Nov 28
I am having SERIOUS writing issues at the moment. Yesterday, waiting in an airport terminal in Sacramento I found it impossible to write even a single sentence. I would come up with two or three words and then stare at my notebook for a full minute, fighting to find the next. I gave up pretty quickly, hoping that today would be better. It isn’t.
I just wrote perhaps the most rambling and nonsensical six hundred words of my entire life. What started as an observation on college admissions somehow ended up with an old man staring at a boy and reminiscing about the life he never lived.
He saw in me all the What Ifs and What Could Have Beens. He saw in me his past’s lost future. And that is why he smiled.
After writing that sentence I literally stood up out of my chair, threw my hat against the wall, and yelled, “WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!”
Then I closed my eyes and said, “What the fuck?” another half dozen times.
I don’t know where this thing is going, but at the moment nothing that is being put to paper even vaguely resembles the story that I want to tell. So far this whole novel writing idea seems to be producing little more than frustration and profanity.