Free your mind, and the blog will follow, again

Despite my avowed interest in writing novels for the rest of my life to the exclusion of most other activities (including "working" or "sleeping" but not "staring at girlfriend" and "playing Final Fantasy"), I've been writing short stories for the last three years because I've been over-run with doubt: what idea could I possibly have that's worth pursuing to novel-like lengths? What the hell do I know about anything that anybody would want to pay attention to for longer than fifteen minutes, anyways? Just who the fuck do I think I am? Or maybe I got to that point because of all the short stories I'd started writing, only to abandon, incomplete and unloved. Or maybe it was because of all the books I've read in the last few years: look at all this great work and not so great work and you try to tell yourself you have something worth contributing to this morass of language and ideas. And it wasn't always this way; I wrote a novel and drafted a much longer second novel in a three year span, diving head-first into each story with reckless abandon. In what direction went the brashness and blatancy of my post-collegiate ideals? A question neither here nor there. Either way, I took a turn toward the short-form, figured I could hone my craft while I waited for the next big thing to come into my brain, the thing that would demand my uninterrupted attention for a long period of time. And yes, thank you for asking, the time spent on short stories was time well spent. Despite all the failure and despite all the rejection letters I've managed to produce about a dozen stories I like and am glad I wrote. I played with style and I've learned more about what I can do with it. And I've taken risks. And so the question now is, when I'm starting to get (according to me) decent at short stories, why now, why a novel now, why this sudden newly re-discovered desire to commit? I blame Steve Erickson, and I blame David Lynch. I blame Steve Erickson because I loved his book Zeroville, especially the style of it, the pop energy, the short-short sections piling up one on the other, the effortless rumble of rushing. It's an energy I decided I wanted to emulate in my own writing, which often (without supervision) tends toward the drawn-out, the circumlocutious, the hyperbolic-parenthetic. Get back to basics, man. And I blame David Lynch because that crazy bastard reminded me you're allowed to trust the shit that comes out of your brain, whatever it is. Somewhere in one of those DVD featurette interviews I've gobbled up like leftover Thanksgiving turkey, he said so. And I was like, Oh. Oh, right. You mean, the right answers aren't known, but made? Right. Shit, man, I forgot. So I turned back to my laptop, took two openings of two recently begun but little-developed and totally unrelated short stories, stuck 'em together into a single file, and started adding more periods and section breaks all over the place. And here I am again, working on another novel. The rest is whatever.