Written In Reverse

Hey people. Symtomatic of my present mind-eff'd-ness, I had the hardest time picking out a song for today's Fav Music Fri. The process mirrored what's been going on with me creatively lately-- I had a few ideas, but when I looked up videos those bloomed into way more ideas, then I began thinking about it-- probably too much, and it just got more and more difficult to make a choice.

Then in the middle of the night I remembered this song, which hasn't been out that long, and it is PERFECT. Enjoy "Written In Reverse" by Spoon. (It's not really a vid, but listen anyway.)



It's so weird being sort of married to your work. When you're a creative, it's not just what you do, it's who you are, so how all that's going affects your moods and everything. Lately it's one of those phases where there's a lot of stuff roiling around building up pressure, but not being released in any gratifying way. ~frustrating~

With the writing-- it's easy to get into an almost masturbatory groove with it-- where it feels really good-- you're feeling that special alchemy of words from your head creating actual people and circumstances and it all sounds really good-- vivid. It's ON-- but then you see really it's not. It's just you playing with your tools, the words, messing around with a story that isn't really worth telling. And in this market-- the story is the thing that will sell your work.

If you are a writer and plan on holding onto your sanity (HA!), you are fated to walk a line between surrendering to the process, telling yourself that even if nothing ever happens with your work you'd still do it because you can't not do it, and trying to face reality-- it probably won't happen for you-- but it FOR SURE won't if your work is weak in any way.

So that's where I am. At this point I've written over 40k words of unpublishable crap (just for this one project), but it might be leading me to something through the back door of "well, I now know that approach doesn't work." Now I have to work on visual art. That's taking over my brain again, so I'm back to composing story lines in my head.

Is this a story that needs telling?
Why should anyone care what happens to this person?
What if all the major chunks of the story were shifted around so the reader had to figure out what this is a puzzle of?
How formative are events?
Can you win a war if you lose parts of yourself?

Gah. This story's written in reverse. Somebody call a hearse! The lighbulb's going off.
Here's how the sun woman came out. She's pretty cool, and I learned something important about expressions.

The welder awaits. Game on. Have a good weekend you guys.