Obsession.

[rushthatspeaks]

Today was a Good Day on the novel, one of the few I've ever actually had on the thing, and as a result it is stuck in my head in an even bigger and more obtrusive way than usual, which is saying something, as I sometimes actually and literally wonder if I have been able to think about anything for the last six years without relating it back to the book somehow. Well, a book. This, or one of the next four or five. Mostly this. Occasionally I want to surgically extract and execute messily the part of my brain that will stand outside any situation, any at all no matter what, and record and record and apply and cut and reuse and wonder what effect I can make this have on my readership. There is nothing in my life that is not fair game, and that sometimes feels like a trap. And then there are days like today, when the mind moves faster than the hands and everything is so right that I have to spend the entire rest of the day looking for something to distract me so that I won't work myself into exhaustion and annoyance and a new phase of hating the book. Right now, just right now, I'm in love with it again, which is a place I like to be. I can love it despite the things I fear I am going to do to my audience with it, and remember that I really do think it's going to be worth it, going to live up to my ambitions, which are damn close to infinite. I can remember that I set out on this to change people, to give me an audience I deserve and to give my audience what they deserve, and that I am making my own reputation and my own legacy and my own immortality one sentence at a time. I can look ahead and see the shape of this book in my mind, the faceted jewel that shines with crystalline intricacy, and it doesn't even matter that I've cut myself on every single one of the edges. Sometimes intentionally. And I know this isn't going to last, this being in love, although I hope it will, because it never does, I know I'm still going to scream at it and rage at it and be wearily resigned to it and be resigned to it in a workmanlike fashion and be confused by it and entranced by it and confounded by it and just plain aggravated by it. But it's not going away until it's finished, and that's starting not to be unimaginable anymore. And at least I have finished, completely and absolutely, the years of making myself into a person who could imagine a book as good as the one I want to write; now I just have to live up to my own imagination, while I'm making myself into a better writer by writing this and coming up with the next one. If I can measure up to my own vision, I can make this a brilliant novel and I know it; if I fail, it'll still be a novel; but I fucking well refuse to fail because this thing has taken up too much of my life as it is. In fact, in some ways it is my life.

At least it's moving faster, too, fast enough to finally delight me. I write longhand, because I have to write with my fingertips, I have to compose with my hands. Writing is a physical process and I want to feel the words. So longhand, now, I have about twenty-five pages of first draft, which doesn't sound like much, I know, but it took me five years to manage the first frickin' paragraph, it was so difficult to find a way into this book. And about six of those pages have been in the last three days, and I don't see it slowing any time soon, so at this rate I'm hoping for first-draft finished before I graduate, and then the real fun gets to start, the part I enjoy more than anything else in the world, more than sex or sleep or food or friendship, because the revision is where I get to pull out all the stops, where I already have the skeleton for the extravaganza. Right now is foundation; later on is the orchestration, the pyrotechnics, the dazzle and the polishing. The part where even I get to watch my dust. And the better the foundation, the better the product, so this part has to be right, which is why it took so long to even start it.

I'm writing this entry for myself, really, because when it slows down next, or I go into my next inferiority complex and start thinking as writers as Greater Than Us Mere Mortals and forget that I have estimated my own capacities and know damn well that I have genius, when I next start swearing at my own perversity and vow never to inflict myself on an unsuspecting universe, in short on the next inevitable downswing of my artistic temperament or in the kind of deep depression where I doubt the meaning of art, which I have devoted my life to-- maybe I'll remember to look back on this, and then I can say to myself, to remind me, that even just for a morning, even just for an hour, this book that I am writing and I have been lovers.