Staring at the picks

Here's what I should be doing. What I should be doing is starting a third draft of the damn thing I've been struggling to write for months now. Here's what I am doing: sitting in the Smelly Cat, over by the window, drinking a coffee that's gotten cold, looking at news, listening to Indie Pop Rocks (some Built To Spill coming over the intertubes and wireless right now), and trying to think of a blog entry.

There was going to be an entry about how Southland Tales destroyed Donnie Darko for me, but I think that's stalled and won't be picked up again. (It turns out Richard Kelly is a horrible director whose ineptitude passed as genius in Darko, which is an interesting phenomena.) And I thought about writing about crazy-lady J.K. Rowling's bizarre and obsessive lawsuit against the wannabe publisher of a Harry Potter lexicon. (Oh shit, I meant to say the "wannabe publisher of a lexicon about a series of books about a character whose name rhymes with 'dairy trotter'.") But I don't know that I want to beat up on poor Jo today--it strikes me as more depressing than funny, y'know? And then I still need to do something about Night Of The Living Dead's 40th anniversary this year. (One of the most important horror films of all time, and justly considered a national treasure.)

(And who would have thought a song about a serial killer would be pretty, but IPR just played "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." by Sufijan Stevens, and now I think I need to get Illinois. What the fuck?)

But no, no, I'm writing yet another Sunday entry about writer's block.

At some point I should probably make myself do some kind of self-imposed NaNoWriMo kind of thing, just force myself to marathon for a month. I think the reason I don't isn't so much a lack of willpower as it is a form of terror. The thing I really want to write at the moment is going badly, very badly, and I don't want to quit it but I can't get in there to dig it out.

("Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (part 1)" is a fucking awesome song, by the way.)

Stephen King, a man who (for all his faults as a writer), undeniably knows something about writing as an act, analogizes writing to paleontological excavations--you're uncovering the story as you write it. I think it's a fair enough analogy, I understand it and I might even agree with it. Some of the most successful writing I've done process-wise has been writing where the characters just went and did things, I had no idea what they were up to until they were doing it and suddenly there was this whole story there. That was a good experience.

But with the current... I hate to keep calling it the project, like it's going to take over the world's nuclear weapons or create a special cadre of biologically-modified super-soldiers, but I like it almost too much to want to discuss it in specific terms... with the current thing, I think I know what all those bones under the hard red rock add up to. I think I have an idea where, under the ground, the tail and the legs and the great big head full of teeth are located. But I'm having the damnedest time trying to figure out where to begin brushing away the rough sand and edging in my pick. Like the cheesy old joke about the man in a bar with a steering wheel in his crotch, it's driving me fucking nuts.

Even this, this that I'm doing right now. This isn't really a blog entry about nothing, you know. It appears, superficially, to be about writer's block or having nothing to say or whatever, but the truth is that it's an avoidance exercise. I'm writing this in the air conditioning of the trailer mounted next to the mesa, just so I don't have to go under that fucking sun again with the picks and the brushes and the chisels and hammers to stare at the monster fucking rock.

I'm screwing myself with this blog entry, so I'm going to stop. I'm making this damn thing out to be a T-Rex and at best it's a goddamn mouse under there. Enough venting, whining and dodging and weaving. Hope your creative work is going better than mine right now.

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UPDATE: Hey, I got two pages done! Hooray! I know, doesn't sound like much, but, I don't know... baby steps or something. Anyway, maybe this start is the right one. We'll see. Until I start hating it again or something....