redheadedleague

I vaguely remember the days when I could sleep till the mid-afternoon on a weekend. Damn you, internal clock.

Random thought while giving up on going back to sleep: When asked what I do, I typically avoid the whole "I write, edit, and defend the documentation for federally-regulated imaging and molecular marker systems used in clinical drug trials," because that's my work, it's not what I do. Instead I go for the far more elegant "I'm a writer." Upon which, of course, follows "What do you write?" (including a few of you here - don't worry, I'm not annoyed by it or anything.)

This morning, it occurred to me that the question immediately puts my head into a weird sub-routine picked up in grad school, where I would slightly alter my response depending on the audience. If the question is being asked by someone at a party or a bar or the dentist's office, I can get away with some derivation of "Mostly speculative fiction" - well, actually, if I'm the dentist's office my response is usually "Ah righ ehh eesh..." But if it was a new professor asking, well then there would be a clicking of tongues, a raised eyebrow, and a murmured "Oh, I see." Like I had just told them I was a hermaphrodite or something (nothing against hermaphrodites.) Sure, I could go into my long spiel about the truly fantastic books of respectable literary pedigree that also happen to be speculative fiction, how there are some ideas that you just can't express unless you leave realism behind, or how the vast majority of mainstream fiction follows its own conventions and trends, as cliched and predictable as any genre ghetto.

But after a while, I got tired of having the same argument over and over, I just wanted to hand them a pamphlet instead ("See bullet point three, 'Are You an Arrogant Literati Snob?'") Besides, my reputation as "the Sci-Fi guy, what a shame," was firmly cemented. So ultimately I just went back to "Speculative fiction," and that was that.

Only recently I started to get that little voice in the back of my head whenever somebody asked me the question, "You know, you haven't had anything published in four years - hell, you haven't even submitted anything in four years." Not that I was exactly lighting up the short story markets, but still, so for a while the question and response became:

"What do you do?"

"I'm a writer."

"What do you write?"

"Nothing."

Oh, there was some writing going on - hammering away at that same damn novel, those same damn bits of it, re-working, re-working, starting from scratch, deleting the whole thing in fits of frustration and then recovering them from the recycle bin ("Restore?Can we ever restore what it once was?)

I'd like to say that period is ending, that the recent loss in my family has jump-started me, but that would be premature. Right now, writing is therapy. None of it is particularly good (people spend years reading crap like this in workshops, believe me, you don't want to read it), but it helps. But it also gets me back into fighting trim, gets me off that train wreck of a novel and producing something. I have to think that is some kind of progress.