Monday, March 14, 2005

A simple status update goes horribly awry on this edition of Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks

So a long time ago (ok, two months ago) I posted a post (namely the post linked to between these parenthesis) that included a list of things I've written and completed and things I'm writing now. And I intend to update that list when it's worth updating. Like, when I can, because things have happened. But that seems really tiring right now, so I'm just going to talk about this weekend.

This weekend, I did a lot, and maybe, some of what I did was good.

Thanks! Good night, everybody!

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Okay, tiring or not, I'm incapable of posting something to the internet that's anywhere between like five words and 27,000 words. One extreme or the other, s'gotta be.

So this weekend, I think I logged about 12 hours at the laptop and hit three different coffee shops doing so. (The formerly-was-but-I-still-call-it-the-Lakewood Arabica, Common Grounds, and the CWRU Arabica, for the obsessively curious, the locally minded, and the rest of everyone else.) That's a pretty busy weekend's worth of writing, and was probably more time writing than I'd spent in the last week before that, total.

The story I'm working on's a trip. Since the beginning of this year I've completed two short stories, which is one more short story than I managed to complete in the previous three years combined, but is also one fewer completed novels and one fewer completed drafts of a second novel, and it's been a while since I took a calc class so you'll have to do the math yourself. In fact, the math here haunts me to such a great extent, that I must move on to a new paragraph, and leave the math boxed up in here for all eternity, never to be visited again by me. Ever.

The two short stories I completed before this month, one was 3000 words, and one was 3750 words, which both seem like nice numbers for word counts for short stories, albeit smaller than I'd ever tried to do with pretty much anything. The story I'm working on now, despite the "keep it short" momentum I had coming out of the prior two stories, currently clocks in at 9000 words, and it lacks an ending. It's a difficult story to end, because it's more about...it's not so much a story in that things happen and they reach some conclusion; what happens is that a guy spends his day thinking about stuff that's happened to him, and I think the conclusion I reached tonight, driving home from a visit to my girlfriend's after spending the afternoon writing, is that the conclusion of the story isn't so much some plot element that happens, but some kind of emotional resolution--the guy having to take everything he's thought about during the course of the day, and decide what he's going to do with it. This is tricky because, well, it is. Because I made a lot happen in 9000 words. I think.

I say I think because I also wrestle with the potential that this story is a huge bloated descent into self-indulgent twaddle with no point or purpose for being. Like maybe everything in this story is as good as I feel it could be if I could just make it all reach a point of some kind of emotionally satisfying "ending" for the reader...or maybe it's just me not growing up and getting a real job, like becoming a coal miner or a CEO or something. The damned thing is, I don't know which it is.

But lucky for me, I think I also came to another sort of conclusion tonight, and that's that it's time to just make the story end, and make it end as well as it can, or at least as well as I think it can, and then let it go out there to the maybe two lit mags that might not mind reading through 10,000 words of potential twaddle, and let them reject it, then I can come back to it in four months with a fresh perspective and the willingness to cut it in half, which I don't think I have right now. Or maybe it gets accepted (which I alternately think is likely and impossible) and then I got nothing left to think about but where I'm going to put my trophies when they start coming in by the truckload.

I also figure this story would be so much easier to finish writing if it wasn't a love story, because I now spend a lot of time thinking things like, "Aren't I too old to be writing stories about girls?" and "You know, if you would just break down and buy cable television, you could totally go watch Trading Spaces and blow off writing for the next twelve years." That latter thought is relevant, in that, my love for Trading Spaces knows no bounds, and if I could figure out how to package that love up into a 10,000 word short story, I'd be a much better writer, I like to tell myself. In truth, I recognize that the story's about a lot more than love, but when you've got a guy and a girl and they might love each other, well, they get all obnoxious with it and start crowding the room, and pushing thoughts of "death" and "depression" out the windows, and pretty soon you're asking them to stop please stop making out on your counter.

Do you know what I'm saying?

You don't?

Then please, allow me to explain:

This story's either hack shite or mature shite. Now it's just about figuring out which adjective's going to be left when I make the word "shite" disappear.

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