wildcat

The astonishing variety of my unfinished stories. Quite often these are characterized as "aborted fetuses," or some equally cruel and horrible metaphor that implies blood, guts, and stillbirth. Either way, I should sit down and cordon off all the unfinished stories in some file folder marked "Unused," or "Primarily Imagined, only Partially Written." Maybe I should release a book of false starts, poor attempts, and deleted paragraphs. My stories have been a little unfocused since graduation, maybe I'm still adjusting to the absence of whip to buttock and deadlines. The unfinished stories pile up and it's hard to explain that I've already imagined most of them in their entirety, it's the transcribing, editing, revision, writing in a physical sense that goes nowhere. The Rapunzel story, for example, exists halfway in the world and mostly in my brain, and it exists from every angle and has development and it's run its course. It sits on a shelf in some Borgesian divine library with annotations and an index.

Sometimes it's an issue of boredom. I have some peculiar idea at least three times an hour, I have no time to write every single one of them down, and they get in the way of each other. They demand attention, they distract, they are selfish and irresponsible to each other. For a while, just after graduation, I spent a month or so working on a particular story and then moved onto another one. But then the momentum dissipated and I've ended up starting things and failing to finish them. Sometimes it's because I talk about them or I don't have enough time because of procrastination and work.

I think the big issue here is my own lack of discipline. I have had very good times where yes, I've been on the ball and disciplined and working. Writing: putting down text and working with it, polishing it, doing my job. Sure, there's the day job, but that isn't my job beyond necessity and let's speak of it no more. I like writing. I enjoy it. Why haven't I been doing it? Failure of drive, I suppose. So, to go along with the plans toward physical fitness - the bicycle, more athletic activity, the goal of getting rid of this pudgy middle section - I have to make my plans toward literary fitness, the completion of stories, the writing of poems, the constant use of my writing muscles.

Michael made some comment recently that he was concerned that all my good writing was going into my blog rather than being sent out for actual publication. His concern is valid, I suppose, but my goals toward writing are sporadic and segmented; maybe what I put in my blog isn't exactly what I write about when I want to be published (and when I'm failing to be published), maybe it is but I want to put it somewhere else, maybe I'm just bored and sad and tired of sending out submissions which are ignored completely or result in a slim rejection notice generated by a computer somewhere, claiming to be an editor. I've been pondering the importance of my blog in my daily writing routine and its significance, how it stands up against my serious (okay, maybe, publishable but never serious) fiction. Most of the bits of fiction that end up on the blog are written specifically for the blog, written in the little text editor screen, edited whether niggling haste.

I don't necessarily want to write about my day at work because most of my days at work are the same, and while I enjoy it, the library can't really extend beyond opening hours for my own sanity and for my audience's no doubt waning interest. There's a lot of things worth writing about in my life, hour-long conversations on the telephone about so-and-so's ex-boyfriend having hepatitis or such-and-such's drug debts from back in the day, the issue of moving whether it be fantasy life on Salt Spring or jetting off to Montreal to do whatever, politics, endless afternoons, whatever. Sometimes the blog is purely here to provide some written content on those days when the words are sputtering forth or I need to limber up the muscles for the bigger tasks, and sometimes the blog is goal enough for itself.