Wow! It's been a while!
Cheers, gang. It's me, Max Overly, your old confidante, second in all of your gentlemen's disputes, and handy with a hacksaw when a limb needs to come off after an engagement at sea! (Although frankly if your engagement requires amputation, we here at Overly Management and Counseling strongly recommend a pre-nup before the actual marriage, har, har, har! Ha, hack, hack, caugh, sputter, kill me now...)
Sorry I haven't written in so long. I feel almost as though my entire personality had been put on hold, like an unfinished novel shoved hastily into the very back of the filing cabinet, so its author doesn't have to spend sleepless nights thinking about his failure, his abject, miserable, utterly miserable failure as a human being. It's just been that kind of season, I suppose. Surely everyone feels like that sometimes. Everyone, that is, with a Tortured Artistic Soul like my own, the Soul of a Writer. Sometimes I wish there were three cases of letters in our Roman alphabet-lower, upper, and, I don't know, mega, or super, or über or something-so that I would never run out of ways to indicate that when I say Writer, I mean the very Platonic essence of what it truly means (something none of you will ever understand, no, not if I can help it, or, er, rather, close parenthesis, nod and smile) to be that singularly miserable specimen of Humanity, a Writer. See, in that sentence alone, Humanity obviously deserves a large letter, because it is a large concept, and more importantly, because my own sense of it is large, larger, perhaps, that most ordinary people's sense of humanity; and yet Writer quite clearly needs something more, something to indicate that it too is large, like Humanity, or rather, like my sense of Humanity, but more so. Perhaps italics? I would hate for my oeuvre to start reading like the overemphatic zealotry of a 19th century political pamphleteer. And also, you know, the fonts available for web design could never really do my italic emphasis justice. I have a strong suspicion that many web browsers render italics as faux italic slanted romans, which simply will not do at all. (Now I'm starting to sound like my degenerate, if rather more prolific, Manhattanite manfriend Stine. New paragraph.)
The good news is that this period of silence and solitude has allowed me plenty of time for reflection and "regrouping," something which my analyst seems to think is important, kind of like our 3-time-a-week sessions (I wanted to scale back to maybe 2, or 2 1/2, but he said this was a very "critical juncture" in our "process," and I didn't dare disagree, lest he hit me on the back of the hands with a ruler-a trick he seems to have learned from my maudlin, manqué piano teacher, which re see below). I was really starting to feel like I might strike out on an existence of my own, away from the petty, childish competitiveness I'd developed with Stine, or my editor, or my mother, and, just at the right moment, I received this from Stine himself. It seemed to be the perfect diversion, not to mention the perfect way to get back up on the whores-horse, excuse me-and so I took him up on it.
I wrote about 6,000 words of the proposed 50,000. After three chapters, my hero, Joseph Feldman-Overly (in the haste of composition, I fear his name may have changed a few times, until I eventually gave up on dissembling, just as he was taking on a life of his own) had not yet even fully showered and breakfasted. I cannot describe how demoralizing, how utterly bestial and disgusting the word count tools I downloaded from the Internet on the suggestion of fellow NaNoWriMo writers on the bulletin boards were. At the same time, this is the most I have written in months. Should I thank Stine for his ridiculous-and, I begin to suspect, unintended-suggestion. Can I kill him instead? (March him over to the zoo and feed him to the yak?)
I shall start posting chapters right after I finish this drink.
Sorry I haven't written in so long. I feel almost as though my entire personality had been put on hold, like an unfinished novel shoved hastily into the very back of the filing cabinet, so its author doesn't have to spend sleepless nights thinking about his failure, his abject, miserable, utterly miserable failure as a human being. It's just been that kind of season, I suppose. Surely everyone feels like that sometimes. Everyone, that is, with a Tortured Artistic Soul like my own, the Soul of a Writer. Sometimes I wish there were three cases of letters in our Roman alphabet-lower, upper, and, I don't know, mega, or super, or über or something-so that I would never run out of ways to indicate that when I say Writer, I mean the very Platonic essence of what it truly means (something none of you will ever understand, no, not if I can help it, or, er, rather, close parenthesis, nod and smile) to be that singularly miserable specimen of Humanity, a Writer. See, in that sentence alone, Humanity obviously deserves a large letter, because it is a large concept, and more importantly, because my own sense of it is large, larger, perhaps, that most ordinary people's sense of humanity; and yet Writer quite clearly needs something more, something to indicate that it too is large, like Humanity, or rather, like my sense of Humanity, but more so. Perhaps italics? I would hate for my oeuvre to start reading like the overemphatic zealotry of a 19th century political pamphleteer. And also, you know, the fonts available for web design could never really do my italic emphasis justice. I have a strong suspicion that many web browsers render italics as faux italic slanted romans, which simply will not do at all. (Now I'm starting to sound like my degenerate, if rather more prolific, Manhattanite manfriend Stine. New paragraph.)
The good news is that this period of silence and solitude has allowed me plenty of time for reflection and "regrouping," something which my analyst seems to think is important, kind of like our 3-time-a-week sessions (I wanted to scale back to maybe 2, or 2 1/2, but he said this was a very "critical juncture" in our "process," and I didn't dare disagree, lest he hit me on the back of the hands with a ruler-a trick he seems to have learned from my maudlin, manqué piano teacher, which re see below). I was really starting to feel like I might strike out on an existence of my own, away from the petty, childish competitiveness I'd developed with Stine, or my editor, or my mother, and, just at the right moment, I received this from Stine himself. It seemed to be the perfect diversion, not to mention the perfect way to get back up on the whores-horse, excuse me-and so I took him up on it.
I wrote about 6,000 words of the proposed 50,000. After three chapters, my hero, Joseph Feldman-Overly (in the haste of composition, I fear his name may have changed a few times, until I eventually gave up on dissembling, just as he was taking on a life of his own) had not yet even fully showered and breakfasted. I cannot describe how demoralizing, how utterly bestial and disgusting the word count tools I downloaded from the Internet on the suggestion of fellow NaNoWriMo writers on the bulletin boards were. At the same time, this is the most I have written in months. Should I thank Stine for his ridiculous-and, I begin to suspect, unintended-suggestion. Can I kill him instead? (March him over to the zoo and feed him to the yak?)
I shall start posting chapters right after I finish this drink.