Haunted By My Failure - Fiction Month

The Story I Heard - Blind Pilot (mp3)
Dial - School of Seven Bells (mp3)

The title of the first story I remember writing was called "100 Leprechauns." I think it was first grade. This group of 100 leprechauns took count of their group before they left the house in the morning, and they took count again before they went home at night. One day, they only counted 99. The group searched and searched only to find out they had counted incorrectly.

I stole from church. The story of the lost sheep. I mixed in a little bit of my love of Lucky Charms, and for my dramatic climax, I took a lesson I'd learned from my dad about checking your work, something I'd continue to struggle with for at least the next 35 years.

Pretty much every bit of the story was cribbed in one way or another, but it was mildly amusing, and for my age it was quite a snappy piece of writing. So it got an A+ and was posted on the wall outside the classroom door, all by itself, for a whole entire week.

That's all it took, really, for me to keep writing the rest of my life. Who knows how our lives might diverge with the slightest of changes? If she had given me an F on that paper, would I have kept writing? Maybe. Probably. Who knows?

I'm a decent writer. Sometimes I'm quite good. Once in a while, I'm downright awesome. Essays, letters, poems, newspaper columns, bulletin board debates.

My whole life, the only genre of creative writing where I feel I have failed, consistently and repeatedly, is in writing fiction. Short fiction ends up lacking bite or confidence. Long fiction never quite gets finished and rarely even gets remotely close to even a halfway point. Part of me panics, as if every day I wake up means one more day of potential kick-ass fiction writing gone.

But y'know what? Raymond Chandler was over 50 when he published The Big Sleep. Richard Adams gave birth to Watership Down when he was 52. Annie Proulx was 57 when Postcards hit the stage. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't even start her damn Little House series until she was over 60. I find just enough comfort in this not to panic.

This blog was, for me, in many ways, borne to maintain and hopefully improve my writing chops while building up my consistency, an ability to write and keep writing week after week, even when the ideas dipped or faded.

We're 42 months in, and the Bottom of the Glass still hasn't quite hit the bottom. You are reading BOTG Entry #886. Not bad.

But lately we haven't had many comments. Some of our once-loyal readers have become too busy and burdened with life to stop by and read as often, and I totally understand. Feelings aren't hurt, but it's always a little sad to go week after week with a mere handful of comments.

So, I'm taking advantage of this commentary dip to flex my emaciated fiction muscles. I'm going to work on the I Don't Know If This Is A Short Story Or A Novella Or Something Even Bigger project I started last year. I'm going to go all Dickens on it and post a chunk of it at a time. I can't promise it will end with any kind of finality at all. It probably won't. But something about this particular project continues to swim around my head and haunt me, so it's time I give it a little of my attention.

Feel free to offer advice, suggestions or even harsh critiques if you feel so moved. Otherwise, I'll return with something goofy or opinionated to say in October.

Peace.

Two Spaces

A Small Victory - Faith No More (mp3)

“That’s just how I was taught.”

Interesting how that phrase gets used by most of us. It’s a defensive statement. It tends to mean, “Hey, don’t blame me. Someone else did this to me. I was just a kid, and this is what I learned.”

When it comes to matters of prejudice, bigotry, or hatred, and when it involves someone inheriting/learning from the small-mindedness of previous generations, many of us are impatient or outright angry at the excuse. Being raised by racists, or being raised by a misogynistic father, or being taught that the original lunar landing was a conspiratorial hoax by a wacky teacher... None of these are excuses for carrying forth with or propagating such nonsense.

But if you throw down the gauntlet about something like the proper number of spaces between sentences, folks come out of the woodwork in defense of two spaces with this very desperate cry, “I was just taught that way!”

Or, better yet, “It’s just a matter of habit!”

