This is a true story. This is also breakout session three, which answers a question that writers ask me frequently, and, as evidenced by today's attendance, are actually willing to pay to hear an answer to.
This is the question:
Here are some of the things I have actually found in my life:
- When I was a kid, I once found a poster for a theatrical production called "The Country Boy" in an abandoned house. The play was a comedy, and it was from around 1915. I still have that poster somewhere.
- My brothers and I once found a rolled-up scroll with Hebrew writing on it. We took it to someone to have it translated. It was some bizarre kind of threat or curse. I am not making this shit up. It was scary. I do not still have that scroll.
- I found a hobo inside an industrial trash compacter. He had been compacted. I called paramedics. I think the hobo survived. I do not still have him, either.
- Once, when I was shopping for groceries shortly after the birth of my son (he was just a few weeks old, I think), I found a banana had ended up beneath his car seat, which attached to the top of the shopping basket. We were very poor in those days, so buying individual bananas was a regular extravagance. I got all the way out to my car and loaded up before I found the banana. I had to reload my son into the shopping cart and go back into the store and wait in line to pay for one banana. I did not want my pre-lingual-mass-of-semi-conscious-goo infant son to start out life as a dishonest thief. Somebody ended up eating the banana. Probably me.
I'm having trouble finding the flash drive I had that has about four unpublished books of mine on it.
Good thing whenever I start a new WIP, I always write By James Patterson on it.
I don't know why I pick on James Patterson so much.
Wait. Yes, I do.
But it's kind of like the Republic of San Marino picking on China. Nobody would care if San Marino got its ass kicked.
Nobody would even know about it if it was raining hard in New York.
Anyway, I'll have to tell you more about FINDING time tomorrow.
I have shit to do.
15 comments:
If you're San Marino, what does that make me, Andorra?
How the hell did the hobo survive that? He must have had a healing factor off the charts. I found a $20 bill on a public bus once. I don't have it, or $20 in general.
If someone asks me how I "find" time to do something I get irritable, like somehow it's an accident that I staggered to the computer before dawn to write or it's a felicitous alignment of the stars when papers get graded or the dogs get walked or I rode my horse. "I don't know how you find time to do that," with the headshake, like I either have a superpower or lead such a frivolous life that I have time for trivial things like reading books.
So I don't talk about my life a whole lot, and that saves a lot of time. Or I talk about the mothership, and then they don't talk to me anymore.
Finding time is not the problem. Catching it is.
And yes, to echo William, how the hell did the hobo survive? I never knew this until I read Barbara Stuber's Crossing the Tracks but hobo means homeward bound. I don't know what that has to do with the compactor but it must mean something. Nothing is coincidence.
I don't have to find time. I possess this magic power that allows me to C-R-E-A-T-E time. Its pretty cool!
You don't find time, you make it.
And James Patterson is a real person? I thought that was just a moniker for an army of trained monkeys.
The hobo is a red herring, I think, and James Patterson is a corporation, which means he counts as a person, right? It's a faculty meeting day, which means my snark is on already, for which I ask the group's forgiveness.
Well you obviously can't "find" any time for this shit.
Just kidding. It's just that my day never feels right without a little breakout AA.
You know... two things:
1. Lately, I have a hard time finding my groove since my son moved away.
2. The reason I didn't post today is that I am currently working on books for two different publishers, and putting some finishing touches on a brand-new one for a third.
I wrote a hell of a lot today. You just don't see it.
I really do have a great post to put up, but I don't have time for it.
And, at the risk of setting off an avalanche of follow-up comments, it really kind of irks me when writers post stuff on facebook or twitter about exactly what they're doing with their WIP, or how many words they wrote today, or the great new idea they just came up with.
In one of the few movies worth talking about, in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, I think Eli Wallach says something like, "If you're going to shoot, shoot. Don't talk," right after he kills a guy.
If you're going to write, write.
Now, back to work for me.
Apparently, nobody in New York City got the memo that they were supposed to take the day off today.
There's one thing I know we can always count on: Andrew's up to some sick bidness, chanting down Babylon, even if we can't see it.
My only complaint (if I ever had one) was that you write too many damn good books. If you finish as many every year as you have been lately, you're going to have to live to 500 to see them all published.
Not that we'd mind, but we care about your feelings too, friend.
Also, I'm sorry about Trevin, and what's it done to your groove, but I have to say I think that's a natural reaction, and I'd be much more worried about it if you weren't fucked up over it.
He's obviously a brilliant young man, and missing him, in spite of how proud you are, is just right, I'm sure, even if it feels wrong.
If you need to talk ...
Haha. Admittedly, I tweet about my writing progress a lot. Wish I had an excusable reason why. I don't. I do it just for the hell of it.
Hehe...
"Find" time...or "make" time?
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