ON NOT WRITING

Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night keep me from writing when I'm supposed to. No, oh no, I'm much more creative with my reasons for failure.

It starts out with a subtle cue of self doubt, a feeling of "what if I just... [anything else]" to avoid the feeling of inadequacy. So I indulge. I put it off. Small increments at first, and then longer and longer. I can write next hour. That'll be okay, right?

No. Will not.

The feeling of disgust at not writing is the perfect fertilizer, urging that self doubt into a unholy vegetable of man-eating, night-dissolving proportions as it feeds upon itself. And then it's 6 AM again and no progress has been made except for sullen drudgery of avoidance, disillusionment and general feelings of unworthiness. I can either stay up until noon and foul up the following day, or I can accept the failure for what it is.

Anything else can include... well... pretty much anything. I've watched movies, listened to music, read a sizable portion of Wikipedia. Reddit, games, email, you name it. I can recite numbers up through novemdecillions without any hesitation. I can tell you why the average phallus length of an aardvark is not available online. I have learned all sorts of things, useful and otherwise. I've sat and refreshed a browser, not going anywhere. At least when I cave in and read extra books, I can tell myself I'm doing something useful.

Slowly, however, doing things I like(or things from which I could conceivably derive neurotic satisfaction) no longer helps me escape. When writing works, it's such a rush, and most things I've listed there are--let's face it--boring. Mind killingly so. If it's not engaging, it's not a good escape, especially because when writing works, it's makes you feel like your mind is on fire, like electric throbbing through your entire body. If you'll overlook the double entendre.

Since such quasi-enjoyable pursuits are used up, I turn to things I dislike as a penance. I read the news. I make food. I read Youtube comments. I watch infomercials. I write and rewrite a sentence or two. I mentally claw and scratch at anything I've written. I reread old emails that have a special place of scalding in my heart. And then I sit and feel truly abominable.

And little by little I become so consumed with loathing that it's a bitterest mercy when the night draws to an end and the brainless morning birds begin singing... at which point the impending completion inevitably drives me into a frenzy of half-assed writing that I'll have to re-edit the following day.

Some of the biggest precursors to the failfests that occur every few weeks are:

• Too little sleep (I drool on my keyboard when i pass out on it. Apart from the drool spatters seeming vaguely modern art, it's not very effective... unless you want yet another 430 pages of "kkkkkkkkkkkk" inserted into the middle of a project from where my nose was pressed.)

• Too much sleep (I often get more creative as my mind decays into sleep deprivation. Too awake is good for planning, but not for delivery. Must run balance.)

• Games (FPS are the worst. The less creativity, the more issues they cause. Story driven is okay, except for the time sink angle.)

• Online waste (Obviously. Dear goodness the productivity increase when my Wifi is out...)

• Vacations (Terrible news. Never more than one day off from writing at a time, ideally, if that. Doesn't have to be the full 2k daily words, but at least 500.)

• Not writing (Sounds stupid, but it's true. Writing even the literary equivalent of feces still gets it flowing. Writing nothing just makes everything turn to stone)

• Guilt (Deadlines are good and lovely. Beating yourself up for failing them is fine. Feeling guilty about failing them long after the fact is pretty self-defeating.)

• Food (I don't like eating, but not eating does terrible things for the mind and body. Until I bypass the maudlin mastery of mortality, eating is a bit necessary and too often shirked.)

• Feeling out of shape (makes self loathing and self disgust so much easier.)

The weird thing is (while wasting my time on researching it) I started noticing how entirely consistent the problems are among writers. Which is a little depressing in and of itself, since it indicates there is no cure. That being said, doing the obvious responses to the precursors does seem to have some effect. So maybe I should try that on nights like these instead of writing self-indulgent blog posts.

But, as tonight has been a more or less complete waste and I'm chock full of bitterness I'm out to go burn a CVS down--er... pick up my wife from the city. Sorry, my inner Baltimorean is showing. I can at least hope this blog entry will guilt trip me into writing tomorrow. 

HORROR

What do spiders, clowns and high places have in common? They're goddamn terrifying.

In all the best ways.

Not to everyone, mind you, but it's a bit of a theme.

