2 February 2009, 11:32 a.m. – Two nights in a row with no sleep…am I supposed to see my shadow today? At my age, I know my moods, my body ailments, and my set of reactions to the familiar world around me. Once, I would attack the world like Don Quixote, jousting at monsters with relish, exhilarated in the extreme during the thrust and plunged into depression when the dragons of the world defeated me with laughter. The highs and lows have mellowed somewhat with age. I, I, I…it's not all about me. I have to keep telling myself that, reminding and repeating myself often, because as a selfish person I tend not to care about others. I just said this to myself and heard echoes in my thoughts of repeating even these set of words. The next thing I know I'll say is, "Yet, because I was raised to worry about what the neighbors think, a selfish person like me still doesn't exceed a limit of social decency that I wish did not exist."
I look at the words, phrases, and sentences I've written and exasperate myself with my attitude of "good enough" (as in "good enough for government work"), not taking the time to perfect my use of the rules and suggestions of the English language. Thus, I'll use too many commas or place a word with a similar but not quite precise meaning (e.g., "I see" versus "I comprehend").
I write for an unknown reader. Well, I write for myself first but myself as a person with a group of colleagues (including some imagined ones, such as other writers who had brains superior in calculation capability than mine but whose inspiration gives me hope for the value of my work), well-read colleagues who may not exist except in my imagination. Colleagues who enjoy reading dictionaries, plant identification books, philosophy, cartoons, economic analysis reports, sports headlines, milk cartons, random blogs, user manuals, billboards, handwritten letters from friends, LP liner notes, fortune cookie slips and literary fiction.
On a flight from one forgotten destination to another a few years ago, I read a book highly recommended to me titled, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves." The friend who suggested the book to me majored in English in college and had more than a passing interest in the correct use of punctuation, even though her career had moved into computer equipment sales. I suppose our lives crossed paths for a reason (a reason, mind you, not a purpose). I reason that I wanted to major in language studies or literature but my upbringing pointed in the direction of the hard sciences such as chemistry, engineering or computer software design, thus my vocation would always clash with my avocation of reading and writing literature (literature in the form of poetry, short stories, novellas, skits, plays and novels; I hesitate adding the word "essays" to the list because the blogging world has taken over the world of the formal essay, where even a haiku becomes both blog and essay; I might add "graphic novel" one day should my artwork interest hold my attention for longer than a day of drawing). So literature becomes a joke about a panda that serves as a book title which mixes my life and my friend's life well.
You know the joke, don't you? A panda walks into a bar, sits on a stool, munches on some peanuts, kills the person sitting next to him with a gun and then calmly walks out of the bar. A patron turns to the bartender and asks, "What was that all about?" The bartender responds, "Don't you know that's a panda?" The bartender hands a poorly written children's alphabet animal book to the patron, who turns to the letter P and reads the definition of panda: "an animal, native to China, that eats, shoots, and leaves."
Today, literature as solely a written art form almost has no meaning. The Internet has invaded our thoughts and actions so pervasively and persuasively that we've become both creator and audience at once. The visual arts, including rap and hip-hop songs, take literature from the static written page into the three-dimensional realm from whence it originated. Our storytelling ancestors sitting in caves would understand us and our need to carry around Internet devices in the form of cell phones and other UMPCs.
Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I watched the movie, "Inkheart," at a local theater. If you haven't seen the movie and plan to, then you should stop reading here because I'll soon discuss spoilers. As in right now. LOL Toward the end of the movie, the character played by Jim Broadbent (one of my favorite actors, by the way), the writer of "Inkheart," expressed his wish to move out of the regular, lonely world of writing and into the exciting world he created with his writing. I don't know how the third act of the movie jibed with the "Inkheart" book series on which the movie's based, but I was happy to see the writer character get his wish granted.
The night before, I slept in a fit of delirium. I tossed and turned, fighting the enemy who has stalked my dreams and wishes like the shadow from "Inkheart." I suppose all of us have seen such an enemy as mine, who works night and day to drain me of my true desire, waiting for the moment to suck the life blood out of me and turn me into a zombie, with which the shadow can play like pieces on a chess board or marionettes on a puppet stage, reducing me to the role of an automaton working in an office full of fellow robots. In the dreamlike state, I defeated the enemy because I surrounded myself with the love and support of those who believe with me that my creative talent is worth calling myself a writer. Or more than that, really…I'll take a deep breath here, look around me to make sure no one is looking, feel my heart beat in my throat before I speak and finally say, "I am an author."
After watching the movie, my wife and I returned home to watch the spectacle known as the Super Bowl. With a superlative like "super," we can automatically assume the bowl is anything but. However, I have accepted the conditioning of my society to cheer for or against the participants of the main event, grown men running around chasing an inflated bag of sewn pigskin (and if you ever want a humorous view of football, listen to Andy Griffith's comedy sketch "What It Was, Was Football," – even if you're not a fan of "The Andy Griffith Show," the skit is funny), whilst with bated breath we gaze at the screen for gleeful exposure to commercial advertising.
As the NFL game progressed, I glanced at the clock, mentally counting down the hours until the countdown ended for the opening of submission of works of fiction for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award at www.createspace.com/abna. When the game ended after 9 p.m. Central, I grabbed another bottle of Yuengling Black & Tan and headed to my study, where I could sit and listen to jazz on old vinyl LP albums and watch the countdown clock on a webpage. Tick. Tock. Or so my brain thought because the silent digital display simply showed the word, "Tonight," underneath was which a counter of hours, minutes and seconds. My blood pressure leapt when the numbers dropped from 01:00:00 to 00:59:59. Had I made any glaring mistakes in the work of fiction itself, much less the other text I had to submit for the contest, including an excerpt of less than 5,000 words, a pitch statement of less than 300 words, an anecdote, a biography and a description to be used for the novel should the contest judges deem my novel worthy of posting on amazon.com as a semifinalist in March?
Finally, as the hour shrank to ten minutes, I resigned myself to the fact that no matter how well my novel succeeded in capturing the attention of the editor(s) who reviewed first the pitch statement (to reduce the 10,000 entries down to 2,000) to create a reasonable set of good entries and then read my novel excerpt (to drop the entries down to 500, I believe), I had written an opus, though not perfect, which represented me, complete with poor punctuation – with ill-advised comma placement, or omission – and lack of precise word usage.
A groundhog does not determine the next six weeks of weather any more than a randomly selected judge determines the worth of my writing. At 23:11 (11:11 p.m. Central, or 12:11 Eastern time on 2nd February 2009), I clicked the Submit button and received confirmation that my novel submission was completed and accepted for the 2009 ABNA contest.
HAPPY GROUNDHOG'S DAY, EVERYONE!
No comments:
Post a Comment