Sorry for the long silence ...

I am a boy,

Who writes sad poems,
I write of love,
Everyday I wake up,
From a sleepless night,
Every night I go to bed,
From a restless day,
Every minute I think of life,
Every second I think of death,
And I am a boy,
Who writes sad poems.

I've been so slack, it's not funny. I am so sorry guys, I haven't written anything for sometime but I did start back with Lost last week. I don't know if I have a reason. Part of it is that I have about one free night a week right now. Part of it is sheer laziness. Part of it is that continuing conviction that there's no point whatsoever.

I have spent quite a time using the tape recorder I keep in my car, however. It's not writing, but at least the ideas I'm having aren't getting completely lost.

I'm a little freaked out by something that happened to me lately. (I was a little freaked out by everything about me, but that's really a different story.) I found myself unable to step outside and observe the process as a writer.

I can't remember a time when I've been unable to do that, since I gained a writer's self-awareness. I can't think of a time when I've been thrown for more than a few, brief minutes, out of the mode of observing my own life, of being the narrator of my own story. But this phenomenon lasted more than a few days.

Very disturbing. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I know there are people who would be downright gleeful that I left my brain out of my life for a day or two, but it's something I've been living with for years. YEARS. All of my adult life, all of my adolescent life, and on and off before that.

This seems to be the sort of angst more appropriate to my daily-life journal, but I just wanted to share the strangeness of what it felt like to have my writer-identity stripped away for a time. If anyone thinks it was refreshing, think again. It was altogether like being suddenly struck mute, deaf and blind. Whatever it is in how a writer chooses to see the world-- apparently it has become an essential part of my psyche.

Julie, darn her, sent me a writing contest, to be found at http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/index2.htm. "The Return of the King." THE king. You know. The one I care about. Arthur.

Damn, damn, damn. It appears that the rumors of my demise may have been greatly exaggerated.

I've been taking a lot of my time with Harvey Industries and Arianna, and while this does not leave me with no time for writing, it leaves me with considerably less time than I would like. The Current contest, for example, came closer and closer, and I had no time whatsoever to really polish something-- I could lay layers of words down like paint with a palette knife, but much like when I paint with that technique, it doesn't resemble anything like art. There was no opportunity to play or refine.

So, I have declared that I will not even bother to consider submitting anything for publication until after I m done with my doctorate. That's about a year from now, if I've figured everything out right. And even if I don't graduate in Nov, if I decide it's more important to have a MSc. than a Phd. and stay in another year, I will take a creative writing class and submit stories to the Hopwood Awards-- so, essentially, I'm taking a year off.

I won't stop writing, of course. I've actually written more since I've made this declaration to myself and my friends than prior to that-- it's almost like it alleviated some problem within me. I've managed to lay down at least a page or two of A Moment With An Angel Maslina story every night since I made this decision. So maybe it's for the best. Maybe it's a decision I should come to, period, since I seem to get that much more joy out of writing if I don't think about publishing it. There's an essential paradox in that-- that maybe if I stop writing with an eye to publication, then I find it easier and more enjoyable-- and yet, I don't want to write on and on for the rest of my life and not try to publish. I think.... well, I don't know. Hopefully I'll get some resolution to this problem in the future, 'cause I sure don't know the answer now.

The other part of me thinks that maybe if I stop gaming, my creative juices will have no choice but to pump back into my writing. So, I think that's going to be my other decision. When I finish studying, I'm going to stop gaming. Maybe not forever, but at least for a year.

Quite a bold statement, no? The downside is seeing less of my friends-- because I know no matter how hard we try, it's going to be impossible to socialize regularly, every two weeks. As much as I'd like to.

One other thought/statement: I'm going to move this puppy over to a blog-system soon. I just have to figure out how....

So, last night, Abel said, "It's not like your articles sucked sucked, but you need the published more." While nothing short of the truth, I wonder why it bothered me enough to have terrible dreams in which I realized my life (like my writing) has consistently fallen so short of the mark of what I had hoped for as a child that it is almost unrecognizable to me. I woke up in a foul mood. I look around and am displeased with everything I see, in a very un-Mer-like way. Ugh. The only happy thing in my life right now is Bridget Jones' Diary, which is a vastly entertaining book, and the fact that I am looking forward to finishing it, and that is the only thing I can think of to look forward to.

What irritates me as well is the thought that the absolute happiest time of my life was, in fact, not a time that I was writing. The happiest time of my life was a mere whole semester of college at Cornell in which Zura and Arianna with me and studied the rest of the time. I didn't read or write anything not school-related at that point. I took one of the best classes I've ever taken that semester, "Classical Sources of Modern Culture" (only surpassed by it's sequel, "Medieval Sources of Modern Culture"). I also took Attic Greek, which satisfied my language desires... and took also Criminology, with James, which was (to me) a deeply satisfying class in some bizarre way. Now... why?? Why was that the happiest time? I was emotionally stable, for one thing, probably more than any other time in my life. But I wasn't writing. Is the key to happiness really to just be busy (but not stressed) and to have Arianna and Zura around? yea It makes me suspect that writing is merely an outle t for me, not an actual blissful end in and of itself. For, surely, I am happier nowadays when I write, but I still do not attain the keen level of happiness and confidence that I had during one whole semester of college.

I feel the need to elaborate on my last whiny comment. What I'm trying to say is, if I wrote to please myself, I'd have the most boring crap on the planet coming out on a regular basis. I like long, intricate character studies. Likewise, the best stuff I've ever written have been things I was assigned. I WONDER.

