Ramblestiltskin

I am simply writing to write. That, at the moment, is the sole purpose. I don’t have anything burbling deep down in the center of my soul, no geyser under pressure ready to explode. I have not sat down for lunch at Parnassus and eaten the fruit of epiphany.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I am writing to spin the hands of the clock a little faster. Letter by letter, I press my foot harder on the accelerator of time and hope that when I look up again, I will be saved by the bell.

Alas, this uninspired word-vomit has the horsepower of a V4 manual going up a hill. It goes from 0-35mph in forever flat. The second hand has decided to tick by in geologic time, the rumble of the slow train going by my office nothing more than shifting of the tectonic plates of my boredom.

So I go on, imagining myself brave enough to run out through the field of snow between me and the track and jump on that train. I’ll take a ride to wherever it’s going and pick up from wherever that is. If I didn’t freeze to death, I’d just call it a fugue and blame it on the monotony of the senseless teasing of the seconds. 

I suppose I could delve into the work that lies before me. Not the work of corporations and desks and endless inane advertisements waiting to be proofread to ensure the half-literate masses won’t miss a period, but the work of my. . . well, my work. My creation, the Frankenstein romance that I’ve patched together from the quilted panels of my imagination, fantasies, and experience.

That isn’t to say that my novel is some reunion of the monster and his bride. I apologize for the misleading metaphor. The genre is, purely and simply, romance. I have done away with my morals altogether and sold out. If Nicholas Sparks paved the road in good intentions, it his footsteps I follow in. My cold, cold heart feels no remorse, however. Let the world shudder in my passing.

I have new scenes to write, which means work, then more work once this revision is completed. Even more than the practice I need writing, I definitely need the practice revising and working. It’s much, much easier to spew incoherent thoughts onto a page and shove a Mack truck’s worth of metaphors in between the nouns. I am quite excited about one scene I intend to add. It’s purely based upon one of my favorite memories which involved painting my house and painting the friend helping me. It was a great scene when I lived it, and it fits perfectly into what I’m trying to build in this part of the story. Said friend is the only one of my Alpha readers who bothered to give me notes, and I haven’t told her yet that I’m writing that scene into the book, so I think she’ll be pleasantly surprised when the time comes for her to read it again.

The process is going to take much longer than I intended, and I am considering a change to the ending. I will probably provide both to a couple readers and keep the one they like. After all, it’s the reader who has to like your book. What the author likes or not means absolutely nothing once it’s out of his or her hands. Especially if there’s an intent to make a living. Though I do believe it’s possible to have both, I’m not some soulless monster spinning straw into gold in return for your firstborn child. Well, probably not.

Originally I had planned to publish on Valentine’s, but I don’t think that I will do the book enough justice if I go that route. I refuse to be one of those author’s self-publishing unedited garbage into the world. I will give you my finely spun gold, (shit, maybe I am Rumplestiltskin), for the low price of your firstborn $1.99 so that you can’t help but tell all of your female friends that they MUST go out and buy this rare mineral of a novel for this ridiculously cheap price. What a steal! (It’s on sale.)

On a side note, how are gold and diamonds rare when they’re slid on the fingers and pierced through the ears of every woman in the nation?

When my novel is finally good enough in the less strict opinions of other people, I will publish it to Kindle and let you know. I hope that you will be so kind as to give it a try after listening to me blab about it for months. Then tell your girlfriends. Together, we will turn lead into silver into gold into platinum! Bwahahaha. Oh, right.

Of course, if you’re the overly practical type and dislike Nicholas Sparkesque romance or prefer reading literature, please don’t feel obligated. It’s a terrible, terrible thing I’m doing to the world and if you prefer to keep your hands clean, by all means, do so. ;)

Oh, and when the movie comes out, be sure to see that too. Ha ha. Can’t hit what you don’t aim for.

On another tack, pun intended, I mentioned to a friend this morning that life is like sailing. Your course is never really charted in a straight line. You have the harbor you left from and the harbor you’re headed toward. The wind won’t let you travel from point A to B without interruptions, however. There will be storms and calms and even on the most ideal day, you still have to cross the straight line at diagonals to keep your sails full. Sometimes you’ll find yourself off course entirely. Tack again and head back. Assuming you don’t just wander randomly across the seas of life. There’s always a new shore somewhere. The thought always reminds me of Dave Matthew’s ‘You & Me’. “We’re gonna ride the blue all the way til the end of the world.”

I’d like to leave this monologue with a quote from Neil Gaiman that I dredged out of my archives yesterday. It’s from Anansi Boys. Too true.

"It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it’s true, or true as far as it does. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It’s not even coincidence. It’s just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or propriety."

And a thousand words, (most of them mine), goodnight.

-m0rg4n