Sorry About All the F Words

*

Well, that was interesting.

I've set myself a new work schedule wherein I am allowed to fuck off for the first half of the day, but I have to get down to business and work (for money) at noon, and can't stop until I have worked for four hours or hit a certain dollar amount. I am also allowed to switch it up and work straight from 8-12 and then fuck off for the rest of the day. The plan is to reserve the fuck-off hours for writing, but during this first week it's only sort of worked out that way.

I'm working on a secret project that has gobbled up some of my morning hours, and that project does indeed involve writing and have to do with writing, so it counts. But my hope was to dedicate time to the actual placing of fiction-related words and sentences on the page, and that hasn't happened.

Yesterday, when noon rolled around, I had an utter failure of concentration. I tried for about half an hour to get to work, but my mind kept wandering (jumping around and shouting incoherently like a tweeker, if I'm honest) and I couldn't focus on what I was reading. My job is editing, so this would not do.

I went out for lunch to a restaurant that I'd been meaning to try, which was a letdown. I went to Michaels. I drove to Granada Hills to visit the library there. (Apparently there are more literary types in Granada Hills, because their library has all manner of things I can't find in Chatsworth.) I returned a couple of books and greedily snapped up four more, none of which I really have time to read. I listened to Florence at high decibels and let the wind blow my hair.

When I got home, I still felt a little chaotic in the mem-brane (ahem), but it was a different kind of chaos. I'd been mulling over story topics while I was out, trying to assign ideas to themes and trying to cobble themes together into a whole. The fornit was telling me I needed to write. I sat in front of a blank Word document and watched the cursor blink for a while, and nothing happened.

So I took my battered notebook to my favorite chair. I sat there for hardly a minute, and poof. "I took the urn and I left the building." I wrote about 2,000 words longhand before I ran out of gas, and Matt came home, and later in the evening I wrote another 400 and typed it all up.

I came up with the germ of this idea kind of randomly a couple of weeks ago, and the story is even more fucked up than I thought it would be. I LOVE it. No one in a right mind will ever love this story as much as I do. It is too depraved. I am so satisfied.

There's a flurry of NaNoWriMo stuff all over FB, and as always, I wish participants the best. I toyed with trying to write 40,000 words of the KUFC book this month, not signing up or anything, just setting a personal goal. But it's shaping up that I'm going to San Francisco AND San Diego this month, plus working on the secret project (deadline is December 1), plus Skyfall and Breaking Dawn 2 come out in the next few weeks and there is a LOT of opera to see. This might sound like I'm making excuses, but I really don't care, this isn't the right month for me to be ambitious about my writing goals.

I'll leave you with this, which is not my pattern at all when it comes to creative work but with which I think a lot of people sympathize:

*In principle I do not like Oasis. I feel it very necessary to make this clear. I think they are/were stupidly pretentious about music that's not much more than solid midlist rock-pop. And, HEY LIAM, YOU ARE NOT JOHN LENNON. But this song, which I do like a lot, expressed just what happened yesterday. Hilariously, my iTunes places it in the "Indie Rock" genre. Oh, it is to laugh.