The time has come, The Steven said, to speak of many things.....
…of love, and loss, and rockin’ out, and killer queens and kings,
of silence and confusing acts, and just how much that stings.
The word of the day, folks, is mystification. Now, while I could expand upon this in a general sense in regards to the events of the last week - pulled over randomly, haven’t heard from my editor, being blown off by a friend visiting from out of town, losing my internet access, the sparkplugs on my truck going bad - I’ve decided that I want to concentrate on one aspect of this, and then possibly expand out wherever my consciousness chooses to lead me (which, by and large, involves a lot of wandering about like a lost pilgrim in the desert). What I’ve decided to focus on at the moment is, as it happens, my writing.
Lately, it sucks.
As most of you now know ad nauseam, I’ve written a book, which is the first part of a trilogy that I already have mapped out in my head. Hell, more than just in my head; I’ve got notebooks filled with, well, notes on the development of the storyline, synopsis’s of the tales within, character backgrounds, location descriptions, detailed charts on how every single story is connected to the whole, whether it’s through a single sentence in a narrative, or pages and pages of correlation - I’ve got all of it, sitting there, ready to be written. This wonderfully dense and convoluted tale, running up and down the scales of time, sitting here waiting to be discovered, to be written, to be experienced by any and all who are willing to jump into this world with both feet and embrace what is at hand.
I have this…and I can’t seem to get started. Hell, I’ve been stuck on it for the last 3 years now, practically.
I’d like to say that I don’t know why this is happening, but I have a sneaking suspicion I know the answer, and that makes me upset in a variety of ways, because it’s….it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that I could just overcome. It’s starting to feel like a sort of soul crisis that I’m afraid I may never recover from.
And, I mean, yeah, sure, I could blame it on any number of reasons - women, work, money, general unhappiness, the feeling of a lack of recognition or futility about my work and about finding lasting success - but the problem is, those things never stopped me before. I wrote what I think of as being some of the very best stories under exactly those conditions before - while deeply in love and having that reciprocated times two, while so poor that I had barely enough money to put gas in my car and buy a 12 pack of ramen, while people whom I called friends were telling me I shouldn’t bother with my writing, while working the exact same job I am now, except longer hours and shittier pay, while heartbroken and devastated, and so on and so forth - I was focused and driven then, and despite everything else in my life, I could still sit down for several hours a week and pound out bits and pieces of the narrative and take a small amount of pride in what I was forging, creating, building. I could look at this world that I was pulling out of my head and putting down on paper (or, to be more specific, the computer screen) and say to myself that I was doing something extraordinary, something that not everyone can do, and (if I do say so myself) doing it pretty goddamn well. So this sudden inability to write anything that I really gave a damn about was unnerving, to say the least. And this forced me to sit down over the last few days and think about why that is. Sadly enough, I have the answer, now, and if I’m being honest about it, that answer hurts like nothing else could.
See, when I first started writing, so many years ago - when I first sat down in front of my grandmothers old manual typewriter and started pounding away at my first story, an alternate reality tale about a private eye living in a 1930’s Los Angeles replete with flying cars, rocket trips to the moon, Martian bodyguards, interplanetary smugglers, and demons masquerading as femme fatales, I had this belief, deep in my soul, that words had the power to change everything. That writing a story, a letter, a poem, could affect someone, could get under their skin and pull them into my orbit, could change minds and destinies and destinations. And maybe they could, once; maybe I did have that power, maybe I was able to use it, and use it well, this ability I had for stringing together sentences that could get under your skin and make someone laugh, make them cry, make them love, make them hurt, make them re-evaluate, and, most important, make them believe.
Now, however, I feel that time has come and gone. Now, my words feel hollow and empty, like I am shouting into a well of infinite depth, a well that has no echo, that swallows every sound like a blanket of nothingness, that eats my words, my thoughts, my dreams, and gives nothing in return, no matter how long I stand there and wait for something to come back. Now, I feel like my words fall on deaf ears, like what I have to say doesn’t matter, or worse, that they are mocked, judged, and discarded by those whose only qualifications are a self-determined superiority of wit and the blind and contemptuous hubris of callow youth. These naïve children parade their own abilities, decry or scorn anyone else’s, and feel the need to declare victory in a game that wasn’t really being played to begin with, and yet still manage to make me feel the loser.
