For a piece that’s due tomorrow. This means I better have one hell of a productive morning tomorrow, because this shit’s gotta get put together.
Luckily I’ve done all the research, just have to put it together. And by put it together, I mean write the damn thing. But today, after two hours of staring at my computer and trying to write — then exercising all my tried-and-true writer’s block elimination methods, like taking a shower or drinking very cold water — it’s just not happening.
Feck.
— Joss Whedon.
—
This is exactly how I am right now, and frequently at other times, but in a much less grand and much less noteworthy way than someone of Dan Harmon’s stature. When people—anonymous or semi-anonymous internet people—say my work is shitty, I lose major amounts of sleep. I lose sleep when I think there’s a chance that maybe someone might say it’s shitty, or say that some restaurant’s appearance on some random map I’ve done is the result of graft/unethical behavior or of me being an idiot or of me being bad at my job.
We take ourselves too serious sometimes, I think. To quote my grandmother, who frequently says insightful things that I instinctively commit to memory: “I think it’s a sin—if there is such a thing as sin—to waste even one day not being happy.” So the first quote here is from Dan Harmon, that second one is Pattie M Macurdy, matriarch of the surviving Macurdys.
Can you add “voluptuous”? Not because it’s overused, it’s not; but rather because it’s dumb and should NOT be used at all. I saw it recently in a description of a cream sauce and it annoyed the heck out of me.
Yes. What the hell is a voluptuous cream sauce anyway? Sure, they obviously mean luxurious, but that one’s on the list as well. (Pretty much everything we eat for pleasure, beyond simple sustenance, is basically a luxury; if a writer wants to describe a food as especially luxurious they should be a little more creative. One caveat—I’m okay with a food writer using luxurious to describe a space’s design or a mood.) Besides, voluptuous has acquired that connotation associating it with a woman’s body that it just seems weird to even try to use it in that context. Weird.
Also, it’s super late and I’m super tired, but I can’t turn my brain off. Hence the rambling.
I’m disappointed to find that, in the course of a very good work day, I only write about 800 words. Or, 800 professional words, split up among 5-8 posts of 50-300 words. That’s disappointing because I like to say that the best part of my job is that I’m being forced to write constantly, but I had assumed the actual quantity I was writing was greater than that.
But hey, at least I’m writing.
Dog sitting in the Irish Channel this week. Finally staying in a place with a backyard, obviously I’m going to work outside.
Also, the lady half of the couple I’m dog sitting for works for Tales of the Cocktail. She has lots of liquor in the house. I love rum. See where I’m going with this? But three sips of rum today and I’m a sleepy boy. Thankfully I’m basically done work writing for the day. Time to get to fun writing (as in, writing I’m not being paid to do, but hope to sell; which, when I put it like that, actually sounds like terrifying writing, but whatever).
Happy Friday, y’all.
Last night I had a shit time sleeping. Just couldn’t turn the old brain off as I lay there thinking about the beach and adventures and work and anything else. As I started to drift off, I wrote about 200 words of the beginning of a story. This is particularly odd, because I rarely think about, let alone compose sentences for, fiction anymore, despite writing killer fiction being The Dream. What’s more, this was most definitely set in New Orleans, and I’ve vowed many times that my next piece of non-Eater writing has to be non-New Orleanian. At this stage in my (nascent) career, I need to take proactive steps not to become yet another New Orleans-based local color writer. Don’t know if you know this, but we have a lot of those here. I don’t want to be stuck in the purgatory of local color.
Anyway, kind of liking the sentences I was constructing in my head, I decided to type out some notes on my phone so that I could remember them in the morning. Here’s how my memo read:
Hungry sweaty street. Small street slides into intersection like a crick feeding a river. Why the hell is he wearing a jacket anyway? No, this is esplanade. Cigarette. Sex.
While these notes help me remember what I was thinking about in my head as I dozed off, I’m pretty sure that this handful of stream-of-consciousness phrases is better than any piece of proper fiction I could write.
So far, super good. Makes me want to 1) go sailing, 2) do some seriously good writing, and 3) do numbers 1 and 2 at the same time.
And cats are psychopaths. I love them for it.
I wrote a ton of fiction (all of it shitty and none of it anywhere near published) when I was too poor to have an internet connection at home. The moment I discovered the internet closely correlates to the moment I stopped writing fiction.
Of course, correlation doesn’t equal causation. It also correlates to a brief, volatile, unhealthy failed marriage. Not sure which one killed the fiction writing. Goddammit I want to be a real writer rather than an internet personality.
Also: cats suck. Except on the internet.
(Source: bradleywarshauer)
