When I'm busy doing other things...
Sonofabitch if I won't do anything to avoid writing.
Thing is, once I have the printed pages in front of me, once I'm able to recognize a good line, sometimes the perfect line, I'm satisfied, not sated, but urged on by my own productivity to produce more, throw the dice and pray for another good roll.
It's just getting started. Oh, I've produced here and there, but it hasn't seemed to really amount to anything. Then, tonight, I printed the last month's output.
Wow. Fifty-two pages of work with sprinklings of very fine lines, some cutesy spinnings on mundane words...but fifty-two pages in a month. Whilst I rued each passing busy-work day, filling feeders and plucking faded petunias, I was writing more than I thought.
And the really cool thing? Though there are six separate essays, they're all related. "Heat" is a continuation of "Belling the Cats" and "Why I Think I'm a Vegetarian," which both build on the epic I wrote last summer, and "Porch Sittin', Part Four" fills the holes that naturally happened as I shifted gears. The other, unnamed essays provide jumping off points for more.
They all have threads that will lend themselves to a weaving together to become what I'm now calling First Half. Neal Cassidy, sidekick of Jack Kerouac and muse of both Tom Wolfe and the Grateful Dead, called his autobiography First Third. I don't know how old he was when he penned the most recent of the inclusions, but as I expect to have things pulled together by next summer, the expected milestone summer when I turn forty, and because I figure I've got, if I live right, eighty years in me, I'd like to steal (Tony says, "Don't Borrow. Steal. The great ones steal") the idea and call mine First Half. So there it is, unknown reader. You already know the why of it, even before the book is written.
Till later...
Thing is, once I have the printed pages in front of me, once I'm able to recognize a good line, sometimes the perfect line, I'm satisfied, not sated, but urged on by my own productivity to produce more, throw the dice and pray for another good roll.
It's just getting started. Oh, I've produced here and there, but it hasn't seemed to really amount to anything. Then, tonight, I printed the last month's output.
Wow. Fifty-two pages of work with sprinklings of very fine lines, some cutesy spinnings on mundane words...but fifty-two pages in a month. Whilst I rued each passing busy-work day, filling feeders and plucking faded petunias, I was writing more than I thought.
And the really cool thing? Though there are six separate essays, they're all related. "Heat" is a continuation of "Belling the Cats" and "Why I Think I'm a Vegetarian," which both build on the epic I wrote last summer, and "Porch Sittin', Part Four" fills the holes that naturally happened as I shifted gears. The other, unnamed essays provide jumping off points for more.
They all have threads that will lend themselves to a weaving together to become what I'm now calling First Half. Neal Cassidy, sidekick of Jack Kerouac and muse of both Tom Wolfe and the Grateful Dead, called his autobiography First Third. I don't know how old he was when he penned the most recent of the inclusions, but as I expect to have things pulled together by next summer, the expected milestone summer when I turn forty, and because I figure I've got, if I live right, eighty years in me, I'd like to steal (Tony says, "Don't Borrow. Steal. The great ones steal") the idea and call mine First Half. So there it is, unknown reader. You already know the why of it, even before the book is written.
Till later...
Comments
Can't wait to read the rest...if I can wiggle my way into it.