Despite this feeling, I have sat down recently to try and rediscover my own passions, to tunnel back into the depths of my soul and pull these stories back out into the light, dust them off, examine them at length, and see if I still have what it takes to breathe life back into them. My foray even led me to sit down for a few hours last week and start working on one of them again, picking up the story mid-way through the sentence that I had left open and adding on, building it up, trying to figure out if my heart was still in there, buried under layers of stardust, broken dreams, fear of inadequacy, and an overall sense of loss of self.
And I discovered that it is not.
And now I am at a metaphysical crossroads: do I continue on, knowing that my heart is no longer in it, hoping that I’m wrong, that it’s just buried so deeply that I will have to seriously work to dislodge it from the rubble that has encloses my psyche? Or do I simply give up and walk away now, asking constant apology to those whom I let down, seeking a sign of enlightenment from another quarter, hoping that I will discover a new form of expression? Where do I go from here, is the question? Is it the lady, or the tiger?
I used to take comfort in the idea of signs, little messages dropped into your lap by higher powers, or fate, or destiny. These signs told you that you were on the right path, that your dream life was right around the corner, that your goals were true, and just, and real, if you just believed and kept moving forward. I used to do just that, believe. Now, the only thing that I take comfort in, and that I ‘believe’ in, is routine. There is no fate, no destiny, no eventual reward of that which you most desire. There is only Monday through Sunday, paid every 2 weeks, gas prices rising, songs of sad memory on the radio, fleeting glimpses of what-might-have-been through the window at a thousand feet per second, the changing seasons, and growing old, so old, and feeling yourself disintegrate, one grain of soul sand at a time.
I know I started this off saying I wanted to speak of many things, but I think that’s all I have in me, today. Maybe more tomorrow, or next week…but don’t hold your breath.
- Steven out
of silence and confusing acts, and just how much that stings.
The word of the day, folks, is mystification. Now, while I could expand upon this in a general sense in regards to the events of the last week - pulled over randomly, haven’t heard from my editor, being blown off by a friend visiting from out of town, losing my internet access, the sparkplugs on my truck going bad - I’ve decided that I want to concentrate on one aspect of this, and then possibly expand out wherever my consciousness chooses to lead me (which, by and large, involves a lot of wandering about like a lost pilgrim in the desert). What I’ve decided to focus on at the moment is, as it happens, my writing.
Lately, it sucks.
As most of you now know ad nauseam, I’ve written a book, which is the first part of a trilogy that I already have mapped out in my head. Hell, more than just in my head; I’ve got notebooks filled with, well, notes on the development of the storyline, synopsis’s of the tales within, character backgrounds, location descriptions, detailed charts on how every single story is connected to the whole, whether it’s through a single sentence in a narrative, or pages and pages of correlation - I’ve got all of it, sitting there, ready to be written. This wonderfully dense and convoluted tale, running up and down the scales of time, sitting here waiting to be discovered, to be written, to be experienced by any and all who are willing to jump into this world with both feet and embrace what is at hand.
I have this…and I can’t seem to get started. Hell, I’ve been stuck on it for the last 3 years now, practically.
I’d like to say that I don’t know why this is happening, but I have a sneaking suspicion I know the answer, and that makes me upset in a variety of ways, because it’s….it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that I could just overcome. It’s starting to feel like a sort of soul crisis that I’m afraid I may never recover from.
