No. I am a no-go NaNoWriMo no-show.
I did it.
As of six minutes ago, I have a completely typed up version of my faerie story. From beginning to end. In a file. An awesome-saucem file.
To celebrate, I made a word cloud from word it out because Doretta Lau made one yesterday and linked to it on twitter and I am nothing if not a follower of what other authors (although calling myself an author is sure to come back and fuck me over somehow) do.
Love the LaTeX markup down in the bottom. I just ran the .tex file through, so that’s what you get.
Now I get to more-or-less ignore it for a few months and then slog through fixing the huge mess my 53 000 word story about faeries is.
Likely it is of little surprise to those who follow me on twitter that I am not in a unicorns-shitting-rainbows sort of place. Makes sense. Two years in one place blahs and winter coming. But someone, via Geoff, said it makes em feel better, my little sad toasts to the world, so here I am, little sad toasting.
When I am down, I get this feeling that there is nothing inside me at all except reflecting what other people are. If I am around someone who is happy, then I smile. If I am around someone who is sad, then I am sad. Like there is nothing to me that exists outside of other people. Since I work, alone, at home, by myself, during half the day or so, I guess I’m just air then, floating, writing endless iterations of writing exercises plus faerie story.
Yesterday I slept from 9.30 to 1.45.
In 2011, I was convinced I was a good writer. I want to go back to that. Right now, I have convinced myself that I am an above-average writer, which is a far step down from good. But, in my attempt to be more positive about my writing, I ordered business cards to hand out to, who exactly? The people I stand at the school bus stop with? I’m not really sure. But I did. And here they are.
I still can’t give up the math part yet. I spent ten years to get that string of letters after my name. The other side of the business card has info you can figure out from the Contact page.
So, if being successful means having business cards, then I am now successful with my business cards. Next time I see you, trust me I’ll be pressing one of these babies into your hand.
Make poems out of them.
I have a list of story ideas that don’t make sense or, more truthfully, I don’t want to write the background necessary for them to make sense. So I’ll turn them into poems when I can’t sleep at night. Sometime in the dim light of today’s early morning, I wrote a poem about exploding glass jars, mason or otherwise.
It doesn’t rhyme.
Rhyming poetry may be passé but there’s always something soothing about reading A.A. Milne. My goal is to get my poems to rhyme. Then I can be both a struggling author and a struggling poet so I’ll have more to talk to people about at potlucks and parties.
I was talking to another writer yesterday. He (more politely than I making him out to be) told me to stop dicking around, put all my best work in a file, and start mailing it out to people. Small presses, big presses, e-presses.
And all I can think of is uggggg.
I am totally not cut out to be a writer.
My submission to the Rusty Toque 2014 Chapbook contest got an Honourable Mention.
If anyone is looking to publish a chapbook, feel free to mention me honourably to them.
August is almost over and I have written nothing.
In my head, I’ve written things. Just not on paper. The thought of taking a pencil and writing something down just seems insurmountable. Like now, Tesfa is catching caterpillars in the yard and I could write fiction, but instead I half read my book and read message boards on the internet. A break would be good if afterwards I felt refreshed and eager to get back into the writing fray.
But I don’t. I don’t feel excited about writing at all.
I should finish my July story and start my August one. I should wrap up the faerie story, even if the ending is as sour as a lemon. I should do a bunch of writing exercises to write something new.
But I don’t.
I guess I’m a writer who doesn’t write right now. And I feel pretty pathetic.
As it says. No acceptances or new stories. I’d hoped I would learn how to write with Tesfa around this summer and failed, spectacularly. Except for this:
So maybe I still haven’t finished draft zero of my July story about The Log Driver’s Waltz and I haven’t even started an August story (although maybe I will write one called Variations on an Office Romance, which I’m afraid to google because likely it is already a story/porn movie). So maybe I still haven’t found a great ending to my faerie story or written it up. So maybe I didn’t read as many books as I had hoped.
Instead, I have a happy kid and I helped with that.
I’d forgotten about this until today – on a message board I frequent, someone had asked me about Ethiopia and I remembered I had written this. It’s micro micro, not even a story, just an image. But I had to search and search to find where I’d written it down, so I’m going to write it down here too so the chance of me losing it again is slight.
Here is something I wrote while riding on the bus. It was a bumpy bumpy ride that took us two hours to go 40 km.
In the fields outside the city, the land is populated by men in green suits. Always green, faded from sunlight, dust, and the harshness of living here. But always green, same cut, same style, same shade. The hems have always fallen. The pants are always held up by a rope acting as a belt. I wonder why this level of conformity which I have seen only once before in the salarymen scurrying around the commuter trains in Tokyo. I think the Derg must somehow be involved, some command economy scheme to outfit Ethiopian men in misfit olive green suits as protection against the bourgeouis excess of Western capitalism. The green clashes with the dried yellow grass of the hills surrounding our town. You can spot the men from miles away, like fireflies in an inverted landscape. I wave but they never wave back. Only the children who chase behind me on the street yelling “Ferenj, ferenj!” (always twice) wave at me. To them, I am an oddity, an amusement, a novelty. To the aged old men in the dusty green suits, I no longer exist.
So, anyone want to publish a paragraph of what I thought on a day in October 2007?
Geoff read my latest story and, in his words, “really liked it.” Exclamation mark!
The story: I had been thinking about a previous story I wrote about the Kawarthas and then, since it is summer time, wrote another story about the Kawarthas. I’m not too enamoured with the final result, which is likely a good thing since it’s the stories I have emotional attachments to that end up languishing unpublished. It’s longer than my normal short stories, about 6800 words. So maybe I’ll eventually get to novel length someday if each story I write is slightly longer than the last.
I say there’s a chapter two here; Geoff says stop. So we’ll see.
Off to proof-reading and endless submissions until this story finds a home.