20150624.0732

A year ago, I wrote a short piece of verse (as though any I write and post here are otherwise) describing some of my writing as weeding a garden and some of it as feeding weeds through spreading shit around. I do not know that my opinion has changed in the year since. I do more writing now than then, to be sure--I have more freelance work going and more in other projects on which I am working--even though Ms. 8 requires more attention now than she did then. Infants largely stay where they are put, while toddlers very much do not (except while they sleep, a blissful time for all involved). To follow the metaphor from a year before, my garden patch is larger, and I am selling produce from it. But I am still contending with many weeds and spreading loads of shit on the plot

I worry that I am so accustomed to the work of that spreading that I no longer smell the smell, or that I am approaching that point rapidly. For much of what I read is not of the highest quality; some of it is quite good, with engaging plots and characters and much to untangle, but some of it is very much not, being hackneyed and trite and still somehow selling well enough to make readers' guides for them a going concern. (It is one of the reasons I am envious of many writers. Making money on schlock...) The writing I do in response, while paying decently enough that I am not complaining about the task, is largely formulaic. I deploy some of what damned well ought to be highly trained critical faculties in identifying and interpreting various features of the texts I treat, but there is only so much I can do within the three to five days each job allows me, only so much I can write within five thousand words when many of them must be taken up by chapter summaries and some of them are eaten up in formatting. I rarely have the opportunity in such work to stretch out, and since that seems to be most of the writing I do, I worry that I am losing the ability to stretch because of the lack of opportunity. I worry that I am losing the ability to read other things as well as I used to for much the same reason; my journal reading still suffers.

I try to allay such fears in the other projects I do. I am not as active a scholar as I ought to be, certainly, but I am active, and that activity helps me to be able still to do what I spent a good many years and incurred much debt to be able to do. Other writing functions similarly, when I can get around to doing it (the lure of the paycheck interferes greatly). But that last bit, the "when I can get around to doing it," is telling. There are not enough hours in the day, or I have not enough strength or discipline to make the best use of them, or some other such thing...It is a shitty situation.