How it's coming

Okay...here doing absolutely fucking nothing except updating Facebook. I worked a bit late last night and slept in. There's the Meatloaf song I'm sure I referred to already on this blog, which says "Some days it don't come easy, and some days it don't come hard...some days it don't come at all and these are the days that never end."

This is one of those days that never end. I have some great ideas for editing and writing but my mind just freezes every time I get up to go on the computer. It's more of a writer's speed bump than an actual block but it's frustrating just the same. Now is not the right time to get inspired but suddenly I am.

Just a note on my view of short fiction writing. We are no longer in the days of Chekov or Maupassant where there was this expectation of of linear, progressive development of plot with a clearly identifiable resolution. For me there is a certain amount of wastage in constructing a story simply for the sake of some preordained climax like you would find in stories, albeit classic ones, like "The Necklace."

Poetry and short fiction are, in my head, closely aligned in that the writer should imbue the relatively small amount of words that he has to work with as much meaning and richness as is possible. I think pure fiction belongs to a less skeptical age, where the prerequisite suspension of belief was made easy due to an unquestioning communal gullibility that does not exist, at least in the West, today.

We live in the age of the metafictional, what is sometimes referred to as post-modern fiction - it is natural that in age which our reality has been questioned and prodded and examined and disputed (stretching from Camus' L'Etranger to the Wachowski brothers' Matrix movies), that [short] fiction itself should be interrogated from its form to the basic presumptions. This is not new - Hemingway's fabled six word short story, "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." was written decades ago.

I intend, sometime in the upcoming months, to facilitate a young writers' workshop and heading my booklist are of course Borges, Nabokov, and one ace-in-the-hole, David Foster Wallace, who is a fucking genius innovator. If you haven't read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men you are missing out on work by someone who has shifted the genre off its centre and at the same time given it a new lease on life. Enough of this ranting for now.