FULL BLEED: THE FUTURE HAS BEEN PICKED CLEAN

The title is *ahem* borrowed from the film All You Need Is Death, from this year, largely by Paul Duane. It fits. Hit kinda hard, really. It is a sharp little piece of dialogue that talks about the exhaustion and cowardice of the media industries and the emptiness that they leave.

Oh, it isn't talking about that? Coulda fooled me. I mean, I was told there was only one interpretation of any particular piece of art and ahahahaha even I can't continue on with this particular joke. There's a piece of art and everyone interacting with that piece of art is going to come up with a different, co-created, work. That's okay. It gets easier when you simply accept that.

I know. There's lots of people who can't simply accept anything. They spend their lives trying to impose meaning on things, and ultimately, on people. It's tiresome. But it's also easy political juice and fundraising potential, given that politics is so much the emotional and not the rational. Yeah, this isn't the usual line of conversation for this place. I'll try to tie it up, much as I would a bloody stump.

There. It's done.

Ticked off another year on the tally last year. No I didn't make a big deal (or really any kind of deal about it.) I've had an ambivalent relationship with the phenomena for a long time, usually along the axis of tolerate to loathe to dread. It's a big area, yeah. Lots of territory to cover there. So, yeah, not having it perceived until its passed is probably for the best. There's often an unreal expectation on these events, that they're your day and to be special and only good stuff happens and I'm not twenty-one anymore. I've passed the marker where I get the aged and infirm specials or early meals, though I don't look it so much. Chalk it up to my years of youthful optimism.

Yeah, last week wasn't great. Maybe that's on me. I'm still here, right?

Sure I am.

Sure I'm supposed to be working on a book right now. It originally started as three novellas, which then became two novellas and is now rapidly working on being one novel with a novella attached. Dummy that I am, it'll probably become two books. I'm in the stage of things where I've got a whole bunch of stuff that I think should be in it and am rapidly finding some of the stuff I was sure was going to be important for it isn't. That part's never particularly easy for me and I'm out of practice with it.

"You should just wing it, then."

I should not. I've tried that before and it never ends well. I need that roadmap in front of me. Doesn't matter whether I really do or not, does it. I only think that I need it, so it may as well be the same thing. So I need it. But wrestling those chunks of a storyline or how to express what I want to get at without coming out and saying what I'm getting at is hard. Even harder when I'm wrestling the notion of where I am in this world of weird genre fiction. Since that's the world I'm in, not actual literature or academic fiction or whatever you wish to call it. Specially since I'm not interested in following the boundaries of any particular genre. So yeah, my own worst enemy here. Yet I was always told that people are looking for something new. And idiot that I am, I believed it.

The future is picked clean because people are afraid to bank on it. Starved before it gets much of a chance. Born hungry.

And yet, what's the alternative? Follow your bliss? Take the advice that YOU JUST GOTTA MAKE THE THING? That's the same line. And, sure, ultimately, it does come down to the creator to go ahead and do it. But in the face of what?

I ask myself that all the time.

I do wish this was the only, the most important problem in my way at the moment. But that's never been true. It's a distant second with the prime spot eating enough of my psychic battery to make sitting down in front of the computer and moving intangible pieces of language around in a way that interests me and has a shot of making sense to someone reading it who doesn't happen to be me a real problem. I know. I really shouldn't think about what's going to happen to the work once it's done. But I'm stuck doing that.

If a work comes and goes without being read, was it ever? Sure, for me, I suppose. But that's a pretty tiny chunk of the world. So is this just a matter of mortality and once that fire's gone out, it's out forever? Something lovely to consider. Of course the truth of it is that it is neither lovely nor un-lovely. It simply is.

I do wish I knew if it would all work out, not unlike Veidt at the end of Watchmen. But I suppose I do in that it doesn't ever end to get to a work/not work status, should you catch my drift. That these stories would at least mean something to someone outside me, even though they're very much the kinds of stories that I like reading with their weird permutations of, well, everything.

But that's above my pay grade, really.

In the meantime, I suppose I should get me back to work. I'd tell you what this next story is about, but the truth of it is it'll only make sense to about ten people on the planet.

Which might be part of the problem.

Until next time.

Birthdays, right?