So the Thinking Positive?

Already harder than I thought. Sometimes I forget what a struggle it is.
Ugh.

Plans of Outstanding Proportions

I just turned in that manuscript. I am DONE.
And, soon, it will be October, and what I’m hoping to be a new outlook on life.
It will take effort to:

Be positive.
Be focused.
Not be a workaholic at work.
Write for myself and only myself with only my own self-imposed deadlines.
Pick a novel and stick with it.
(Get healthy on [...]

Inspired

I’ve been setting some things aside to inspire me when needed. Now that I’ve reached the end of my deadlines, the time has come.
This beautiful post from my magician friend Lucksmith at Bored Ludic? gets my heart pumping each time I read it. He says (and please forgive me for quoting so liberally):
I wanted to [...]

Latest Story Theories

1. First sentence. It all rides on the first sentence, so go all out. Do not start with the long, extended description of the train. Start instead with the sentence that had been on page 2 (the belly shirt, the blowjob bracelets, the gum). This is the sentence that started the story in the [...]

All Pages and Scenes Accounted For

Can it be? Oh, yes. I reached the end of the manuscript. Easily, swimmingly—actually it went pretty fast and I even did line edits this morning and, turns out, the thing’s not as bad as I thought.
I think.
Seeing as I already asked for, and was granted, an extension until Monday morning I will sleep on [...]

A Little Less Heavy

I am no closer to the imminent end to the endless manuscript that will be holding me hostage through the weekend.
But today was a better day, even still. Yesterday I got my revision notes on my Alice manuscript—one that I thought would surely carry through into October. But the revisions were much simpler than I [...]

Heavy

This latest deadline is really weighing on me. I have to force the pages out—and then, once out, I’m afraid to look at them again. I’ve never had this much trouble with a project before.
I’m thinking it’s not really about this project at all, is it? It’s about what comes after the project. It’s about [...]

Stopping Point

Page 50.
That’s all I’m gonna get today.
You know it; I know it; we all know it.
I have to be happy with page 50…
Okay, so page 50.
Will someone carry me home now? I’ve reached page 50 and I’m too tired to walk.

Invasion of the Ice-Cream Song

I am high up on the twelfth floor, banging out these pages at a laborious pace that is killing me slowly on the inside, down in there where it counts the most. And yet for some reason all I can hear, from the street twelve floors below, is the ice-cream truck. It’s blaring its song, [...]

What’s in Me

So I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t sick all week. Oh, who am I kidding. I had a cold. And I was so exhausted after not being sick that this week I slept in every day and ended up writing only 2 pages toward the final 80 due in less than a week. So you could [...]

Not Sick

Ten days to deadline and 54 pages still to go and how am I doing?
I have a cold. I have pink tissues (did not expect them to be so pink!), throat lozenges, vitamin fizzy drinks, Zicam to stick up my nose, soy in my mocha instead of milk. Still, I am in denial about this [...]

Tunneling

There’s that extended moment in the subway—when I’m on the train and we head into one of the long, darker tunnels and the lull between stations seems longer than usual. Much, much longer than it should be. This happens during my morning commute when I catch a certain express train, a 30-block trip along [...]

Scattered Nothingness: On Being Socially Awkward, and Being Bad, and My Possibly Unhealthy Attachment to the Seventh Grade

This post will not be poetic. It will not say anything of great meaning. It will be a blank stare in a room full of people at that moment at the office party when the boss suddenly points to you and says it is your turn to contribute and you say, awkwardly, that you have [...]

Looking-Glass Life

I had to read Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There* for the assignment I was madly trying to finish for Monday. (Done!) I’m sure I’ve read Alice in Wonderland dozens of times, but how is it I don’t really remember reading its sequel? Well, I think it’s nonsense. Perfect nonsense. In it, Alice [...]

So Close

I am very close to finishing the project that’s due next. This is good, because it had been due the 17th, but the editor cut her vacation short so now I have to get it in on the 10th. Monday.
I am so close, I can see the end. I can stretch out my arm and [...]

Borrowed Spot

I don’t have the cable to hook in my camera (meant to, forgot), but try to picture this:
A dining room table, oval. Candlesticks, red, unlit. Cool stone wall before me, to my left a glass wall of light. Out of that a thicket of trees, so much green not even the sky is visible.
I am [...]