So I’m in a weird place right now, you know? I’ve just finished a rough draft for a novel. I think it’s good – or at least entertaining, which I classify as “good,” though I’ve run into plenty of other writers who draw a distinct, bold, Berlin Wall-sized line between entertaining and good. But this puts me in the position of having to wait a couple of months before I start editing it, you know? The strategy, picked up originally from inhaling Stephen King’s On Writing when I was in high school, then bolstered by dozens of other people through the years, is based on the idea that you need to put some distance between you and the thing you’ve been working on. If you try to edit it right off the bat, then you’re going to be too close to the material and won’t have the presence of mind needed to think, “Does a human who is not me understand this sentence?” 

So, then, what to do with the time between now and then? Because my fiction writing has been focused entirely on that damn book for the last, ah, two years, I don’t have any story ideas in the chamber. (Or if I do, they’re buried in a Google Keep note somewhere on my phone. I need a better system for those, because hoo boy, Keep is trash.) And yet, I don’t want to abandon my practice of writing every morning. I came perilously close to doing that last year, when I was well and truly stumped by both the book and being stuck in a personal rut, and that’s the last thing I want to deal with again. 

I thought about that earlier and recalled that the advice I keep giving people whenever they ask is consistent enough to stick in my head. I then think that, if I don’t follow my own advice, what good is it? So, that advice: Just write something every day. Doesn’t matter if it’s trash, or unpublishable, or something aping Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness in a beleaguered attempt to just keep the gears going. Just write something every day. 

So why not? 

I thought back to my publishing history on my blog, or website, or whatever this is, and how it’s been beyond sparse over the last few years. That’s partly down to the book, partly down to the horrors of the pandemic, partly down to the horrors of an emboldened and growing American fascism, and partly down to the realization that not every damn thought I have needs to be broadcast on the Internet. (That last one’s been a hard lesson to internalize. Seems like I grew up in the first generation to grow accustomed to that, and it is only through the grace of God that my LiveJournal and Xanga are lost to the aether.) But would it kill me to post occasionally? 

So what I’m saying is that I figure I’ll post a few times, here and there, maybe queue up some ideas. Maybe in doing so, I’ll have some thoughts on short stories to write, tuck away for a bit, edit, and try to get published. Cause it’s like any form of exercise, you know? The more you do it, the easier it is to branch into other things. With writing, that has – for me – typically meant that the more I get in the groove of jotting something down on paper (or bits or bytes), the easier it is to come up with other ideas. It is, I think, the only explanation for why Stephen King wrote “The Mangler.” The guy just had to write something, lest the demons in his own brain consume him. 

So what’s on my brain and what is transmittable? Well, the main thing that’s been on my brain – safely compartmentalized so I don’t forget it, but also don’t give in to depression every time I think about it – is the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months thinking about how various groups have tried to mold my relationship to Zionism throughout my life. Those groups ranged from my rabbis, to youth groups, to Taglit Birthright, to the left-wing organizations I ALLEGEDLY IN MINECRAFT have worked with, to people at parties who cornered me about being Jewish and how that, obviously, means I support an apartheid state. It’s been a lot to consider and I’m not going to start going through it now – not this morning – but I think that’s going to be at least something I throw up here. I don’t have any illusions that anything I write here will sway anyone one way or the other, but I do feel like it’s worth saying something about, in some manner that I can point to and say, “I assure you, I wasn’t completely twiddling my thumbs.” 

(On the note of not completely twiddling your thumbs, you should all find organizations like Medial Aid for Palestinians or Doctors Without Borders or someone [who’s not the Red Cross, because oof] on the ground in Gaza and throw resources their way, because governments all around the world are failing Palestinians yet again.)

Of course, there’s nothing as solipsistic as blogging about something and calling out to the world, “I’m doing something!” Part of that writing exercise will, thus, be self-flagellation for not doing much more and me thinking about why I haven’t done more. I’m sure I’m going to feel real great about myself afterward and this will do wonders for my already-bleak outlook on humanity and the state of the world. Trust me, I’m as psyched as you are.

So anyway, I’m hoping that I’ll have more things pop into my head aside from bleak reflections on reality, but from such things come short stories. (Sometimes.) So I’m hopeful that something’ll pop in there.

Barring that, I’ll wade through the horror-show of Keep notes and try to find my list of story ideas that I came up with a few years ago.