“Value the process, not the product” must have been said for me. Since my mental age is six, several decades younger than my biological age, I go for instant gratification.

I love to write the first draft for anything. A bit of fixing I can take like a multivitamin pill, but more than that makes me cringe. My bad, big time!

For the same reason, I don’t like to send anything out for publication, and if and when I do, I feel disgusted with the whole thing. No, it is not the rejection; I can take rejection pretty well. I hate losing so much writing time over stupid stuff. As I said, my mental age is six, and I am like Alice in wonderland, but I don’t want this six year-old, yours truly, to have tea with the queen. The protocol kills me.

As Jane Yolen said, “Write the damn story. Nothing else matters.”

As to my reading, I finished Anita Shreve’s A Change in Altitude. Well-written book, absorbing, but maybe it is me, I didn’t understand the relationship of the ending to the core of the main conflict in the story. The main character felt responsible for the death of another mountain climber as she angered the woman by acting close to her husband. The jealous woman did something stupid and fell to her death during a climb. Thus, remorse is the theme of the story as remorse ruined the main character’s life for an entire year. Then, at the end, the protagonist climbed the same mountain again and reached the top. This is supposed to be a positive ending to her remorse.

But her remorse was causing the other woman’s death; it wasn’t the remorse for not making it to the top. It seemed to me the ending was only a consolation prize that had nothing to do with the core of the story.

Maybe not all writing has to make sense, but I really like Anita Shreve. What did I miss?

I am back to reading Faulkner again after a writing.com member inspired me with "Invalid Item"   by A Guest Visitor . As I said, a six year-old mental age is like being in Neverland, and I like jumping about.




 

“Bunyan spent a year in prison, Coleridge was a drug addict, Poe was an alcoholic, Marlowe was killed by a man he was trying to stab, Pope took a large sum of money to keep a woman's name out of a vicious satire and then wrote it so that she could be recognized anyway, Chatterton killed himself, Somerset Maugham was so unhappy in his final thirty years that he longed for death... do you still want to be a writer?”
Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House, said.

Omigod! Now I know why I’ll never make it. I am on the happier side of the world.

Why do writers get into so much trouble? I am going to try to come up with possible explanations, as far out as they may sound due to my usual far-out reasoning.

Some writers do not write as much as the writing art requires. Writing is akin to exercising. If we stop doing it, the energy dips, muscles atrophy, and mind grows cobwebs. We turn into couch potatoes and lazy slobs, and this makes us depressed because we've gotten lazy and we feel useless. This feeling encourages us to do things that are out-of-character and socially unacceptable.
Remedy: Have a day job in which you feel useful.

Writers, good ones, are perfectionists. They are terrified when they run out of gas. They think that their ambivalence and lack of ideas show and that they have become pathetic writers. So they act out of desperation or from the subconscious belief, which says: If I’m going down, I’ll take a few others with me.
Wretched isn’t it? And soooo sick!
Remedy: Have a day job in which you feel useful.

That quote could be null and Bennett Cerf could have belonged to a cult that worships cynicism. But then, I’ll come up with anything to free writers from the claws of degenerate, self-indulgent publishers.
Remedy for me: Stop reading publisher quotes or blogs or anything they say.
Remedy for Bennett Cerf: Rest in peace!

What is so difficult in writing is that we only have our brain to work with. Although the brain seems like a fantastic organ, it is an inferior one. Superior to other organs in a human body, maybe, but still it is inferior because it is mortal. If it was that superior, we all would live forever. And I think writers discover this fact before other humans, and this drives them to being the writerly losers Bennett Cerf has talked about.
Remedy: Discover a better instrument than your brain? Nope, that won't work either. We already have computers and robots.

Coming back to me, well, I have a life philosophy that says, do not fight a useless fight. That is why, even though I write (granted, not as good as those authors Bennett Cerf cited), I am on the optimistic side.

And oooops! I just looked over this entry to discover my use of the bullets. Recently, I have been thinking in bullets. My NLs have tons of bullets in them.
Bullets, guns, crime?
Does that mean I am joining the crowd?

Heck, no. Not in my wildest dreams…


 

I don’t know why we call peeves pets. Pets are fun; peeves aren’t.
Anyway, today’s pet peeves:

People blocking the isles in the supermarket by parking their carts across from the isle and standing on the other side, admiring the boxes, bottles, or whatever as if they are in 1920 watching a movie in the RKO. I just returned from shopping and it wasn’t fun, because I shop from a list and never fool around. My fooling around happens anywhere else but the stores.

Games in FB, constantly sending pop-ups while I am there playing. The worst is the one that says send a free gift to friends. I go there, select, and click, and nada. “You have already sent your gifts for today.” If I already did that, why are you bugging me? Another one is, “get more neighbors.” Some people I hesitate to ask because I know their lives are either already full or they are more serious writers than I am. It is as if they want me to get all the 6 billion people on earth, and all the members of my family. I am not acquainted with all the people on earth, and from what I have seen lately, some can get pretty violent. Then, most of the members of my extended family do not like FB, and neither do my kids. I am the only black sheep who likes play more than work. For the same reason, I like writing because I play with it.

People who flaunt stuff with vulgar writing on them. Yesterday we were out at lunch. A guy had a cap on with the rim turned from front to back, so the people who sat at the tables around could see the writing on it. On the hat, it was written: "Trojan Condoms"
Gross!!! Plus, such a wrong place to wear those.
And this is a restaurant in a town with a lot of elderly population.
And my chair faced him. Why me!

But my worst peeves are not about other people. They are about me.
To start with: on both sides of my computer, all the pieces of paper on my desk that are waiting to be sorted and put away. They have been waiting for over two weeks now.
The half drunk tea in the teacup that I always forget to finish.
The reheated coffee forgotten inside the microwave.
Half finished stories.
Tons of first drafts I never fix, but I go on and write new ones anyway.
The soup I sometimes do not remember to put back in the fridge because of waiting for it to cool down, then forgetting all about it.

I better stop here before I really drive me crazy. In comparison to me, FB, people wearing stuff with weird writing, or people blocking supermarket lanes should wear halos.