Thursday, January 16, 2003
Yesterday I hit the brick wall. The brick wall is always there, skipping along just a few pages ahead of me. Patient. Patient beyond imagining. Knowing that, always, sooner or later, I'll mistep, mistime, and run, headlong, into it. Like yesterday.
Splat.
And that moment, or hour, or day, or week — however long is required to pick myself up, wipe the masonry dust from my clothes, extricate the little griity bits of mortar from my teeth — is time enough, always, for doubt, which has a sort of an arrangement with the brick wall. You stop 'er, I'll hold 'er. Something after that fashion. Doubt, which is bottomless and topless and goes on forever, from side to side. Doubt which leaves me lying awake at 7 a.m., shaking off the nightmares and thinking about all the things I'm best off not thinking about. Considering how much better the day would be spent on absinthe or wine than soberly trying to climb over the fucking wall, thinking tomorrow's hangover really wouldn't be all that bad. Worrying about what hasn't happened or hasn't happened yet, what didn't happened or didn't happen when I needed it to, or wanted it to, whatever. What may never happen, what is inevitable. Doubt knows each and every string and pulls them until the little hooks that keep them anchored securely into my skeleton and soul begin to ache.
Yesterday I almost wrote a paragraph. Almost. Then thought better of it and wrote nothing at all.
Three good days to the brick wall. And now that I'm stunned and fit for nothing but doubt, the wall is already moving, waiting for the next time I'll catch up to it, and the next, and all the times after that.
Deciding, unwisely, against the absinthe breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I spent the morning reading an interview with Quentin Crisp in an issue of The Sentimentalist and listening to music. The interview left me feeling bleaker than before I'd started reading. The music did me a little more good — The Cocteau Twins, Patti Smith, Poe, The Psychedilc Furs, The Danny Hutton Hitters — tiny dabs of balm for all the places where the impact with the brick wall had left me raw and doubt had left me sour. Maybe I'm moving forward again. I'm not sure. It's probably too soon to tell.
There's supposedly a winter storm heading towards us. It looks pretty grim on doppler, a great wall of green, lavender and white sweeping down towards Atlanta from the northwest. Tomorrow night's low is forecast at 19F. I think I shall stay inside until this idiocy has passed. The sky turned dark gray about an hour and a half ago. There's supposed to be snow and sleet this evening. Doubt, by the way, does his very best work in weather like this.
Anyway, tomorrow night more Farcsape, episode 4.13, "Terra Firma," and yes, it will be on the test. The Sci-Fi Channel, 8 PM (ET/PT). Some people have been complaining to me that they missed last week's episode because of the time change from the summer, when it was in the later time slot it never should have been in, and that they were unable to find the time anywhere. This mystifies me. Some of these people even read this journal regularly and I'd posted the time, never mind they could have gone to sci-fi.com, or one of the bezillion Farscape fansites, or TVGuide.com, or an actual hardcopy of TV Guide, or their local newspaper, or that channel everyone has that tells them what's on when — you get the picture. One of the things that I am learning is that television viewers, like everyone else, are lazy. Many readers suffer from a similar laziness. At almost every signing I do, every con at which I'm a guest, every conference I attend, at least one person comes up to me and says something like, "I've been wanting to read your books forever, but I can never find them anywhere." I usually reply by asking if they have a computer with internet access. They usually reply that, why yes, they do. I then ask them if they know about Amazon.com; most of them do. Most have even ordered from Amazon. "You know," I tell them, "pretty much everything I've ever written is available on Amazon. Just type in my name." They usually look at me like I've just told them some great secret. I don't even bother pointing out that they could have simply typed my name into any given search engine. Or, for that matter, that Barnes and Noble, Border's, etc., generally can be counted on to have a copy or two each of Silk and Threshold in stock and on the shelves, and if they don't will be happy to special order copies for you, at no extra charge. Anyway, point being, if you want to watch Farscape tomorrow night, and have access to a television with the Sci-Fi Channel, and have no other pressing commitments, you need not miss "Terra Firma" for want of accurate information about the time:
Eastern: 8 p.m.
Central: 7 p.m.
Mountain: 6 p.m.
Pacific: 8 p.m.
The episode will be repeated in each time zone:
Eastern: 12 a.m.
Central: 11 p.m.
Mountain: 10 p.m.
Pacific: 12 a.m.
So, there you go. Many excuses are readily available to readers of this journal who miss Farscape tomorrow night, but "I couldn't find what time it was airing" is not one of them.
"A little black thing among the snow . . ."
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