Lloyd Jones Struggle

Anybody out there remember that Portland band?

Back in those days, I didn’t appreciate the struggle part of it. I do now. I’m still working on the finish trim of a novel called Mothership. I’m stuck out on a rock ledge where I simply must find a crack in which to drive a piton.

Just yesterday, I told one of my occasional readers about my problems with Mothership and here on joecsmolen.com. She was actually listening. She said, “Oh, you mean a blog.” I told her I wasn’t keeping up with the blog because I was having a really hard time making the story really hit and it was all that was on my mind, but I wondered about how smart it is to blog about being seen with toilet paper trailing your shoe.

She just said, “Oh, yeah! People like that kind of thing.”

At the time I wrote Lostine, I got called names. My dim hope now is that I might live up to them. Lostine was, so to speak, handed to me. The feeling then was distinct. In the fast, 25 weeks or so in which I dashed Lostine out, I had an invisible means of support.

But attempting to finish Mothership now, I am for sure left too much alone with the story in all its glory - and my smallness.

My writer’s sense of inadequacy grinds. Because of the incredible beauties of the largely done Mothership, because of my 5th-Grade narrator’s endless innovation in causing himself strife, because of the mostly absolutely juvenile fun of it, I’m riding the Wild Mouse with a sadistic Carney at the controls. Can you see the toilet paper?

Bla, bla, bla and and hour later - in the other room, E.L. Doctorow is reminding me -

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining…researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

So, I’m going to cut this off and do the day’s re-write edits of Chapter 32 of Mothership.