Post 900

This being a milestone, I decided to do something special. I considered committing suicide and leaving you all hanging, but that amount of irony is more appropriate for post 1,000. Then I thought about railing against religion, something I haven’t done in awhile, but my blogpals are picking up the slack on that one so instead I’ll blog about a moment of truth I faced last night.

I have noticed that many of you consider yourselves unique. Whenever you blog about your uniqueness, I resist the urge to leave a comment saying “Yes, you are unique – just like everybody else.” I, on the other hand, am truly unique. I know this because it impacts everything in my life and gets thrown in my face constantly. Don’t get me wrong – I’m happy most of the time and I like my myself because I’m superior to all of you in every conceivable way (especially my innate sense of humility), but sometimes I just wish I could fit in with my fellow human Americans instead of defaulting to the group created by the other outcasts. As it happens, I’ve never found a group in which I fit – too weird for “normal” people, and not crazy enough for the truly insane.

My writing (my real writing, not so much the blog) is a true reflection of me. I prefer commercial writing to nonsensical, self-aggrandizing literary claptrap, but I’ve found acceptance in the writing community to be difficult as well. My writing is not incomprehensible enough for me to be hailed as a literary genius gasbag, but it violates many editors’ rules, and yes, the creative community is riddled with rules, not merely guidelines. Ironically, Sci-Fi and fantasy editors tend to be the most old-fashioned and inflexible and many will not accept any work which strays across genre lines, especially if they dip into that most lowly of human inventions (shudder) – humor. If this doesn’t make much sense to you, it’s because I’m eschewing a lot of detail in favor of brevity, or because you’re a moron, or some combination thereof.

As to writing, I’ve always said that if I have to work in Corporate America to pay the bills and write at nights, I won’t consider it a wasted life. I do dream of supporting myself by my writing, but I don’t want or expect fame or riches. The writing is the important thing, and if I can be true to myself and my craft and scratch out a meager living at the same time, I will consider that my personal nirvana.

I’ve been writing a manuscript for a novel – my third and personal favorite – but the writing has become increasingly difficult, and last night I realized why. I don’t plan my writing or write from an outline, so I have little idea where the story will go or how long it will take when I begin, although I do admit I have a vague idea how it will end. I began this novel last November in an attempt to write a short but complete novel (no trilogies, in defiance of the federal laws governing genre fiction), the kind that is easiest to sell for mostly unknown writers (200 – 300 pages). I breezed through the first 50,000 words, then forced out another 30,000. That puts the story at about 280 pages, but it’s nowhere near complete and can’t possibly be told within the confines of a single book. I had begun unconsciously trying to end it while the story was still gaining momentum, despite sensing the presence of other characters standing to the side, awaiting their turn to contribute. Without meaning to, I started a series, one that would be great as graphic novels or serialized chapbooks, but not as a single brick-like offering.

Unfortunately, I’m not in a good place in my life to write this story. Work is busy, and my nights and weekends are already partially filled with studying Japanese. Besides, I don’t want to spend the next several years of my life writing the full story only to put myself in the position of trying to sell my first novel by approaching the publishers and saying “Hey, I just wrote ten books that don’t neatly fit into a single genre (humorous horror). Will you publish all of them?” I feel I need to work on smaller projects at this stage of my life – short stories and simpler novels. With this tale I may be looking at my opus, and I’m not ready to write that.

So, in a difficult but important decision last night, I decided to shelve the book until I’m prepared to face the task. The story will be told (assuming I don’t die in the interim) and it will be told like it wants – no more trying to force this dodecahedron-ical peg into a square hole. I thought I would feel like a quitter, but instead I felt as though a huge weight had been lifted. Cliché, but true.

And with that, all the joy in writing returned. I can’t wait to jump on my next project, whatever it will be.

In closing – fuck the Pope.