A Moment With An Angel, the kiss of death is "Very nice" when you are asking for writing criticism, right up there with "It was fine/ok/neat." Hm. A bland criticism is pretty much an admission that what you wrote was bland, I guess. I don't know. I'd rather have something returned to me in a sorry state-- folded, spindled and mutilated-- than to hear "it was ok."

So, should I start keeping this writing journal using blogger? Abel seems to think so, but when I said I only updated once a month, Abel thought it might be a little over the top. But now I'm updating everytime I have a thought about writing (and can't just go write). BTW, I did a little scribbling last night (both on one of the novels and also just for the exercise), but everything I wrote seemed boring. Ugh. I know that the common wisdom says "Write only what pleases *you* since you can't know what will please someone else..." but what happens when every time you write, you think you are pleasing yourself-- until you reread it, and then you hate it???

Abel was on my case in a big way last night about not writing as much as I should (and I appreciate it, I sure do). He told me it doesn't matter what I write as long as I do (I'm not sure I agree with that, because by that definition the stupid updates to my deardiary webpage would count, right?). I said it was hard not to have specific assignments to work on, at times... He said, "Write a three-paragraph short story, then!" He was pretty surprised when I handed one to him fifteen minutes later.

Let's face facts. I'm a dilletante. Well, actually, I've faced those facts, but perhaps you haven't. I have difficulty being faithful to one story the way some women have difficulty being faithful to one man. I spent part of Sunday (the part I didn't spend working at Harveys... grrr...) working on yet another new story. I need to settle down. I don't know how to settle down. My guess is that I need to stop staying at nights, too, since I think that's where my consistent creative energies go. There's probably more to it than just that, too...

I drove home last night in a flight of fancy. I worked out everything in my head for what I'd do if I got cast back into a year ago. A year that might change everything.

I'm going back to school, trying to finish the long-delayed doctorate s degree. I spent a little time working on my Aftergods A Moment With An Angel story- I made a lot of progress with the backstory, but very little on the actual writing. Somehow, research seems less important than the writing, though I get really stuck and unable to write if my research isn't finished-- so it's a catch-22. "You're setting this story in a world in which all contact between the New Me and the Old Me was severed for a long period of time--what years do you choose?" I spent about three days trying to figure that out, reacalling (I think that's what it's called). I decided that it was around Oct 2000 that "something devastating happens" (I've mostly decided on a plague) that cuts the contact between lives. The point of all of this? Well, you'll have to read the book to find out, I guess. If it ever gets finished. Of course, if I end up in school full time, and if my home-life doesn't straighten i tself out, I might not be writing seriously for a time. We shall see. I have a paper due for school in two weeks, and finishing school is more important than my non-existent writing career.

So far, June has been a bust. I feel lame for not writing very much, but life seemed to get out of control somewhere in there, and then I went on vacation with Arianna and didn't do anything at all then, just read... this month I re-read the first three books of Jean M. Auel's series (Clan of the Cave Bear, Valley of Horses, Mammoth Hunters) and read her Plains of Passage for the first time. At the beginning of the month, I also read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. On vacation, I also finished Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (and gave my long-suffering mother three or four lectures on human evolution derived from Diamond's theories, but she forgave me my enthusiasm). Additionally, I read Spindle's End by Robin McKinley and a book by an Australian author called Obernewtyn that I picked up on a whim-- Obernewtyn pissed me off, btw. It was given great reviews by not only Anne McCaffrey (who seems to have whored herself out to the book community by allowing "Great read!!" coupled with her name on anything these days) as well as Lloyd Alexander and Charles de Lint. Not that it was a bad book, but with those glowing reviews, I expected a major tour de force on par with, oh, George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, or something at least as emotionally engaging as Jayne Castle's Orchid (which I also read this month in a moment of indulgence). Oh, I don't know, whatever. Anyway, I did work on some clues for my "Aftergod" novel, and last night did some brief story out-lining. Stephen King (I think) made a disparaging remark once about writers who work from out-lines, but c'mon. There's just too many thoughts in my brain to keep them all in order all the time. I NEED an outline.

I sent off part my chapters and synopsis ( Lost ) to the contest. Julie read it for me, and was utterly supportive, which, of course, worries me. Not that I'd be happy if she'd ripped it to shreds, but at least it would have been a reality-enabled unhappy. Now I think she was just being nice. In any case, what I sent out was based on some concepts I've been kicking around for years, in part, along with some new ideas that came to me in November. I totally scrapped the project, by the way, and I think that was a good plan-- it was WAY too hard to put myself in the mindset. Perhaps when Arianna is seven, and I have some first hand examples, I'll pick that back up. Anyway, at least I KNOW someone will have read my work when I get rejected. *laugh* And, because I'm at home tonight and missing the fireworks at Koh Samui, I wrote a weird thing. I don't know what to say about it from this end of things. -- btw, I won the poetry contest I entered in December last year-- found out in June. Oh, y eah, one other bit of news-- I submitted "Sir Michael" to The 13th Story, a nifty web mag, and it got rejected... I could start doubting the story, but I'm just going to pretend that it wasn't the right market. It's really a YA story-- that's true. I had kind of hoped the (cough) brilliance of my writing or some nonsense like that would land it a home. Alas. Wow, this is long. Should have updated before now. Put the notion on hold when Julie sent me email about a first novel contest... entered "Ascent," a lengthy poem, into a chapbook contest.

Oh ya, almost forgot - A moment With An Angel -, will be publish next November. No free list. I love you all, thank you for everything ...