Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Returned. Perhaps not so triumphantly

It's weird coming back to a place you've left dormant for weeks. Lights have burnt out, there's dust covering most of the surfaces you touch, cobwebs stretch outin the corners and in doorways.

The place remains familiar, of course, but it's you that seems alien there, uncomfortable, like the dwelling has moved on with its life without you.

That's sort of how I feel coming back here. And I'm only here now because I knew if I didn't do it soon, I'd never come back at all.

My recent attempt to push myself into writing regularly again -- by trying to write an episodic fictional blog -- has fallen apart, mostly because I had the germ of an idea whout an actual plot and, as you might be surprised to know, plot is awfully important to fiction.

Instead I sat down in front of my unfinished NaNoWriMo novel two nights ago and pushed out 1200 words on it. Another 800 words were added last night. At long last I'm making some progress on one of my new year's resolutions.

It still feels a little awkward, like I've kind of forgotten what the book is really *about*. I know the pertinent plot details for the next chapter or two, but the stuff that's going on under the surface -- or supposed to be, at any rate -- is a little grey to me. It's coming back in bits and pieces, but the next few days of writing will be a little tougher.

But I do intend to do it for the next few days. And the days after that too. If I can push my way through this week, I think, I can get the momentum rolling again and see it through to the end.

The intention is to write 5 days a week, generating somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 words. I'll likely skip the days I do my column and my cartoon (as those will be my creative outputs for those days) but try to do two 1,000-word bursts on my days off.

Speaking of the cartoon, I know I'm a few weeks behind in posting updates, but c'mon, this blog is a few weeks behind in just about everything.

And, of course, a new King Covers section is dearly needed, even though I'm sure no one gives a shit about the covers, or my opinion on them.

Signing off...hope to be back before another three weeks slither by.

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

after

And so it settles on me now, grimly final. What we do as writers, before our typewriters and our keyboards and our notepads, is something that can only be done alone. It's a form of communication that is more like masturbation than anything else. We scream, silently, hoping that someone is listening, that someone is taking note of the words, of the rage and the disgust and the disgrace.

But you never know. How can you know?

At the end of the day, they're just words on a page. Words that break down into sounds and into letters and into nothing but grunts and groans.

And how is this different from the desires we had a hundred years ago? A thousand? That we might grunt, and be noticed, and be heard, and change the tribe somehow.

But the tribe never changes. Evolution is a farce. We fool ourselves in thinking that this about improvement or evolution. We are worse for our history -- a species that is devouring itself out of a hunger for progress.

I joke sometimes that I would like to be alive a hundred years from now, two hundred, to be in a position to watch our inevitable destruction, but I don't want that. I couldn't stand that. Better I leave this world still beliving that we might somehow turn things around, in spite of it all, in spite of those with a fanastic appetitite for everything that is good and pure in the world.

Because it isn't so much that I don't believe that things can get better. It's that I don't believe we, as a species, have the strength to pull it off.

And that, my friends, is infinitely worse.