Thought-Drive

Searching my closet for things that I could throw away with little regret, I happened upon one of the lost journals from college. I forget when, but sometime through my matriculation, I stopped taking notes in helpful ways. It might have started as far back as high school, but flipping page by page was like looking into my thinking life as it was at that time. One page had brief and confusing class notes scribbled in a rushed hand, then the next was a diary entry of sorts, naming my demons and listing their predilections, which was followed again by half a page of notes from a completely different class than the first. Only the journal entries had dates, and none of the class notes had titles. Occasionally, there would be rough drafts of poems written on the back of flyers for events on campus. I poured over it with a friend, and he repeated a quote I gave him earlier about how bad authors publish such things and good authors burn them. Mine is sitting beneath a dusty box of quiet noth...

I missed a whole week, and have little excuse, except for maybe that last Monday came around and things were solid, stable. Then, I lost hold of time like someone had played a prank on me, and the concept as a whole became greased and slippery. And then suddenly, like the joke had ended, it was Monday again. Questions about the nature of reality occurred to me, and only partly because time and space recently played havoc on my mind. A sci-fi show I'm an on-again off-again fan of impressed me the other night, and then the day following I had cause to hang out with a scientist friend of mine. I asked him about what science was to him, and what he thought about when he saw the mad doctor cutting up patients with finely explained reasoning or not. "Whenever I see morally reprehensible stuff like that," he said, "it offends me as a scientist." He went on the explain that the whole point of science, to him, was to do the impossible. If a doctor felt he had to test h...

I'm to the point now where the first handful of outlined chapters are practically chapters themselves. It is relatable to a term taught to me by a friend steeped in screen writing. I forget the name of the term, of course, but it basically is a summary of what happens in a scene before its actually written out. So I'm feeling good. The introductions went well enough, thus completing the first week of writing; after looking them over, I asked myself the same old questions. Do they catch the reader up fast enough? Do they include the most pertinent details (that the reader wants to know) of the immediate and of the distant (that the reader needs to know to make sense of the story as a whole). Sometimes I wish I was the type to be able to write a whole book, throw it away, and then write a better one. Along with those things cramming my brain pan, I've also found myself reading two other books. One, I'd say is for a friend and colleague, the other is for a colleague who ...

And January had seemed like such an interminably long month... I had told myself I'd start writing in February, and that I'd give myself until the end of summer to finish these next projects. I couldn't remember how long the previous craziness took me, but that seemed feasible. And if not feasible, then necessary. There are whispers of my position becoming full time in the fall, with benefits and responsibilities and that oppressive weight which I've heard that smites writers (hm, I think I just indirectly characterized myself as a writer). But then things got lost in the weekend as I discovered old friends. January 31st. It's the end of February, my calendar shouted at me, and I woke from something like a dream. Because in my driving to this place and that, pumping gas and putting cheese squares on bread, checking the mail and brushing my teeth, I discovered holes in the narratives I've been trying to build. "Hey, wasn't there some villain I wrote ab...

A good metaphor I came up with recently to explain my brain (good because it was effective) was that there's a little mouse constantly running on a wheel in my mind, which anything could be affixed to and that without even trying, my mind spins on it until I replace the thought with anything else. As such, the last week has been spent recharging my batteries, which I guess amounts to letting the mouse just run with nothing to turn, and spending moments here and there thinking about what I've decided to do next, which involves putting various related ideas on the wheel, but for limited amounts of time. This morning I woke up and found myself ready to write. It was a good feeling to track down all the notes I had taken, loose sheets of different color, out-dated flyers or color coded documents on one side, scribbled paragraphs on the other, and put them together. Some of them had sprouted like weeds in the midst of my last project, and I had put them away to sift through later....

On Saturday, the envelope went out. Contained therein were the first three chapters and introduction, which came out to a couple hundred words over 10,000. I felt happy with that because the submission guidelines called for the same amount of words if the book's chapters were very long or very short. Maybe that means my chapters are almost just right? Also in the pack was the requested cover letter, which I drafted once and finished, and the synopsis which took me longer than a chapter would. For some reason I focused on it the most, likely because it was so difficult. I tried explaining the phenomenon to a friend, that I probably don't spend enough time practicing the art of selling my work. Someone told me about the "elevator pitch," wherein the writer has roughly 30 seconds alone with whichever power player with agency and clout to sell them on an idea. And I'm still not sure if it involves compressing the entire work down to 30 seconds or expatiating on the m...

Today I am embracing my heritage, birthright even, of blaming the weather. I might have updated this days ago, but the most ready excuse is that I was sick (under the weather, see what I did there?). It was an odd experience, being legitimately ill, feeling too bad to move or eat or think. I haven't been like that in years. I feel much better now, but there is the persistent cough, and the less regular coughing up of things, all of which makes me think of lungers in the old west. I feel like I should be walking with a limp and sporting a scowl. Then there's the pesky blizzard. Right this second, I'm being informed via machine that I'll be out of work again tomorrow. Crazy start to the year, I think qualifies. But I have been writing. Chapter 23 was drafted today. I was telling a friend about how excited I was about the process, and I even went so far as to describe the different stages, as I know them, of novel writing. The first part is awful. There's no momentum...