(minimal edit)
Spontaneous but edited? Fun for the reader? Could be talked about in a university classroom? Feels cool and wise? Makes you laugh and makes you think? OH MAN WHAT’S THE POINT?
Sixth draft almost done. Doing the end of the sixth draft while starting the seventh from the top, meet at the middle. Even out the edges. It’s a good feeling though. Because the story is done and I’m still rewriting here and there, but it felt good because I could read again for fun today before a brief two-hour snooze time. I’ve been blocking out as much as possible. Other inspiration is something serious for me. Sometimes I think I’ve been ripped off but that’s laughable. People think of the same kind of things and so I’m not so much talking about the plots, but the artistic side. The mixture of prose and paints. How I write it, and how that makes it different from anybody else. My style. My camera angles. My vision of a similar film called life.
And I say this often but I really do feel like this is the first one, the first novel, out of many more in my career. I wrote a couple before but not as serious in the editing process. Wow. Almost done but it could take forever… That can not happen…
The fall now. Thirty two. It’s fun. I like doing it. It’s my job. What am I doing? This is a question you have to bury in the freezer.
Writing is weird. I work two jobs. Yours and mine. Doing everything for many people and do yard work for hours a day. I edit for pennies and fix cars and computers for quarters. Work at banquets on the weekend and you’ll see me picking up the trash after the holiday parades. Not to mention that listening to people is a job too. They don’t know how to do normal things. Anything to keep busy. I say this because I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t writing. Just stand there and look and never mind.
Got a check and bill today. less than two hundred dollars for some word objects. The bill was a claim for parking tickets at a place where you can’t even get tickets anymore. The meters are gone but fortunately enough for society, I’m a grandfather. I’m still here. That’s great…
The publishing thing is hard when you’re starting from zero, especially in this post book generation I’m told I was born into. And My press is not a money-maker but will never go out of business. It makes money and then it makes zero. I don’t know. Basically in the end, you try to stay sane. None of this that you’ve read, is for the timid. I’m glad I didn’t know how bad it was going to be…
Laugh. I do. And I blame Albert Camus and Immanuel Kant for all of this. Absurd. They’re dead, so what’s the use?
That’s why I go for walks and make books by hand, to feel reality. Even that’s odd sometimes. The level of stress you place on yourself because you want to make something great is nonsense. It’s weird to realize that you’re not going to stop trying to catch the dragon so to speak. I also know it might not be a good book, but it has a chance to be something better than awful. And how do you create something not so awful…well…that’s so much work.
Smoke break. Living and being a writer is a job in itself…Blah. (thinking I’ll finally using this picture for the hardcover version of the book. The portable can use a different cover. This one fits. And Concepts? You want themes? This book is a neighborhood watch…..or it could be awful. No. It will be something…)
Peace. Thank you for reading la la la
Adventures In American Writing 