Eccentric Flower:200003/Consuming Demands

Boy, am I in a bad mood today. My sleep cycle is horribly disturbed, Molly lost her job, I sense my time for the remainder of March vanishing before it's spent, my friend I wrote about last time is still in a bad way, and (not of the most cosmic significance, but definitely the biggest drain on my good cheer) I'm still treading water with this project at work.

The more I try to work on it, the less I get done. I've missed deadline once, and I will probably miss it twice. I may get fired over this. And yet I can't seem to get my brain to work on it!

Meanwhile, all my other projects stagnate. One of the things that kept me awake last night was that my brain insisted on mentally writing the first chapter of the Aedie revision.

Me (to brain): Cut that out and go to sleep.
Brain: No. This is good stuff. Get up and write it down.
Me: If I do that, I'll start working on it and I'll be up all night. I have to be awake to work on code tomorrow.
Brain: If you don't, I'll keep you up all night anyway thinking about it.
Me: You're a sadist.
Brain: Ah, come on, get up and write it down.
Me: No way in hell.

So of course I oversleep the next morning because the quality of my sleep was so bad, and when I get to work - late - I can't focus on code anyway.

This is everywhere. The J story - I know how it comes out, I just need to finish it. The mouth organ code - oh, lord. I shut down the system, and started to revise it; realized there was too much work for me to do in my "spare time" and finish it in the allotted two days. This evening I'll have to take the system back up again, albeit in a half-baked state.

The sad thing is that I've got a lot of Stay Tuned stuff in the pipeline, but I need to use the revamped mouth organ code for that. So that's on hold too. As is my interactive fiction project. As is everything worthwhile in my life. Meanwhile, having pushed everything else off the table so it won't distract me from work, I just sit here and stare at the blank tabletop.

I want to work on everything else. I have no time to work on anything else. And the guilt is consuming me from both ends - both guilt about the stuff I want to work on and guilt about the stuff I don't.

Of course, once mouth organ is running again, the readers may still have to wait for new items. Each new item I add there takes anywhere from fifteen minutes to a half hour. I just don't have that kind of time.

No one has that kind of time, although they may kid themselves that they do. The people who put the most material on the web are all - if you can get them to confess to it - horribly overbooked and sinking under the weight of their own words.

Beth (who is currently struggling through a similar quicksand-project at her job) wrote in her weblog today that:
Creative personal pages always make me so happy, and they seem to be more and more rare. We all just have journals now. Sigh.

I hate to tell you this, Beth, but there's a reason for that. This web thing is a vast, unrewarding consumer of information that will suck you dry if you let it.

Some of us creative types are slowly, reluctantly, coming to the conclusion that it's not worth it to be creative on the web - that you won't get anything back in return for your time. The rest of us already knew it.

I'm in the first category. I have more rewarding readers than most, I think - when I put a story here, I generally get some feedback. Not as much as I'd like, but then, I'm demanding. Point is, a lot of other writers on the web are getting no feedback. In fact, I'd say the latter is typical.

The web demands huge quantities of new material every day. It doesn't pay. It doesn't give you any feedback. It just sucks and sucks and sucks until you are wrung dry.

But the web is easy. Regular readers know that I don't send out my short stories to publishers because I feel that the meager rewards are not worth the agony of the slushpile - keeping track of where you've sent it, writing endless BS cover letters, making sure you have clean copies (my short stories, unlike my novels, presently exist only as electrons - they've never been printed out on paper, at least not by me - and I like it that way).

So "publishing" becomes a lot easier on the web. But less rewarding at the same time.

Ironically, as a reader, I'm just as bad as everyone else.

The other night I was combing my list of some twenty or thirty fetish sites - it's my habit to read a little smut before bed, just to let my brain unwind - not that it works. After a few spot checks, I launched into the usual gripe - no new content! Nothing new to look at! Nothing new to read!

Then it occurred to me that I check those sites nearly every night I'm at home, and if they have something new, I devour it on the spot. It's ridiculous to expect every site to have something new every day, or even every week. These people have lives, after all. When did my expectations get so inflated? How did they get that inflated? Did the web do it, or did I do it to myself?

Furthermore I don't comment on what I read unless I have something specific to say. Okay, in many cases I can't comment. Nine-tenths of the fiction on the web is pretty bad, so bad that in many cases I can't even offer constructive criticism. Nor would it be welcome. Most people who say "I want your comments" don't mean "I want you to tear this piece to shreds if that's how you really feel about it." (I do mean that, but I'm weird.)

Even when I see something that really works for me, I don't usually write. What am I going to say other than, "Hey, that was really good?" Don't they already know that?

I guess the problem is that I expect competent writers to know they're competent and bad writers to know they're bad. I know some of you are laughing at that, given how dismally I look upon my own words, but I'll tell you a secret:

I adore everything I write. I think it is the best thing since sliced bread. I think it's the cat's pajamas. This isn't just ego - it also reflects the fact that I write to cater to my own tastes.

Basically, my system is to start by thinking it's pretty damned good, and wait for everyone else to provide me with a reality check - to cut me down to size. It's a decent system, when it works.

So I know I'm competent. Despite my grousing to the contrary. I might even be very good. But I'm sure I'm not as good as my ego wants to tell me I am.

You folks have given me a lot of hell over time about my puny self-worth, and some of it (most of it) is justified. It's true - I don't think much of myself. (Duh.) But that overcompensation is necessary. No one but me knows the extent of the ego lurking in here, the hubris just waiting for a chance to seep out through the cracks. And if it's up to me, no one ever will. I'd rather badmouth myself until the end of my days.

But - back to feedback. I have one more thing to say, then I'll stop.

A gent named RC pulled his stories from the Mind Control Stories Archive a while back. I found his site the other night, and saw his explanation: That he'd pulled them because he wasn't getting any feedback. I confess, my response was, "Oh, and moving them from the one mind control site everyone thinks of as The Central Repository to this little site no one knows how to find is going to make that better?"

I think that RC's response was essentially petulant - I'm not being rewarded enough, so I'm going to pack up my marbles and go home. Thing is, I can sympathize. There are days when I'm strongly tempted to do the same thing.

I'm not going to - I'm too much of a wordslut to do that, and I know it. But today is definitely one of those days.

I've changed the Scherzi list back to an announcements-only list. As I said in a message you may have missed, the discussion was great, but when it began to interfere with the primary purpose of the list - telling people new entries were up - it was time to close down the conversation. Regretfully.

So if you're one of the people who unsubscribed because of the traffic level or the discussion content or what-have-you, you may want to look into resubscribing now.

Or not.