Thursday, February 20, 2003
Yesterday was one of those unenviable days when I'm pretty sure that the cosmos is possessed of some capricious form of consciousness and it's out to get me. That somehow I've pissed off the entire universe and now it's time to pay the price. The death of a thousand cuts. Piranhas and thorns and rusty thumbtacks lying on the floor. That sort of day. The sort of a day that makes writing impossible. I've never entirely bought into the "room of your own" bit, feeling that a writer will write, if she truly is a writer, regardless. But a certain degree of sanity and space is required, and yesterday, and, actually, for quite some time, that sanity and space have deserted me.
God. I'm whining, aren't I? I loathe whining. When I started this blogger, back in November '01, I swore to myself, and several other people, that I would maintain a strict barrier between most of my "real life" and the journal. It wouldn't get personal. No emotional venting. I would write about writing the books and that was all. But, slowly, while my back was turned, that barrier has come down. And, after all, all this dren nipping at my heels is part of writing the books, the part that makes it almost impossible for me to write the books. It's getting very hard to tell where one thing (my personal life) and another thing (writing) ends. What I write is the direct product of the chaos or calm (or both) in my life. My writing arises from every level of being alive and interacting with other people. It's about what I feel and how I try to cope. Don't let the ghosts and goblins fool you; it's all True.
It's all True.
Most of yesterday was wasted. I wrote nothing, except a blogger entry, a few e-mails, an entry in my hardcopy journal, and a dozen or so posts to the discussion phorum on my website.
I did manage, in a brief moment of calm, to read through a short story I wrote in December 2000, "La Mer des Rêves." It was written for an anthology that never materialised and has sat unpublished for two years. That happens sometimes, usually through no fault of the editor/s. Sometimes books just don't happen. I've been fortunate in that most books I'm commissioned to write for do happen (though, sometimes, they may take years to see print). I was glad to see that I still like the piece and it'll be included in To Charles Fort, With Love, if nothing else. It's the sort of surreal, dark fantasy that I feel is what I should be writing now. No one would ever mistake it for "horror" (whatever that might be this week), though it's pretty macabre. Wait, I just realised it may be perfect for an anthology I was recently asked to write for. Anyway, I think that a lot, maybe most, of the next novel will be that sort of dark fantasy. I hope so, anyway.
Oh, and I think I'm getting sick. A cold maybe. Hopefully nothing worse than a cold. It might just be allergies. The weather's warmer and things have begun to bloom and bud, so I'm sure the air is thick with pollen. I suffer for plant sex. If only the biosphere had stuck with good, old-fashioned, tried-and-true asexual reproduction.
I do think I've settled the buisness of a cover for To Charles Fort, With Love. Maybe. I'll know sometime today. I hope.
I'm fighting the urge to go sit with the dinosaurs today.
|
|
