Too Much About Other People

So I'm going through the manuscript trying to stitch up the gaping holes in plot, motivation, character. Don't know if this poor devil is going to make it. It's been a real trooper so far but I want to prepare myself for the idea that it might just bleed out right here on the operating table.

Seems like I've got too many chapters from other points of view. We'll have to see how that plays out in the end. So far it's one chapter after another from various other points of view, and I have a feeling that as we move deeper into the second (and then the third) act, the POV will resolve itself around the main character, and I'm not sure how that will work. Despite my grave doubts, however, I press on. Yes, like a set of adhesive fingernails, I press on.

Too Clever by Half

Nothing worse than a writer who is aware of the big words and how they function but who lacks the overall command to make their vocabulary really work for them. And yet, you have to give people like that a bit of credit, no? For trying, anyway?

I don't know. Most of my drafts make me cringe at least once or twice per page; I always have a few groaners in there, a few places where I clearly got lost amid the glittering polysyllables.

But I have to keep trying, because for me (and this is difficult to articulate given my limited talent) the only real reward comes in telling a thing right, in making the words sing just a little, not much, but just enough that the constructions give an impression of solidity, give the reader a small pulse of aesthetic pleasure. For example, there's not a single misstep, a single poor sentence, in any of the JJ or VN canon (although VN's early short stories have their flaws) or, if you need something more immediate, read one of the stories from the New York Times online.

So having said all that I will now reproduce one of my groaners from years past that still makes me cringe today: I was trying to describe a man waiting for a train (on which he was to encounter himself, or his double -- I was reading a lot of Borges) who, as he made his way along the train station's concourse, weaved through the racks of postcards which were like "apocryphal trees."

Oh! Still makes me cringe! Like fingernails down the blackboard, these are the words of my life.

How I Operate

Here's how I work it:

My mind riots with complaints and and woe-is-me visualizations all centered around the lack of time I get to write. I think about checking into a hotel. I think about running to some shack on some shaley mountainside in West Virginia to scriven to the strobe of a guttering candle. Ridiculous fantasies parade before my mind's eye: My son and wife weeping at my graveside, throwing skyward the pages of my latest manuscript which would have, could have been a masterpiece if only I'd lived to finish it! If only I hadn't died of overwork, broken down in the traces like an old mule.

Then, presto! I get a day to write. A whole day, how beautiful. And what do you suppose happens next? I screw around. I fritter. I procrastinate. Sand falls in the hourglass and still I postpone, I delay, I forestall...

Back to the AM

Hey Steve:

Great post below. I was laughing out loud at the description of the cookies and their effect on your digestive system. I was laughing out loud at the blown budget and all the rest of it. Yes, I know how that goes. I know it all.

Holidays. Well, my mother, who had been scheduled to come down and visit us, just backed out and is not coming after all. Less than 24 hours before her scheduled flight, she called and said that the last time we talked (when I was only trying to confirm how many reservations to get for a Christmas brunch) I'd hurt her feelings with my brusque and stressed phone-manner. Hurt her feelings to such a degree that she wasn't coming any more.

Who the fuck does that? This is like the third time she's canceled a trip to come and see us in the last two years. Who the fuck backs out of a Christmas trip at the last fucking second? I'm not so much angry for myself; I'm angry for my little son, who is only 14 months but is cute as can be, and who doesn't really have a relationship w/his paternal grandmother (kind of hard when she keeps backing out).

And how exactly is it my fault? What, I'm not allowed to be stressed? Isn't that the point of the holidays? I mean, motherfucker, are you telling me that my family won't see me unless I've been purged of all frustration, doubt, and acrimony toward my family? If that's the case, we might as well just call it a day and save ourselves the trouble of planning for all of the Christmases in the future.

Well, maybe that's God doing for me, etc. Maybe that's the way to look at this. Because now we're home, just me and the wife and the family, for Christmas.

BTW, our budget is blown too. Has been blown. Won't un-blow for months. Fucking Christmas!

Video Olympics

Hey... sorry so long between posts...

I remember very early on in our relationship, perhaps even our very first meeting, when you told me that wonderful analogy... that old memory of hitting the keyboard keys to make that video olympics stick figure run down the track on the old Apple II... how you compared hitting those keys faster and faster to the time that builds up between sexual encounters... I fucking loved that... I knew we were meant to share our lives in some way when you threw that out on the table.

