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| The author/publisher, Dane F. Baylis |
YEAH, LATE AGAIN...YOUR POINT?
OR
EQUITY ISN'T PART OF THE DEAL!
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It's simple math, the more time spent at the day job, the less time and energy for the words. Even when I guard my time with the jealousy of some pimple faced teen-ager trying to keep the neighborhood crotch dogs off his first bit of loose drawers, just like him, I find myself getting screwed out of exclusive rights to that thing I desire most. My time to sit here and try to get something down that I can be content enough with to publish.
Tonight was one of those times. Something comes up at the day job. Something as poorly thought out and planned for as almost anything put together by committee has to be, and the next thing I know, I'm watching my writing time dwindle away. That's the frigging inequity of the whole thing.
I get up, pack a lunch, eat, hit the showers, and drive in to a morning meeting that is more pathetic bitch session than anything else. Day in, day out, trying to maintain some sense of dignity in the face of so much bullshit about how much I'm valued. Sure I am, so long as I'm making the moron in the office look like he might actually understand what it is I do and afford him the opportunity to flaunt that false comprehension before people who have less insight than him. It would be dog eat dog, but this pack would starve before it figured out the only rule.
That's the joy of working around the educated. Most of them are just glad that nobody has figured out they've reached their own special level of incompetence and are hanging on in paralyzed fear, hoping they can manage to look like they're part of the network. They are the ones who are "living lives of silent desperation". They eat, work, open a beer, turn on the tube, nod out, stagger to bed, and wake up to the same damned thing over and over. They vacation in the places their superiors mention, the eat at the places they hear about during breaks, they drive the same kind of car they see parked in the office lot.
So I come home and write, and publish enough so that I'm not too embarrassed to call myself an author. Just so I can sit down across from some broad whose husband is killing himself working two and a half jobs so she can whine to him about her right to pursue her "artistic needs"...Then she pens a sappy god-damned romance or coming of age story that has all the joy squeezed from it by the time she has figured out what dictionaries, thesauruses, and style manuals could have done for her brainchild. Only to find out that, as far as the world is concerned - Well, they're not concerned. At all!
Meanwhile, I rewrite the same short line a dozen or so times, hoping to find that magic rhythm and phrasing that can illuminate the emotions contained in the words and maybe even tell you what I really felt. You know, the words that express the choking fear and sweaty confusion of the emotions I don't want to admit I experience. The desire I can't let in because of the expectation of the loss to follow. The elation for some small victory I won't admit to possessing when I know there's always some prick waiting around the corner with a sock full of sand to beat in my roof because, in his psychotic domain, all success is his.
But if nothing else gets accomplished, there are these words. These few paragraphs that launch me a step further than Joanne Smith, formula mystery writer extraordinaire. Why? Because I was looking at me when I wrote them and I know what a squirming case study in anxiety tremors I represent. That's what it's about though, waking up and looking in the mirror and promising, for now, to not open a vein. At least not today, because I just might write that one perfect sentence that is the heart of a real tale and that will be enough incentive to get me through the agonies of mundane existence and one more fucking sunrise.
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Meanwhile...live, love, write.
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