Slate.com offered a polemic against double-spacing recently, and were it not for the hype of a Tiger Mother, it might well have been one of the most unpredictably viral screeds of the week. Slate’s page received a barrage of commentary, well over 100 at last count. Of particular fascination is how much time many people took to observe that the entire issue was a waste of time. That is, people wasted their own precious time to point out the time they clearly wasted to read the piece and scroll down and sign in and offer opinion.

Compared to matters of warfare and world hunger, the issue of space width between sentences is certainly trivial. Yet more than 100 people, myself included, find ourselves wasting time and some level of emotional energy on the matter.

Two spaces versus one. Edward versus Jacob. Yankees versus Red Sox. We Americans crave meaningless and superficial debates about things which ultimately mean little or nothing, because we seem so poor at handling matters of greater import. We are so irresponsible in how we debate and discuss truly important issues, and we embrace such a low level of intellectual discourse, that we instead drift into debating things with little true significance. Because, ultimately, even the lowest-educated soul can find some way to argue for a favorite football team or a preferred lover for Bella. You need only read two books or sit in front of a TV for a few hours, and suddenly you have all the firepower necessary to engage in a heated and passionate debate.

With the matter of sentences and spacing, the bar is set even lower: Have you ever written a paragraph? If you answer in the affirmative, then you are immediately capable of injecting your opinion into the debate.

While Mr. Manjoo comes across too much like a snooty bully for my tastes, his “side” of this debate is backed with more than ample research and information which, if you remove his taint, is quite convincing.

The real deal-breaker: everything anyone reads online or in newspapers or in magazines or in books. Almost every printed piece you’ve ever laid eyes on that wasn’t written for or by an educator uses a single space after sentences. Even the most conservative, anti-evolutionary, most change-o-phobic sites on the Interwebs use a single space between sentences.

What’s more, most of us have accepted this online reality without batting an eye. We read the papers and the Internet articles, and few of us notice or care about the single space.

Personally, here’s the reason I prefer single space: I’ve rarely if ever seen a single-spacer inconsistently use that option in writing. Double-spacers are maniacally inconsistent. Rarely if ever do I run across anything of modest length by a double-spacer where at least one or two sentences are followed accidentally by a single space. (My job requires that I read and edit lots of copy from lots of sources, so this isn’t some willy-nilly claim.)

A single space is economical. Eventually, piled up sentence after sentence, single spaces save trees. Compared to two-space people, I’ve probably saved a whole tree. And each tree means something to some little dog out there in the world, needing to take a piss. Or a bird needing to build a nest. Hell, it's possible I've helped save an entire small ecosystem compared to those wasteful, space-eating, greedy two-space sumbitch bastards.

Help save the planet. Stop pressing that space bar so many dadgum times. Quit using that lame “That’s how I was taught” nonsense and join us here in the 21st Century.

Stuck Inside the Clogged Drainpipe of Creativity

The Story - Brandi Carlile (mp3)

My latest work of fiction stuck in writing limbo is haunting me.

It's not alone. My writing limbo is quite roomy and crowded. In fact, since back in college when I completed what might well be the worst piece of shit I ever wrote, I'm not sure I've finished anything fictional that was longer than a sestina.

When I say this 1993 short story was a piece of shit, it's not humility. Inspired by a friend's descent into drug use, I attempted to write a short story from the first-person perspective of someone on 'shrooms. The fatal flaw -- and it's not a minor one -- came from my clearly having never touched a hallucinogen in my life. The closest I'd ever been to a 'shroom was watching the guys on Young Guns take peyote. Even the damn friend who inspired my writing had never done 'shrooms. He was an LSD man.

So not only did I lack some crucially vital experience, but I didn't even have proper connection to anyone who had. Unless watching a few Lou Diamond Phillips movie counts. Quoting Dirty Steve and his obsession with the size of chickens as a crucial hallucinatory moment of inspiration is simply insufficient.

What my experience in writing a piece of shit taught me was that, if I were ever to succeed in writing anything fictional, it would need at some level to cast a harsh and critical eye on some aspect of myself. Almost 20 years later, and I still ain't finished anything.

