When I plotted the book out, I projected 128,000 words and 580 pages.
Ha. And I’vecutmaterial. This book is growing unwieldy.
But I’m almost done.
I made the comment tonight that almost everything I write is about coping with death, and then I followed it up with, “I think every writer is, in one way or another, trying to cope with death.”
I don’t have a morbid (har har) fascination with shuffling off my mortal coil. In fact, I feel quite strange, because there’s a kind of serenity that I feel about death. It is the great and impending full stop at the end of the telegrams that are our lives (is a metaphor about a telegram really appropriate in 2012? I doubt it), and there really is no escaping it.
So you may as well live, but it’s beyond that. For me, coping with death is not finding a way to handle my own death, because I won’t have to worry about it once it’s over. No, it’s handling the deaths of others. I am, for all the wonderful things I’m sure everyone is saying about me, incredibly needy. I need other people in my life, to bear witness to it, I need to see what others do.
Writers are almost universally introverts, but we’re also fascinated with other people. And other people have a very disconcerting habit of dying.
And so I write so I can find a way to handle that. I write because I’ve lost friends, family, and pets to the inevitable scythe that swings, sometimes prematurely, down on our heads. I write because even through the haze of magic and pirates and adventure, there are things to be said about sacrifice and loss.
There will be a time when I am long forgotten. Hell, I’m not exactly known now. But there will be a time when my grandchildren’s grandchildren will look at a family tree and see my name and shrug, wondering, Who is this person and what did they do and also are they responsible for my horrible genetic disposition to sucking at sports? Maybe, if I am very lucky, they will be able to pull a slim volume off the bookshelf and see what I had to say.
Maybe I lied earlier. Maybe I am concerned about my own death, but my serenity comes because I feel like I am in the active process of leaving something behind. I have not come into this world and left it as I found it, I have a record of words and thoughts that will stay behind, for a little while, at least, when I cannot speak.
Sometimes I will write about pirates, and sometimes I won’t. Sometimes I will write the sentence, “They were shouting in unison, and it looked like they were sucking in the cyclone, which grew smaller with each incantation.” Yes, it is silly and unimportant and hardly the greatest composition the world has seen, and it will probably have a short shelf life. That sentence will not wind up on my gravestone.
But there are rare and golden days when I say things worth saying, when my words do fly above the limits of a lifetime, and they will be found in the future by someone else, read, and remembered. And these words will be sparked by the disjointed nature of life and death, by the jarring fact that everyone and everything must perish — everything but the words.
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Mitt Romney’s new iPhone app, misspelling America. (via @thischoi)
I fully support letting Mitt Romney run for President of Amercia. Let the Amercians deal with him, and let us Americans have Barack Obama.
My laptop knows which side its bread is buttered on. (It’s the socialist side that wants to give sick people insurance.) (Taken with instagram)
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Page 600. Still not done. My fingers are starting to get numb from writing so much.
When school got out, I was on page 400 and was at 90,000 words. I’m at 140,000 words now.
Still not done. Don’t care. Gonna keep writing until my hands fall off. Gonna finish this thing before the end of the week.
Blue Moon is a worthwhile beer, if you don’t drink it.
Lately my life has been writing pirate books and drinking beer, which is a good combination. Although it also consists of carpal tunnel syndrome, which is not fun, and I feel like a weenie because I can only write for an hour and a half before I have to go cry in the corner.
I just tell myself because even though I’m only four chapters away from finishing, it feels like I’m never going to be done.
Maybe that’s because I’ve written almost 40,000 words in two weeks and my fingers ache and I think I’m getting carpal tunnel but I don’t care because this thing is almost done and I don’t want to be rid of it but I want to be finished because I am anxious to see how it ends.