Alright, so, I need to apologize for a bit of a quiet stretch here. I have a bunch of half-started drafts, and I’ll get to them. And god knows I won’t bail on ALF reviews because the day I claw my way out of that horse shit is the day I can face my own reflection again.
But, as I mentioned last week, I’m writing fiction again.
Fiction, without exaggeration, has been the most important thing to me for the majority of the time I’ve been alive. I went through a long dry spell, wondering if I’d ever write again. There were reasons to be doubtful. Maybe I’ll discuss them at some point.
I had a small spark of inspiration, though, and a story that had been brewing for around seven years finally clicked for me. My problem with fiction is never coming up with a plot…it’s coming up with an interesting way to frame that plot. I have a thousand ideas for stories that I could start writing tomorrow…but I’d get bored the day after that, because anyone can write a sequence of events. It’s a lot more difficult to create a universe in which those events unfold, find the proper voice with which to describe them, and tell the story in a way that nobody else can.
That’s important to me. And that’s been my sticking point.
For no particular reason that I can identify, I figured out how to tell this particular story. I went home and started writing. It’d be a lie to say I haven’t stopped since, but I can honestly say that any free time I have had has gone to directly or indirectly working on it. And I’m excited, because even though I’ve lived with these characters for seven years in my mind, I’m finally discovering who they really are.
I feel great. I feel younger and more excited than I’ve felt since I’ve moved to Colorado. And I also feel tired and mentally drained whenever I finish working on it…which is why the posting here has suffered.
It’ll come back, and likely pretty soon. I’ll run out of creative energy and take a break from the story to recharge. This isn’t goodbye; it’s an apology for those who keep checking back and finding nothing.
So far, so understandable. But here’s where I come to a slight crisis:
I really wanted to keep Fiction Into Film a monthly feature, but I’m running out of time to finish it. It’s started, and it’s going to be a good one. It…just might be a late one. I feel terrible about that, even though I get the sense that nobody really cares if they read it in February instead of January…but at the same time it’s an adaptation I really want to do justice to, and I don’t want to rush it for the sake of meeting a self-imposed deadline.
We’ll see. I still have time to finish it, but I want more than anything to avoid half-assing it.
May God forgive me.
Anyway, that’s all. Just a brief note to let you know I’m alive, happy, and productive than I’ve been in ages. Which is why you haven’t seen one damned thing.
We understand Phil, I think we all agree that better content is preferable to frequent content, and the prospect of you writing more fiction certainly has me excited, if not everyone else around.
But indeed, the sooner we reach Alf’s total evisceration, the better.
I think if we wanted a constant stream of shit we’d be over at Buzzfeed. Write what you want to write, Phil. That’s the whole point.
I think I speak for everyone else reading this (because I have a massive superiority complex) in saying that we’d rather read something a little late that you’re proud of than something you have regrets about.