Bot fly larvae burrowing up under your skin, wriggling, throbbing pale white grubs the size of half-dollars. You can see them moving under your skins, twisting and turning like monstrous pimples, filled with so much more than pus. True story.

Creeping legs crawling over you while you fade toward sleep, falling through that twilight of consciousness. The prickling across your skin as sharp feet pierce and tease over bare skin. Knowing it’s happening, feeling it, but being unable to stir toward consciousness to brush them away as they decide whether to start burrowing, or biting, or exploring a way to some unexpected orifice where to crawl inside. Think on it hard enough and your skin will tingle.

The top fears are fairly consistently rated as:

          Public display

          Dark

          Failure

          Dying

          Heights

          Flying

          Spiders

          Spatial fears (tightly enclosed or wide open).

No particular order. I could list on and on.

They give you chills and shivers and you think about all the horrible concepts of that something that is waiting for you, grinning that manic, alien grin. It's fun. And only occasionally crippling paranoia. Not always rational fears, but the knowledge they are irrational is what changes it from harrowing to a thrill.

That's the fun bit of fear. A scenario that is both unlikely and awful is fun to read.

The fun of horror comes when one of those irrational masks is settled atop a very rational fear, or at least a very rational truth.

• In Cujo (Stephen King), the rabid dog was a fun face to the conclusion that monsters are very real, and “it can’t happen to me or mine” is a lie.

• In The Ruins(Scott Smith it was malevolent Brussels sprouts. And the helplessness of inescapable confusion and despair and death.

• In Dracula(Bram Stoker) it was Thoreau’s attempt to establish the raw essence of American culture. Or wait… wrong book. But underneath Stoker’s vampire was the desperation of confronting something that is not understood, and that even the steadfast are susceptible to seductions. Stoker was working through some fears of female-equality too.

No one wants to read pure real horror. It's not fun. It's awful. It's the phone call that your child just died in a car accident, the end. Or that you have some completely unremarkable but utterly fatal disease, or that you can’t pay your bills and you're going to get evicted, or you get in an accident and lose your license or your wife leaves you because she realizes that she shares that same dismal opinion of you that you've hidden in your own heart but believe in far more devoutly than any priest of any religion. That awful lurch, the drop just at the top of your throat that makes it hurt to swallow. The dizziness, the vague feeling of detachment that throbs in waves punctuated by the simple underlying horrible truth that worlds are easily shattered and you can't go back and stop IT before IT happened, because time is too late and your one life is horribly disfigured beyond repair.

It's too much to look at it head on.

Stephen King did not want to market Pet Semetary. Understandably. At the risk of spoiling, he wrote into it the death of his own son in a very realistic and plausible way. He said it wasn't fun, and that he felt it was just horrible. I personally think it's a pretty good book. But then again, it involves necromancy rites and Indian burial grounds and all that fun stuff dressed over the skeletal core of "if my son died, I'd risk damning myself and dooming anyone I know to try to bring him back. And sons do die."

It’s a heavily recurring theme in King’s work, at least as common as the perils of being a writer in Maine.

Not all things have to be so direct, of course.

Zombies, vampires, ghouls and ghosts.

• I Am Legend(Richard Matheson) is about vampires. Not in the Twilight estrogen-drenched sparkle-fest sort of way, nor even in a Stoker-ian sense of the supernatural, but in a way that attempts to conform to established scientific principles. Underneath it all, the concept that savagery is a manner of perspective and that loneliness/individuality is an easy background to make someone seem a monster.

• John Dies at the End(Jason Pargin, alias David Wong) is humorous horror about... that's a tough one to summarize, but the underlying constant is the constant, unremarked cruelty of the world contrasted against some pretty fantastically remarkable circumstances.

I could list on and on.

Chuck Palahniuk(Fight Club, Haunted, Lullaby) is probably one of the best horror writers in my mind, but he is not at all the most fun to read. His brand of horror bypasses much of the outer fun-fear, or he purposely puts one so outlandish that the reader is heavily conscious of it being implausible. He then barrages the horrible internal truths at the reader until you feel like you're going to be sick (and in some cases, people have been known to literally pass up and/or vomit during his readings.). Palahniuk has no patience for foreplay. He may get the real work done, but he does not pretty it up to help it go down more easily.

It’s all a balance.

Serial killers, home invasions, satanic rites.

