THOMAS SULLIVAN: PRIME BLOOPERS, THE GREATEST ROMANCE OF ALL TIME, AND THE SEEDS OF SLEEPING RAINBOWS
When it comes to writing, every day is April Fools’ Day. The Muses — hobgoblins of the mind that they are — play their usual tricks 24/7/365. Clear your desk, your computer screen and your brain for them and they will clear out of town. Cut yourself off from pen and paper and they will immediately begin dictating the great American novel to you. They have a sense of humor, a sense of irony, and no sense of obligation whatsoever. Swim a mile from shore, sky dive, slide under your car and remove the oil drain plug, grab a handful of buttered popcorn, or swab down deck cleaner that must be rinsed off in 20 minutes, and inspiration that needs to be written down IMMEDIATELY will hit you like a Mack truck driven by a muse. They do this to a-Muse themselves because they don’t have TVs or iPods and there is nothing funnier than a writer with an idea and no place to put it. Sort of like diarrhea in the middle of a speech, or a frying pan that bursts into flames as you lift it off the stove. It must be boring as hell to be a muse — being more than human but still a lesser god and always in charge of your own entertainment. I’m betting more than a few of them go off the reservation. Muses, leprechauns, and poltergeists are probably all related. Theologically speaking, it’s tempting to speculate that the Big Kahuna created us just to keep the demigods and minor spirits in good…uh, spirits. I mean, think about it. Name a magical being below Prime Mover that you can depend on. They’re all mischief-makers and unpredictable. Holy Hijinks , I’m using voice recognition to type this, and when I dictated “Prime Mover,” Dragon NaturallySpeaking typed “Prime Blooper.” And if that wasn’t enough fun for the muse, when I tried to use “Prime Blooper” in the title of this essay, it became “Prime Pooper.” I rest my case. Lady Luck smiles on a whim and Cupid can’t shoot straight. If love is fickle, writing must be the greatest romance of all time.
Anyway, to move along here and get to the point (can you see how I’m getting to the point?), people who live off their creativity evolve all kinds of strategies to max out the good timing and beat the bad. Some of us have “systems.” But systems usually trigger counter-systems, and the gods of irony love to be challenged. So it’s a constant battle. Still, seeing someone else’s pathetic struggle can sometimes unlock one’s own shackles, whether through the shock of recognition or just out of plain old pity (there might even be an untried stratagem for you in the following). Therefore, for all you disenfranchised souls — or for anyone who has ever gone to the cupboard for inspiration and found it bare — I humbly offer:
ONE NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF AN AUTHOR
6:18 p.m. Wake up, you sleepyhead, rise and shine! Hey, where’s the sun?
6:19 p.m. point at self in bathroom mirror. “Don’t even try to hide. Call yourself an author? You are going straight to Geekspeak9 — that bells and whistles desktop for which you paid much wampum — and you are going to work relentlessly through the night until the Great American Novel sends the smoke signal for mercy through whatever orifices a computer has. And put some pants over your posse, for booty’s sake, you look like an Ethiopian snowman.”
6:21 p.m. pull on sweatpants and Wal-Mart deluxe wrist guards for carp ‘n’ tuna syndrome, adjust 6-way ergonomic chair all six ways, plug-in USB sound card adapter, plug-in microphone, adjust Sennheiser ME3 headset, open Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice-recognition app, adjust cheap Costco reading glasses for computer screen over headset, don wool cap, mute phone, turn off Big Bang e-mail alert.
6:26 p.m. open working novel file. Read last page written. Read again. Read last paragraph. Read six more times. …stare out window at lone duck squatting on ice on lake. Wonder if duck’s feet frozen in ice. Too dark to tell. Start to take off headset to go check. Reach for binoculars instead. Still can’t tell. Crank open window. Bark like dog. Feathered squatter unmoved. Shake head rapidly while making noise like Donald Duck pissed off. Duck waddles slowly away in zigzag line. Notice small child next door staring up at me wide-eyed. No problem. Someone will explain to her that it was God’s plan to make writers this way. … Duck emergency over. Must quit stalling the Great American Novel.
6:32 p.m. notice status bar update alert. Jump on it like it was the secret of life and happiness. Trace tech info links explaining the option that Windows wants to install for new fonts in Farsi and Pig Latin. Install. Reboot computer.
