08/16/00 -- Just another day in the life of...

I think I've realized why I'm not updating this very often

My life is dull.  Boring.  And not a lot has been happening.  So I'm pretty reluctant to open up Front Page and write something about, well, about nothing.

Sure, I'll go on for an entire journal entry and not say a damn coherent thing because I just need to vent about what I can't talk about, but to come in here and say, So today I woke up, went to work, came home, had dinner, went to bed. just bothers me.  It feels way too much like those couple of entries in week four of Clarion that say, "Fucked if I know what I did today."  Except then I know I was doing something.  Something that entertained me, or that meant something to me.  Now I know what I'm doing day-by-day and it's just not worth talking about or writing about.  I'm having moments of angst, moments where I laugh like an idiot, moments where I'm bored (a whole lot of those moments).  I'm having moments where I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to write again.  And then moments where I'm certain that I'd be a complete idiot if I didn't write again.

Last night was one of the latter types of moments.

Yesterday evening, in a fit of procrastinating my novel, I pulled out "Sisters and Sirens" and decided to look through it, see what I could do with it.  I made notes to myself in the margins, I scribbled out bits here and there, I added other things.  Boo asked me if I was coming home.  It was 7:30, by that point.  Yeah, I guess I am, just let me finish making notes on this thing.   So I read through the last two pages, finished scribbling notes, then drove home.

On the drive home, I thought about the end.  I thought about what people had said about it in critique.  I thought about the notes I had scribbled to myself in the margins before I left the office.  And the end rewrote itself in my head while I was driving.  By the time I got home, I knew what I was going to write, I knew how the end was going to work.  Sure, the story spans a lot more time now than it originally did, but I think it's a better story for it.  But Boo was taking me to dinner (which is why he asked if I was coming home).  So we drove off to Potts.   And I left my velvet spiral book at home because it started raining just as we walked out the front door.

In Potts, I wrote on film-developing-envelope receipts.   Seven of them.  From the seven rolls of film I got developed after Clarion.   Seemed oddly appropriate.  I ran out of room on them.  But I got the ending down.  I didn't lose it.  It needs a little fleshing out in a few places where I forgot about a word or a phrase or a bit that I had planned to write in, but I still have those bits in my head and I'll add them in when I go into the file to revise it.

At Potts, I lost myself in the story again.  I knew what was happening, I felt it around me.  Every time the waitress came by to put food on the table or refill drinks or whatever, I had to remind myself that I wasn't in the story.   That I was there, in Potts, with Boo.  And then I put pen back to paper and forgot again.

Moments like those make me realize I can't not write.   I have to.  Because if I stop, I'll never have one of those moments again.

I want a moment like that with my novel (hell, a lot of moments like that).  And I'm not sure why writing it is such a struggle. Why I'd rather update my checkbook than work with it.  Why it takes me 5 hours to write 1000 words on it.  Why I'm shying away from it when it didn't hurt as much as "Sisters and Sirens" did.  And maybe that's the answer.  There isn't enough of me in it.  I don't know.  I know where it will go if I put too much of me in it right now.   The part of me that would weasel in would make it a totally different story than it might be in the long run if I keep writing it the way I'm writing it now.  Maybe it needs to be a different story.  I don't know.  Maybe it wants me to strangle nurses.  Maybe I should listen to it, or maybe I shouldn't.   I'll tackle it again after I revise "Sisters and Sirens".