It's the same thing as roller coasters, or sky diving, but for your mind. You experience the instinctive reaction to lethal speed and uncontrollable space, impending doom as you hurtle through impossible conditions. You roll the dice and delight in the sensation that it all could go wrong, that it might go wrong, that something similar has probably gone terribly wrong for someone else. The face story is the plane and parachute, the roller coaster. The falling is real.

It’s far less fun to skydive without a parachute. Thrilling, sure, but not exactly a bumper crop of hilarity.

Personally I'm afraid of all sorts of things. I’m not an anxious person, but there’s more to fear than screaming and hiding. I do not like heights, or clowns. I do not like camel spiders or large things moving just below the surface of water. I don’t like crowds or people touching me. I do not like full body suits that hide the wearer entirely. Sorry, furries.

I do not like raw meat, the knowledge of it rotting, slippery and wet as I touch it, slimy with a film of digesting bacteria. And of course, I do not like the feeling of foreign things moving inside me, infesting and wriggling. I do not like certain irregular patterns. Think that sounds silly? Look up trypophobia. See if you keep laughing. And sometimes ventriloquist dummies. Because ventriloquist dummies.

But all of those are just fun faces to the real fears.

The unreliability of my own mind. The dark, monstrous thoughts. Failing even at things I should be able to easily do because the shortcoming lies not in the skills, but in me. Being unable to express things. That I’ll grow old and weak and withered and I’ll have no fire, no drive, no purpose. That my opinion about myself that comes crashing in on those dark and bitter nights was right all along. That other people will be able to read my mind and know the horrible truths I've long since discovered about myself.

I could list on and on.

Universal fears that are all the more horrible because when you peek under the bed to say “Ah! No homicidal clown there today!” you see them peeking back at you with a mocking, toothy smile and you realize that the most dreadful monster you can barely imagine has nothing on the real fears that confront you in your life. 

Which, of course, is why I like to read horror. Because the world is a scary place.

So, 

Of what are you afraid?

P.S. If you are a horror movie fan, I’d heavily HEAVILY recommend watching the movie “Babadook” as it’s one of the better horror movies I’ve seen with a very interesting underlying truth.

HOUSE

A lit window at night spills light out beyond, and all that light makes it very easy to forget that darkness too spills in. Not a deliberate darkness, no overly dramatic caricature of shadow painted against the floor or roiling cloud of blackness curling in like mist, but an intrusion of awareness, a watching from beyond.

Looking out, you cannot clearly see it either, for the light makes a mirror out of glass when you're on the inside looking out. You see only yourself, distorted and pallid and murky, as through water. It's often easy to believe you're alone, that there's no invisible face pressing close, peering in, the vague stirring in your reflection's eyes.

If it had hands, there'd be prints against the glass. If it breathed, it'd leave a stain of fog. But it does not breathe and it has no use for hands. It simply watches, pressing close, invading and drinking in your presence, learning you, grinning coldly at the simple naivete of your perceived privacy, laughing you to scorn as it seeps in, little by little toward the beckoning light. The glass grows cold, feels so slick it's almost wet with the watchers drooling anticipation. To see out, to look for it, you must stand very close and look through your own shadow, into its eyes. And sooner or later it inevitably will slip past the threshold and creep a fragment of itself into even the most mundane of households.

So you put up blinds and shutters, but that is futility in itself. The slivers peeking out are still slivers peeking in, and that is all it takes. It can be very patient, pressed up against the glass beyond. It creaks along the floorboards. It groans like the sound of a settling house. It's easy--very easy, even--to convince oneself there's nothing out there, but to do so is a grave misstep, because glass has been known to crack...

Which is essentially why I don't terribly like social media websites. Too many opportunities for folks to come peeking in, unseen, and impossible to really keep them out. The irony of course, is that this is all written in a blog, which is more or less like a Ouija board, firing out a beckon call to those who dwell beyond.

It's also why I don't like glass doors on a house. It's one thing for a window, a window is for looking, but a door is made for entering, and certain things should not be let in.

All of which would seem like fairly silly verbal meanderings, as I live in an apartment characterized most eloquently by the word "shabby" or perhaps a somewhat nasal sigh. The front door is shared with the other units, and the door to my apartment is a slab of brown-painted metal. I certainly needn't worry about the light permeability of my doors. 

