Everything.
Rejections, fixing stories that don’t work, coming up with ideas, typing, pencil stains (left handed), losing my eraser, interruptions, the well-meaning (Well, why don’t you write a best selling novel then?), the plateau that I’ve been stuck on for years where I’m better than average but not great.
I’d have a nap, but I have work to do.
I use the word stomp a lot in my stories, I’ve noticed as I proof-read through the last batch.
I read a non-fiction book that didn’t involve Nazis! I feel I should give myself an award for that.
But I didn’t like reading it. Why? Why don’t I like reading non-fiction? Is it I pick non-fiction books that are, in terms of literary writing, not literary? Why am I so obsessed with plot? Why don’t I like reality even a little bit?
Why am I writing this meaningless post instead of proofing my short story collection?
I don’t know anything.
Behold my $1.39 stock photo book cover for my e-chapbook I hope to have out before Christmas! Self-published, so don’t be too happy for me.
I’m stuck on one bloody sentence that I
just
can’t
get
to
work!
“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma.”
“And in the afternoon?”
“In the afternoon—well, I put it back again.”
Oscar Wilde
I wrote.
I wrote about one short story a week, more or less.
And now, sadly, comes the editing. Perhaps in a week or two I’ll have a nice little e-chapbook to share with you.
I did have a writing partner, who also tried to write one short story a week. It was a bit like school. I miss school and the deadlines and the expectations to do work. By myself, I do very little work because I am easily distracted and I get migraines and now I work in my basement since COVID which means a whole new set of distractions I have to learn how to avoid (I’m right next to my sewing machine now. Do you know how many things I could sew? Neither do I!)
In any case, the worst part of writing is whatever step you are on currently.
I am still in the process of fixing it.
My website is only quasi-working. I know. I’m working on it.
Whaddya know? I actually did it.
This book is that friend you had in high school that one day you said Seriously, dude, not everything has to be funny as he tries to make an inappropriate joke about the Holocaust and then after that, you don’t hang out that much anymore and you know what, you don’t even mind that much.
***
I don’t understand being in love with someone based solely on their looks. I guess, since I am not beautiful, it’s an alien concept to me. But it’s also boring. In the back pages, in the notes by the author section to make the book book-clubbable, author goes on about how he’s subverting tropes and the girls in the book have depth. Firstly, he describes them as girls. Then what is their depth? We know that one is poor, one is the daughter of a sleazy lawyer, one is fat. That’s not depth. Depth is what is your favourite piece of classical music and why? How much one weighs hardly counts as depth.
***
This is a book for geeky boys who wanted hot girls.
I am a geeky girl.
I never had much interest in hot girls.
Ergo….