The rumor about Charles held he'd squirted lighter fluid on the back of his hands and lit a match. Self-inflicted punishment for writer's failure. The words wrong or his sorting of them wrong or some audience reaction less than stellar. Charles taught film studies and drama, tiny classes at the community college. Seated up front, I had more than enough opportunity, but scars, damaged hands, these I did not see.
Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud and Larry Brown all burned finished manuscripts. And then there's the tale about Dashiell Hammett, winding down, whittling old manuscripts down until paragraphs became sentences became words became letters.
The manuscripts for my books float in the cloud. Delete is the new burn barrel.
The ache from not writing is so damnably odd. The older I get, October and November knock me down a little harder each year. In my most mournful phase, I always think the date I died was 11/4/2000, the day I drove out of Los Angeles for good. Been a corpse ever since so failure in so many other aspects of life doesn't really matter.
The writing thing though. Without it, I get a little twitchy. Maybe not DFW or Hemingway not being able to write twitchy, but twitchy. I admit an ignorance of the horror stories of female writers dealing with a downturn in the muse pulling strings, but I can imagine it's a mover and a shaker in Ms. Woolf's decisive day at the waterfront.
Novel ideas are DOA. What passes I make towards poetry evict Bill the Cat style hurling from the reader-portion of the writer in my head. I'm all tapped out in the essay/social commentary vein. Right now, it's the shits all around up to the point I can't even finish a letter to grandma.
The cat thinks it's marvelous though. The somber monkey spends less time seated at the desk, more time on the bed, staring into space, sighing.
So long as someone wins.
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