The Non-Adventures of Ernest and Vernal Equinox

I haven't written entries here much this month. You've been in and out of rehab each week, trying to cope, I know. You figure "hey, I guess he's given up on this thing, I can finally get clean!" But you'd be wrong to think that - as you know - since I've had to babble once a week to keep you hooked on the smack - er, blog. And that's okay. This is America (At least where I'm writing this.), and planet Earth (Gotta be all-inclusive.), and to not have some sort of unhealthy addiction - that wouldn't merely be unamerican, you could say it's even entirely unearthlinglike. You don't want to be mistaken for one of those space aliens, do you? You know, the ones they always say are abducting people and making Sigmund Freud proud. You don't want to be one of those - word is, all they ever do is get high and look at asses. They're the underachievers of the universe. (Which is something, considering that those Earth-creatures haven't even figured out that simple loophole to exceed light speed in space travel. Always forgetting to carry the two, sheesh.)

Anyway, obviously, it's been nearly another full week since that last one, which flopped pretty epically. Ah well. Since then, the Vernal Equinox has passed, and thus, it now spring. Spring! When a young man's fancy turns to love then it turns out just to be lust and things don't last till summer - leaving room for one of those fanciful "summer romances" where you pretend to love each other for less than 100 days, then realize it was just skin cancer because you didn't stay out of the sun! What a glorious time of the year it is, jumping between irritatingly warm temperatures and more pleasant, cooler days at a brain-scramblingly unpredictable tempo. We've seen some nice rain here and there around here, though we're still dealing with drought conditions and no sign of an end to them before summer hits and everything dries out even more. Meanwhile, the weather's been pretty crazy everywhere else in its own way. If New England and the Midwest aren't getting hit with huge blizzards - blizzards that I admit I'm quite envious of, and look forward to whenever I hopefully get up there next year - they're getting drowned by floods, as the Midwest presently is. It's hard to decide if I envy everyone in Illinois and all dealing with that. It'd be fantastic to see an end to the drought conditions here, but a surplus to the point of water damaging everything is, to put it lightly, less than ideal. Though knowing North Carolinians, as soon as we shake off these drought conditions - however many years that take - we'll celebrate by going right back to overusing our water resources and learn nothing from this whole ordeal. But then, most of us don't seem to be learning anything, anyway.

If you've been curious about the reasoning behind my not pummeling you with random entries here this month - and it's not just a matter of feeling uninspired as to blogging topics lately, though granted, that's a part of it - I thought you should know that it's a matter of my being productive in regards to other matters. I don't exactly want to be one of those aspiring novelists who talks about finishing and publishing a novel forever, after setting up a writing blog online like this, and never goes through with it. And I've been working on this novel for over two years now. It's been growing, evolving with its cast of characters and the events they experience aboard the phantasmal train chugging down the Kettenkrad Line. The book has been nearly complete for a good while now, through my usual non-linear writing style - as I tend to jump back and forth between linear and non-linear writing - it keeps things interesting, and my mental processes fresh. I'd say it's preferable to sit down and go through a story from multiple perspectives, to look at it as something complicated and three-dimensional, and a non-linear approach to writing works well that way, I feel. Then you can go back through it and figure out how to best string everything together in a linear manner so that the reader will actually be able to sit down and read the story and actually understand what they're reading. From discombobulated ideas with subtle connections to an ideally rich narrative through which you connect all the non-linear concepts and plot twists. This approach is probably somewhat eccentric, though. In having read other established and aspiring novelists' conversations about their approaches to writing online, this sort of method doesn't seem to be the status quo. At any rate, I've been working hard every night to finish completed packet after packet of chapters for my test readers, with the goal of finishing the novel 100% by the end of April - a goal that is certainly within reach, at the rate I'm going. As such, that has my full attention over coming up with topics to write about here - I'm probably getting to be a bit overdue for another love/relationship musing post anyway, those seem to do well enough, ironically for someone who's only had bad relationships like myself - and I probably won't be writing quite as frequently here until the book is complete and I've begun the agent-querying process by later spring. That's not to say that I won't at least try to write at least one entry a week here, though. I just need to find more inspiration, more interesting topics that I can babble about until you realize "Hey, this guy's a nutjob with nothing interesting to say." Or at least, that most people conclude that somewhere along the way is what my traffic numbers seem to be telling me - not that it's any good to focus on those as a blogger either. Profiticate your blog for moneys! Hold up Google Ads at gunpoint as though you were knocking over a bank while learning how to please your woman with your own Ronco Ultra Death Ray for payments of $29.99 for just 3,127 months! You can't lose!

These seasons, though, they do indeed change. Time passes, and life, for me, is admittedly pretty monotonous until I get this book published - ideally within the year, hopefully reaching my spring 2009 goal, unrealistic as it probably is, given my additional aspirations with what the novel stands for in its dedication - or I at least make it into a grad school Creative Writing program. But I do hope life is more interesting and eventful for the rest of you, those of you who still remember to drop by this dusty little corner of the internets. Hopefully I'll find more inspiration soon - or at least, I'll find something in the headlines that I feel like blogging about - considering how slow and uninteresting these entries have been as of late, no doubt. (I can't exactly blame anybody for not bothering with that last entry. American culture is confused about sex? Politicians are corrupt and love to have affairs!? I may as well have written an entry about how grass is green, the sky is blue, and how Sonic the Hedgehog is not an accurate representation of real hedgehogs.) In the meantime, I'm going to keep working on finishing this novel up so I can get it on shelves as soon as feasibly and humanly possible - depending on how lucky I get - and in the meantime, enjoying Opoona when it hits stores in the next 24 hours.

It's spring, things are starting to warm up again before the foul beast we call summer shows up again to devour everything. Busy as you may be, make sure to take some time out to enjoy yourself. We can't all work all the time, after all. Take some time to enjoy a walk in the fresh spring air, listen to the birds sing, stop and smell the roses, yadda yadda yadda. I'm turning into a stale platitude here, but you know what I'm getting at.

Waffles?