But not for long! I've bought a house.

It is a good house. I quite like it. If it were a pancake, I would likely eat it. If it were a person, I would shake its hand quite warmly. And most likely not eat it, unless I were terrifically hungry and had no better options. I have no desire to follow in the footsteps of Tom Dudley and earn myself a death sentence for eating the cabin boy just a couple days before being rescued, but I suppose the humor in such a sentence is better than starvation.

So. No longer to dwell in the apartment in hell, no longer to linger and lay under the spell of misery, drug use and domestic ire that neighbors display (and on occasion, gunfire). The pounding on ceiling, on walls, and on floor shall certain continue! But I'll hear them no more. I'll have room to raise a child or pet, and curl up comfy behind walls, yard, and debt.

Don't get me wrong, I love the apartment. It's pretty grand. It's cheery and bright and it's home. But between the mice I've had to beat to death, the roaches I've had to beat to death, the neighbors who occasionally beat each other to near-death, the lustily amorous adventures of the neighbors who live above us (they've managed to work sex into a sort of relay race-style scramble of sprinting across the apartment and fornicating at various locations, with a ferocity that I can only call admirable), the carbon monoxide events and the constant haze of mold and pot smoke, I'll be happy to move elsewhere too. I'll finally have an office. A basement. And a reason to worry about glass doors.

Also: if anyone is interested in helping as a beta reader, please feel free to contact me at DanielGJFranklin@gmail.com. Neither of the projects are fully prepped for such a task yet, but i'm hoping to break them into a few segments and ask casual readers for thoughts on a few particular issues before far too long.

Shame (1)

An English professor I know and with whom I occasionally speak encouraged everyone to write the most shameful things they could, because if it is embarrassing to you, it's probably fairly interesting to others, and people will want to read it.

It's also extremely volatile and unsettling, but omelettes and eggs and such.

My name is Daniel Franklin, and I am a ______. Welcome to _______s Anonymous. Take your seat with the others. I think it's when I decided I wanted to write, no matter who read it. I have such dirty things to say, and the saying is empowering.

You take that awful filthy secret and come right out and say it. BAM, out in the open, no holds barred and watch the reader cringe in sublime and delighted revulsion. It's like stepping off a building. Having stepped off a building, I am entitled to the cliche analogy. Read Chuck Palahniuk. It's juicy and wet and tantalizing, raw and fresh and ready to be consumed.

It's also a death knell for relations, private and public, but nothing risked means nothing gained and such.

A minor example:

_______________

I remember the last time I wet the bed. 

It's really the only time I can remember doing it. I was probably about 6 years old, give or take, and I remember it with naked clarity. I was at a hunting lodge in West Virginian with my father, grandfather and two brothers. We didn't hunt, mind you. We just were out in the wilderness doing our thing. I never really understood it, but more and more I have begun to suspect it was as much a vacation for my mother as it was a situation of bonding, which I also never really understood as I never really bonded with anything terribly well throughout my childhood. I was a tiny, scrawny, cheery thing (believe it or not, I really was).

It wasn't much of a lodge, certainly nothing fancy. It was a mostly wooden building. It smelled like wet leaves and wet hair. There was an age-yellowed plastic gallon jug flipped upside down and cut in half attached to a wall in some cramped, pipe filled closet that worked as a urinal. There was an outhouse for if you had to defecate, but I eternally swore to myself I would never go out there after dark. There was a kitchen and table and chairs and a couch and a television where we'd watch the same movies every year that we went. It plays in my memory like a dream that repeats and repeats. We all slept in the same room, a cramped room with beds lining every wall, one bunk bed where my father and grandfather slept.

During the drive down, I drank a 20 ounce bottle of mountain dew. We got there late at night, or at least late enough that it was well after dark. We ate dinner on the way at some rustic, rural diner. Before long went we all went to bed. I used the urinal, but apparently it wasn't enough because I woke up in the dark, laying on my back, the sky just beginning to shift as the first emissary rays of morning light fumbled at the dirty windows.

My bed was soaked, three circles of dripping humiliation. I must have rolled while I peed. The back of my underwear was the wettest by far, something I've always found odd, considering my particular anatomy.

