If there is ever a time I wish I was driving the last of the V-8 Interceptors, and I could just blast people off the highway with my hood-mounted death lasers, it’s late Friday afternoon on I-65 between Lebanon and Rensselaer. Damn, but people spend all their time driving with their heads up their asses. Here, it’s real simple: right lane slow, left lane fast. Got it?
Really, I was trying to relax, trying to get some good thoughts in my head, listening to The Who’s Join Together, playing Disk One, which is their live performance of Tommy, and I was holding it together until I saw a small opening, and the some Cousin Kevin came on . . . and I just went for it. Jacked the ride up to about 95 and started busting past slow pokes in the left lane before I found an open stretch on the left and ran it back to a normal, for me, 80 mph.
And all the while I was singing, very animatedly, the words to the song. I hope the other drivers were either amused or frightened by my display of telling Tommy what would happen if I turned on the bath, or threw his ass outside, because I was thinking of them.
But far later, when I’d left the annoying drivers behind and I could cruise, another of my favorite songs from the album, Sensation, came on, and that put me in the right mood, particularly when I got to the follow stanza:
Soon you’ll see me, can’t you feel me
I’m coming…
Send your troubles dancing, I know the answer
I’m coming…
I’m coming…
I’m a sensation.
It’s sort of the way I want to feel as a writer. You want to feel the adoration, the sense that you’re something special. You want to think that people are just waiting for your next word, that they can’t wait to see where your characters are going to go, what new adventures await them.
I’ve been in that mood myself. Now that I’m back into my novel, Transporting, I’m really having a blast. All the crazy stuff that was keeping me away from it–it be gone. It’s not bothering me these days. Yes, I’m still only writing about seven hundred, eight hundred, a thousand words a day, but that’s an accomplishment.
Like last night: got into Chapter 39, the first one of Part Four–which I titled Instruments of Loving Grace–and just set off. It was a lot easier than I thought it might be; I’m into new territory now, finishing the work, and even though I’ve thought about what I was going to say here, doing is a lot different than thinking.
But I’m not worried these days. I do my blog, I write my stories . . . I’ve gotten into the grove of doing what a writer should. Yes, I’m working on increasing the production, and it has gotten to where I make sure I have more than 500 words for my blog, and I’m working towards 1,000 words a day, minimum, on my stories. It’s getting there, it’s very much getting there.
So far I’m pleased with how I’m going into the novel. It’s a personal piece for me–but what isn’t these days? Part of the reason, I think, I couldn’t get back into this work for so long was due to being very much cut off from my own feelings, my own emotions. For the longest time I’ve been dead inside, and in the last year that’s changed a great deal. I’ve been able to open up and feel, to admit to things that, for years and years, I couldn’t. It’s made me a better writers–and, in a way, it’s making me a better person.
It’s also making me crazy emotional. Because as I headed off to bed, in the dark of a silent room, I lay there, and something that had been rolling around in my brain finally hit me. And, hugging a pillow, I had a cry out. The reason isn’t important; it probably isn’t even one you’d understand or need to hear.
But it happened. It happened because life can be a malicious bastard at times, and it isn’t always going to show you it’s hand. The best you can, at times, hope for is that when the time comes, and you’ve paid to see its hand, it was bluffing your ass the whole time . . .
You never know what’s coming next. You just hang on and hope you’re going send your troubles dancing.
