Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Yesterday, the feared uselessness asserted itself almost full force. I did manage to get most of the boxes out of my office, but that was about it. Today, Spooky and I may flee out into The World, though the weather is drear (grey, foggy, rainy, cold). I've hardly left the new place since the move. I get like this. I will make a happy fossil. Perhaps I need the botanical gardens, a brief game of I'm not really here and it's not really December again. Or maybe we could just go to a bar. Or the library. Most likely, I won't go anywhere, because it's easier to sit here.
Repeat after me (come on, you know this one), A writer who does not write is nothing.
I've written nothing of consequence since finishing the prologue to Daughter of Hounds just before Halloween. Granted, I've had some pretty good excuses — Fiddler's Green in Minneapolis and then the three-week grind of moving from Kirkwood to here. But all that's past, and now I should write. And no excuse is presently good enough. Dying men and women have made better attempts to write than I've made the last week or so. The time to resume writing is long past. I'm not a lazy person. On more than one occasion, other authors with whom I am aquainted have called me a "workaholic" (I hate that word, as it assumes one can work too much, which is, prima facia, a damned silly idea). I'm not lazy. But, I am sometimes afflicted by this malaise, this self-perpetuating stillness. Winter is probably the worst. I look outside at the ugliness of Atlanta in December and can't imagine why I should write.
Except (repeat after me), A writer who does not write is nothing.
One may as well be a fisherman who doesn't fish, a stripper who doesn't strip, or a begger who doesn't beg.
Writers write. The rest — all that stuff that gets lumped together as "life" — is gravy. The rest is what we get because we were good and wrote like we were supposed to do.
And no, blogs don't count. Not at all. Not even a little bit.
(Of course, I will accept the corollary that there are some writers who ought not to write, i.e., who ought to be something other than writers. I will not name any of them. That would be crass. Sadly, few of them know who they are.)
Okay. Enough of that.
The current eBay auctions have been going well, and I very much appreciate that, as the costs of moving were not insubstantial. There would be more stuff up right now, but doing eBay via dial-up, what with all the "improvements" that have been made there the last few years, is, as stardustgirl recently commented, not unlike emptying a bathtub with a thimble. Anyway, as I've said, use "Buy It Now" and get a free copy of Nyarlathotep: The Crawling Chaos' Threshold-inspired CD, Our Thoughts Make Spirals in Their World, along with a monster doodle by me (one doodle per customer, until I'm sick of drawing them).
Oh, word from subpress is that the trade hardback edition of The Dry Salvages will be shipping beginning December 8th; the limited edition will ship as soon as the accompanying chapbook and CD are ready. There's still no word on exactly when the hardback of Low Red Moon will ship. For the hundreth time, I apologize to those of you who have been waiting so long for this book. It should be along later this month. At this point, the book's more than a year and a half late, I think.
Anyway, I'm gonna go do something. It'll probably be something instead of writing. Which is appropriate, as I feel about as solid as nothing on this drizzly afternoon.
1:21 PM
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