First!!!11one

In December of 2010, in the middle of a truly horrendous snowstorm, I stayed up all night in order to deal with the arcane rules about moving cars during a snow emergency in St. Paul. (Actually they’re fairly clear, just never uniformly enforced and they assume people have normal sleep patterns.) While pounding espresso after espresso and listening to the entire Clutch discography nonstop, something broke in my brain. The eventual result was a short story that wound up novelette-length (word count around 17,000).

In the cold light of the next time I got at least three hours of sleep, I realized it wasn’t very good. This happens quite frequently to me, and to many others I suspect: ideas that shine golden and hot in the midst of sleep deprivation turn out awful when you get a chance to consider them again or, worse yet, when your lack of judgment causes you to show your terrible idea to someone else. I am still notorious in certain parts of New Jersey for my fervent proselytism over a dreamed invention that solved the eternal problem of how to enjoy the great taste of fish without having to eat any.

Within three days, I had a ridiculously detailed outline at 25,000 words. Within a week and a half, I had 55,000 words of actual first draft. It’s taken me until last week to actually slog through the rest of it (which is a parable in itself), so I can do it all over again in the rewrite process. In the middle of all this, I think I somehow generated 3 more short stories, 4 synopses for short stories, and four pages of one-to-four sentence ideas that may never go anywhere.

At some point I became aware that I might have to deal with people if I ever actually submit any of them (another parable), and so here’s another blog. Huzzah for unlimited subdomains. I will do my best to actually, you know, update this one more frequently than my last one, which had a runtime of 13 years, with recent updates on a schedule similar to that of seasonal solstices. This may be difficult, as I still adhere to my rules regarding useless blog posts about my cat, what I had for dinner, and the minutiae of everyday life that clutters the interwebs like, well, the sheer number of blogs. At least I have a topic.

You know, writing.

Speaking of which, I have to go work on my revision map.