I'm sitting here in my bed poking around on the innerwebs, I hear a far off whistle, and I'm thinking to myself how nice it is to be close to the river again so that I can hear the sounds of ships at night, the sounds that I used to fall asleep to when I was a kid.
Then I remember I'm back in Austin.
"No, dear, this is the dream, you're still back in the cell."
Which means it wasn't a ship, it was just a fucking train.
Sigh.
All I did was mention a recipe on my twitter and 15 minutes later I get this:
Martha Stewart (MarthaStewart) is now following your tweets on Twitter.A little information about Martha Stewart:
1912096 followers
1202 tweets
following 6002 people
Boy is she in for a surprise.
You are all hereby put on notice. Any further use of gumbo metaphors, related to Treme or otherwise, will be met with Cease and Desist orders as per the "Gumbo Metaphor Non-Proliferation Act of 2006".
That is all.
Baby's on fire
And all the laughing boys are bitching
Waiting for photos
Oh the plot is so bewitching
Rescuers row row
Do your best to change the subject
Blow the wind blow blow
Lend some assistance to the object
I'm back to writing again. Dredged up one of those short stories I've been sitting on for a few months. It's a great story. Unfortunately I am telling it in the most shitty, banal way possible. I suppose I just need to get the whole story down on paper and think about making it sound good later.
I don't know why fiction is so hard. When I'm writing about something in the real world, something that actually happened or somebody I really know, all I need to do is get the idea, and the thing writes itself.
I wrote a story about AshMo and me that is coming out in the new anthology from Chin Music Press this summer. It's the longest piece of creative writing I've ever written, and although I turned the idea over in my head for a couple of weeks ahead of time, when it came time to write it, the whole thing just blorped out onto the page in an afternoon, and needed very few edits.
Some of my introspective blog posts over the past few years have been not much more than a vague idea and a handful of catchy phrases rattling around in my head, and when I sat down to write them, my front brain got the fuck out of the way and the story just came out on its own. Hell, I barely even remember writing them when I'm done.
So why is fiction so damn hard? I've got such a clear idea of every piece of this story in my head, but I write and discard, write and edit, write and rewrite and it just sounds dreary and dull and dreadfully drearily dull. It's bad writing. Great story and great writing, you've got something that people will want to publish and read. Great story with no great writing and you got dick.
Anyway, fiction is sucking mightily tonight. But at least I'm writing again. I've got a couple over at Back Of Town here and here, and other BoT writers are hitting their stride as well, so check it out.
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