I'm about to insult poets, so if you are one... well, first, I'm just sorry in general. But more importantly, you might not want to read what comes next.

Some 25 years after realizing I would spend the rest of my life writing, scribbling and typing words, pushing them out of my heart or mind or soul, down through the muscle fibers in my arms, and out of my frail knobby arthritisy-doomed fingers, I at last realize why poetry was so much easier for me than fiction writing.

Most poets know where the end is before they begin. If they don't, they find it pretty quickly, like a tourist who knows the keys are in her purse but has to dig around a little to find them. Poems are Bonsai Trees. They reveal detail and inspire awe in a way regular-sized trees rarely can. But when Mr. Miyagi starts clipping away, he already knows most everything about his tree, and the work is in snipping and binding, in pulling out and attending to the tiniest of details.

I'm part of the human condition that, even if I'm better suited to Bonsai trees, I can't help but stare out the window and long to be amongst the giant redwoods and towering pines. Look! There's Paul Bunyan! He's soooo much cooler than Mr. Miyagi! Unfortunately, although too many salespeople and educators tell us differently, it's not always true that we can be anything we want to be. You can't just wake up, work hard at it, and be the next Shaquille O'Neal or Jonathan Franzen.

Having left three lengthy writing projects in Fiction Limbo, most for decent enough reasons, a fourth now sits on the precipice, and I'm hoping I can find a way to keep it from falling in.


The story is inspired by a single autobiographical event and lets me have fun exploring some topics that reveal my own hangups while embracing a character on paper inspired by the woman who cut my hair recently. The opening scenario is so specifically out of date and pointless now -- a teenage boy's pathetically desperate midnight search for his first naughty magazine -- that I find myself laughing a little when I'm writing it. My generation never appreciated the "walking uphill both ways" stuff, and the current testosterone-addled teen will never appreciate needing to walk into a convenience store and pay a clerk in order to see naughty bits.

But, dammit, what began as a short story, in the hopes of me avoiding the rut of never-finished novels, has stretched. It's about to hit 4,000 words, and the end is nowhere in sight, even though I'm fairly convinced that there's not quite enough meat on this literary bone about boners to comfortably fill out a novel.

Thus, my current state of limbo. Which probably makes no sense to real writers. I doubt real writers ever get stuck just because they don't know whether something will end up a short story or a novel. If they do get stuck, it's probably less a seasional hibernation than those dudes whose head lolls over momentarily during a boring meeting.

But for now, I remain stubbornly willing to believe I might be, one day, somewhere in the future, a real writer. With the same kind of tense, awkward, nervous hope that the teenage boy in my story carries with him as he searches from convenience store to convenience store for the one night clerk willing to sell him a dirty mag.

Yeah, I might actually finish this one...

The Act of Writing

Glen Campbell--"Words (Bee Gees cover) (mp3)

I've already started grading, or at least commenting on, papers again. It has been very difficult, that writing.

No, not writing. Writing. In the literal sense. As in the physical act of putting a pen tip to paper and moving it around.

It is no surprise that as we age, our bodies unlearn skills that we do not use. The surprise for me is that the act of writing seems to have become one of those skills. While writing may be like riding a bicycle, in this case, that means just as wobbly.

Right now, as I look over the beginning of a comment I've written over on a student paper, I notice several things: the "n" has been written over top of itself twice to make it clear, the "a" isn't all the way closed and looks more like a second "e," there are stems missing all over the place so that, for example, a "u" looks more like a check mark. Trying to make a "z" is laborious. My "ly" looks like the slope of a face and nose pointing right.

Sure, my writing has been deteriorating for years. It happens to all of us. But this time, it almost feels like I've had a stroke or something and am trying to work my way back.

