Sunday, October 18, 2009

They Say the Most Horrible Things, But I Hear Violins

Interesting aside: I find that I usually have to wait until I'm done writing a post to give it a title, because if I try to slap a title on there first, it almost inevitably will have nothing to do with the content of the post. Yesterday's post is a good example of that; the title's just some song lyric that I was listening to when I started.

Although that's not to say that song lyrics don't make awesome titles, especially out of context. I'll probably include a song lyric today, now that I've said that.

I haven't touched my fiction in a while.

I'm not quite sure why that is, but it bothers me, because writing fiction is what I'm supposed to do or it least, that's what it feels like I'm supposed to be doing. But I haven't written any short stories in a few months and only made a few half-hearted attempts at anything new. In fact, it just occurred to me that I haven't written any stories since I got the new computer. Although I have written quite a nice collection of blog posts, which is something of an achievement, I suppose. Unless the fact that these posts usually consist of me talking to myself indicates that this isn't "real writing." Or something.

I guess I'm always torn about that, because on the one hand, I read a lot of blogs these days, and whether or not I consider them to be "real media" is irrelevant, because I'm reading them, aren't I? People are creating words which I am consuming, and that's the whole fucking point of this craft. It's not about having something made out of dead trees that you can stick on your shelf (although, admittedly, that's something I very, very much want some day.)

But then whenever I think about feeling good about the fact that I've been writing so faithfully on my blog, I'm reminded of the fact that George R. R. Martin, one of my favorite writers ever, was supposed to release the next book in his excellent "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, what, three years ago at this point? And when I look at his blog, it's like, wow, man sure has a lot of time to talk about sports, but where's my goddamn sequel? I don't feel like I'm being unreasonable, because, here's the thing. If he'd written one or two books so far, I'd be willing to cut him some slack. After all, he doesn't owe me anything. He writes the books, I buy them.

The problem is that we're four books into the series now. These characters have become a pretty serious investment of my time and brain energy (I get concerned about the characters in a story, just one more way I'm a nerd, and I'm fine with that) so I feel like I deserve a little more than endless posts about the Giants and football, or whatever. I feel like maybe I deserve to know what happens, given how long I've stuck it out thus far as fan.

Maybe I feel that way because my own sequel has been languishing in an incomplete state for a few years now, and it'd be nice if I had a rabid fan who was eager for me to finish it.

Hah! See? We're at the end of this post and I'm going to title it after a line in the song I'm listening to, even though nothing in this entire entry even mentions violins.

This may indicate that I'm crazy. If so, I'm okay with that.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Now you have a rabid fan. So........