I used to have the urge to write all the time, just to indulge those itchy fingers and get those mundane thoughts out into the ether, get them out of me. Now I spend a lot of time thinking about sitting down to write something and then thinking about what I would write and getting SO FUCKING BORED with myself. I have nothing to add to the conversation at large. I never did, probably, but…
Argh, this is driving me crazy. I can’t write. My brain feels constipated but no amount of squeezing yields … anything. There’s so much happening, trails being blazed every day, and yet. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to write. It feels like everything I could possibly say is trite and worn. And don’t even talk to me about taking pictures. It’s like I’ve never taken a single one in my life and wouldn’t even know…
That’s something we know. And yet when we create we do our best to try for something new anyway, against the damned odds. I’m always slightly amused/horrified when I belch up something (that’s always how it feels when I write, really: Like a force of nature, something to be gotten out of me and once it’s out, I feel better and lighter) and then later find something in this world that already existed for some…
I’m good at starting stories, but I’m not so good with coming up with compelling conflict and I’m even worse at wrapping things up. Most stories I write get rambly and bogged down in details and go unfinished, and yet opening lines tumble through my brain on a nearly constant basis. I thought it might be fun to put some of them here in the hopes that you writerly types might see fit to use…
This weekend I got my hands on my grandmother’s memoir manuscript. My mother has been keeping it unavailable for as long as I’ve known about it. That’s because it is my grandmother’s first-person account of her descent into what she straight-up calls insanity, and that is a particularly and understandably painful subject for my mom. Nana was bipolar (I) and schizophrenic, with a long stretch of alcoholism thrown in there. She spent some time in…
… and my mustachioed friend Zach was kind enough to publish it over at The Great and Secret Thing. It’s a very short story. A glimpse, really, into a moment in a life that may or may not exist somewhere in some time. Please ignore all the incredibly flattering things Zachary says about me (“drunkard,” ha!) and my notorious (?) champagne habit in his introduction. He is accustomed to drinking whiskey distilled from the sweat…
I’m writing right now. It’s good. It’s solid. The first thing I ever wanted to be in life was a writer, but at some point I realized how impractical that was as a profession, so I moved it from the career column to the hobby column. Muscles atrophied and confidence withered. I became crippled by my inability to end stories. So I stopped for a while. And then I started back. And then I stopped…
Last night as I was leaving work I saw two rockabilly dudes with tight jeans and plaid shirts and slick black hair peering into the windows of Sun Studio, taking pictures through the glass because the place was closed. It made me smile. I get a kick out of living in a place that’s a mecca for a lot of people searching for some cultural roots. My co-worker David wrote this this morning and it’s…
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