6:43 p.m. read last page written, read again, read last paragraph, read six more times. Stare. Read last sentence. Read 23 more times (might have been 24). Need a starter word. Write “The.” Stare. Delete “The.” Stay with it, stay with it…
6:44 p.m. check e-mail. All subject lines begin: “Fwd:Fwd:Re:Re:…”
6:44:06 p.m. ignore e-mail. Return to novel. Reread last sentence five more times. Write “Sometimes.” Delete “Sometimes” — too many syllables. Do not give up. Do not give –
6:45 p.m. check Drudge Report, follow all links in order to be fully informed in case any news tidbit turns out to be relevant to new novel.
6:59 p.m. return to novel. Stare. Consider new plot in which neighborhood awakens to find lake missing. Small child with wide eyes is only witness to what happened and no one believes her. 100,000 ducks with their 200,000 webbed feet frozen in the ice lifted off at dawn with the entire lake still locked around their skinny orange ankles (shallow lake completely frozen down to lakebed). Child is vindicated when jet airliner crashes into flying lake, or maybe it melts and drowns East Sweet Pea, Arizona, or maybe the ducks get testy when all the ones flying wing on the V cannot rotate into new leadership formations, or maybe my muse is making me quack up!
7:11 p.m. check e-mail again, reading everything this time, including contact lens re-order reminder and pathetic letter from 106-year-old Nigerian widow suffering from Dutch Elm disease looking for someone trustworthy to help her launder $45 million left by late husband, General Abubacar Jones XXXVII, who was tortured to death by a cabal of witch doctors in the employ of Shell oil. Return to novel. No witch doctors, no tortured general, no Dutch Elm disease, no $45 million. Novel sucks.
7:22 p.m. burn title page. Smoke alarm goes off. Beat out flames. Sulk.
7:27 p.m. try to get things rolling by calling self from cell phone and leaving voicemail SOS for muse on home phone.
7:28 p.m. switch to home phone to hear voicemail SOS just phoned in. Stare expectantly at novel on computer screen. Muse must not have pager. Print out new title page.
7:29 p.m. check blogs, including StorytellersUnplugged and dozen others. Reply, manage, delete, adjust privacy settings…
8:02 p.m. call muse on cell again. Busy signal. Busy signal? Am sitting next to phone that is purportedly busy. This proves that muses are magical and conspiratorial.
8:03 p.m. check more blogs, recalling a certain Thomas Sullivan fan site a few months back that had nothing on it. Find again. Nothing on it. Laugh hysterically until wracked with sobs.
8:05 p.m. decide I must immediately upload pictures that have sat in camera for two weeks. But which import app to select in dialog box? Major dilemma.
8:12 p.m. pick Windows Media. Upload pictures from camera.
8:15 p.m. decide to upload lone cell phone photo that has sat in phone for two weeks. Major dilemma redux.
8:19 p.m. choose Roxio. Upload photo.
8:21 p.m. stare at novel on monitor some more. Type in single word “industrious” on first page. Discover house phone is not fully seated in cradle, explaining busy signal.
8:22 p.m. exhausted from writing. Time for break. Google: The Cranberries Dreams. Google opens. Hit link for Cranberries music video “Dreams” on YouTube. Iridescent green frogs rain into green pool, followed by raining green pearls, followed by blue Ophelia-like face floating to surface. Am incapable of hearing urgent beat of “Dreams” without magic and inspiration breathing into brain. Song flows through veins like a drug, but nothing to do with novel. Poignant stabs. Screw novel. Crank up volume. Loop video. Turn off lights.
9:33 p.m. 71 minute magic carpet ride ends when computer announces new updates available. Click off YouTube “Dreams.” Go for nightly drive.
9:36 p.m. think about new novel while driving Interstate. Look for remorseful muse hitchhiking on soft shoulder, but dead doe’s eyes flash directly into mine. Protruding tongue definitely aimed at me.
9:37 p.m. turn on FM. First song is A Fine Frenzy’s “Almost Lover.” Insert CD of Cranberries “Dreams” in car stereo. Crank up. Loop. Romantic ideal comes ghosting in from outer reach of headlights. Here it comes, here it comes on the soft shoulder, the face I will love forever. …another dead doe with tongue hanging out. Does species matter?
9:37 p.m. to 1:51 a.m. 4 hour and 14 minute magic carpet ride. Alien abduction?
