Wizard of Wor

Predator Press

[LOBO]

I should probably preface this with the fact that I'm sick.

And before your mouse pointer goes soaring down to the "comments" thingy with your "I know!"s and "And how!"s, I don't mean that kind of sick. I mean like hay fever. 102 temperature. My skull feels like someone dropped a searing hot bowling ball in it, bolted it back shut, and then kicked it a few times to evenly swirl it all together.

I feel like crap. And not the good kind of crap -you know, the kind of crap that's all dolled up with crap sauce and a little sprig of crappy parsley? I mean crap crap. The Chinese food of crap: the crap that gets served in an unostentatious, blasé little cardboard box with sticks crap.

And on top of it all, Doctor Nyarlathotep took me out of service for the rest of the week.

I'm slightly irritable.

Remember when we were kids and the doctor took us out of school for a week? That meant an indefinite period of unlimited sleep, meals in bed, and unimaginable new high scores on Yar's Revenge and Galaga. Even the totally useless gesture of blowing into the cassette and jamming it roughly into the console to make it work provided a giddy sense of delightful anxiety.

But even the most rudimental of my motor skills seem fried. While sitting upright, I'm barely able to loll my exceedingly-heavy and Alka-Seltzer muddled braincase in any particular direction whatsoever, let alone seek amusement of any complexity.

Crap.

So now that the Universe has failed to amuse me even at the simplest and most fundamental level, I've moodily escalated from merely "irritable" to full-scale, "I want everybody dead! Now!"

I'm exaggerating of course. I don't want LadyTerri and the kids dead. And certainly not you.

Just mostly everybody else.

Mostly.

But alas, I'm helplessly daydreaming about all the stuff at my job that isn't getting done. And while the house is certainly loaded with the kids' modern and clearly superior video games I've never even tried, I'm distantly surfing the news through glazed eyes only halfway grasping daily new tragedy.

I don't 'idle' well. I am utterly unable to 'shut down'; my addled mind works in fits and starts ... like something will go terribly wrong if my attention lapses. So inevitably, I drift back to my word processor with nothing in mind whatsoever.

And this post manifests.

Curious.

I remember seemingly ages and eons of 'writer's block' ... and now it seems even my my own polluted biology can't shut me up.

So what is this 'writer's block' thing all about? It absolutely cripples young authors.

And why do I seem now so impervious?

As I've mentioned, my college English teacher singled me out in front of the class and read one of my badly-butchered paragraphs aloud. She underlined with great conviction how much she "resented having to deal with remedial students here at the college level".

That was a gift ... for as fate would play out, it is exactly this adversity that drives my pen today. Her venom made writing a simultaneously sweet and violently savage, selfish release.

Admittedly, writing is now my addiction.

My justice.

My revenge.

I don't need to be considered a good writer, and I enjoy every letter I type thanks to her.

From Hell's heart, I stab at thee.

If you would further indulge me a piece of advice for the aspiring new writer suffering from this 'writer's block' bullshit, I would grab them by the ears and scream, "It's all in your head dammit! You have plenty to say, just maybe not for this jaggoff critic you are trying to please! Now you fucking tell me!"

People like that "teacher" can be sadly conventional, stale, and frankly unforgivable murderers if you let them.

Sure, there's a lot to be said for the disciplines that formal training can give you. But you have to remember that there's a danger there: these people often want like-minded cookie cutter clones for "authors" ... an elite group of pompous asses whose opinions unilaterally agree on what is "art" and what is not.

I say screw that. Stop worrying about semicolons and proper deployment of your apostrophes. Find the 'voice' that communicates your thought; in time the rest will fall into place on it's own.

And speaking of 'thought', guard yours carefully. Test it frequently. Be open to potentially being wrong, and don't fault yourself too harshly when you are. I mean look at what you are up against for God's sake ... every news headline I've seen over the past few days isn't about the Myanmar disaster; it's about our irrelevant new election fodder -despite the fact that your local City Council Members and dog catchers have done more for your individual communities than these people ever could or would.

Want something "significant"?

Skip to page six.