This past month, wherever I've gone, I've been absolutely beset by people enquiring after the state of my writing.
I'm not exaggerating when I say it's been dozens. (Well,
a dozen, but still...) I point out to them that I'm writing a blog, which takes considerable time and energy. At which point most of them act like they've never heard of blogs, the Internet, or personal computers.
What they really want to know is: am I still writing fiction? Ah, fiction... The last bastion of the masochist. First, last, best...
I then explain to them (v e r y s l o w l y) that I sometimes write as many as a thousand words a day on my blog, and it takes just hours to find the right photos and stuff to go with each post, especially since the hamster that runs my processor chip recently took up smoking. I then do whatever I have to to change the subject, lest I jinx it for myself and everybody.
Yes, I have been writing fiction. No, I don't hold out any hope it'll ever see the light of day. Yes, it is fucking brilliant, but then it would be coming from me. This is the point where the Ego Monster appears, and I have to catch it, kill it, skin it, then prepare and enjoy a lovely Ego Monster stew for lunch. For the record, it tastes
nothing like chicken.
What most of my fans who clamour for my glamour fail to understand is that a) there are only 24 hours in a day, b) as I am basically indolent I insist on wasting at least six of them on sleep, c) nine or ten get wasted on work and a couple more on things like being neurotic about my appearance, so then d) why would I spend the rest typing away at something that'll never get published when I could be spending the time on something that is being published, namely THIS BLOG!
Sorry for yelling; it's not even angry yelling, it's funny yelling, like Kirstie Alley. (Funny, but from an angry place.)
I assure you, I am not being negative in this, but I do not have the credentials to be a novelist, period. To be a blogger you don't need credentials, just a computer and an attitude, and what I lack in computer (lovely as it is) I more than make up for in attitude. Following the path of least resistance, I find myself here, being irresistible. ; )
Nevertheless, I have a planet's worth of characters inside me, and if I don't write them out they take over, so I write.
Hopefully, by the time I can afford to go to university and get my degree so that a publisher or an agent will deign to talk to me, I will have many such novels waiting in the wings to support me in my dotage; my dotage being that time of my life when, having written several novels, I'm unfit for any other work, and mostly suited to drooling in the corner.
Ah... Those'll be the days.
Jack Valenti brought censorship to the mainstream. While the ratings system he pioneered through the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) undoubtedly made it clearer what sort of content one could expect on the way in to the multiplex, it did so in a reductive way, by edict of a committee whose decisions were anything but transparent. As well, the process by which those ratings were assigned was fraught with corruption.