Hello and Hi-ho
I’ve been feeling guilty for my friend and the memoir. Given he’s writing and I’m editing, I feel that there’s an expectation to hat it’d be whipped up and finalized sooner. However this is merely my own fear, given we’ve shared many a discussion of life and the pursuit and an understanding it may take time, more time than expected. So why the guilt?
I think of Neil Gaiman’s ‘View From the Cheap Seats’ an autobiographical that covers life and growing, writing and love, comics and being a husband, parent, and the tribulations that transpire throughout. But, I’m here to discuss Harlan Ellison, his soapbox, and the project he went on to show and demystify the idea of what it is to be a writer. Ellison would go from bookstore to bookstore at numerous locations throughout the U.S. to show the practice, the duration of idea to finger to paper, to being posted on the glass windows at whichever spot he’d be at and voila. 100 short stories later and I think, this should be like that right? 100 short stories, a little over a year of our project and I’ve made just a slight dent to the whole of what’s wanted for this memoir. But then in truth, there are long durations where Ellison admits, he’d wander, whether it was in mind or body, he’d putz about pondering the next page, next chapter, that next step. Gaiman does, King, well I don’t know, he whips them out like I eat, but I feel even he’d drift in thought, pause for a moment, maybe a day and get back to it. But that’s what it is to be writing. Thought, planning, silent and invisible outlines draped across our eyes, while we take a scalpel to it and partition, splice, and rearrange what is wanted.
My days start with thought, planning, and almost immediately an editing to the steps I take, the writing I did the might before, what I’m doing, and what is planned to be done. What’s nearly comical, is that the more I find myself with less to do, I do more.
I’ve found myself with two silent weeks of no Discussion Questions or subject readings for school, two minute projects, and all the time in the world to edit memoirs, paint, write for DreamDarkStories, and be a dad and husband.
In some areas I have more success than others. Guess it turns out like that sometimes. Anyhow to those who read and if keeping track some of my stuff is dropped a little late sometimes too late so I’m going to try to drop this just a little after midnight from the last day of February.
C’est la vie
May you all have a wonderful night and a wonderful most glorious morning, and for those of you who are seeing the morning may it be peaceful and may the night that come be just as gentle.
Nosce Te Ipsum
Dream Dark Stories 