Week of: 8/16

Still at it, lol.

Evidenced by my actions, this has been more the year of reading (so far) than writing -- but I'm doing both, honest! There is a connection between the two, moreover, though I can't allow myself to forget that the primary thing a writer does is write.

Writing is intimidating, though. It's so hard. Not hard in the sense that finding the words is difficult (though it can be). Not primarily. It's hard in that it wears on the ego. It threatens to expose us to ourselves as fraudulent.

After all, let's say that Hemingway was right, that the first draft of anything is shit. Well, then: how much time would you feel comfortable writing shit? I don't like it at all. I don't like giving up a day, a morning, or even an hour, and then looking at my execrable output and thinking, "it was all for this??" It takes a level of faith that perhaps, as an atheist, I'm ill-disposed to employ, to believe that somewhere further down the line -- in another draft, perhaps, or (more likely) another work in some future year -- that shit will resolve itself into gold via some literary alchemical-editing process.

It may help that faith to develop to see some level of success, preferably early. I've had successes, but I've also had failures -- and some horrible feedback. I remember making a book in second or third grade, a crudely hand-drawn affair, a sarcastic prequel to the fable of the Fox and the Grapes. (In this one that selfsame fox is trying to outwit a chicken; when he fails, he resolves to try to get the tasty looking grapes instead, which I think accounts for a plothole in the original: why is the carnivorous fox bothering with grapes to begin with?) I had a bit of trouble when the teacher wasn't satisfied with my onomatopoetic rendition of the fox falling off a ladder (his ACME-flavored attempt at getting the chicken) being rendered as KERPLAT. She insisted that it ought be KERSPLAT. Now, I'll agree that this is more conventional, and that I'd been operating out of age-appropriate ignorance. But still, to require me to revamp so much of my artwork (the fox falling off of things, KERPLAT!, was a running gag, you see, and it was rendered in big, colorful letters across the several pages) to rectify this almost-isn't-an-error was... well, it seems to me now a bit of an overreach.

I'm rambling. What's my point? It's that it can be disheartening to try to hard to do something you really care to do and to feel as though the results are poor, continue to be poor, will be poor again in the future. I console myself that, really, we are poor judges of our own work (which I think true); and I have had some genuine successes in the past. But in the end, what can I do but resolve that, if it be shit, at least it will be mine -- that I will embrace being bad and do it anyway.

Week of: 8/9

After the excitement from last time, a quiet week -- for both writing and reading. Still in the thick of Under the Dome and Snow Crash. But I'll be at both for a while yet.

Week of: 8/1/26, & Summer Reading Update!

So it turns out that writing is a slow process.

I mean, I already knew that. But committing myself to regular updates here has the feeling to me of watching the status bar load. You get arbitrarily stuck on 35% for a long time for whatever reason, and then 72%, and don't even get me started on 99%. You'll be on 99% forever, and a watched status bar never loads.

But hey: I did in fact finish the draft of a story and submitted it this week! So, huzzah, lol. Of course, stories aren't ever actually "done." They're just, well, submitted... and sometimes sold, or so I've been told. But there's never a point, in anything I've ever written, where I've felt like, hey, I did it! It's over! Never a time I've read one of my stories and not made some tiny alteration, at least, or wished that I could do it over again, do it better.

Reading does offer that advantage: you do finally reach the last page. You do finally close the book with a sense of accomplishment. So I can report here that I've finished reading all ten of my chosen summer reading books! A month early, no less.

Or... I've "read" them, if audiobooks also count? Surely they must. Though I must report that the experience of reading a physical copy and listening to a book are markedly different for me. Just to clarify, I listened to Babel and Beloved, but read physical copies of all the others (which were: A Deadly Education, The Night Circus, Gwendy's Magic Feather, Middlemarch, The Prophet, Love and Video Games, Mother Night and Anna Karenina, though not necessarily in that order).

Of course, when you finish writing a story, you start writing the next. (At least, that's how I mean for it to happen -- starting tomorrow, lol.) And when you finish reading a book...

So, I'm already starting to think about my next reading project. Maybe starting next month for "Spooky Season"?? I've already plunged into another two novels, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Stephen King's Under the Dome, because I have no ability to allow myself to rest.