How I Became Rich and Powerful (Part I)

National Novel Writing Month made me quit my job.

Okay, maybe that isn't entirely fair or true. There were dozens of other factors that brought me to this decision. I'm overweight, my health is suffering. I don't sleep because I'm anxious about work. My performance is consistently overlooked unless there's something negative that can be shifted my way. You know, typical food service stuff. I've been doing this job for sixteen years in various states of satisfaction. Then, November rolled around. I'm a creature of habit, but that growing dissatisfaction with my career and where it has led me started to become insurmountable right about the time I started seeing things like, "101 Ways to Have a Fun, Successful NaNoWriMo!" and, "Is It Time to Murder Your Spouse and Focus on That Novel?" popping up all over.

See, most of these articles are written by morons. They're people who have a sort of generic voice, parroting back things that someone else, who maybe self-published a novel once in the halcyon days of 2002, wrote down so they could show their exasperated friends and family that, "Look, I am a real writer."

The rest of them, barring a special few with something to say and the moxie to say it well, are written by people that want to give you just enough vague, nonsensical advice that you'll decide writing for money is fucking magic and take their 12-week course on which part of Lucifer's taint you need to suck to get a book deal.

So, I thought, I gotta get in on that racket.

Then I had some work stuff go on, which I won't delve into too much because I'm still processing it. Long story short, I became willfully and gloriously and terrifyingly unemployed. So here I am, with a dozen browser pages open to different job searches and the thing I keep coming back to is the feeling that none of it will make my health or my well-being, or even my long-term financial situation any better. Because, ultimately, I don't want to do anything I'm seeing in front of me. I want to chase that dream, slay that dragon. I want to quit being such a fucking coward and put everything on hold while I go on this quest.

Typical, selfish, and invigorating because now, right god damn now, I can do it. Oh, sure, my head's all big because I had one little short story published this year but that is all I needed. I needed some editor somewhere to say, "Hey, you're pretty good at this." Since then I've been a maniac, writing and plotting and doing the things I had only sort of contemplated before, because the reality is that I've always assumed my support system, my incredible friends and family who have patiently listened to my excuses for not doing this, would get tired of me lounging about in front of a keyboard trying to make this happen. But you know what? I'm wrong.

So while the encouraging articles on how best to write your novel are being hammered out by idiots, and the world keeps spinning toward the end of this year, and I have no financial safety net except to be excellent, I realized that it was time to shit or get off the pot. Stop saying you can do it and just do it. Worst case is some hunger pains and light homelessness. Its not even that cold yet, so I think we'll be fine. I choose to shit.

Also, I have an interview for a Human Resources job tomorrow morning. Baby steps, kids.

Yours,
-JT

Rhyme and Reason

I haven't written a poem in five years. Now, I was never much of a poet to begin with. I have always preferred fiction. There is a freedom, in prose, to ramble and lose yourself in tangents. It is, by all accounts, the more forgiving method of writing. And, truthfully, I have never been particularly good at poetry. You could say that's subjective and I would say that I have personally met some of the most talented poets of my generation and it is not, actually, subjective. Not one bit. Its a skill that can be honed, but one where a natural affinity either is or is not present. I'm not a terrible poet, I'm just not a very good one. Even in short form I have always written songs, preferring to hear melodies and music as I spill my words.

Poetry has always been a little bit mythical for me. When people talk of muses and the sort of divine inspiration that comes with being an artists, poetry is what it brings to mind. I have never, for instance, plotted a poem. I've never edited one. They appear, when they appear, wholly formed. In a moment of creative fury I put them down on paper and that's it. The feeling is gone. The magic, if that's what it can be called, is used up all at once. It strikes when it strikes and never by choice. I have pulled over on highways, left meetings, ignored classes and family dinners, ended phone calls and interrupted post-coital cuddling because I had to write something down. Fiction is different. There's always a source for it. I can trace the idea for every story I have ever composed back to a handful of specific, if unrelated, bits of inspiration. Different things that came together and gave me an idea. Fiction, therefore, seems much more logical to me.

I can't edit a poem. I can't change character names, descriptions of places, the subtle but flowery details that come with a love of language and a vivid mental picture. I can't move chapters around to make the narrative flow better. I can't eliminate whole threads because they went nowhere. A poet, of course, will tell you that you can absolutely do those things. That poet is fucking wrong. She can do those things. I can not. You, its likely, can not. For me, a finished poem is one that is out of my brain and on the page. Further examination of it can only tell me if I like the piece or if I should save it into a file filled with songs and poems and half-thought short stories that I tell myself are works-in-progress but are really just mental abortions. They are twisted, awkward things, shambling around with acne-ridden faces and treatises on war and politics and the semi-incestuous relationship between fantasy and heavy metal. The kind of thing that, if it went to school with you even your least socially adept friends would pity it. They aren't inherently bad, my basement-dwelling creations. They're incomplete. Or, rather, incompleteable. Perhaps that's too harsh, but I would encourage you, non-poets, to sit down and write a poem and then, upon being dissatisfied, try to edit it into something palatable. You can't because poetry is a thing of divinities and you, poor bastard, are as mundane as I.

I'm not saying poetry is the most difficult thing in the world. In fact, a few of my poet friends struggle mightily with fiction for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with their implied magical natures. I give them advice, if and when they ask, but the truth is that fiction requires discipline and poetry requires you to be some kind of a god damned ancient Greek creatrix.

I'm not even sure what led me to musing about how long its been since I wrote a poem. But, I suppose that's the point to this whole thing isn't it? It just fucking came to me, all at once, without rhyme or reason, and now that it's out I'll probably never consider it again. Well, except as an example in five years when I wonder why I don't write blog posts like I did in my angsty teenage years. Or, for that matter, in my mid-twenties.

Look for it around 2022, probably posted directly above this one.

Yours,
-S.R.