After this I am probably going to go to Culvers and eat more food than I should. As a result I will pass out and sleep through the night. This is significant, because I only have two nights left after this one. Then my kids come back. Then everything gets crazy. And Expensive.
I’ve learned this vacation that there is a painful cycle to my writing that needs to come to an end. I start to write and the feeling is like breaking up scar tissue. I write and write and eventually start to feel that awesome sense of energy and one-with-the-universe-ness I feel when I’m on a good story run. I finish and, exhausted, I kick into a refractory period. Then I do nothing for a long time. The scar tissue hardens, often coming back stronger than before. Then I get the call to write again and the process repeats.
I might have the worst process in the history of craft. All I am missing at this point is opium. I’m not talking the Bukowski/Hemingway sort of get loaded and go write. I’m talking the David Sedaris, ‘I’ve been taught this is how it ought to be done’ sort of get loaded and go write. I was taught not to alter my state to get to the words. In fact, I’ve always believed I need to be in the most sober state–tuned in–to get the words.
Lately I cannot tune in all that well and what comes happens in spurts, the way you’ll turn an old radio knob and hear something clearly for just a moment and then it is gone and you spend an hour trying to find it again. I might need to face the possibility that I am writing the wrong stories and that I’ve evolved as a storyteller to an entirely different genre of writing, though I don’t know what that genre is.
I might also have to face the fact that I have a lot of stuff happening in my life that ought to be fuel but is instead the wall I’m not allowing myself to clumsily scale in order to get to the words that breathe faintly on the other side.
Or maybe its as my muse, the love of my life suggests: maybe I’m jut being awfully lazy. After all, when you spend more time on minecraft than on a blank page, your words are not being properly served.
But that is neither here nor there right now, because ten minutes is about up and there is a burger out there waiting. Once it finds me sleep will soon follow.