Amazing Fantasy No. 15

I don't know that I've necessarily given up on writing. It's hard to maintain that as a hold-fast position given that I'd be expressing it here, in this textual form for dissemination amongst readers who live outside of my own head. I'm never 100% sure where my meta tolerance boundary lies, but I'm pretty sure writing about how I'm out of the writing game is on the hard edge of one of those frontiers. Best to be avoided. It's like the California border with Nevada: nothing good comes from venturing beyond. That way lies madness. Probably induced by syphilis.

I've made some attempts at it in a professional way*, a few of them possibly even classifiable as "serious." I've been handed checks for things I've put to (the digital version of) paper. And if I added all those checks together in one place, I could throw a very modest party for a single-digit invitee roster so long as they showed up pre-fed and pre-drunk. But as every prostitute will tell you, money in exchange for services automatically makes you a professional. And, in their case, subject to prosecution.

I'm at the point now where this, Dear Reader, is pretty much it. I don't have that luxury of time I once had to indulge the muse. I have what comedians and rock stars sneeringly call a "day job." It's a writing-ish job where I spend a lot of time arranging American English words in a certain order to maximize understandableness,** but nobody is ever going to construe it as creative. Most of us understand that the correlation between creative and income-stable is largely an inverse one, unless you're one of those weirdos born with a fecund, maker's soul and a sense of self-worth driving you to practical creation of market value for that wastrel burden. A few of us are spinning useless nothing into gold, like Rumpelstiltskin. The rest of us are the dumb miller's daughter, hanging out in a room full of gold-potential straw looking moonily out the window even though we're on deadline.

The thing about waiting on the magic dwarf to show up and do this shit for you is that it almost never happens. The trick, as I've alluded to already, is you have to be the magic dwarf, by which I mean a ruthless self-starter with the ability to enter and egress from impenetrable locked rooms and a thirst for the blood of firstborn children. None of that describes me really.***

I will tell you frankly that I do lack drive. I haven't always, I guess. I have most of a novel written. But I stopped when I realized it was awful. That's not false modesty, either. When I write something awesome, I'm generally the first one to recognize it. And I'm surrounded by loving, helpful, constructive, sometimes fucking relentless encouragement in what is almost objectively recognized as the one thing I'm not awful at. But that brings me to the central question, I guess: is writing something I want to do or is it something I feel obligated to try harder at because of the heartless bastards around me who (yeeuch) "believe I can do it"?

Well: here I am at home by myself on another Thursday night doing this shit for free. So I guess I accidentally got all meta again and mostly answered my own question.

But I will also say: maybe we shouldn't judge the miller's daughter. Was she lazy and useless and prone to over-promising undeliverable results, the failure at which would result in her own death and/or the death(s) of those she loved? Sure. But straw-into-gold is a speculative enterprise at best, to put it shockingly fucking mildly. There she was in a room full of straw. Straw you could feed to animals or stuff a mattress with or make the bottom part of a broom with or thatch a roof, knock together a wicker chair, line the floor of an animal pen... The urine absorption properties alone of some good straw should have been enough to give any reasonable person pause. There was some real value in that room already.

You could make the effort and then, yes, maybe defy all the laws of physics and reason and fairy-tale logic to produce some gold out of straw, but gold... what can you do with that? I mean besides buy happiness.




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*Writing I mean, not syphilis. There's almost no money in syphilis anymore, not since the circuses were taken over by human rights groups and the Acrobats' Union.

**Clarity and usage are what I practice as a career. You can't make me do it here.

***I'm pretty tall.