It makes me wonder: what did I not write over the summer? I think, as I look back, that I did not write much of anything. Maybe a note here or a list there, but certainly not a single paragraph and probably not even a full sentence. A couple of bank checks.

As I sit here with my hands back to the more normal activity of typing, they have a kind of tingle to them, a reminder that muscles have not been used for a long time, at least not in these strange muscle formations. The number of times while responding to those student essays that I had to go back to a word to make it right is a little alarming.

I have always thought of myself as a writer. Many of my earliest accomplishments involved making lines and solid blocks of color with crayons, pencil writing inside the triple lines (middle one dashes, not solid) of writing paper, smearing the ink of early Bic ball point pens as my left hand slid over what I had already written. The paragraphs in grade school that seemed to take forever, the essays and stories and poems and notes and tablets filled with ideas or fragments or half-finished thoughts.

Now my hand is unpracticed; now that kind of writing in motion across lines and down pages is pretty much gone. I cannot imagine the circumstances under which I will fill the pages of a notebook with handwritten words again.

Students like to point out their bad handwriting; some will even apologize for it. Increasingly, I now have to explain to students what I have written.

Oh, I will get it back, some of it. The grading, the notes in meetings, the reminders on Post-Its all will help me to re-establish some base level of readability. But it's the loss that is haunting me. On a guitar, by contrast, I can practice and practice and, at least to my ears, get back to where I was with some songs and techniques.

Not so with writing. The signature on my Social Security card, signed when I was a child, is not a signature that I could write today. I can examine it and confirm that I wrote it, can acknowledge that it is part of the evolution of my signature, perhaps the de-evolution, but I cannot return to its precision and flourish no matter how often I write it.

Maybe one day people will not write at all, will only enter words in some different, advanced, technological way onto pads and screens or through the air. And maybe that is fine. But let us acknowledge that something is also lost when we aren't scratching out letters, when the computer swallows every revision we have made as if it never existed. Then our relationship to the words changes, if only semantically, for we are no longer writing, only entering text.

Open Letter to Richard Russo

Great Big Mind - Josh Ritter (mp3)
Mercy Now - Lori McKenna (mp3)

Dear Richard Russo,

"You should write him."

My mother, looking every bit of her 67 years of age, lay on a hospital bed in the emergency room as we awaited results of several tests, any of which could come back startlingly negative. Her skin contrasted just enough with the sheets to keep her from disappearing, her lips almost devoid of color. She hates not being "put together."

Conversations in hospitals have a surreal quality. At times the patient speaks like a shaman, connected to dimensions and spirits the rest of us can neither see nor comprehend, sallying forth with wisdom and insight beyond their normal capability. At others, it's just incoherent babbling. Not even the patient seems certain of which is which.

My step-father, the man who adopted me and helped raise me since I was five, had died the previous October. Mom wasn't loyally following him to the grave or anything, but from my selfish perspective, it just seemed natural that she'd go ahead and die on me, too.

It had taken a full year to feel the impact of Dad's death, like I was one of those crash test dummies who surge in super-slo-mo towards the hungry and eager windshield. The action moves at such a slow, frame-by-frame pace you almost believe you could change things, avoid hitting that glass and cracking your skull, but you can't. You're just a dummy.

From my dad's death to that stay in the ER with my mom, I'd been inching, one frame at a time, towards some windshield. No seatbelt. No pause button. No alternative Choose Your Own Adventure outcome. And just as my head began to connect with the glass of Dad's death, I found myself sitting in an emergency room with my mother. Dad and I weren't even all that close. I'd originally, naively -- because why do we think we know what the death of a parent will or won't do to us? -- thought I'd be fine. I knew Dad was dying for years. I'd accepted its inevitability and taken numerous opportunities to say the things that might haunt me had I kept them in. Closure was not going to be a problem. Besides, I had a third child born the next month, a son we named after both my step-father and my biological one, who died shortly after I was born. My hands were full with real-life shit, and I had paid them both their due respects by naming my first son in their honor, so they should be able to rest and leave me the fuck alone.

