You know, I really need to start writing these things earlier in the day. Lately it seems like my usual writing period, which is between 8 pm and midnight, is the time when I am least capable of any kind of coherent writing. Hence the mad proliferation of these somewhat incoherent stream of consciousness diary style entries.

I am writing these things with the least amount of brainpower I have in a day. No wonder they tend to wander and meander and trail off and get muddles and get lost and go on and on and on with far too many words in a row without even a comma or a semicolon to break up the relentless onslaught of word after word after misbegotten word until the reader is just about ready to claw off their eyebrows with a pair of white hot pliers rather than continue to endure this endless hopeless worthless cacophony of words that don’t even seem to make any sense together any more wardrobe carpet ampersand beetlefuck and you lose all hope like a man stranded in the desert of ever seeing water or in this case punctuation ever again!

(long desperate intake of breath)

I will try not to do that tonight.

My glasses seem to get dirty at frightful speed lately. So either my fingers are especially grubby lately or I have been pushing them back up on my nose far more than usual lately, and getting said grubby fingers all over the lenses more often in the process.

You would think that after wearing glasses for the last 34 years ago, I would learn not to touch the lenses when I push the glasses back up my nose. But alas, no. I have actually pondered inventing glasses which give you a slight electric shock, just enough to be a little painful, every time you touch the lenses (but not the frame, obviously). Get a little negative feedback conditioning working for you. You would learn not to touch the lenses pretty quick, and your glasses would stay clean for ever so much longer.

I have been noticing that my glasses seem to be a looser fit lately. I somehow doubt the shape of my head has changed much, so I wonder if they just need some kind of adjustment at the optometrist’s. Tighten up a few screws, make the fit snug again.

I could make a joke about needing a few screws tightened in the head the glasses rest upon as well, but I am too damned tired right now.

Seriously. Here it is, 9:53 PM, and I am dead tired. I want nothing more than to crawl into bed and hibernate for a while. This would not be that weird except that I slept all damned afternoon, so much so that I ended up eating supper at 8:30 instead of my usual sixish, and of course, that ended with some of that ever so wonderful sweaty Bad Sleep where I dream so intensely that when I wake up, I am not sure what’s real and what’s dream.

And sometimes, I am sincerely disappointed to come back to this stupid pointless boring life of mine. I wake up and I am thinking “Oh, right. This is what my life is actually like. Lovely. ”

Pretty fucked up, n’est-ce pas?

I have had some caffeine lately, so that might be a factor in extra sleepiness as I caff crash. Usually, in the long term, that ends up being a mildly good thing because after some deep crash sleep, I actually feel more refreshed and awake than I do from normal, not crash type sleep.

Sometimes you have to go higher to go deeper, like a high diver splashing into the water harder than someone who jumps off the side of the pool, I guess.

Well, the good news is that I finally done the first edit of the book I wrote over 25 days in November, Slightly Above Average. All that is left is to add a Table of Contents and a cover page and maybe even a frontispiece if I am feeling fancy, and then I can keep my promise and send out a copy of the final PDF (for now) to the handful of people who have expressed interest in reading it.

Not sure what I will do with it after that. Send some query letters to some publishers, I suppose. I have no idea if it is good enough to publish. I like it, but I wrote it, so I just might be biased. I am particularly pleased with the last section of the book. I think I did some good work in the science fiction of ideas, and I love how I ended it. By and large, when I read it, I am happy.

That’s a big deal for any artist, honestly. The basic act of art is to create that which pleases you. Like a child finger painting, putting color to paper for no other reason than to please themselves. If an artist can create that which pleases them, the rest of the process, like the stuff involving actually trying to make a living doing this stuff, is not all that important at all.

Why did it take me more than a month to edit the book? Was it really a time consuming, labour intensive, midnight oil burning, mentally exhausting process that every day threatened to break my will with its fiendsih complexity that mocked my feeble efforts to complete it?

Totally. OK, not really. Honestly, I am just plain lazy.

Though I am starting to wonder if all writers are lazy, if that, in fact, is part of what drives us to write. It might not be the easiest road to travel and it sure as hell is not a normal way to live your life, but it sure as hell beats working for a living.

Depending on how you define working, of course.

Possibly what makes a person a writer is, in fact, the fact that for them, writing is easier than “work”.

And with that, I am gonna take a nap.