INTERRUPTIONS IN MY WRITING

People often ask be, “Have you been doing any writing lately?” as if it’s something I only get to on rare occasions.

I answer, “Yes, all the time.”

Yeah, I work, I have family, and live a world of things that are forever demanding, or even commandeering my time and attention, but I am never far from writing.

It’s a never-ending battle, like the one for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. And it took me years to get to this point, I tend to stay on track, and always have a writing project or more crashing around my brain. I can’t help it, leave me alone, and I start taking things I’ve experienced and encountered, mixing them up, and making them into stories.

It keeps me from getting bored.

Also, you can’t be a writer unless you write. Funny how a lot of people don’t get that.

It does mean that I tend to write the scattered, jagged fragments, on the run, sessions at the computer augmented by bits done on my phone, on Google Drive.

There is the fear that my work will turn out too disjointed. Now and then the barrage of interruptions is so intense that I lose track of what I was doing. I’ve forgotten all about unfinished projects, only to find them much later while looking for something else in my files. I’ve found that a notebook--spiral, with lined paper, what used for on the run stuff in my pre-cyber days--works for reminding me of all that I’m juggling.

Like the short story (for an anthology, but I’m not saying anything about it right now, because it’s way too early in the complicated process) I just reached the end of. No, I didn’t “finish” it. I laugh folks who go on the social media and crow about having just typed THE END. That usually just means that a different kind of work has begun.

Looks like I left out a few things in this story (once again this is complicated, and would take too long to explain), and some scenes and dialogue could use some fleshing out.Now that I’ve read what I have, I can get to the final pick and shovel work.

It also turned out a lot more coherent than I was afraid of, considered the fragmentary way I wrote it.

The same can be said of my novel-in-progress, Zyx; or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin. In reading it over, I was glad to see that the story-making machine I’ve been building in my head every since those hours in grade school that spend daydreaming instead of paying attention to the teacher, works just fine, maybe it’s even getting better as I tinker with it into my old age. It’s not the big mess I was afraid it would be. It’s crazy, but has a structure, and I may even be able to finished by the end of 2019.

Ah! Delusions of grandeur! You can’t really be a writer without them.

But that’s another story.

And another interruption.