I'll preface this by saying that I hate hate hate writing about writing, because coming from me it either sounds douchy and pretentious or whiny and self-serving. Plus, I read something like this and I realize that there are lots of other people who really CAN write about writing.
But. You all know that I've talked about doing a novel on occasion. Over the past five years I've come up with a couple of ideas that I thought would take me someplace, started in on them, and then tossed them in the virtual circular file. It's not that they weren't good ideas - they were. I realized that right now I'm too close to the subject matter. See, starting to sound like a douche.
A few months ago I did, however, come up with a nifty idea - there's no other word for it than "nifty" - that was completely outside of anything I'd thought of doing. I probably have some Serious Work in me, but my daily writing - what I do online, for money - has become a job. A job I love, but a job nonetheless. I've told a few folks that I'm not satisfied just writing about the dad life. And there's this: at some point, I'll be done with DadCentric. My kids are growing up, after all, and I need to start thinking about what's next. I'm seeing the beginning of the next phase in my non-fiction writing life, and that's been immensely satisfying. More than that, I need something more, and I need it to be new, exciting, challenging, and about all else fun.
My nifty idea sprang from what I've been reading. I've spent the better part of the past year diving into what I like to call "literary genre fiction" - guys like Justin Cronin, Lev and Austin Grossman, Michael Chabon, Nick Hardaway, George R.R. Martin, who've taken the stuff I read and watch (and write about) for pure pleasure and elevated it. And thus my nifty idea was born. I did some outlining and a bunch of research, started the actual writing...and then, to my dismay, a work of fiction was released that was fairly similar to what I was doing. So I shelved it. I won't say what that work was, because I'm keeping my idea close to the vest - and, as it turned out, that particular thing was a dud. It went nowhere. And my idea was back in play: it occurred to me that I could do something different, cool, unique. So far I've powered out several pages and they keep coming. I listen to my guts when I write, and they're telling me to go go go.
So that's where I'm at. If I seem a bit distant, or not as chatty on the Twitter, it's because I'm hunched down over the laptop, creating. It's hard, draining, exhilarating. I'm geeking out over it.
