On my own writing, or lack of

Writing projects I am ostensibly working on right now:

• A currently untitled long novel about five main characters grappling with history: their own personal histories, the intimate histories of their various relationships, and the overall scheme of public and/or global history. Takes some inspiration from two characters originally roughly created during NaNoWriMo 2003, idea fleshed out during 2004 during a many-months long burst of writing (300,000 words of “zero draft” quality).

• A long short story, “Welcome to Planet Fabulous,” that started out in 2003 under a very different title focusing on a 30-something stuck-in-childhood female pedophile; in the current incarnation, last worked on in October 2004, she’s now a college aged girl with college aged girl problems, but interesting problems, I hope. (Though actually she is a 30-something happy-to-be-grown-up female who can’t quite shake the feeling that something went wrong, somewhere along the line, and she tends to think about some stuff that happened in college, though never too deeply, not as deeply as the story lets on.) Common themes between incarnations: distance between herself and her parents, distance between herself and her past, character’s desire (vague or firm) to fix something (in potentially the wrong ways).

• A short short story, currently untitled, about an alcoholic living in Cleveland during the winter who drives a snow plow who does a quote-unquote very bad thing. Loosely related to “There Were Lightning Bugs,” see below. Main character, I’ve come to think, is who Holden Caulfield would be if he grew up to become one of David Foster Wallace’s hideous men. Only very recently begun, only really lacking an ending for it to be considered a finished draft. Surprised me by showing a possible connection to the Bugs story, which reminded me of an idea I had shortly after writing the Bugs story, about the writing of a sequence of stories, all loosely connected to each other, with moments from the various stories illuminating aspects of the other stories in the cycle, all of the stories which could be ultimately, eventually packaged together as The Dildo Cycle. Might be a bit too ambitious to contemplate right now, though.

Writing projects I have completed in the last four years:

• One short story, “There Were Lightning Bugs,” about a late-20s-something going-nowhere male thinking back to childhood, when his sister had a pet rock and his bored parents were still alive. The pet rock was named Dildo, and it died; later in life, the main character’s sister went to jail for computer hacking-related crimes. Vague focus on a theme of the existence or lack of imagination in the two main characters, the brother and the sister. Has been rejected by five publications, but I won’t start worrying until there’s 30 rejection letters on my desk. Maybe even more—I’m very proud of this story, in that it does exactly what I believe it needs to do, and I did it just right. Is now loosely related to short story mentioned above.

• One novel, Curl, about a 20-something guy, his psychic mother, his genius scientist father, his neurotic ex-girlfriend, his dangerous and damaging best friend, and a female stranger with very red hair, and how they deal with the main character’s father’s morality-gone-AWOL,-maybe? unknowable scientific creation/mistake, a mysterious, unmutable cloud of smoke that has popped into existence right outside Ashtabula, Ohio. Slightly fantastic centerpiece, but, attempts to tackle themes of science and romance, game theory and national enemies, complex personal relationships and love and loss. Originally drafted during NaNoWriMo 2001, final copy completed just prior to NaNoWriMo 2003. Proposal letter has been rejected by four agents. Won’t start worrying until there’s a lot more rejection letters than that on my desk.

Amount of real actual work I’ve managed to complete tonight:

• Yeah, how about nothing.

That’s it. That’s what I’ve been doing with my life. A handful of as-of-yet not abandoned projects, a pair of completed projects with a smattering of rejection letters between them. It doesn’t feel like all that much, even when I remind myself that half of the last four years were devoted to a single novel (during which time, somehow, the completed short story was also written), and that some amount of time before the first novel began, I was still putzing around with poetry, before I decided (wisely, I think) to abandon it in favor of prose. Not to mention the constant existence of both a full-time job and a sometimes distracting personal life. All of that taken into account, this should seem like a not so bad amount of material to have produced by this point.

And yet.

