::Megawattage

Today I am sizzling and toothsome.   For no rhyme or reason I’ve been humming with energy, right down to my bones.  Like i could reach up and point, and there would be a crackle and a boom.  I feel like I could reach into the sky and tear down the clouds — weave wings with them and soar off to be the Raingod.  Like there is glowing light behind my eyesockets, forcing its way out.  I am six and a half feet of kick-ass in a six-and-a-quarter-foot bag. 

No reason at all, but I’ll take it.  This place is finally clean.  All the cobwebs and shadows and memory and maudlin – it’s been boxed up.  There’s a closet over there, behind that door, my pretties.  That’s where we’ll go when I need to have a look at those things again.  I still miss them, but there’s no need to prattle on.  Next thing you know I’ll be anorexic and cutting myself.  

I suppose a little spot of anorexia could be good for me.

Maybe it’s this thick, summer weather finally sinking in.  I feel like I have a big, scaly Godzilla tail and the requisite nuclear breath.  The urge to growl and stomp is pretty high.  Flattening a few buildings would be cathartic.  A substitute for all the people I work with, who I am not allowed to grab by the collar and pin to a desk and wallop with a stapler, whilst telling them plainly what Giant. God. Damn. Idiots.  They.  Are.  (Envision the stapler being swung in tune with the punctuation, of course.)  I have a techie project-management type of job.  Mostly, I hold hands and clean up other people’s mess.  Which is fine, when it’s a routine mess and not a giant clusterpork of a fubar, brought on by someone’s laziness and complete lack of professional —

— ah.  Excuse me. 

Anyway.  Maybe it’s work that has me all keyed up.  Maybe it’s all the sex and violence in the air, in my dreams, in the moonlight and the humidity.  Mentally, I want to start running and never stop.  Over the hill, down to the highway, along the beltway and keep going for a few weeks till I hit the ocean.  I have an irrational yearning to go see the ocean.  RIGHT NOW.  Which is what I did about 10 years ago – spur of the moment trip, solo Indianapolis-to-Boston drive in one sixteen-hour night.  Exhaustion and reverence and the foothills of New York State and Boston clam chowdah and all-around goodness.  I can’t really get away with another one of those… migrations.  Not now.  I wonder if I even have the attention span for it?

I’ll bide my time.  Gen Con is coming up and I will be incommunicado, lost in the thundering herd of Geek Mecca, surrounded by chainmail and goofy Tshirts and dice and neeeeeeerrrrrrrrds!  An army of kindred spirits right outside my front door.  They brought the mountain to Mohammed a few years ago, and for this I am thankful.  I am taking a few days off, sticking a knife between my teeth and jumping into the rapids, and I’ll return the following Monday bruised, sweaty, laden with loot, and grinning like a madman.  Possibly gibbering like one, too.  An ocean of nerdity instead of, y’know, the Atlanticum.  It’ll have to do.

In the mean time – I have the candles lit and I’m trying to decide if I want any of that Scotch.  It’s eyeing me from across the room.  Someone told it my name, I think.

Any of you lot ever get serious about writing?  Because I’ve been dicking around with it as a lust and a hobby since the second grade, and still haven’t put together a novel.  I have no excuse really, unless it’s some subconscious longing to die an abject, miserable failure.  Because, people — I can WRITE.  That stuff you see on the shelf and Barnes and Noble?  Dreck.  Well, ok, not all of it.  But the number of times in the last five years I’ve picked up a book, given it 100 pages of grace and thrown it at the wall, shrieking, "Hang the editor!  Smite the author!  I COULD DO BETTER!"… well, it’s shameful.  But I don’t say it unless it’s true.  So it makes me feel… serious about it.  For a change.  Like I need to lop off someone’s head and get the Quickening.  (Oddly enough, Pandora has decided to play me the Ride of the Valkyries during this part…)  So.  Anyway.  You there.  You ever get serious about that sort of stuff?

The reason I ask is because of baby steps.  Just like I don’t go all Forrest Gump and dash out of my house and jog for weeks until I get to the ocean, it would be profoundly bonkers to dive right into The Big Novel Project without doing some stretching, some lifting of narrative weight, some fencing practice and punching of paragraphs.  I don’t jog that far because I’m not ready for my knees to explode and my heart to hit the ejector seat.  I am Not Quite Ready to get started on the gigundous Make-Me-Famous project, until I knock some of the rust off.  Kind of like I’m doing here.

So I was wondering if anyone else is into that.  Because some writing prompts would be divine.  And some beta-readers.  Real ones, curse it!  Most of the time when you post writing on the Internet, your readers give you wild applause and shout MORE MORE MORE and tell you how good you are.  $DEITY knows it’s happened to me for years.  When the truth is that my work wasn’t perfect – and in some cases not even good.  It took a neutral reader who didn’t give a fuck about me or about science fiction to tell me the truth, back then.  That was a shocker.  So anyway – someone who could tell the truth about the flaws and the boring parts and the why-the-hell-is-this-like-this.  Instead of kneeling at the altar of Oh-You’re-a-Writer, May I Blowjob You?

Is that you?  Because you people seem, as a rule, somewhat literate.  I dare you, fuckers.  Prompt me!  Go on, do it!  I can make it worth your while.  I give good critique.  I’ll look over your work all long and slow, make sure to savor every inch.  We’ll do it together, until you beg me to stop.  And then I’ll laugh, because you forgot your safe word…