2:01 a.m. drive to Elm Creek and enter back trail on skis kept in car. Soar to different part of Universe. Phantom blue, deep beyond measure, roaring with silence. No pen, no paper…abandon computers all ye who enter here. Out of crystal silence, crackling like million shooting stars bursting through black velvet ether, comes tardy and unapologetic muse, spouting soul-searing poetry like auctioneer put to music. Great voluble stanzas of wisdom bound to beauty. I channel thoughts and words as seeds of sleeping rainbows awaken. Indelible stuff, wasted on mere mortal me, because what am I to do — write in snow with ski poles and take cell phone picture? Cell phone! ET phone home. I call voicemail and repeat dictation from muse.
3:46 a.m. arrive home smug and intoxicated. Peel off soaked layers of polypropylene. Drink Cytomax, O. J., cherry cider and ice water.
3:57 a.m. don sweatpants, go to computer. Pull on Wal-Mart deluxe wrist guards, adjust 6-waychair six ways, plug-in USB sound card adapter, plug-in microphone, adjust Sennheiser ME3 headset, open Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice-recognition app, adjust Costco cheap reading glasses over headset, skinny on wool cap.
4:04 a.m. transcribe voicemail poetry. Open novel. Stare. Except for priming pump, no connection between Elm Creek rapture and ms. Wherefore art thou, muse?
4:11 a.m. delete word “industrious” added before nightly drive. Wool cap rubbing stubble of shaved head is picked up by Sennheiser microphone, which keeps writing “fish” – “fish fish fish…” Must shave stubble.
4:12 a.m., while running hot bath, drink quart of microwaved Coffee Blast ice cream because haven’t eaten since 4 p.m. yesterday.
4:19 a.m. esophagus numb from drinking Coffee Blast. Get into hot bath. Scald privates. Shout “Baby!” like wrestler in FM heavy-metal commercial.
4:24 a.m. pain from third-degree burns subsides. Once again cut off from computer, pen, paper. Hello, muse. Writing ideas flood brain. Call voicemail from cordless phone next to tub, leave deathless but incoherent prose.
5:31 a.m. water now room temp. Lather up with Irish Spring on bod, leg shaving gel on head. Shave head. Bloody foam floats around tub like little volcanic glaciers. Shower caddy mirror reveals cross between stigmata and piranha attack above neck.
5:39 a.m. write entire novel in six minutes with styptic pencil on skull.
And there you have it. At this point I throw myself on the mercy of my readers. I am open to suggestions (and I mightily fear I will get some). No, I will not flay my scalp and submit it in formaldehyde to an editor, nor will I collaborate with a taxidermist. Yes, I have considered collaborating on a novel with a 106-year-old widow in Nigeria. Am currently checking to see if there is a vaccination against Dutch Elm disease. In the meantime, may my life serve as a warning to others.
Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website. My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds. I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included! And David Niall Wilson, whose questions are like laser brain surgery, has done a new interview of me at this link: Interview-Sully Does anyone ask better questions than DNW? Squirm, squirm. One last. As many of you know from my column subbing in a few days ago (April 13th), Frank Wydra is fighting the toughest battle of his life and doing it in the style for which he is so much loved. The outpouring of response for Flamingo Frank and that column are appreciated more than you know. Thanks for reading.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/
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Comments
It’s odd…your sort of distracted by anything description fits how I often work..but I’ve managed to bend it further inward. I hit out 200, 300 words…check e-mail as I think…come back - surf … come back… watch TV…and I’ve bene averaging 2000-2500 decent words a night. When I’m lucky, I start writing and suddenly someone is asking me a question for the third time…and I go HUH? Those are the 5-10k days. The key, for me, is that at 7:50 (or thereabouts) every night I open word and a file…and it doesn’t close until 11:00.
I laughed my way through this essay though…we are all such similar different creatures…
D
You are a monument to multi-tasking, whereas most mortals find multitasking just monumental, Davey. How’s this for a quirk? I actually index the level of distraction I use to the kind of writing I want to do. I.e., if I want to really go heavy, I need profound silence (or alternately, a chaotic atmosphere where I know I am a stranger and won’t be interrupted, as in a restaurant, park bench, etc). On the other hand, if I want to edit my stuff or read it like a normal person, I might eat sugar till I am borderline comatose, or crank up all kinds of music, TV or — yes — multitask. Seems to help me catch dense stuff and read as a first-time reader of whatever I’m working on might do.
– Sully
Reverse the a.m.’s and p.m.’s and you could have been describing my standard display of sharply disciplined focus and concentration. Thanks for a most entertaining read’n and writ’n romp. It added positive ions to a brilliant sunrise.
