Wednesday, June 16, 2004
I almost worked yesterday. I made more notes for Daughter of Hounds. Well, actually it seemed like I was making notes about my misgivings about doing another novel now, another novel about these characters now, and about doing a novel set twenty years from now that isn't a science-fiction novel, and the things I might could change about my work so everyone would love me, so I would become a Household Name, so next time I'll have three years to write a novel that needs three years to be written, trying to fathom what the fuck it is exactly that people want from me, from books, from stories, and I know goddamn well the only opinions that matter are those of other writers, because no one else has any idea what the hell they're talking about, and, really, I went on like this for quite some time, pretending I was making notes for Daughter of Hounds. I also made notes for a long sf story that I'd write tomorrow if only prose were capable of communicating action as deftly and beautifully as is film. My imagination asks so much more of this English language tool than it can ever give.
I can see things that I could never hope to describe, much less describe with any semblance of art.
Oh gods, there's that word again.
I need to take steel wool and hyrochloric acid and scrub that useless word from my mind.
There were other bits and pieces to yesterday, though none of them seem to warrent recollection. There were storms. Those were good. I have nothing ill to say about the thunderstorms. I lay in bed and tried to hold just one moment of deafening thunder in my head and keep it there, so I could always have it, whenever I needed it, but it dissolved as the moment dissolved.
There was a long conversation with Spooky about how hard it is just now, how hard it's been the past two years, the writing, the indeterminate, unpredictable Audience, the weariness. I might have saved my breath. Conversations like that are borne of too many years wasted in therapy, years that ingrained in me the mistaken belief that talking helps. Talking only underscores the futility and the aloneness.
Oh. Yesterday, I also heard an absolutely awful cover of Tom Waits' "Yesterday is Here" by Cat Power. I think Cat Power has only ever impressed me with one song, and that song really did impress me, but the rest of it...feh.
I have to put it all out of my mind, all the rest of it, everything that isn't the next novel. All the distractions. All the uncertainty. None of this matters anyway.
11:52 AM
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