Except that having parents go and die on you is very much like parenthood itself. People can warn you about how grueling it can be, the emotional nitroglycerin that injects itself at random intervals in the aftermath, but until you actually experience it, you just can't appreciate those warnings in a genuine way.

At the time I was close to finishing Bridge of Sighs and had pulled it out to read a quote I'd marked. It's where Lou says life is a series of doors, that going through them one at a time like we do, it feels like we're making free will choices, but when we get closer to our final doors, and we look back at our path through all those doors we walk through, it starts seeming inevitable that we could have chosen any other path, that maybe we weren't really making free will decisions after all.

I asked Mom if that made sense to her.

"I don't think your father ever had an affair," she responded. "But I couldn't know for sure."

Her eyes were fixed on some point miles above the ceiling. I gave the "Huh?" response. She searched for moisture in her mouth and continued. "A few women, I wondered. Never worth worrying about, I guess. What we don't know." Then she said something about his Bloody Marys.

What I remember about Dad making a Bloody Mary was how he crushed the ice, and the ice machine stood on the bar and roared and crackled louder than our lawnmower with every cube he'd drop in. I was watching The Karate Kid on HBO and my Dad crushed the ice and conversation between he and Mom and a friend of theirs took on this staccato strobe light feel of pausing with every cube.

"I loved your father so much."

I told her that your books gave me a level of comfort and hope and sadness that I hadn't felt with anyone else. You convince me that humanity is so deeply and pathetically flawed that only some kind of powerful force could have such a sense of humor and love us enough to pull it all off.

"You should write him," Mom said.

"Write who?" I asked. "Dad?" That would be kinda weird. I mean, I'd written him in my journal, but not like an actual letter or anything.

"That author. You talk about him a lot. He seems really important to you."

"He is. But he's a Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author. I think he kinda knows that he's important to lots of people."

"But he doesn't know it about you. And maybe he'd like to know. Maybe all of us like to know those things."

I shrugged and half-nodded. Sure, yeah, but come on.

"Wouldn't you want to know if you gave some stranger hope? I bet you sure would appreciate knowing that. Why is that man any different? I bet that's half the reason he writes."

"What's the other half?" I asked, but in that two-second gap, she had somehow drifted, and she was silent for a long pause. I stood up to look into her face and make sure she was OK.

"I loved his Bloody Marys."

Mr. Russo, you know people. Or, maybe better put, you know people the way I think I know people, or the way I want to know people. You see in them such beauty and such pain, and it's never simple, although their actions may be occasionally predictable or inevitable. More importantly, you love people. You don't love them for the Wizard of Oz facades we all manage to create for others and ourselves. You love them because they all do stupid or inexplicable or random things that are out of character or out of bounds.

The worlds you create, where you are the God of sorts, are places where there's a God who cares for them, who shows grace and understanding and maybe even sympathizes with their plights. I know you love your creations, and you want the best from them, and even as you open that next door for a character, a door you've fated him to open, I know it pains you to do so. Your love of those people passes understanding.

And I just need to thank you personally for that. Every book is a gift, and I'm lucky to receive them.

OK OK, I'm also intensely jealous, but mostly lucky.

He Brought Me The Book

Yo La Tengo--"Nothing To Hide" (mp3)
The Feelies--"The High Road" (mp3)

He brought me the book. “Here you go,” he said. “I read it.”

I nodded. I waited. Finally, “What did you think?”

“I think you should read it,” he said.

“I have read it.”

“I think you should read it again. I’m not sure you know what it says.”

“I wrote it,” I said.

“No matter.”

“Well, it has to matter some. I mean, I did write it after all.”

“I think it’s changed since you wrote it.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s entirely possible. You’ve changed since you wrote it.”

“Did you change it?”

“No.”

I picked it up and looked at it. Flipping through the pages, I couldn't really tell if it looked as it should. “Did someone else change it?”