I remember my heart pounding as I snuck through the room in just a t-shirt, shedding my underwear, tighty whities that I knew were now *almost* white, even though in the darkness I couldn't clearly tell. I remember the sounds of the others snoring. I remember slipping the incriminating articles into the dirty laundry, and how little dirty laundry there was. It was our first night there, of course there was only things people had worn the day before. The dirty laundry was in a paper grocery bag, from Food Lion, and I pulled out as much as i could, pushing the evidence down near the bottom. Not on the bottom itself, I didn't want the wetness to seep through the bag, but out of sight. If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence you failed. Even as a child I was well designed for lying.

I know the hunting lodge smelled like leaves and hair, but when I remember the hunting lodge, I first think of the smell of piss, of those awful three damp patches, of that awful catch in my throat, the awful knowledge that my shame was exposed and painted for everyone to see. It was almost a high; heart-pounding, mind-devouring.

For years I slept with my hand shoved down the front of my pants, cradling myself, telling myself that if my hand were there, the wetness would wake me. That I could stop myself, that I could fix it before it happened again. It still helps me sleep when all else fails. I still don't care much for mountain dew and I can go days without peeing. Not that I'm particularly worried about wetting the bed these days, mind you. I should have a good number of decades before I start up on those shenanigans, and even if not, it's a problem that can be bypassed easily.

________

At the time, it was foul as cowardice, as criminality, as cruelty. It was an admission of a lack of control. It was one of the more horrid things in my life at that point. In retrospect I was laughably innocent. Urination is certainly not a big deal. I have much better shames now, and of that you can be sure. 

Even a lesser shame though, calls for reading. Nothing magnificent, that story told. A spark of interest, but no real electricity. You'd be reading a lot slower, hanging on my every word, if I announced I was a murderer or a pedophile or a whore or told you in detail about erectile dysfunction or how it feels to cut an animal open with a knife or the time I did that thing with you know what to you know who. And no one else ever knew, prior to this revelation.

These are what you'd want to read. Not all of them are all that bad, but they carry that stain of social deviance that perks and piques. Not all of them are true either, mind you. I'm not that interesting. Probably. But are they all false? You have to wonder. A game, then. I played it with my wife's family a while back, and it's fascinating. Truth, truth, lie. Tell three things, make one false. Raise the stakes each time by telling more and more dire truths until someone folds.

Maybe I should choose a few of the higher shames and throw them here, at the risk of horrifying the wife. At least a few Truth-Truth-Lies.

Think of your most staining moment, of the worst thing you've done. The worst lies you've told, the worst things you've seen, and sought, and all the lies you tell yourself to build a barrier between them and the truth. Maybe others know them, maybe they don't. The secrets you bury and pile time and dirt and stone on top of, but you know beneath it they still lie rotting without diminishing, lie festering with disease, and on top of it nothing grows. Nothing ever will. 

They're the moments that will play back through you as you lay on your deathbed, before the dark.

Now go into the bathroom, or somewhere quiet and private with a mirror. Look in the mirror, look yourself in the eyes. Breathe in, breathe out. Look at yourself until you seem almost alien, almost like another's face looking back, and say that shameful creed. Recite them in a list to yourself. Hear them echo in your mind and hear the awful flat way they sound when they fall out from dry lips, a pale imitation of their internal, infernal heat.

It's also pretty catastrophic to the self esteem and such, true... but that professor knows his stuff. That's what to write. To God above, if someone were passing by the door and listening, you know they'd listen hard.

7 DEADLY DAYS

The most difficult thing about writing blog posts is not coming up with topics, as I originally suspected. Neither is it the formality with which I should write-- ie, is it better to be mocking ( because mocking is fun, funny, and I'm not at all a bad person for thinking so) or professional (because someone involved in selling anything I write is probably going to Google my name and find this blog)?

The biggest difficulty is forming a proper segue from a topic of discussion to a topic which has some relevant point to writing. 

If I ever had a stalker, I'd not want them sent to jail. I'd pity them. I'd pat them on the head. I'd give them a cookie. From the outside, I really don't do much, and I suspect they'd be terribly bored. I read, I write, I go to the gym, and I pretend my blankets are tortillas and that I'm rolling myself up in a burrito each morning before I go to sleep. No, really, it's true. I'm that cool.

