The story so far ...

I started writing this book some time between March and October of 2006. I only know this because the previous entry in my red writing book is dated 3/12/06 and the next non-book related entry is notes for my Wedding Play which debuted 10/1/06. For some reason, I must have unconsciously decided to write with as few 'guilters' as possible. For me, knowing how much time that passes between efforts is hugely embarrassing.

Not embarrassing enough to actually write more frequently, but it doesn't have to be logical to fuck me up and keep me in this creative constipation.

What you didn't see there just now was a paragraph I started, stumbled to a halt for a few minutes until I decided it wasn't worth saving and junked. Rather than take the chance of seeing words I might have chosen differently sprawled on the page like a clumsy homicide, I call in the napalm strike and scorch the evidence.

That's part of what gives me pause about posting in a journal, but that's the price of wanting everyone to agree with your ego always and for always. Insert inspirational motivational motto here.

So, about this book. I really like it and I'd like to be done with it at the same time. It took me in the neighborhood of seven months to write twenty-four and a half hand-written pages. Each page has 29 ... rules I guess they're called? Hang on, I'll check, I don't want to ruin the mystique of the wordsmith. Yeah, they're called 'rules' and this book appears to be in A4 size. My handwriting is on the mediumish size I think ...

One line from the book from margin to margin:

and I stared at it. I lost all sense of time. My cigarette

Okay, I take it back, I clearly have gigantic handwriting.

So, after 10/1/06 to the next dated entry of 4/16/07 I wrote one and a half pages. Let's see, that's like ... four and a third months per page. Clearly, I had crawled into a creative shame-hole here.

Another fifteen and a half pages between then and now, and most of that is short-lined ...

And I like this book. I am interested in the story and I want it to have been written. I am just so ... bound up that I have to sneak some writing past myself when I'm not looking. So, I being me, I have to analyze this endlessly, grinding finer and finer until the dust of truth is revealed. This is what the process is and how I sabotage myself. If I know my tricks and tics, I can abuse them for my own gain.

I'm gonna rape my mind, y'all.