Orientation

I guess in theory tonight's the night I'm supposed to update. But like so many minds, I am allergic to routine. This Thursday like so many, I remember my promise and I find myself unsure of what to say.

The writing continues apace. Grows, even. I keep working my way toward a voice I love, a turn of phrase that makes me smile; that sort of lifelong work that I can't escape and don't want to, but the same lifelong work that makes a writer wonder if he's gotten "there", the "there" where you're happy and productive and wake up every morning and shake your head in wonderment at your success.

I have a lot of irons in the fire--a story I'm writing, two novels I'm editing, and another story waiting in the wings to sprout a plot. I have ideas that I discard and ideas that won't go away, and I have some queries sitting at magazines and agencies that I can only hope blossom into acceptance. More likely I'll have something else to hang on my wall with the other rejections, but at this stage in the writing game it's all about the dream.

This past weekend, I watched two writers get married. The officiant quoted Nathaniel Hawthorne, and while I know it was there to touch the newlyweds, it also managed to touch me: "Words--so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them." I wish I could say it was my motto, if only because that would make me feel so very clever; but every time I consider that I imagine myself in an ironic outfit, smiling bitterly at the unclever little world, and I don't want to be that guy any more than I want to always sound like a cross between William S. Burroughs and a textbook.

So for now, that is your update, and I hope to have something more philosophical and polemic next time. But so you don't feel like all you've gotten is a glimpse into my life, I would like you to know that Warren Ellis has written the greatest recipe for sweet potatoes ever. I don't care how it tastes; this man manages to make cooking feel perverted.