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Not good enough for my dreams
All right. Let's sum up.
I am not just in the same dark, low, bad mood that I've been in for several days. I also woke up this morning feeling like hell. Whether the latter was related to the former is unknown.
I have completed two novels. (Actually, I've completed one novel once and the other novel three or four times.) This is two more novels than most people finish writing in their lifetimes. That's dandy, but I refuse to take a merit badge just because I can spit out vast amounts of prose with facility.
One novel will require a complete and utter rethinking, and may not be salvageable, because to keep it the way I want it, I will have to think up an alien species that's actually alien - and I'm obviously no good at that or I'd have done it right the first time.
The other novel, Quarter Moon, is pretty good, but it has some fatal flaws - some I don't want to fix, and some I'm not sure I can.
The problem is the same with my short fiction - the problems that my astute Ardent Readers find are not the easy ones; you are all too intelligent for that. You find the hard ones, the ones that I am reluctant to fix because then the result would be something I hadn't intended to create in the first place.
I don't have any inspiration to write any new fiction right now. I don't even think I can muster the energy to write new non-fiction. Not coincidentally, I debated once again last night whether to stop doing mouth organ. I have a content problem there - no new ideas, no suggestions, nothing. Everything there is either
1. Things which we've already done to a turn;
2. Things I'd rather write about here, where they belong;
3. Things I really don't want to write about at all. Like celibacy, which has been causing a big fight for the last two weeks. These are the rewards of trying something new.
Of course, we could probably repeat the same material over and over. People keep discovering mouth organ anew, and they say, "Why don't you talk about this," and the answer is "We did. In 1997." But even though the readers would be okay with it, the authors - i.e. me - would have their brains quietly turn to oatmeal.
Which may already have happened.
I am lonely. I need human contact. I need to dress up and go out shopping with someone, or sit in a cafe with them and have a long chat. But I don't have anyone. I am in a conversational rut with both Marc and Nonelvis; Eric and Rose require careful choreography to see; Judy is barely given time to breathe by her new job; Molly is both busy and rather caught up in her romantic life (not that I blame her) ... and that is the entire list of people in this area I'd feel comfortable picking up the phone and asking, "Hey, want to do something this afternoon?"
I hate being lonely. It happens so seldom and it is a blight upon my self-sufficiency. I hate being depressed. It happens so seldom and it is a blight upon my mental health. And I hate being a failure. That happens a lot. At least by my standards it does.
My standards are very high in some ways, nonexistent in others.
I am thirty-one. I should be a success; I have nearly run out of time to become one. I recognize that I should be grateful that I have what I have - a good job, a basically good relationship, a lot of creature comforts - but none of those things are measures of "success" on any scale that means anything to me. The only scale I ever took seriously was being a writer or an artist or another creative type. And so far, I'm a relative bust.
It doesn't matter when someone tells me, "Hey, I can't write fiction to save my life!" No, but you didn't make it the focus of your life either, now did you?
Being better than the neighbors is no consolation. I am not good enough for my dreams, and that's all that counts.
© Columbine
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