Friday, September 19, 2003
Yesterday, Spooky and I read, and, in the end, the reading left me even more filled with doubt about the merit and future of Murder of Angels than I'd been to start with. I always hope it will work the other way, that reading back I'll be reassured that I'm a much better writer than I think I am. But, more often than not, it goes like yesterday. Spooky yelled at me (she does that) for being "too hard" on myself. Personally, I deny the possibility that a writer can be too hard on herself. Other people can be, those people whose child the book or short story or poem is not, those people who have no business opening their mouths because they can't begin to guess the bottomless horror of a blank sheet of paper (okay, in 2003, "blank sheet of paper" must stand as a metaphor, but you know what I mean). And, while I'm in this mood, those people who whine about my stories not being "scary" enough (may they all rot in the most forgotten crevices of every culture's version of eternal damnation, the morons), they ought to spend a few years as an author, an author dependant on her work for her livelihood, if they wan't to see something really scary.
Anyway, after three chapters, I was so dispirited that I no longer felt like going to the theatre and just laid around all evening, mostly. And I'm not going to start Chapter Ten until tomorrow; today I'll spend at a museum or a park or a landfill or something, trying my best not to think about the goddamn novel.
I'm getting conflicting reports of how many people have died in Isabel. Thirteen or fifteen, one or the other. I also get the impression that a lot of people have misunderstood what I've said here about hurricanes. And I'm not much in the mood to explain myself. Yes, violent natural phenomena often kill people. This does not, in any way, diminish their ability to inspire awe and wonder. I never said that I thought people who choose to live in what is, historically, the path of hurricanes "have it coming." It seems to me that people who live, by choice or chance, in hurricane-prone areas have to learn to live with and accept the storms as a regular part of their lives, and deaths. I think that most of them do. Because the storms aren't going away. And when I marvel at Isabel, I'm not disregarding the lives that might be lost, I'm simply refusing to see humanity as the only thing on the planet worthy of consideration.
Maybe I'll just find a good bar and spend the whole day drinking . . .
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