(Phaysis)

If I could have one wish, I’d like to actually be creative. Proactively creative, procreative, instead of being clever in a reactive, reactionary sort of way. The kind of proactivity that sparks the genesis of an idea, pushes it to germinate, punch through the soil, and grow until it has reached fruition and has born seeds to be carried forth and planted elsewhere.

Most of my creativity comes in the form of reacting to statements, comments, words uttered by others and trying to be witty or charming. It’s obvious to me that it’s gotten me nowhere.

What I’d like is to be one of these intensely creative people I see drawing, painting, writing, recording and turning nothing into a powerful something that moves and inspires others. I’m tired of being the passive inspired. Of being the automatic bear trap. Of sitting in wait for the end so I can begin. My life is half over. What have I to show for it?

So I’m getting feedback from three of my proofreaders regarding “Lost Carrier”, and it’s all some heavy stuff. They’ve provided me with a ton of ideas and a few pounds of problems to work through. They’re proving to me that no matter how “done” I think a thing is, there will always be more work necessary to get it polished.

The general feeling I’m getting is that the story needs more, that the world of the story needs more flesh on its bones. In the spirit of a noire story, I made most of my descriptions as sparse and dry as possible. But the instances where I rambled on, I provided too much detail, and they stand out as accidental focal points. So the solution is to either trim them back or backfill everything else.

I had set out to make this a short story, but with the number of named characters, scenes, and themes, it calls out to be a novella or a serial. This will require of me more time and attention — and more writing — so I will not be publishing as soon as I had hoped. Sorry, kids.

Again, I would like to thank my proofreaders Amy, Rachel, and Jana. Your notes and comments have been incredibly helpful. Fresh eyes see best. To the rest of my proofreaders, let me gently nudge at you for a bit. Nudge-nudge.

Apparently, the Texas Relays are in town, meaning downtown is supposed to be fucked up with traffic, cruising, and young adults hooping it up after competitions. Whoopty-shit. Hope I can park somewhere near the venue when I go see VNV Nation tomorrow night. Don’t care if I gotta pay ten bucks to do it.

Looking forward to the show. It’ll be a welcome reprieve from the long workdays, even though I’m taking my work home this weekend. It’s a rare thing that I can work from remote, but now I have the need. Fuck my life.

I was noticing that my blog didn’t have any spam in the queue waiting for deletion. “Hmm, maybe they’ve forgotten about my blog” or “Hmm, maybe that botnet got taken down.” No, the answer is more basic: it’s been over 14 days since my last blog post, past the open comments timeout. Sorry about that, comerades. My bad. Spam away.

Remember that short story I was talking about writing, “Lost Carrier”? Yeah, well something weird happened: I finished it. Really finished it. Compiled the first draft and grabbed a cadre of volunteers to copyedit for me and give me notes on what could use some more work. Sent out the draft to the first of the four volunteers three weeks ago. The last delivery was a week ago. So here’s what’s funny about that: I’ve heard nothing by way of feedback. I’m in an information vacuum. Maybe there’s a curse on the story that causes the reader to go deaf-mute.

Realistically, it’s a short time ago that I submitted the draft to my readers. I sincerely appreciate their free help, and I wouldn’t wish to rush their response for fear of getting poor feedback, but I’m anxious to hear something, anything on how I can make the story better. Y’know? I hope for closure on the feedback loop.