Silence of the Muse, or How to Geek Out Instead of Writing

Being (still) more geek than would-be writer, I obsess around the edges of the writing. I track my wordcount in a spreadsheet. I’ve got graphs and everything. I find it soothes me, especially on days when the actual writing seems to dry up.

Hey, it’s something to do. Better than staring at a blank page all night, eh? (Which is what I was doing yesterday night, before I gave in and called it a day at four in the morning.) The green line and the red line belong to the left-hand Y axis, and represent the daily wordcount I’m optimistically trying to stick to (green) and the actual daily wordcount I’ve managed over the last month (red). The blue line belongs to the right-hand Y axis, and represents the total wordcount, in the particular file I’m working on ,over the same period. The green line is hope and the red line is manic-depression. The blue line, on the other hand, is probably some sort of important lesson in perseverance: all you have to do is keep pointing out to yourself that the blue line only goes up.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. I’ve made a religion of not believing in writer’s block. At least, I don’t believe in it as a genuine condition. I think there’s no shortage of things to say, or ways to say them. I think there’s just tiredness and shortness of breath.

More on the subject of obsessing around the edges: I’ve been fiddling around trying to set up the Simplest Possible Backup. So far, what I’ve got is this:

All the stuff I write goes into text files in a single parent directory; there’s a cronjob which tarballs it once every day and emails it (using a one-line script for mutt and msmtp, which in any case is configured to work with my work email account -which, as of this week, is a hosted gmail account) to my personal gmail account, where it is filtered, labeled and archived automatically. Text files tarball very small -the entire thing comes to around three hundred k once compressed. That’s cool, but also a little deflating for some reason.

You know what’s weird? My father, that’s what. My father is a writer -unlike me, he’s a published writer with half a dozen books out of print. He’s writing a new one. Every time I go see the old man, he’s gone and hand-written pages and pages of manuscript. He cuts them up and staples them in the appropriate places. He’s been doing this for thirty years. He wakes up at three a.m. to write (I clearly did not inherit his metabolism.) The irony just about kills me.