Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Never, ever, under any circumstances, begin a day's writing by declaring online that you intend to write approximately twice your daily average. There is no surer way to screw up the day. Which is to say, yesterday was a catastrophe. Not a total loss, but catastrophes rarely result in total loss.
I didn't write 2,000 words. I wrote 1,001 words, and only just, by the skin of my teeth (whatever the fuck that means), by a small miracle, by the force of sheer, stupid persistence. I'm so close to the end I can taste it and the ground is beginning to feel very unstable. I'm seriously considering an entirely different ending than the one that I've allowed to lead me here, my Beatrice of a conclusion, out of fear that I've been wrong all along. That happened with Silk and it happened with Threshold. At the last, my intended ending seemed patently untrue and other things happened instead. Someday maybe I'll write a book of alternate endings. It wouldn't be a small volume. Anyway, here I am, well into Chapter Thirteen, trudging headlong toward The End and completely uncertain where to put my feet.
Lord, this is a stupid job.
I think after I move to New England in October, I'll give it up and become a freelance paranormal investigator instead. When asked what it is I do for a "living," it would be ever so much more amusing to say, "Oh, I'm a freelance paranormal investigator," than to say, "Oh, I'm a writer." And it surely sounds less sordid. Maybe people would stop giving me the hairy eyeball if I didn't have to tell them I'm a writer. That's like admitting you work for the IRS, or that you find Olivia Newton John sexually attractive. And, never again would I have to say, "No, I'm a real writer, the kind that pays the bills with the sweat of her fingertips." No one expects freelance paranormal investigators to pay their bills.
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