Where I Am Now

I already have the idea for my next bit of fiction and can't wait to get going on it. The problem is I'm still not done with the current thing. I'm a little anxious to get started on the new thing and, as expected, I already hate the old thing. But I have promised to send it to someone who wants to try and do something with it in January so I guess I better get that done.

Don't get excited, I hate everything I've ever written. Everything.

If anything I think I've found the voice I've been looking for all these years.
There's not a lot of verbiage anymore. No long-winded paragraphs and descriptions until you've got every last freaking detail.
Don't write the boring stuff; the big, long paragraphs that just make everybody yawn.
Dialog dialog dialog.
As few adjectives as possible.
And one sentence paragraphs. A lot of them. In a row.
Your reader should be on page thirty before they even know it, and wrapped up in the story so that they don't even realize they're that far in.
Take out all the flummery. Distill everything down to as few words as possible. That's the hard part.
Write 6,000 words and cut 5,500 of them. Then do it again tomorrow.
Expect that most of what you did yesterday is shit.
Don't fall in love with anything you create.
Just tell a story and don't be full of yourself. A five-year-old can tell a story.

Hemingway said writing is easy. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

Then don't take the blood seriously.

On another front, I've taken out a subscription to an anarchist magazine. Anarchists are so cute. They realize what they're saying is impossible but they keep going for it anyway. I saw a cartoon, said "libertarians are anarchists with money." But if the people who call themselves libertarians - as it is understood these days - knew the anarchist roots of the idea they'd be shocked. Shocked I tell you.

But I was browsing through Quimby's Bookstore the other day and OMG saw issue #103 of The Match. Do you realize I first saw The Match when I was in HIGH SCHOOL??? Like 1969 or '70 (yes, I've been weird for a while now, and your point IS?). The same guy is doing it. Fred has got to be in his 70's by now and has lived pretty much off the grid since forever, spouting what he styles as "ethical anarchism." There is no website, so forget that. You have to really look to find an address to connect with him via snail mail. And if you can manage to get a subscription you have to realize that he has no publishing schedule. You'll get it. But you'll get it when he's done so bugger off.

Still in all that's not the one I just subscribed to, but just the same it's Issue freaking #103 and I think forty years ago it was like Issue #2 or #8 I was looking at.

And NO I'm not joining the movement. I stopped dreaming of the impossible a long time ago. If everything was anarchism the only people in charge would be gangs of roving thugs. Whoever was armed would say what's what. Which is kind of what we have now except on a worldwide scale. So there is that.

Okay so tonight I'll throw out most of yesterday's work and plow in again. It's like a dam broke but most of what comes out is swill.