“No.”

“No one changed it.”

“Didn’t have to.”

I was starting to get a little irritated. It had taken me a long time to write it. I knew it like a child. "What do you expect me to discover if I read it again?"

"What do you expect to discover?"

"Thank you for answering a question with a question."

"I think that you wrote the book, but it isn't yours."

"Why not?"

"Once you put the words down on paper, you lost control of them."

"Says you."

"It happens."

"Says you. I know exactly what I want this book to say, what it says."

"Says you. Tell me."

"Tell you what?"

"What do you think it says? What do you want it to say?"

"Well, that's where I'm not willing to go. I put the time in to put the words down to say what I wanted to say, and now I'm not inclined to summarize that."

"You're avoiding."

"You're annoying."

"Says you."

"Well, anyway, I do appreciate you reading it. And though you haven't really said what you think, I guess you've said it by not saying it and by implying that I probably need to resay it."

"That's what I'm here for," he said. And left.

So I sat there. Picked it up. Flipped through it again. But eventually, after hours of holding onto it just for the fact that it was mine, I had to open it as you would, and begin to read it as you did, and when I did that, I discovered that, indeed, another hand had written it and that I didn't know him or the words he used or the story he had to tell. My story.

Yo La Tengo and The Feelies are both available at eMusic.

"You get to decide what to worship."

My Time Outside the Womb - Titus Andronicus (mp3)
Write Your Own Song - Matthew Sweet (mp3)

Is it possible to be haunted by someone you've never really met, someone whose work you've only marginally encountered? Can a ghost have just enough form and substance to gnaw at your conscience when you had no sense of the actual person? If so, I'm being haunted by the ghost of David Foster Wallace.

If you don't know anything about David Foster Wallace, you're not alone. Hell, prior to his suicide last September, the only thing I knew about him was that he wrote Infinite Jest, the scariest-looking book I've ever perused in a bookstore. It's the kind of book, the size of book, someone like me sees and thinks, "I'll read that thing when I lose all of my limbs in some tragic accident involving a deer stand and a gallon of rye whiskey." It's 900 pages (plus another 100+ pages' worth of footnotes and asides). If Stephen King's tomes are milk chocolate, then DFW's prose is triple-chunk German dark, so rich it's almost impossible to digest.

The March 9 issue of The New Yorker includes a fascinating piece on DFW (yes, like all New Yorker pieces, it's long as hell). The piece seems to suggest what I've been afraid to discover, which is that the man's humanity and his psychological struggles were even more fascinating than his writing.

Because I, too, wrestle with the timeless challenge of moving beyond a universe where I'm the center of everything -- Paragraph #7 of Wallace's 2007 Graduation Speech at Kenyon College, if you please -- everything about the DFW's writing and life feel like a giant, super-sized cautionary tale of wish-fulfillment for my own deepest and darkest imaginings. Intellectually, I am but a gnat stuck in the tail hairs of the ass of his Clydesdale-esque brilliance. My ability to structure sentences, to communicate via type what circulates in my synapses, feels infantile by comparison, as if I were trying to write in calligraphy with my son's diaper droppings.

Despite his brilliance and skill, most critics and book-lovers seem to agree that DFW was a highly-flawed novelist at best. "Ambitious" tends to be the highest praise he earns from most folks. His essays and "journalistic" writings, on the other hand, tend to be held in much higher esteem. One of his most-famous pieces, "Consider the Lobster," fills me with seething admiration for the man. His brain was so all-over-the-place, so schizophrenically filled with thoughts and insights and Ideas, that he really needed a concrete and finite subject -- non-fiction -- around which to focus them. The minute he shifted into the world of non-fiction, where he was required to make his own rules and create the concrete-ness, he got a little carried away. Methinks it must have been like trying to lasso a comet.

