So me with social media is amusing, at least in my own mind, because I feel like I’m spinning around and sort of poking at the blog, then sporadically reblogging stuff on Tumblr, once in a very blue moon peeking at Twitter before then hiding again with a sigh, and maybe the only thing I’m remotely good at is Facebook because it takes maybe ten seconds and if I post a picture of my child, I get instant feedback.
Most of my words right now are going into a story that I hope will be a book.
I don’t blog about my writing while I do it, for a lot of weird, superstitious reasons. Well, that’s not entirely true–I have been known to bitch about whatever I’m working on, and I do occasionally post word counts and despair, but I do that under the filters on LJ … I am very shy of blogging about writing in “public” (and I’m very vague in “private”). A lot of it is the fear of being a poseur–I mean, this is not my first time with the book-writing, and I do not have a published book to show for it (yet–that ‘yet’ is brought to you in my husband’s always-optimistic voice, by the way), so it feels kind of arrogant to post about my novel-writing process.
Anyway, that’s not likely to change, really. (Though I have been a bit more open about it on Facebook because it’s lonely in my office and, frankly, this first draft of this first chapter is so awesomely sucktastic that I felt the need to share.) But I did feel like I ought to say that there’s a reason I’m not the most prolific blogger on the internet, but I always come back to it.
I am basically obsessed “J’me Tire” by Maitre Gims:
… and “White Rabbit” by Mayssa Karaa (off the American Hustle soundtrack):
So I am constantly listening to two songs in languages I don’t actually speak. Hilariously, I think, I should understand the French, I took five years of it, but since I know “White Rabbit” already, the song in Arabic is the one I understand. More or less. Sort of.
Okay, so what else? Because blogging nowadays seems so portentious, Everything Must Have a Larger Meaning or Be Selling Yourself!, and god knows my life is a long round of writing, reading, the internet, parenting, work, chores, blah blah blah, with no portents and only the occasional bout of Larger Meaning. I mean, seriously, I spent all last week trying out every to-do list and task manager app that comes in both iOS and Android … and I am not even kidding you about this.
Over this past weekend, in my now-copious spare time (thank you, Unfuck Your Habitat; I now have enough time on the weekends again to get bored!), I read “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” by Harlan Ellison–which I had apparently never read before. How the hell did I not read this before? I went through a serious Ellison phase somewhere around 1991-92, and somehow the iconic Ellison story slipped through the cracks.
And wow, that was just a gut-punch of a story. I’m not sure why I didn’t expect it to be, but there I was, rolled onto my back on the bed being haunted by images. Benny just generally. Benny and Gorrister at the end, specifically.
And … I have no conclusion.
Laura E. Price 