AJH

March 13, 2012

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.

9:24am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZVlZowHwXQai

February 2, 2012

Although to be fair, I have an internet connection at my workplace and haven’t written ANY fiction in a long time.

ubiquitousamericana:

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.