Saturday, March 29, 2003
Hay fever, my ass. My present suffering involves neither hay nor a fever. Pollen snot, that's a better term. I've spent the day weighed down by the deleterious effects of pollen snot. Ugh. Straight from the cold to this.
However, the lie has been told.
At least that is put to rest.
I'm going to attempt to begin Chapter Four of Murder of Angels tomorrow. I confess, though, I'm in one of those deep troughs, one of those sinking places from which inertia and indifference make it hard to rise. More damned words. More words in exchange for nonrefundable moments of a finite lifetime. Times like this, it seems a very questionable exchange. It's not like I delude myself with fantasies that the world, or any part thereof, really gives a shit, one way or the other, what I do, what I say. It's not that. It's never been that. It's just what happens, sometimes, when I look back over the past ten years and wonder at all the other ways that time might have been spent. Instead of writing stories. And I have to have doubts about devoting another decade to the same pursuit. Is it better to have written six novels than to have written three? To have sold a hundred short stories instead of fifty? Do I actually have anything left to say that I haven't already said several times?
You tell me. Right now, I sure as hell have no idea.
It keeps me awake some nights. And keeps me from writing some days. What's an hour worth? A day? A week? Not in money (though money's pretty goddamned cool), but in whatever intrinsic or extrinsic value may be assigned to units of life. I left the apartment for the first time this evening since last Saturday. Between the sickness and struggling with my work, there's been nothing to lure me out of hiding. It's hard to see past the keyboard anymore. It's been that way for a long time now. I don't expect I'm making sense. That means that I should stop. But the original mission of this journal was to provide insight into the process of working as a novelist. And there's a reason that suicide rates are particularly high among writers.
It's a strange place to be. It's a strange place to live. The little house I've made, nouns for board, adjectives for lathe, and I could drag this metaphor out to painful lengths, couldn't I? It's a strange place. And like most strange places, it seems wonderful going in. It seems positively delightful. But that wears away. Well, it's worn away for me, at any rate. And all that's left is the strange, and the knowledge that, in the end, it's just me and these keys and the words swirling about inside my skull. That's all.
I knew I should have gone to see The Core tonight. Enough cheese will cure anything . . .
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