Want Some Cheese With That Whine?

As anyone familiar with this blog should already know, I'm usually not big on complaining over the internet. Ahem. But I'm having a hard time thinking of anything to write about. I know that I don't HAVE to write anything - I'm not on a deadline here, and nobody's lining up to pay for this stuff. And I also know that it's a common conceit for a writer to write about writing. But really, there's just nothing in my life worth writing about, so this is what it's come to.

I've been writing pretty much forever, and have never, until the last month or so, even attempted to write fiction. It's always been about my life, or my opinions, or my (puke) feelings. I recently went through a ton of old crap, and found the original copies of the dozen or so issues of the zines I used to hand-publish back in the Nineties. Such a massive volume of stuff, the equivalent of probably a couple hundred pages, and the majority of it is absolute crap, self-centered whining about how put-upon I, a white, middle-class male living with Mom and Dad in the suburbs, felt. I mean, I DID have a less-than-ideal childhood, but who the fuck didn't? Even rich kids suicide every so often, and I certainly wasn't THAT. It's just that 20 years of perspective makes me realize what a little shit I was.

My point was, It's just so hard to come up with a workable idea for a piece of fiction, at least for me. Right now, I've got approximately the first 6,000 words of a much longer, novel-length piece of fiction, and it's quite good, in the author's opinion, but it's really just a highly-fictionalized version of things I've experienced. It's just so much easier that way. I have no problem coming up with words that make sense, and which tell the story in a concise, entertaining manner, but first formulating that story is massively daunting. If I write about my life, well, I already know how the story goes, don't I?  Makes it flow like milk instead of molasses.

I feel like a rip-off artist when I post an update here, and it's an album review or something like that. I don't even fucking like music, man, what the hell am I doing telling people what I think of it? Not that anything else I write has any intrinsic interest to anyone beyond my tiny circle of family and friends, but the music stuff must be on an entirely higher level of I-Don't-Give-A-Fuck for most people.

And even when I write something that is all about me, I still fight the idea block. If I spend an hour writing one of these things, you can bet you ass that 40 minutes of it was just me, staring at the screen, slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, wondering what I've done to deserve such a fate. Then, if I'm lucky, something catches, and I can usually pound into submission fairly quickly.

I always seem to have trouble ending an entry, though. Thank god for YouTube.