Killing Your Babies

            Relax – I don’t mean it THAT way…

            So I’ve hit several walls recently – a combination of writer’s block and joblessness has largely rendered me linguistically impotent to the point where my goal of updating this blog just once a week seemed absurd.  I’d reached a point where I was asking myself “Why should I say anything?  What do I have to say that’s worth reading?  Who’s life am I going to make better just by pooping onto a keyboard and clicking ‘update?’”

            And then I realized that I don’t have to say anything important at all.

            And here I am, writing again.

            In Stephen King’s On Writing he talks about how he hit a wall when writing The Stand – he was several hundreds of pages into it and he wrote himself into a corner.  Quite understandable, of course, when you’re writing something that’s both bigger and better than the bible, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, he cheated his way out of his writer’s block much in the same way.

            He simply had the hand of god come down and wipe out a good chunk of the population of his book, too.

            Now I’m not saying that I’m going to do anything quite so extreme here – after all, since this is a blog if I were to kill off any of my cast of characters I’d have to slit my own wrists – but the idea helped me overcome a massive roadblock that was holding up progress on my latest novel (Permits Pending (that’s the name of the book) – coming soon to a bookstore or website near you!).  It was actually connecting two thoughts that did it; one being King’s call to “Kill your babies” and the other being Elmore Leonard’s advice to “Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.”

            And then I knew exactly what I had to do to move on.

            So while it hurt to do so, I deleted three pages worth of work and suddenly had an open road before me.

            And once I’d done that, almost as if a dam had broken loose in my brain, I had several ideas of things I could write about in here.  Hell, I even tweeted something (please don’t ask for my Twitter handle right now – I’m still figuring out how to “make it work for me”).

            So today I present this to you all, my faithful readers and first-time viewers; when the world seems to be jamming up at loggerheads and you’re being buffeted and beat to shit on all sides and you don’t know which way to go or what to do, instead of doing more, do less.

            Get out.

            Go away.

            Turn things off.

            Get rid of things.

            I know this sounds like rote advice that you’ve probably heard before, but remember – this isn’t one of those zen “do nothing and let the problems of the world flow and wash over you and away from you,” this is different.  This is “remove shit from the equation, even important stuff that you think you just can’t live without, and see if that clears your head and your path.”

            Try it.  Even if it doesn’t work, at least you’ll have that much less baggage you’re toting around with you, and that alone will make your life easier.

            Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some work to get done.