Forward motion

One of the first things any writer learns (besides that everything has been done before) is that there are some days when you think whatever you put on the page is crap. The second thing you find out is you don’t feel like writing anything sometimes, but you have to find a way to forge on…even if you think that whatever you are putting down on your page is toxic waste.

It is days like this when you have to put your creative juices on a forced march, letting it lead you blindly into some foggy foreign soil without a map. It’s a frightening time, testing your confidence in yourself as a writer. I’m taking it a bit at time, working this jigsaw puzzle from the edges inward. I have an idea of what the general picture is supposed to look like

It’s lonely in my head right now. The gang who use to treat me with dialogue and scenes and motives now all seem to have left the bar, and here I am bereft of their cleverness. My characters are strange animals, never letting me see them face-to-face. I spot them out of the corner of my eye, running parallel with me. If I look directly at them, they vanish or go through some horrible transmogrification of real and phantasm, like when you seen one of those images that is a kitten if you look at it one way and turns into a Japanime monster-tiger if you tilt it.

So, here I sit, like Jane Goodall waiting for her chimps. Diary ready to go.

Ode to Haloscan

Haloscan is a third-party Web feature that I picked up when I was looking for a comment application. I saw other bloggers use it, and it was free. Sounded good.

In the beginning, it worked. But apparently these days, if someone looks at the comment section funny, it vanishes, coming out of hiding when its feelings aren't hurt. Haloscan's comment section is a moody teenager, a sullen spouse, a lame dog, that groundhog that supposed to divine the length of winter, a spacey relative, a vagabond, a gypsy, a disappearing con-man running into the night with someone else’s sentiments, a thief of impromptu love notes.

Minor epiphany

My in-laws have joined us for a few days, coming up from the warm climes of Arizona to attend a wedding of my wife’s cousin. My father-in-law is currently duking it out with the baddies from “Halo” for X-box. He’s beaten the game a long time ago on his X-box and brought it with him on this trip, treating my wife and mom-in-law to a constant parade of video violence.

I played it and beat it months ago. I picked it up again when dad-in-law brought it up, gunning through alien corridors and unloading clips into various creatures that want to do me harm in serious, violent ways.

I hear dad-in-law now, blasting away in the living room. I hear the digitized screams of aliens being shot up or blown up. I hear explosions. I hear my wife going “geez” when something vile that I can’t see just took place on the TV set.

I’m in the other room, typing away on this entry. I have my mp3 player going. I’m waiting for my friend Cori to pop into MSN I/M. I have my blog buddy Mayamaya in another window talking to me about ways I can get out of my current dark mental cloud.

Best of all, I have my silver tabby cat perched over my computer like a decadent lady-in-waiting, cooking unevenly under the desk lamp. Minutes ago, she was dreaming, her body in a spastic combo of twitching feet, rapid breathing and snarling cheeks, sending her snow white whiskers waving back and forth in a savage metronome. She made soft, growling noises, either fending something off or reveling in primal lust for a target she was about to dream-kill.

I stopped typing and watched her, raising a cautious hand in order to pet her. I’m her daddy, telling her by the caress of her side fur that she’ll be okay. I’ll speak in low tones and go “shhh” a lot, as if she can understand English. My wife does the same thing when I awake up startled from a bad dream. I figure when I do it to the cat something has to translate along the way.

Before I pet her, she calmed down into a solid snooze. The episode ends. In a few seconds, her green eyes will come alive and spot me. I’ll pet her lightly and she rubs firmly against me, furred cheek across fingers.

My sleeping tabby cat is more interesting than any video game.

Today’s Word: Wire

From One Word

Cybernetic veins and arteries. Copper in the transit and electrons on the vibe. The closeness of machines to the human body. Any object in transit traveling on a circuit, back in on itself. Only works when it’s in one, uninterrupted piece. Like the rest of us.