After plowing through Stephen King's Dark Tower series, my reading pace petered out, Peter Straub's Ghost Story now over a week overdue, the library's new policy of forgetting all your fines if you return your books on Thursdays between 5-6 PM only enabling me just like owning books such as Blood Meridian did (no hurry, I have time . . . I have nothing but time). I am just now getting around to listening to more than the essential albums of this year that I noted in my first blog post and will likely get back to the essentials when bands such as Porcupine Tree, Muse, Nightwish, Between the Buried and Me, and so on release their albums that will likely worm their way onto that list of essentials.
Also, after gaining the infamous freshman-fifteen (exactly), I wanted to work out and lose those pounds once again over the summer. But, with my headphones malfunctioning, and my dad not wanting to mess with sending them to Sennheiser for repair because he'd have to list his credit card number on the form you send with, and my earbuds only staying in my ears when taped to them, and me being without tape for quite a while, and constantly forgetting to get tape when we were out, and not being in much of a hurry to get it subconsciously, I have only just now started to do that. Went jogging once all summer. Would've done it at least one more time if it weren't for the week-long (thereabouts) block of rainy days that followed. Being the moron that I am, I forgot to wear sunblock that time, too, and got a slight sunburn that was enough to make the back of my neck sore for days.
What's happened to the days where I churned out a novel (though admittedly crappy, at least I made something of my summer) and novella (again, at least I reached, "The end") during the summer? Or the times when I was so driven to be healthy that I'd go out and run in the snow, as it snowed, and the wind almost prevented me from making any movement forward? I'm struggling to even work my way up to doing simple tasks, like filling out my application for student loans from Sallie Mae for the upcoming fall semester at Pitt.
Also, after gaining the infamous freshman-fifteen (exactly), I wanted to work out and lose those pounds once again over the summer. But, with my headphones malfunctioning, and my dad not wanting to mess with sending them to Sennheiser for repair because he'd have to list his credit card number on the form you send with, and my earbuds only staying in my ears when taped to them, and me being without tape for quite a while, and constantly forgetting to get tape when we were out, and not being in much of a hurry to get it subconsciously, I have only just now started to do that. Went jogging once all summer. Would've done it at least one more time if it weren't for the week-long (thereabouts) block of rainy days that followed. Being the moron that I am, I forgot to wear sunblock that time, too, and got a slight sunburn that was enough to make the back of my neck sore for days.
What's happened to the days where I churned out a novel (though admittedly crappy, at least I made something of my summer) and novella (again, at least I reached, "The end") during the summer? Or the times when I was so driven to be healthy that I'd go out and run in the snow, as it snowed, and the wind almost prevented me from making any movement forward? I'm struggling to even work my way up to doing simple tasks, like filling out my application for student loans from Sallie Mae for the upcoming fall semester at Pitt.
Even the desire to have something decent my sister could read, since she's been pestering me about my novel, Autumn and The Fall, and how she wants to read it, died out quickly and I got very little of note done.
Someone needs to come along and give me a swift kick in the butt, or perhaps point your blow between my cheeks at what dangles between. I think that would send me the message, unless I happen to be like that guy on Sports Science on Fox Sports Net that managed to take a kick to the bollocks that would likely rupture an average man's testicles without even flinching.
Someone needs to come along and give me a swift kick in the butt, or perhaps point your blow between my cheeks at what dangles between. I think that would send me the message, unless I happen to be like that guy on Sports Science on Fox Sports Net that managed to take a kick to the bollocks that would likely rupture an average man's testicles without even flinching.
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