On my annoying voice and $3 cupcakes
To the untrained eye it looks like I’m sitting on my ass watching Martha Stewart. I can see how people might leap to this conclusion, after all it is cupcake week. We will, for the time being, ignore the fact that I even know it’s cupcake week means that I need to find more constructive way to spend my time.
So while it looks like I’m watching Martha Stewart, I totally am not. What I am doing is the very first and crucial step of my creative process. It’s what I have come to call spinning in infinity. It’s where my brain whirs and whirs coming up with a jillion story ideas and before they are even fully realized, they are quickly dismissed as lame or stupid (my brain’s favorite putdowns).
I told myself this time it would be different. I was going to write the story well before it was due on Thursday, April 10. I would even do a second draft! That’s what I said, and I’m a damned dirty liar.
{cupcake related aside: Okay, $3 for a cupcake? Am I hopelessly out of it? Have I gotten cheap? But come on, isn’t that like $1.50 a mouthful. Damn. Maybe I need to give up this writing nonsense an become a cupcake baker.}
I’m at this point in my writing where I’m really sick of my own stories and my writerly voice. I want to be someone who writes about hot robot on human sex (like in Jeanette Winterson’s new book) or man’s inhumanity towards teeny, tiny men (like Aimee Bloom) or you know anything that Mary Gaitskill writes about.
I am so tired of my voice and I just don’t know how to escape it.
i think it is safe to say that many of us would like to be able to read more of your stories. when i am elected president there will be an unfunded federal mandate that you will have to let me read your stories whenever i want to.
- vote often, vote bakiwop
04 Apr 08 at 1:44 pm #I think it’s safe to say that many of my short stories blow goats because the voice is lame and stupid. Aren’t you paying attention?
04 Apr 08 at 2:16 pm #Randl Fiction is begging for you to write him into a kewl scifi world in which he travels to Uranus and gets laid a lot. YOU CAN DO IT!
04 Apr 08 at 2:42 pm #jodi jodi jodi. you will give me want i want or i will track you down and destroy you!
me want-y read-y.
04 Apr 08 at 3:30 pm #I’d like to read one or two of your stories. Where are they?
Also, Aimee Bloom’s, whoever she is.
04 Apr 08 at 4:06 pm #i, too, have been hoping to someday read one of your short stories.
04 Apr 08 at 10:16 pm #Doh, I totally meant Aimee Bender and not Amy Bloom. Though I do enjoy both of them.
I think all y’all who want to read my short stories should get on the horn with the New Yorker and ask them wtf, or start a petition or something.
04 Apr 08 at 10:18 pm #