Writing as a sickness

Just got back from conDFW, which was in one way a good experience, talking to other small (micro?) press published authors. But the experience eventually bummed me.

I left early, hoping to see my friend S., for at least a hug, a kiss, some minor attention of some sort, but she was consumed with her own drama — a family drama, which, as you know is the worst of the worst. “I feel my head is going to explode,” she emailed me this morning, as a sort of excuse I guess for blowing me off for the whole evening. (Except she wrote the account in modern indirect style, which is kind of cool: no paragraph breaks, not quote marks, etc., as she recounted her kid’s dialogue.

Me, I dont’ feel so much as my head is going to explode as my soul is going implode.  It was a dark, stromy and lonely night, full of self-doubt, a sense of being old and stupid, fear of a future without purpose or love — you name it.  Partly it was the affair with S., but just as much due to the conDFW experience. The main message I got from the other writers, except for the big names like David Weber and Jim Butcher, is “don’t quit your day job.’

Though the micro-presses, like Swimming Kangaroo, will typically not screw over or totally ignore new authors like the big houses do,  most writers must have full-time jobs and write on the side. Worse, they count their royalties in the hundreds not the thousands of dollars - and these are the established small press published writers. Talk about Greatly Diminished Expectations! Though I was never planning to make big bucks writing novels,  I had dreams of making enough to live meagerly along with my social security and my state health insurance.

But I guess I keep writing anyway. I feel better for some reason after just venting above. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the black death crow of writing is flapping its wings, kawing, don’t waste this self-torment (kaw!) on deaf ears; (kaw!) drawn on it. (kaw!) start the new novel. (kaw!)

Maybe I’ve foundly found what blogs are for. To vent stuff that perhaps would only make a suck-novel.

Writer-man’s guilt

Oh father (or great goddess) I confess: I haven’t been practicing what I preach to other would-be writers.

“Would-be writers,” my doppleganger might ask. “But I thought you were already published.”

“That I am,” I said, puffing up a little.  “But a writer is always a writer in progress, existentially speaking. “Writing means writing every day. Which I haven’t been doing since having bone nubs ground off my shoulder.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me,” my doppleganger said.

“Now you’re getting the point.”

But I haven’t been writing much. I’m only a few hundred words away from finishing the first draft of Dreamtime of an Alien God, and I just can’t quite get there.  I don’t know whether this an indicator of a basic flaw of the novel or the shoulder pain — shit! it hurts — but then I’m writing this, albeit on an IQ-lowering dose of hillybilly heroin, aka, Vycodin.

Another thought occurs to me.  Maybe one shouldn’t write an occult sci-fi novel when one is in love. I’ve got all these passionate scenes in there. Even the living are falling in love and doing stupid things over their undead lovers.

Whatever, I should just write it and throw it out later. That’s what I say to people — friends, lovers and strangers — who say they are “working” on a novel but haven’t started writing yet.

Hey? Where’d my doppleganger go. Here’s where he’s supposed to butt in and say something both wise and pithy.

More on this later…