I’ll start off by saying that I don’t really think that writer’s block is an excuse, but at the same time it’s also not broken fingers. The psychology of the situation is beyond me, but it’s also not like trying to type with broken fingers. Although there may be some real manifestations of something like a “writer’s block”, it may in many cases be something more like “writing well block”. Since “writing well” is something I don’t necessarily feel pressured to aspire to, I have yet to encounter something like writer’s block. If I feel afflicted some time in the future, though, I’ll be sure and document it here.

So what’s my excuse for not writing these many decades I’ve stumbled the earth?

Writer’s fugue is what I call it, and I’m guessing that every good writer has it. The problem for me is that I hate the feeling…

You sit at your computer, notebook, smartphone, or parchment, dip your feather in some kind of berry juice and start to compose. You start with a few words but by the second line you are gone… in another world… experiencing life as your characters… fuguing so to speak.

Interruptions fail around you, nothing can push its way through the thick clouds, the thick smoke product of your creativity, until it lifts and your left with a few pages full of words, an empty mind, and an appetite for sushi or some other food unobtainable in a timely manner. That’s the fugue that takes you away into your writing, and from the perspective of a novelist work in progress, this should be a very good thing.

… unless of course you like to have control of your mind and faculties. Hell, I don’t even drink, but who needs drink or drugs when sitting down to write can take me out of reality like crack could only dream of.

My excuse, fellow novelists and novelist works in progress, is that the fugue scares the shit out of me. It makes me envious of werewolves to whom a kind monster hunter will say, “Hey man, I’ll just lock you up in here so you can’t hurt yourself or anyone else, and I’ll come get you when all is well and your episode has passed.” Maybe a good 2 hour a night lockdown with no cares and no fear of the fugue is what I need to get things done.

For now though, it’s a matter of trying to manage the fugue well enough to get words on paper and make magic while keeping sane, even if it means keeping a toe in the cold real world while “going in”.

EPILOGUE

Successfully avoided any reference to “Inception” thank you very much… I believe I even managed to avoid the words “deep” and “deeper” though I won’t deny that there was a slight temptation given it’s elite meme status.

I figure a lot of people who read this blog have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not! (Miniature Edition). One repeated phrase in the book is to “pay yourself first”.

As a writer hoping to be a novelist, this advice comes close to home, but right now I have as much luck with that as I do with the financial advice originally intended.

The lesson here, folks is that all writing is not created equal, and that the writing for yourself – the writing you WANT to do has to be made a priority somehow.

Using a corollary to Parkinson’s Law, I guess one solution to the problem is to allot less time to the non-novel writing, trusting that it will indeed get done in that time, and allot more time to the novel writing.

Here’s to hoping that Parkinson’s Law and all it’s friends and relations work to the favor of future novelists everywhere.

I have to admit. I haven’t been writing anything creative lately. I have been blogging for money a bit and trying to build up websites using the Keyword Academy Method which I highly recommend. I have been writing resumes and cover letters for the horrible pursuit of employment. I have been writing emails to friends and texts and all kinds of social crap like that.

Base things. Unimportant writing. “Thin text” as one of my professors would call it. Time sensitive things that become meaningless in days.

This is my confessional so I can admit things like that. I can say that writing a novel should be every moment of my day… but society has me in a stranglehold about finding a job, supporting the family, being a good friend.

I decided that Amazon might have some information for me as I perused books and thought about wasting some money on something to justify my procrastination here.

I decided to pay for some motivation… knowing full well that my local library has a lot of jazz albums I could take home for free, I’m looking for some of my beloved jazz to serve a s a bit of inspiration for me here.

Buying an album will also increase my cloud amount to 20GB for the year providing further excuses.

So what kind of jazz inspires? Hard stuff. Badass stuff. Charles Mingus and guys like him who lived jazz like I used to. If you loved the badass jazz and a unique voice in writing, check out the Beneath the Underdog which is Charles Mingus’s autobiography. Very good reading.

Now to the jazz badassitude. Here’s a little sample of Mingus in action.

Like I said. Badass. This is from the Triumph of the Underdog Documentary about Charles Mingus.

A writer can’t be afraid to go with the moment and change things up.

OK, let me go get some jazz and hopefully inspire myself to write a bit and leave the “laundry list writing” for later on.

I’ve wanted to be a novelist since I was in middle school… maybe before that, but memories get fuzzy and ideas of what I wanted become a bit more simplistic – like pie, a skateboard… you know.

Not having a lot of money didn’t make me especially business-minded or motivated by material things like it does people in the movies. I went to college and should have studied something that would have allowed me to make a ton of money out of the gate. I studied cultures and religions.

Since middle school I’ve built up a collection of novel and short story pieces, random poems, and even started movie scripts. No matter what I do to make a living, it always comes back to writing.

I’ve designed and written content for my own websites with some limited success, but not a day goes by that I don’t think of those novels that are still waiting to go onto paper.

So… taking a page out of the weight loss advice books, I’ve decided to be semi-public about my efforts to become a novelist. I have hundreds of handwritten pages of different UNFINISHED novels in notebooks around the house. I am currently unemployed and job hunting, but it is also time to crack down and dedicate some of my time to the pursuit of becoming a novelist. I’ll use this blog to be public and hopefully provide some advice and useful resources or ideas to readers who are on similar boats in the same waters.

Sang-froid.com is a website I registered several years ago and never used. It seems appropriate now as I’ve got to remain sang-froid as I hunt for a job, try to support a family emotionally and financially, and pursue the dream of becoming a novelist.

Defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as:

n. Coolness and composure, especially in trying circumstances.
[French : sang, blood (from Old French, from Latin sanguis) + froid, cold (from Old French, from Vulgar Latin *frigidus, alteration of Latin fr?gidus)]

Defined by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary as:

n. self-possession or imperturbability especially under strain
Etymology: French sang-froid, literally, cold blood
Date: 1750