And, I mean, yeah, sure, I could blame it on any number of reasons - women, work, money, general unhappiness, the feeling of a lack of recognition or futility about my work and about finding lasting success - but the problem is, those things never stopped me before. I wrote what I think of as being some of the very best stories under exactly those conditions before - while deeply in love and having that reciprocated times two, while so poor that I had barely enough money to put gas in my car and buy a 12 pack of ramen, while people whom I called friends were telling me I shouldn’t bother with my writing, while working the exact same job I am now, except longer hours and shittier pay, while heartbroken and devastated, and so on and so forth - I was focused and driven then, and despite everything else in my life, I could still sit down for several hours a week and pound out bits and pieces of the narrative and take a small amount of pride in what I was forging, creating, building. I could look at this world that I was pulling out of my head and putting down on paper (or, to be more specific, the computer screen) and say to myself that I was doing something extraordinary, something that not everyone can do, and (if I do say so myself) doing it pretty goddamn well. So this sudden inability to write anything that I really gave a damn about was unnerving, to say the least. And this forced me to sit down over the last few days and think about why that is. Sadly enough, I have the answer, now, and if I’m being honest about it, that answer hurts like nothing else could.
See, when I first started writing, so many years ago - when I first sat down in front of my grandmothers old manual typewriter and started pounding away at my first story, an alternate reality tale about a private eye living in a 1930’s Los Angeles replete with flying cars, rocket trips to the moon, Martian bodyguards, interplanetary smugglers, and demons masquerading as femme fatales, I had this belief, deep in my soul, that words had the power to change everything. That writing a story, a letter, a poem, could affect someone, could get under their skin and pull them into my orbit, could change minds and destinies and destinations. And maybe they could, once; maybe I did have that power, maybe I was able to use it, and use it well, this ability I had for stringing together sentences that could get under your skin and make someone laugh, make them cry, make them love, make them hurt, make them re-evaluate, and, most important, make them believe.
Now, however, I feel that time has come and gone. Now, my words feel hollow and empty, like I am shouting into a well of infinite depth, a well that has no echo, that swallows every sound like a blanket of nothingness, that eats my words, my thoughts, my dreams, and gives nothing in return, no matter how long I stand there and wait for something to come back. Now, I feel like my words fall on deaf ears, like what I have to say doesn’t matter, or worse, that they are mocked, judged, and discarded by those whose only qualifications are a self-determined superiority of wit and the blind and contemptuous hubris of callow youth. These naïve children parade their own abilities, decry or scorn anyone else’s, and feel the need to declare victory in a game that wasn’t really being played to begin with, and yet still manage to make me feel the loser.
Despite this feeling, I have sat down recently to try and rediscover my own passions, to tunnel back into the depths of my soul and pull these stories back out into the light, dust them off, examine them at length, and see if I still have what it takes to breathe life back into them. My foray even led me to sit down for a few hours last week and start working on one of them again, picking up the story mid-way through the sentence that I had left open and adding on, building it up, trying to figure out if my heart was still in there, buried under layers of stardust, broken dreams, fear of inadequacy, and an overall sense of loss of self.
And I discovered that it is not.
And now I am at a metaphysical crossroads: do I continue on, knowing that my heart is no longer in it, hoping that I’m wrong, that it’s just buried so deeply that I will have to seriously work to dislodge it from the rubble that has encloses my psyche? Or do I simply give up and walk away now, asking constant apology to those whom I let down, seeking a sign of enlightenment from another quarter, hoping that I will discover a new form of expression? Where do I go from here, is the question? Is it the lady, or the tiger?
I used to take comfort in the idea of signs, little messages dropped into your lap by higher powers, or fate, or destiny. These signs told you that you were on the right path, that your dream life was right around the corner, that your goals were true, and just, and real, if you just believed and kept moving forward. I used to do just that, believe. Now, the only thing that I take comfort in, and that I ‘believe’ in, is routine. There is no fate, no destiny, no eventual reward of that which you most desire. There is only Monday through Sunday, paid every 2 weeks, gas prices rising, songs of sad memory on the radio, fleeting glimpses of what-might-have-been through the window at a thousand feet per second, the changing seasons, and growing old, so old, and feeling yourself disintegrate, one grain of soul sand at a time.
I know I started this off saying I wanted to speak of many things, but I think that’s all I have in me, today. Maybe more tomorrow, or next week…but don’t hold your breath.
- Steven out