Yesterday was mostly unremarkable. I had the day off, so I slept late, then went to a movie, grabbed a bite to eat, ran some errands and came home. I chatted on the phone a bit, read awhile and went to bed.
Not once did I even think about posting something here.
Sure, this site has been quite before, for days at a time. But always for a reason, because I've been away, or sick, or something. This time, I just didn't feel like writing.
Things change.
In the last half of the eighties, writing became my passion, my mission. I churned out tons of fiction, none of it published, some of it actually good. I submitted a couple of TV reviews to the local newspaper and wound up with a regular column, then convinced the editor of a Des Moines-based weekly to take me on as a freelancer. Suddenly I got paid to write!
Oh joy! Oh rapture! I'd sit in front of my cheap word processor, crank up some music and let it rip. My shtick then was basically the same as what you read here, only without the overuse of the word "douchebag" and with constant references to The Nightmare Before Christmas instead of The Pirate. So easy! Words flowed, they gushed, cascaded...until they didn't.
The Des Moines weekly got a new editor, much less enamored of my work, and as for the local paper, well, I moved away, and what was the point of writing for it anymore? And I got married, and other things seemed more important.
Eventually, a friend of mine became an associate editor of that local paper, and she convinced me to write a monthly column. A simple, easy gig, but damn, things had changed. Words no longer flowed, they had to be pulled like unyielding teeth, and carefully, deliberately placed in order to form coherent sentences. It felt like work.
So I stopped, and never wrote another word until I started this little forum, and I admit I have very mixed feelings about it. Initially, it felt great to start pounding out the wordage again, but lately I've been gripped by the feeling of Is That All There Is? I had hoped what I do here would lead to other things, would fuel my ambitions and spur me on to bigger and better things. I've made a few stabs at writing fiction again, but most of it is shitty, and I've certainly never submitted it anywhere.
For now, I'll continue here, hoping against hope for a sense of purpose, a sense of direction, or hell, any sense at all.
