Saturday, May 17, 2003
No writing today. The weekly day off. So far, I've helped Spooky patch a latex catsuit and helped Jennifer deal with Sophie's latest sudden butt swelling. Sophie had to visit the vet today, actually. Now she's groggy and uncomfortable.
Yesterday I wrote virtually nothing. I did try. Hard. I read back through much of chapters One and Two, for continuity, then tried to get back into Chapter Four, to no avial. I think I wrote three sentences, and that took me two hours. One of my lit professors in college, in a seminar on Ulysses, told a story (which I sometime suspect of being apocryphal), of James Joyce being asked by a woman at a party how many words he'd written that day. He replied, so goes the story, "One word. Today I wrote one perfect word." Sometimes I find an absurd sort of solace in that anecdote. Mostly, yesterday was one of those days when I couldn't stop thinking about how I have to write, how, for the rest of my life, this thing that I once did only for my own amusement is the source of all my income, my livelihood, and I have to do it. It doesn't matter if I'm not inspired, or if I'm bored, or would rather be doing something else, or can't think What Happens Next, or I'm sick to death of writing frelling novels - it's still what I do. It's a bad thought to get stuck on. It shuts me down. Locks me up. Freaks me out. It's like having to have sex for a living. A word whore. I am a word whore. The truth is rarely romantic. It's rarely even true.
Sense escapes me.
Back to my hard-earned, undeserved leisure.
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