That I would dare to think I could even just barely be a sidekick to his level of capability, a Robin to his Batman, makes me feel like I'm moronically flying toward the sun with wax wings. Beyond my secret burning hope that I could even hold a slight candle compared to DFW's sky-penetrating spotlight is a fear, the fear that artistic brilliance of such magnitude almost always exacts a damning price on its owner, and more often than not the owners of such brilliance tell anyone who will listen that they are not artists by choice, that they frequently wish they didn't have the burden, the weight, the need to express themselves via paint or writing or acting or whatever medium pulsed through their veins. It's not a choice for them, but rather a compulsion, a driving aching itch that must eventually be scratched.

DFW's brilliance also came at the expense of his emotional stability. A man who by most accounts was incredibly empathetic and attuned and generally considerate, he was also constantly fighting to tread the waters of his own depressive despair. He wanted so badly to write things that offered some hope and shed some light upon our existence, all the while fighting desperately to convince himself any of this was worth doing.

I feel I share Wallace's penchant for rambling, for swimming (perhaps egotistically) in my love of language, for making stupid and wild references about which few souls could remotely care. I feel I share his struggle to rein in my fiction writing even while my goals and hopes are nowhere near as ambitious or fascinating. I've even begun to suspect I share a little of his emotional struggle, perhaps an amount precisely proportionate to my inferior level of ability.

I don't want to be David Foster Wallace. Of course I don't. But his spirit lingers, floating around between my ears and outside my window and in the music I hear. He's not the first artist or writer to drown in substances, in demons, in psychological turmoil, but he's the one haunting me at this moment in time, and in a big-time way.

Do yourself a favor and read one of those two links of his. You might find David Foster Wallace haunting you as well, but you'd be grateful.


Titus Andronicus' debut album can be found on iTunes, Amazon.com's mp3 site, or eMusic. Matthew Sweet's In Reverse, perhaps his screwiest most ambitious album of the 90s, is only at Amazon.com for some reason.

POSTSCRIPT: I shit you not, I went to Ted.com to watch whatever tickled my fancy right before I would go to bed tonight, and I stumbled across this Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love) speech about creative genius. Totally serendipitous. It's 19 minutes long, but it's a beautiful balm to my panic, and I hope it made DFW's ghost smile a little:

Afraid to Commit

Self Inflicted - Katy Perry (mp3)
Driftwood - Travis (mp3)
One Little Victory - Rush (mp3)

My life has been filled with failures, and most of them haven't been nearly as painful as you'd think. In fact, most of my failures have been surprisingly pleasant. What I mean to say is, most of my failures haven't caused permanent damage. They're the kinds of failures that, when you look back on them months or years later, you find yourself grateful for having gone through it. You can convince yourself that, had you succeeded, you'd be a different and maybe less refined person.

It's been a decade since I failed colossally at writing a novel. That particular failure has left scars.

That this failure somehow hurts me more than any number of others that carry more weight in dozens of categories says a lot about me. It says:

• I'm a whiner at heart;
  
• I probably think I'm a better writer than I actually am;
• I lack the obsessive gene necessary to complete such ambitious goals.
  

The story was inspired by my time as a novice journalist working in Warner Robins, Ga., a town that formed around the Air Force Base ("Air Logistics Center," to be accurate) there. The ways I found myself disillusioned by my job and, more importantly, the gravitational sway of power, were the lessons that cemented my conversion from someone of more conservative political views to a fairly liberal fella.

Crimes committed by airmen were routinely swept under the rug or kept out of the paper lest the base get a bad reputation. (Our paper had a contract to print various projects for the base, and the threat of losing those contracts, which were a big income stream, was powerful.) We even had one of our reporters fired for writing a column that criticized the base. No warning. No write-up. Just canned on the spot.

