Well, it's Sunday and I still haven't finished the book I'm supposed to be reviewing for this week. Seems like aiming for a weekly review is a bit overambitious, so more than likely I'll juggle with the planning a bit as we move into the new year.
Not that this blog is generating a whole hell of a lot of traffic. So it doesn't matter all that much. Which is a bit of a relief, since no one's watching while you're flailing at the beginning of the process.
And to be fair, I've come a fair distance in the two months since I restarted this blog. And I have some ideas moving forward that you're just gonna love. Nothing before the first of the year, though–hate to spoil the surprise.
I'll be putting up a monthly update on New Year's Eve, seeing as it falls on a Sunday this year. So you'll get the big announcement then and we'll press on with a new effort as the new year begins.
So don't worry too much about this post, it's not going to be anything substantial. I'm mostly doing it because I feel an overwhelming superego duty to put up a post every Sunday. I skipped my post two weeks ago and as a punishment I ripped all of the toenails out of my left foot. It's beginning to heal and Get Well cards are appreciated.
So, if you'll pardon the cliche, let's get into the thick of it.
Blogging
I'm pretty sure the second or third post I put up on this blog was called "I Hate Blogging." And while I think I've learned a bit of self-control since then, the fact remains that I've still only partially worked out the solution to the Hating Blogging Problem.
I like writing fiction, for one thing. All this other stuff is marketing. I'm doing it purely to sell books. (Well, not purely. I kind of enjoy Twitter for its own sake. But I wouldn't be nearly so active there if I didn't have books to sell.)
"But when you're a writer, you need to have a blog," is what all the writing advice says. And there are good reasons for it, too, I won't get into it here.
What they don't tell you is what to write about. Or at least, not in any way that I find useful or compelling. Some people blog about the experience of writing a book–which, depending on the reader, is
completely uninteresting, in the case of non-writers,
laughably romanticized, in the case of aspiring writers, or
about as compelling as reading about yesterday's bowel movement, in the case of fellow writers.
Anyway, what am I gonna say? It's Monday and I wrote a thousand words. It's Wednesday and I wrote a thousand words. It's Saturday and I have to seppuku myself now because I failed to write a thousand words.
I know some people write up character profiles and that kind of thing to give the readers a sneak peek. But if anything is going to kill my interest in my character's story it's writing up their Okcupid profile. Plus I have to assume my reader is similar enough to me that they'd find such a thing disgustingly redolent of marketing energy.
Like I said, I like writing fiction. It's liberating to be able to make up stories about things that never happened and not have to worry about what they mean. Or to densely populate a story with a certain symbolic structure and watch it work itself out. Like nearly any other human activity, writing is a way of imposing structure on the world and (perhaps more importantly) on ourselves.
Politics
It's crossed my mind to write about politics. But political writing takes a certain polemical one-sidedness that's always disgusted me. I try to internalize the possibility that I'm wrong about everything, but engagement with politics calls for making your opponent out to be as evil and wrongheaded as possible.
I have a drive to do that, same as anybody. But I don't like that tendency in myself and I'd rather not reduce myself to being the mouthpiece for an ideology I don't believe in. Or the other into the representative of an ideology.
I'm no debater and I'm no propagandist. I have my opinions about how the world ought to be, but I try my best to keep them to myself. Do they come out in my writing? Yes, to an extent. Although pretty often the characters I like the best are ones whose beliefs about the world I like the least.
I'm fairly conservative-minded in some ways. And in some of the more contemporary fiction I've been reading there's a certain thread I've noticed. This trope where a conservative-minded male character pretends to have all the correct progressive opinions in order to placate some female character he really views as nothing more than a sexual conquest.
It's sickening. There's no pussy in the world worth lying for.
Sex
Maybe now's the time to pretend I've read more Heidegger than I really have. Talk about the technological enframing of the world and the modern drive to view the world as a set of resources to be exploited.
I'm of two minds here, same as anybody. On the one hand I like the romantic notion of people freely living out their human potential. On the other hand I really like getting what I want.
In writing, that means viewing every activity as a means for maximizing sales. In politics, it means viewing every event as an opportunity to further some political cause or one's personal drive to acquire power. In sex, it means reducing the other systematically into a vessel for one's own pleasure.
As a way of viewing the world, this has its merits. Once you know what you want, you can direct your actions to bring the world into alignment with what you want to occur. States of affairs you desire. Sure, it's selfish and egotistical, but at least you know what you need to be doing with yourself.
And it's not like you're not paying a price when you view the world this way. Reduce the world into a series of means toward predetermined ends and you inevitably reduce yourself to the same. But then again is that really such a bad thing? You know what you should be doing at every moment of every day, and you extract the most you can from yourself in order to get the most out of your time.
This is the psychological state of one who doesn't know what "enough" means. And it helps if you also don't know how to relax.
And I mean sure, it'd be nice to see sex as a loving, romantic thing that takes place when two people love one another very much and want to share themselves with one another without reserve. But show me one person over the age of 20 who really sees sex that way and I'll show you a liar.
I'm not saying I don't enjoy all those romantic notions and I'm not saying they don't show up in my writing. I'm not saying I don't have a heart. I'm just saying the entire subject of sex is incredibly psychically painful and it's easier to approach it with a detached eye. To the extent that one can.
We're only human, after all.
Enframing
If you get the impression I'm mostly arguing with myself here, you'd be right. Another reason I'm not much of a debater: I'm never genuinely convinced that my own position is correct, or even valid.
Fiction is easier. Identify a character with one part of your mind and that character will act consistently enough in a story. Create several characters and let the situation develop from their interaction and eventually you have a novel.
It looks like it's a lot of work and effort, and it is. But I have to counterbalance that with the consideration that it'd be just as much work and effort to drink myself to death.
Artists are people who try to make wrestling with their own personal demons into a livelihood.
If I were better at controlling myself, I'd be better at marketing my books. As is, I have to tell myself I'm making progress as long as I get the weekly blog post out by the end of Sunday.
You could say I've enframed myself as "that which produces x outputs every week." Which simplifies things, as long as you can focus the mind on it and keep the imagination from wandering when it's not supposed to. The imagination can wander freely when you're writing fiction, but when it comes time for passing those fictions along to the public it's time to put on the marketing hat.
At the moment, the marketing hat doesn't fit my head very well. But I'll go on telling myself I'm making progress as long as I keep putting out my blog post before Sunday ends.
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