Wednesday, May 28, 2003
I think I've become Scheherazade. As long as I can keep telling my stories, as long as the ideas, the dreams, the images, the characters, the magic, keeps flowing, Schahriar won't put my head on the chopping block. But the stories have to keep coming, and they have to be good stories. They have to leave you, my surrogate Sultans, wanting more, and more, and more. It doesn't matter how contrived or fantastic the stories are, so long as they entertain, so long as they engage, and buy for me another day. And clearly 1001 nights were not enough. Already, a rough estimate puts me at 4,015 nights, with no end in sight.
Keep talking. Keep typing. Keep them listening. Keep the people who pay me to do this convinced that someone out there will buy what I have to sell. What I offer them to sell. At least Scheherazade didn't have to deal with middlemen.
Today I thought, in a moment of suicidal disregard, about driving to Myrtle Beach, or Savannah, or the Tennessee Aquarium, or Athens, or just as far as the Fernbank Museum of Natural History. I could sit in the great atrium with the Gigonotosaurus and the Argentinosaurus and not say a word. Not tell a single story to a single soul. But I won't go anywhere. I'll sit here, instead, and write, or pretend to write, or pretend to pretend to write (sometimes that's enough).
Five novels (one ghost-written), fifty-nine finished short stories, forty-eight comic book scripts, and uncounted introductions, afterwords, prefaces, poems, and proposals. All in eleven years. Most of it in the last eight. And here I sit, wondering why I'm having so much trouble coming up with ideas.
You tell me.
Yesterday I spent three hours and fifteen minutes signing the signature sheets for The Five of Cups. The edition is limited to 1,052 copies (1,000 numbered and 52 lettered), but I'm pretty sure that I signed at least 1,500 sheets. Afterwards, my arm was so stiff and numb I went outside and slaughtered innocent foliage and twigs with a bullwhip until the feeling returned and I could move my wrist again. Late last night, I watched Alien Ressurrection for the first time in ages and wished to whichever omnipotent being might be listening that someone would tell Joss Whedon that he just isn't a very funny man, and wished also that Jeunet had chosen a different screenwriter. Despite the occassional flop of an inappropriate one-liner (most heaped upon the ample shoulders of poor Ron Perlman), and the inexplicable death of the delightful Michael Wincott barely halfway through the film, I still think it's a worthy addition to the story of Ellen Ripley. The first and third films are still my favorites, of course, but there's not a turkey in the bunch. I'm rambling. But that's how Scheherazade avoided the axe. She rambled, night after night after night.
Here we are. Entertain us. Or die.
What could be easier than that?
Postscript: As I was editing this entry, Spooky walked into my office with the arm of a doll she'd found somewhere on the grounds. It has bits of dirt clinging to it and is the colour of chocolate.
|
|