We had a call-in line -- not unlike what the Times Free Press and other papers now have -- where people could leave any messages they wanted with total anonymity. My first job every day was to transscribe those calls. Roughly half were racist, sexist, or other kinds of extreme hatred best offered behind the cloak of namelessness. It took me four months before I could work up the courage to remove them myself, not waiting on my editor to determine which ones were worth keeping. You can only type in certain words so many times before you can't live with yourself typing those words anymore.

I covered the police beat, mainly, and I gained tremendous respect for police officers and the people who worked behind the scenes processing papers, or people, or manning the phones. These folks weren't necessarily heroic or admirable, and they deserved as much criticism as teachers. Just because a job is underpaid and underappreciated doesn't mean the people in those jobs can't be criticized when they suck or get careless or calloused. Yet, in spite of the many screwed-up things I witnessed happening with the police, I still came away with more admiration than disillusionment.

I covered at least a half dozen murders. The most memorable one involved a botched drug deal where the dealer ended up hacking a married couple with a machete. The couple had been trading sex for drugs. This dealer and the couple would have all kinds of kinky sex and film it, and the dealer got copies of the tapes in exchange for heroin. The woman's father had been babysitting their young son that day, and the two of them were the ones who discovered the chopped bodies.

When I got to the scene, I was allowed to go to the doorway and look at the crime scene from a distance of some 30 feet.

All the talk about how the rap sheets these parents had, how drug-addled they had become, how awful they were as parents, none of it made those limbs and the blood that had splattered over walls and the floor any easier to comprehend. None of it made me able to grasp the notion of a boy barely in elementary school walking in on that scene.

I'd like to tell you I cried that night when I got back to my crappy little apartment, but I didn't. I couldn't. If it was possible, the scene was so emotionally overwhelming that my entire system shut down temporarily. I might not have cried, but I'm fairly certain I went a day or two without feeling happy, which for me is maybe even more dire a sign of trauma than tears.

There were good stories, too. The people with whom I worked were a crazy lot, and they'd make for one helluva sitcom if they didn't fit so many stereotypes so well. The photographer who constantly bragged about the women he slept with in his darkroom. The editor who was, quite simply, the ugliest man I've ever met. (Naturally he was from Alabama.) The local "bulldog" reporter who had been valedictorian of her class and found herself in her fifth year at this paper with nary a promotion or a raise. The old lifestyles woman with serious incontinence who hated computers and regularly shat in her seat loudly enough for the entire newsroom to act like we didn't hear it.

The city editor, who came onto the job a few months after I arrived, ended up sleeping on my couch for six months. What a hoot he was. When he wasn't busy being a useless ex-husband who operated more like a bad car salesman, he was a darn fine advisor on the world of newspapers and journalism, better in many ways than most professors, I suspect.

The county editor and reporter was in a miserable marriage and could have drunk Marion Ravenwood under the table. Her husband would have tried to bed Lassie if the dog had ever entered the city limits. He was the horniest, most non-selective philanderer I'd ever met.

And there were other characters. Frustrated TV reporters. The owner of the movie rental place who got to know me by name. The stripper who came back home with the city editor one night and then invited two of her friends over because she was convinced that the five of us could have one helluva great night of sex. Wile E. Coyote couldn't have run out of that apartment faster than I did.

The experience was so rich with possibility that I still can't to this day figure out why I failed so badly. The novel died in the water, so to speak, because I never finished it. But it deserved to be "put down." It was a wounded animal whose injuries I was not capable of healing, and to keep it alive for my own sake would only have needlessly extended its suffering.

A new idea has been gestating in me for the past six months, and I've been nursing it along in my head very carefully and slowly, hoping I can get everything in some semblance of order and direction before diving into the writing part.

But mostly I'm that pathetic jilted lover who's afraid of committing to another relationship for fear it will crash and burn like the first one.

"Self Inflicted" is from Katy Perry's album, which I don't own, but can be acquired through iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site. Same goes for the Travis album The Man Who, from which "Driftwood" comes, and Vapor Trails, home of Rush's "One Little Victory."