Snuffle

I'm still wrestling with the remnants of a cold that had already tagged the rest of the family. I'm nearly better, it was a mild cold, but an annoying one.

I'm also recovering from a bout of South Park Character Generator addiction -- whew, glad to be over that; for about 48 hours, I was turned everybody I could into South Park characters.

I cranked out over 4,000 words on a story I'm working on; I've been frustrated this summer, working on some long-term, long fiction projects (it feels pretentious to call them books, so I almost always just say "stories" or "long fiction" or that kind of thing -- to me, a book is what you hold in your hand, and a stack of papers isn't a book, really. It needs a spine to be real for me, a "book" is a finished product; until it gets to that point, it's just a draft). Anyway, I've stumbled a bit this summer, humming along on some pieces and then something going wrong with them, or them not quite cohering for me. It's a little frustrating, but it's part of the creative process -- some things work, some things don't. When they don't, and when, after a reasonable interval, I can't make them work, I put them down and work on something else. I can always revisit the failed pieces.

Still, I don't like failing; I play to win, and it bugs me. I was caught in a bit of a funk near the end of the summer, and have gotten my feet under me again, and am working again. That's good, even though I wrestle with whether my ability to write translates into having anything worthwhile to write about. I dunno; I get all tangled up inside -- like I'm always thinking about things and am passionate about a lot of things, snarky about even more, and part of that always percolates into my words, but at the same time, I wonder if there's no real depth to my work, or if I run away from depth.

Like maybe it intimidates me, or that I'm afraid to be vulnerable in that way, to really show what I care about. I mean, there are things that I truly care about, but if I were to explore them fully in fiction, there might be a risk of sentimentality, or hokeyness, or something. I don't think I have a great mind; I'm smart, but I'm not brilliant -- about the only area where I would say I'm brilliant is in my ability to make people laugh. I'm really, really good at that.

But at the same time, it's not something that necessarily translates into fiction, or at least something I personally can translate into fiction. And yet, there is a black humor to a lot of what I do, a gleam in my gimlet eye that gazes at the world -- I can't escape that part of me that laughs at everything. That's the part, the jester, that doesn't take things seriously, and I feel like if I killed the jester, I'd be a pretentious douchebag (DB), like so many of the DBs I work with at Bizarroworld, who take themselves Oh. So. Seriously.

Those DBs bug the hell out of me, and how they network and protect each other. Then again, Spousette says it well when she says that if people's work is any good, it stands on its own, and doesn't require that kind of networking for the work to shine. And yet, it does. Networking matters. Gruh. I don't take myself very seriously, and I wonder if that's what holds me back, or if it's a good thing.

My drugs are wearing off. Sigh.