There’s some truths you have to learn for yourself, along the way. Truths I’ve learned about myself along the way include:

• I’m very bad at sending things out, seeking publication. It’s taken some conscious effort in the last half year to get better at this, and while I wouldn’t pronounce myself cured, I’d say that yes, I have gotten better. This has required the development of systems that involve devotion of a single night a week to the preparation of mailing materials (and acceptance of the accompanying loss of writing time this entails) and consumption of cookies and/or donuts and/or chicken. Fear of rejection, conveniently, has never been the factor that’s prevented me from sending materials out. These days, I cherish rejection, because it means that yes, I did, in fact, send something out, and it means I can call myself a real writer, not a hobbyist. I might not do the little dance of joy when I see the envelopes with my address written in my handwriting on them when I open up my mailbox on my way home from work, but they’re still nice to see, and they’re nice reminders of what’s been done and what will be done again. No, the major initial factor preventing me from sending stuff out was sheer laziness. (I’m selectively lazy. Write a novel? Sure. Write an address on an envelope? Get bent.) Now, I guess, the factor’s becoming a lack of material worth sending out.

• Writing one novel doesn’t mean writing novels becomes easier. Nope. I’m looking at the stack of paper on my kitchen table right now, a stack of pages with 300,000 words worth of rough ideas printed across them, and I’m thinking of the file on my laptop with a prologue now contained within it, a prologue that bears little to no resemblance to much of anything contained within the stack of pages, and I’m thinking of the other file on my laptop that has about a single page’s worth of Chapter One saved within it, the ideas and events of which I never imagined would have to happen when I was originally writing the 300,000 words, the ideas and events of which I didn’t really latch on to until I was almost done freshly reading through those words for the first time, and I’m thinking, “You’ve got to be shitting me,” because, really, you’ve got to be shitting me. I recognize that my methods are somewhat work intensive, and I’m okay with that, because I work how I’m comfortable working, but, my god, man, this ought to be so much easier now, with one completed novel under my belt. But nope. Writing novels doesn’t get easier with practice. It just gets more challenging, I suspect.

• I really do work better in coffee shops, I think. I was writing in coffee shops until a month or two ago, when I decided to try working at home, in an effort to save a little time and to save the five bucks a pop each trip to the coffee shop inevitably wound up costing me, damned tip jars, damned nice-guy genes. I have gotten some work done at home; I wrote the entire prologue for this second novel right where I’m sitting now. And to avoid working on that novel I did start writing this draft of this story about this guy who drives the snowplow. But the last few days have been pretty skittish. While I’m not ready to call it quits on the writing from home thing just yet, because I think there’s been other factors at play other than the distraction of not being in a distracting place, I’m starting to wonder.

• Starting a project is next to impossible. But once something is started, once a few lines are down with no intention of calling them perfect, spitting stuff out becomes easy. I mean, yeah, okay: I recognize that spitting out 300,000 words worth of stuff—even though that stuff is actually zero-draft quality—in under a year is probably grounds for hospitalization on the basis of insanity. But I work well that way. I can spit and spit and spit until time runs out. Once stuff is spat out, revising it is hard but not next to impossible at first, then pretty easy once I get going, though not necessarily as easy as the spitting process. Revising often involves totally re-writing, though I still think of it as revising, perversely. Once I get into sentence-level stuff, moving sentences and/or words around, I tend to over-do it, and lose much of, though not all of, my forward momentum, getting mired in the mundane. So there’s hurdles with starting, and there’s hurdles with revising. Finishing, on the other hand, is sort of a hurdle right in front of a brick wall. You can jump it, but you’re just going to hurt yourself. I’m not sure what the deal is here but I seem to have the most trouble with finishing things. Which is why I’m way proud of the novel and the (one) short story. Because they’re done. Or abandoned in a state that I feel happy with them, at least. No art ever being finished, yadda yadda.

• Bullet points make writerly introspection sexy.

So.

So. So, I’m sorry. What was the question?