Three highlights that brought the broadest grins were the “fish fish fish” bit, the “stigmata and pitanha attack” and the “vaccination against Dutch Eelm disease.” The frozen-footed ducks towing the frozen lake put me in mind of the Stan Freeberg bit when he was trying to prove that radio commercials could produce better images than could TV. As an exampe, he told his marketer audience to imagine Lake Michigan filled with whipped cream, then imagine all the planes in the U.S. Airforce towing on a giant marachino cherry (sound of airplanes in background), then cutting the cherry loose (screaming wind sound of cherry descending in background), then a giand POOOF sound of the cherry plunging into the whipped cream. Stan finished by saying, “Let’s see you do that on TV.”
Thanks to your essay, this has been a better day.
Amalgam
Stan Freeberg was right. Radio did produce better images than TV! Thanks for the kind words. The lake ice this morning is breaking up into continents, making a beautiful map of the world. The ducks are circumnavigating that map and showing no inclination to steal my lake. And I thought positive ions produced enervation — like the positive ion wind that blows out of the Siroco coincident with high crime and violence rates. Easy, big fella…
– Sully
Forgot to mention, Amalgam, there was a photo on Drudge couple days ago of a man who appeared to be encrusted with tree bark. Turns out his “limbs” were calcified in warts from the papilloma virus. So maybe the Dutch Elm disease folderol I threw out there wasn’t that far off the mark.
– Sully
To quote the wisest man of the age, Homer Simpson, “It’s funny because it’s true.” Man, don’t you sometimes feel like an infant with a mobile of lovely bright shinies hanging over your crib?
No lakes out my window, alas, but something just as magnetic to me: the mountains on the edge of town, which I defy any ducks to carry away. They don’t move a whole lot, but they often trigger the thought, “Hmm … wonder what things look like from up THERE now.”
In all, a healthier distraction than The Internets. For which I had to come up with preventative measures. So I keep a salmon can on my desk with some coins inside. Nicely resonant nickels and pennies. Taped a note around the can that says CAN YOU SPARE SOME CHANGE? When I catch myself staring at the lovely bright shinies too long, I give that thing a vigorous shake and the wages of dawdling become ever so clear.
Damn, now I have to toss my digs searching for a spy cam. How did you know about my shinies mobile? Love your kick-the-can strategy. But I dunno, you’ve heard what they say about mountains disappearing one grain at a time. You had better shoo the birds away. Keep going to that mountain, amigo. You always come back with wisdom.
– Sully
Sully,
…enervation only if you inhale.
Brian,
“wages of dawdling” is bound to become a classic
Amalgam
I, on t’other hand, have an anti-Muse. Murphy lives with me. H/She was gifted to me by a very small, very drunk woman in Carmel Valley. She was advised to do this by her pet tree frog.
–Janet
Our licensed eccentricities just get curioser and curioser. I vote for your anti-muse as the Mascot of Unplugged Storyteller Eccentreics (that’s MUSE). I believe I shall go ski on the asphalt and keep my eyes open for roadkill (hoping it isn’t me).
– Sully
>now I have to toss my digs searching for a spy cam. How did you know about my shinies mobile?
Oh, a LOT can happen in a house while the owner’s away on a 4 hour 14 minute alien abduction.
>“wages of dawdling” is bound to become a classic
About time something constructive comes out of lethargy!
Plus I reeeeeally wanna know more about these advisory tree frogs.
Re.: 4 hour and 14 minute alien abduction. Well… during that timelessness I felt more like I do now than I did when I first got there. … as for the advisory tree frogs, I think they are frauds. Frauds, frauds — not frogs. I got one, and when I asked it what I should do, all it said was: “Croak…croak…croak!”
– Sully
As soon as my portable 02 is back in operation, I shall invite you to follow me to the land of the talking tree frog mascots of SU. You must bring booze, food for the wild dogs that live in the hills, pool cues for the game down the road, cameras for Utube, and tape recorders. My friend the psychiatrist who writes books on Frisbees will be joining us. –Janet
Had to laugh a while ago as I roller skied through marshy runoff at Elm Creek and heard about a zillion frogs giving me “what for.” Or maybe they were just horny (my God, not for me). Anyway, it made me think of your anti-muse muse, Janet. Word spreads fast in the arboreal Kermit kommunity.
– Sully
Now that’s bleeding for your art — just be careful when waxing your skull or else the novel on your “hard drive” will be erased and then you’ll have to start all over again. And wouldn’t that be a shame. thanks as well for the piece on Frank Wydra — bringing light to dark places is always welcome.