It would be terribly dismal to spend one's life watching that and I just sent out a first group of query letters regarding the novella I wrote. See? I told you I'm bad at segues.

The novella is called Seven Deadly Days, and it's the story of an entirely lonely genius's attempt to destroy the world over the course of a week, following an epiphany that the world has lost all purpose when [spoiler redacted]. It's meant to be humorous. If you've spent enough time in traffic, I'm sure you can see how that topic is inherently lighthearted. The narrator's story is cataloged in an alliteration-laden and somewhat scientifically considered journal of prominent apocalypse designs and why the world is in the state that it is in. And why getting up each morning might really not be the best decision. Stay in the burrito, it's warm inside.

Also contained: Candians, sex robots, and Swiffer wet jets. Unless they're big on law suits, in which case Jiffer Wet Sets feature prominently.

I'll attach a brief bit at the end, so if you have any interest in reading it, or just want to scroll by my mindless babbling, please do, go on down. Go on down, you shameful voyeur. Skip right along to the climax. Traitor.

Writing query letters is terrifying. Writing query letters that you've read over a few dozen times and then spotting a conflict of past and present tense, just moments after you click send, is summarily soul-crushing. 

A query letter is something you spew at an agent saying why they should adopt your book and market it to publishers. You have to sales pitch your way into making them want to read your manuscript among the piles and piles of competing query letters which they haven't gotten around to reading. You're supposed to be professional but charming, engaging and personal but respectful. You're supposed to fully describe your product, and why they should try to sell it. You have about 10 sentences. You are not allowed to lie your ass off. You don't hear back for months.

So I sent a bunch out and I will wait to hear back and then send out more, should they bring in nothing. The success rate for unsolicited queries is somewhere between "No." and "Go home, you're drunk." but I have to start somewhere. If all else fails, I may eventually self-publish, but for now I should try optimism. And besides, I have to do something to keep my non-existent stalker entertained. So here goes:

8:00am

I woke up to the throbbing, groin-clenching auditory stab of my alarm clock and allowed myself the usual 15 seconds of sublime delusion that my waking up is simply a bad dream. Just short of halfway through, I stopped. I could feel it even then, that something was terribly wrong. Those seven seconds of singular simplicity and sweeping ignorance are a blessing I shall not forget. So, I woke up, impaled an interesting pair of slippers that resembled small gutted bunnies with my feet, donned a bathrobe and began my dreadful journey to discover what precisely had occurred. It didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened. I am extremely clever. The world, you see, had ended.

9:00am

            I felt a little bit helpless in light of this. At something of a loss as to where to go from such a realization. I decided to check the news channel. Perhaps the wailing and lamentations of the masses would help guide the shock home and help me to better cope. But the news man had nothing to say, or nothing to say that mattered, at least. Some country with a direction-prefix to its name was upset with its neighbor and they were both pointing fingers—well, mostly the middle finger—at each other. Ludicrous. Child’s play. Unimportant. I tried the internet, but found, as usual, that it is little but a weathered temple to the faded societal ideals of the sacred and the profane—porn and kittens. Some actress had accidentally revealed a portion more of her mammary glands than was deemed socially permissible while on some frivolous award pageant for frivolous viewers. Gasp. Shudder. Insipid. A cat jumped in and out of a box while meowing to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Be still my fluttering heart. The ever-archaic radio neither wept nor beat its non-existent (yet fully concealed, to be sure) breast. Instead, a talk show advising how if I bought the new model of Swiffer Wet Jet, my world would be complete and my floors would be clean no matter what I got on them. It’s better than a traditional mop and bucket, you know. I would be able to make order out of the chaos. Somehow, I don’t think any number of Swiffer Wet Jets will be enough to clean up this tragedy and rubble. At any rate, I’m willing to risk it. Inconsequential.

            As I searched on and on, I came to my second startling realization of the day—way ahead of schedule for before noon, and on a Sunday, no less. The world had not only ended… but no one else knew! You can imagine my surprise. Well, more likely, you cannot, but trust me when I tell you that it was quite an epiphany. But tarry not I in depression! For nothing is truly broken that can be truly fixed. First I decided about fixing breakfast, and then I’d tackle the problem of how to fix everything else. Ever.