Fear and Fascination

NaNoWriMo is so quickly approaching and, at the same time, can’t seem to come fast enough… it’s a conundrum, I know, but here’s how it happened: I am so afraid I’ll fail at this that I can’t stop planning.  I’ve done everything next to actually writing the thing (again, the thing here is my novel — it isn’t flesh yet, but it is a terrifying unrealized/imaginary monster hiding under/above/around and extending beyond my bed and closet and automobile and desk and computer monitor).  I’ve outlined it, loosely.  I’ve practiced writing.  I’ve named my main characters and written a list of all my jumbled thoughts.  I’ve read up on successful WriMos’ tips.  And yet I do not know where it will start.  I do not know my first sentence or opener.  My outline only contains what I view as the middle and as I reported my fears to a co-counselor at work she said, well then why not start in the middle and work your way out?  Well, I hadn’t actually thought of that.  That used to be my best tool for collegiate writing — loosely structured outlines, well-structured and bold section headers, and always save the beginning for the last.  And when a beginning idea strikes you, well thank the thing that hit you and be sure to write it down by returning to the beginning and starting an openers list.  Yes, that is what I’ll do, I’m certain.  It takes the fear out of just starting.  Out of just writing.  And in the mean time, I’ll try to live inside my town and write in the voice of my narrator(s).

On my way home from work, I began thinking about all the fragments of stories and songs I’ve abandoned, but, worse still, all the fragments that somehow abandoned me.  Through the course of every failed relationship, no matter how blunderous or brief they tend to be, I’ve lost pieces of myself or blindly given them away.  And, generally, I do not realize what I have lost or given away for months or years afterwards.  And just like tangible objects, I do not realize I have lost my intangible ideas and creative fragments until I begin to miss them and search haplessly for them on my harddrive, in saved scrapts in my bedrooms and drawers, and in my notebooks.  Through the course of my interpersonal history, I have lost countless recorded songs and song fragments, perhaps even enough to make an entire album.  It’s odd to think of them now, wistlessly or even with anger – because to do so catalyzes thoughts about recorded versions of my creative output, extensions of myself, in other peoples’ possession for them to do what they will with them.  A very odd and fearful thought indeed.  Yet not only have I lost songs and poems and recordings, too, I have lost these things:

- a jar of coins and dollars earned while playing shows at small venues with my old band, which I had collected and saved up for a rainy day much to my partner’s chagrine
- a used accordion purchased from a retired Japanese tailor moving to the west coast, whose piano I helped sell and whose hurricane wreckage I sifted through in a dark and damp basement to find, though I did not find it, a mandolin
- art prints of innocent fawns and birds among raspberries gifted by my adopted aunt, which even in retrospect remind me of their once strange juxtaposition against the taxodermied heads of buck hung up in her den
- my first copy of The Good Soldier with my penciled annotations in the margins and a lover’s quoted e.e. cummings inscription on the inside flap of the cover
- a few disparate, but essential cords for my Sega Genesis
- a few cds and dvds

…. and countless other objects I may not ever realize I’ve lost, perhaps because they are not missed, and perhaps because my memory simply does not serve them.

I can’t and won’t ever ask for these things to be returned.  I and my belongings have moved on.  I suppose we no longer need these things in our collection.  And here, in any story, is where we would usually include a clincher – a strong and brief standalone sentence that encapsulates all that has preceded it.  But not in this blog, for this blog is of my thoughts, and I will continue to think… and so this blog shall end with an ellipsis…