Sometimes I feel that way with this blog... it's almost like hitting the keys faster and faster is that build up of other bullshit that I write... some that I have to write... some that I write because I think it'll push my career forward... but it's almost never brutally honest... I haven't used the word fuck in any of the writing I've been doing... and that just ain't honest cuz I use the word fuck like six million times a day in daily conversation...

Anyway, I guess I get the occasional urge to really let loose, to let the shit fly without worry about who's reading it, repercussions, the impact on my career, my family, my golf game, my dog.... it's so nice to just not give a shit every once in a while.

I'm handling it all a lot better than years past. Talked about that in a meeting last week... I'm not so prone to grumbling and bitching... I know the Christmas bullshit is important to the wife and the kids, so I back off and participate as needed and give lots of smiles and hugs and just let it happen... cuz I think that's what God's will is... God's will is to keep Steve out of the picture as much as possible... at least when he wants to take action to make changes... let Steve get involved only when he's helping keep the Christmas magic alive for wife and kids... that's it.... when Steve's ready to start grumbling, he should take the fucking dog for a walk.

Christmas lights, fuses that have to be replaced, a Christmas tree that will be left alone for two weeks with lights on a fucking timer... bags and bags and bags full of bullshit and we haven't even begun to pack our clothes... two hundred Christmas cards out the door... holiday cookies... barely able to take a decent shit because my intestines are so backed up with shortening and sugar and butter and chocolate chips because I have no fucking power over cookies.... gingerbread that fills the house with delicious smells for days but pisses me off because it smells like Christmas, and that creates that immediate Pavlovian reaction of feeling the credit card burn its way through my wallet... scrambling so the kids can buy presents for their teachers... the stockings.. Oh God, the stockings.... when we're finally done shopping, blown the budget completely out of the water, the wife will head out "just to pick up a few little things for the stockings".... another couple of hundred bucks later and they overflow, candy, candy, candy that I will eat for weeks, and back up my intestines even more, the shit coming out in dribbly nonproductive rectum reddening squirts of guilt and remorse, and I will wipe my ass and wash my hands and open the cookie tin again before they are completely dry...

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....

Anything is Better Than Working on the Book

This is the dream I had two nights ago: A hockey game seen from the tenth row of the bleachers, slightly above and to the left of the action. Below me two goalies are fighting while the referees and other players (forwards centers defensemen) look on, sometimes skating around to get a better view. Both goalies are lying on the ice: a bearded man in a green sweater and a man with dreadlocks and a maroon sweater, both of them ensconced in their bulky goalie pads.

One of the bearded goalie's arms is missing below the elbow and has been fitted with a black wooden peg which the bearded goalie is using to steadily bludgeon his opponent. The blows from the black peg-arm fall with metronomic regularity; it's clear that the dreadlocked goalie is beaten and incapable of defending himself. I yell and pound on the glass for someone to stop the fight, but the steady driving blows from the black peg go on and on.

Eventually the all the hair and skin is pounded away from the dreadlock-goalie's head, leaving a white gleaming skull in which shift back and forth two helpless eyes. Now the wooden arm, as it lands its blows, makes a clinking sound on the shining bone in which the overhead sodium lights are reflected. The beaten goalie's face and hair hang around his neck like a frayed collar. Still nobody stops the fight. The referees, the players, and the crowd are all sunk, like me, in dream-quicksand.

A Helpful Dream

Still not writing. But I did go lie in bed and read the last three pages of Lolita again. So now I've found two writers whose work consistently yields some lesson or pleasure every time I pick it up: Joyce and now Nabokov. I'm sure there are others! I spent twenty years re-reading Joyce and wouldn't touch Nabokov because of the lurid reputation that Lolita had acquired (even though I read it myself when I was a drunken collegiate lout). Which just shows what a fool I am.

Anyway, I was reading the final three pages when H.H. is standing there at the canyon's edge and hears the whispering of children at play. That passage is so satisfying that I decided to close my eyes and think about it awhile and my thinking slowly faded into sleep but right at the edge of sleep, just when my thoughts stop being my own and become someone else's, I heard this voice telling me that I should not judge myself too harshly, but should do my duty by my characters and give them the best possible story in which to live, and that when I'd made a good-faith attempt at this I would be free of them and could move on. This seemed like such wonderful, sensible advice that I promptly relaxed and went to sleep.

You might think that I awoke from my nap refreshed and that perhaps I tumbled drowsy and happy to my keyboard where the words came forth in a golden flow; that hasn't happened, I'm sorry to say. Apparently procrastination trumps epiphany.