Sunday, April 26, 2009

a blog entry

Remember when I used to write a blog entry nearly every day? I liked doing that. I miss it. I think I was compensating for not writing very much fiction.

I don't have much motivation to write in this thing anymore.

I'm looking forward to moving away and changing my lifestyle, which has become intolerable ever since I found out that it would be changing. Time has never moved so slowly.

The "great submissions project" is finished, I guess. Submitting is fun. Now I see why everybody does it so much.

I hate the last bunch of prose poems that I wrote, so I'm probably not going to do it anymore. I'm in a funk again. I took a break from writing them for a couple of weeks because I had to work on an essay and I sent my laptop in for repair and I didn't feel comfortable writing the poems in a notebook.

Now I have my laptop again and I wrote a few poems and they are no good.

So I tried to start a story and it was no good.

I don't know where to send my stories anyway. I feel like I need a place to target to motivate me to write.

I like submitting to online journals over print. It's easier to get accepted into good online places than good print places. Because online places are more adventurous than print. I think my poems are for online and my stories are for print. My stories usually end up long, and I don't submit long online.

I'm going to start a new novella tomorrow night. It will be literary fiction, then it will not be. I don't have a good title yet. Ron Loewinsohn's Magnetic Field(s) has inspired me to write it. I wonder if it also inspired Blake Butler and Mark Z. Danielewski.

I wonder if the novella actually end up being a book rather than something short and unfinished. I already have a couple of "books" like that. I've met a lot of people with books like that. They are usually written by people who have never completed a novel before. I ask, "How far along are you?" They say, "Like five pages." A couple of months later and it's still "like five pages." I say, "Why don't you write a short story? Short stories are easier to write." They usually haven't really written any shorts. So many people want to write novels without first doing shorter work and end up biting off more than they can chew. I think there should be another term that should be used for the "I am working on a novel" sentence if the novel is in its early stages. "I am working on a THING THAT WILL PROBABLY NEVER GET DONE AND I WILL PROBABLY WRITE VERY LITTLE OF."

I'm not going to talk about my plots anymore. Getting paranoid.

Fuck this blog entry.

Interview with Ryan Manning for thunk.

6 comments:

BLAKE BUTLER said...

magnetic field(s) is indeed the shit

Jason Gusmann said...

i agree. you probably shouldn't even say "i'm working on a novel" until yr at page 200. in fact, unless someone asks you directly, "are you working on a novel?" you should probably just say something like, "yeah, still writing (sigh)" and then they will ask what you do for a living and then you get to stab them.

Matt DeBenedictis said...

I enjoy your shit. It gets me mad high.

dharmabeatdown said...

Yeah, maybe all responses to writing questions should be monumentally inappropriate redirects. I have a guy at work who keeps asking me if me I ever finished my book. The answer is still the same, man. Yes, I did, I'm waiting for the publisher to get the illustrator in gear. Maybe I should change my answer to "You should vacuum under your bed more often."

Mike Boyle said...

I find that if I think "I'm writing a novel," it usually turns to shit. But if I think "Hmmm, let's see where this story goes," and it becomes novel-length, it sometimes is not shit.

Bradley Sands said...

I think I'll call it a "novel." My "novel" is only about 1000 words so far.