Friday 3/5/21
Very disappointed with myself and angry with myself. My failure to deal with anything cost me a major op-ed running in USA Today the other day. I have to find a way to get everything that has piled up in me, as a result of what has happened to me for so long, out of me. It's like the soul is a tire, and so much tread comes off of it. And the tire can't meet the road the way that it needs to meet the road, and that impacts the entire vehicle and how the vehicle performs and where it can go. I need to find a way to make those tires fresh tires, even after all of the wear.
I wrote another story today. In many ways, there is no point. There is almost certainly no point right now. This was the letter I sent to some people:
I'll tell you..I don't know what to say here sometimes. I want to say, "isn't this amazing, can you believe how good this is?" but I don't want to say that every time because I don't want to be the boy who cried wolf, but in reverse, if that makes sense. But I honestly feel like I'm creating the best work ever, pretty much every day. And I'm creating modes of fiction that have not existed. I am making the complexities of human life more understandable. But whatever is happening, I just think this is really good.
It's a story called "Saturday Night in Town." I don't know if it's for Longer on the Inside--it's kind of at the edge of the length I'd like to keep everything under. That is, it's 1450 words.
The story is about various people in the same town on the same Saturday night. I wanted to capture the quality of "this is what lives are, this is what is happening in your building and on your street and in the place where you live, from floor to floor and house to house and street to street."
The moment when the last person's friend asks, "Are you sure?" makes me so sad for some reason.
I pitched something to JazzTimes (Hasaan Ibn Ali) and something to The Daily Beast (science fiction). I apologized to USA Today. I formatted a short story called "Captains' Practice" for publication in Aethlon. I was tardy with that, too.
I wrote five short stories this week, started a sixth, wrote the op-ed that I totally screwed up, and a humor piece. Obviously these entries. I have to do this NEA grant thing.