bookfraud

I have five short stories in various stages of completion. A couple are a mess, two are looking OK, and only one is ready for prime time.

I thus find myself in a rare, wonderful, and distressing predicament — what the hell comes next? There was a time when I would work on a single story (or novel), work on it until I sweat blood and could not stand it, until I had polished and polished and polished to a high sheen, then collapsed in disgust and anger and the crap that had resulted.

For many reasons, at present, there are five things on my plate. Five fingers on the hand. Five freaks a’ trippin’. Five reasons not to procrastinate.

As my novel grows mold upon editors’ desks, I have busied myself with the short form, something I have not mastered despite my best efforts. Now, here’s what I don’t understand: many writers do this all the time.

I know one freak who seems to publish a new short story a week (if reading this, you know who you are); he is renown among friends for his work ethic (among other things). I admire his work and his work ethic, though it escapes me how he does it.

Perhaps he’s the bastard child of Joyce Carol Oates and Isaac Asimov, two scribblers known for their prodigious output. Perhaps he’s cloned, or has an evil writing twin, or is so hyped on sugar that he can write while sleeping.

Five young men

If writing is rewriting, I’m doing some serious writing though with every rewrite I feel like I’m doing a moonwalk; i.e., going backwards. (This must have something with
my present circumstances, I tell myself.) I am going to submit all five of these buggers. I promise.

I just don’t know when.

It’s been two months since I posted to this blog. I actually have a reason, a good one — good, at least, in most writers’ eyes.

By nature, I’m depressive, and if not for that fact, I might have written something by now, something pertaining to the larger world of death and loss, of grief and the bottomless anguish one feels with the loss of a loved one. A couple of months ago, my father became ill, and he passed away three weeks later. The details aren’t important, nor are appeals for readers’ sympathy.

And if I weren’t such a cynic, perhaps I would have written a tribute to my father or perhaps not posted this without a pretentious title. You know, How Dad Inspired Me to Become a Writer, or something to that effect, true or not. How I am the person I am today because of him (well, duh).

But I do get depressed more often than your average lad, and I don’t want to sound like an ungrateful snot, but I’m not going to write about Dad, except to say I was fortunate to have seen him before he died. Wife and I did an inordinate amount of travel over the course of a month, shed many tears, and were gratified at the number of family and friends who came to comfort my mother and the rest of us.

The fact is — and it is not a small thing — that Dad dying pretty knocked the wind out of me, and writing has assumed its rightful importantce in the universe, which is to say, it is of little importantce. I cannot say that writing makes me even feel better, much less if it makes me a better person.

Not quite

There are writers who work through their mourning, pounding the keyboard as a means of catharsis. There is the school of thought that posits you should keep writing in your most painful moments. That the feeling of anguish has its own shape on the page, and one can truly give it voice only when one is experiencing it.

Personally, I would have punched someone in the face had they suggested that I needed to sit down after my father’s funeral and get my feelings on paper. For those whose singular goal in life is their art, this is a desired (if not admirable) thing.

One of the biggest shortcomings of my fiction is that it can be all brain, little heart. While I’ve recognized this and have improved my writing as such, I’ll always go for wit over emotion (Dylan over Springsteen, Borges over Neruda, etc.)

That’s the real reason I’ve been kind of a chickenshit of late — I have nothing clever to say, spill my “true feelings” and reveal something that I care not to share. Which is what they tell you to do in writing class.

Over and out.