Writers Block

So this blog used to be a daily meditation for me, more or less. As my second marriage deteriorated, I found it easier to sneak drinks away from my computer—she knew I was escaping the world when I blogged, though I used the blog as an excuse to do more things that would make good blog posts. I obsessively carried my Nikon in its big camera bag with me everywhere, photographing things I saw in my bike commute, things I did with my kids, the garden, various homebrew efforts. This blog was an open diary, and most of it was written under the influence of alcohol.

I'm 319 days California Sober as of this writing. I can tell I write differently, at least to my ear, than I did in those days. But I don't feel the need to share the details of my daily life in this weird way.

I have, however, been back on 'the novel.' This is a different novel than the one I struggled with 20 years ago. Wealth Effects may eventually be a novel I write, starting from scratch. The elevator pitch is three childhood friends grow up to be suburban drones who conspire to rob a bank to resolve their various financial woes as well as the boredom of their daily lives. They succeed beyond the dreams of avarice, as bank robberies go they get real money and the cops have no idea who they are. Hilarity ensues (really the book is about how their money problems aren't because they needed more income, they spend faster than they earn, that doesn't change with a bolus of cash.

I had 186,000 words in a 'rough draft' at one point. I despaired in the rewriting process, I hated re-reading everything I'd written. I'm not too shy to self promote, I think a suburban bank heist could really have legs. Of course, the exciting part is the robbery itself, that part seems easy enough to write but it doesn't tell a story in particular.

The novel I've been working on sober is Jaws of Victory. This is a sendup about an NFL owner hiring a shaman to influence the outcome of games and fate of his team, the Kansas City Funk nee Chiefs, a team he plans to move to Jakarta for the larger media market. This is set in the middle future, 2061. The world building is very satisfying because I reflect on how different life is now than it was 35 years ago, and project the changes I see coming for 35 years from now.

35 years ago only rich, pretentious cunts had cellular phones. I didn't have an email address. I worked on a computer but your microwave is a more sophisticated piece of hardware. Fax machines were state of the art. We had cable. Nothing streamed, you rented VHS tapes from Blockbuster to watch movies. I might be fudging the time of certain things by a year or two, but basically the phone was still a thing bolted to the wall and the only thing it did was place phone calls. You had to buy an external device to get messages, phones were that dumb.

You watched a TV show when it was on. I remember not even wanting a cell phone because isn't it nice that there are places where nobody calls you? What's the point of stopping off at a bar on the way home if your wife can reach you at the bar stool?

Anyway, as with Wealth Effects, I have trouble re-reading what I've written so far, and as with the earlier novel (every novel I've attempted, Wealth Effects was just the one I sustained the longest effort with). In case you thought this was going to be a confession that I write badly under the influence. That's almost certainly the reason for some of the bad drafting I did with Wealth Effects, I'm not saying I write great drunk. But sobriety doesn't seem to be any guarantee I'll like what I come up with.

I seldom re-read books anyway. When I know how it comes out, I lose interest. There are a few books I have read or listened to multiple times, A Confederacy of Dunces comes to mind, but I have trouble finishing books by Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace because I see the patterns and feel like I know where the book is going. Another talking dog, another dirge on addiction. So I guess if I have trouble reading their finished product, I can be a little easy on myself for bad rough drafts.

Though I'm a fairly deliberate writer. I fully verbalize what I read and write, like almost to the point where my lips would move. I don't know how you read, I took a speed reading class in high school and I can't do what they claimed we could do skimming along. With verbal shit, I either get it all or I don't fucking get it. The result is my rough drafts read relatively polished, at least in my incredibly humble opinion. Which makes editing hard.

If I commit the sentence and bother saving the document, I generally felt very sure about what I wrote. I do a lot of back-spacing and editing on the fly. Sometimes I can refine what I was trying to say, though most of the time I just hate everything. It's what I meant, I thought it expressed something at the time, but now I can't see it.

Couple that with my problem of worrying about the plot holes and I get some serious paralysis going. I worry about how would this entrepreneur find a practitioner in the first place? I wouldn't know how to recruit one because Robert the Psychic would rather stay a humble janitor than risk engaging in black magic, and that lunatic is my whole roladex when it comes to psychics. My former mother in law is in the Sacred Fire faith, another friend is in the OTO, but I'm all out of ideas on where you'd hire someone to do ritual magick for hire.

Not to brag, but I know a lot of freaks and I don't know where you'd look for one of those. But that's the magic of the novel, they must have agents for that kind of thing or something because I'm telling you, this shit happened. Well, it happens 35 years from now.

And no, I don't think I'm Thomas Pynchon. Part of the problem is getting published isn't the same barrier it used to be. I don't know how Pynchon got past the gatekeepers, V. wasn't exactly mainstream fiction. Or to pick someone more relatable, Vonnegut. I think even Max Barry, who was published in the old school sense, his novels were represented by an agent and published by traditional book publishers. Same with Palahniuk. They happened to sell enough copies and be good enough at promoting themselves that they've retained that publisher's backing.

The path for most, these days, as in music is to start off self-producing/self-publishing. I was brought up to think of that in a bad light. "Vanity publishing" my dad called it. A good way to end up with 10,000 copies of your book clogging up your garage. The self publishing houses always market it with examples like Mark Twain and Frank Herbert. But of course they are the exceptions.

Nothing has changed about that general assessment of self publishing, who the hell do you think you are, with the millions of volumes libraries don't even bother keeping in book form anymore, you who haven't even read all the great literature of your age have something to say? I might, when I eventually self-publishing my novel, actually call it The Vanity Press.

So I guess I'm just committing to continuing to plug, every single day, at this novel until I manage to accumulate a story I can bear to publish. Maybe in the meantime I can figure out some kind of way to street team the book, promote it in the discord communities I have friends in. Critical Mass, Rennaissance Festival, etc. Because I think if anyone is going to like my ideas, it's going to be in those groups, and hopefully that means word of mouth could do me some actual good. I don't need to write for the mainstream, I need to free myself to take Frank Zappa to heart, make my art for whoever it is turns out to like it.