It’s been an enlightening few days. Or weeks, maybe.
A couple of months ago, my lovely, awful, wonderful dog ate the corner of the screen off of my HP laptop. That pretty much got me off Facebook, twitter, and off blogging. I had Bird’s iMac, of course, but it wasn’t the same; there wasn’t the same sense of portability. I like to blog from the bedroom, with the sun coming through the windows and Wire or the Buzzcocks playing good and loud, in my pajamas with a cup of tea and my comfy pants on. An iMac and an office just don’t seem to groove with that perfect little place I make for myself when I want to tell you all about my life.
(I read an interesting article not too long ago about how writers should avoid building Neil Gaiman’s Gazebo. The idea is that, rather than waiting for ideal conditions and perfect spaces to create in, the writer should write. Anywhere and everywhere, write. It’s a good article, and fun. You can read it here. But I like my comfy pants. They are my weakness.)
My dog also ate the screen of my phone, so I’m unable to read texts easily, and even less able to send texts.
All this within a week. Needless to say, I was very, very angry with my small, adorable dog.
And then I wasn’t. Losing all my technology, my ability to bury myself in a cyberspace of work and projects and clever articles about Neil Gaiman’s Writing Shed left me with something I haven’t had in well over a year.
A break.
Marlon is one of the biggest, maddest things I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve discovered, over the last few weeks, that it’s hard to get proper perspective on big, mad things when your head is buried in them to the hilt. Marlon had become something I never wanted it to be: a job. I set timers for myself in the morning, after I got my coffee, to ensure that I would sit at the desk and work on The Movie for at least four hours a day. I may as well have been punching a clock.
But Trinity (the aforementioned explorer of the techno-gastronomical) sunk her teeth in and dragged me back out.
It’s remarkable the things you learn when you just have a bit of room to sit and think about things. I’ve come to realize that I emphatically do not want to be a person who wakes up early every day, sets a timer, and works dull-eyed for hours on something that started as a mad lark and a laugh. Oh, I’m going to finish Marlon. Not just that, it’s going to be fucking brilliant when it’s done. Believe me when I say it’s amazing—what we did with a few cheap DSLRs and a microphone and a lot of corn syrup has a weird, snarky energy to it, a real undercurrent of...Indie Film is not the word for it. Maybe it’s The Way, the new Buzzcocks album I’m listening to right now, but the undercurrent in Marlon feels more like Punk filmmaking. There’s a sneering irreverence in this movie which I absolutely love. (A feeling that’s coming out in the soundtrack in spades.)
My months without portable, pointed workaholism taught me two important things:
1) I want to finish Marlon on my terms, in the spirit of loosey-goosey fun that my friends and I made it. Because art is fun. Art is hard, but art is fun. Jobs are not fun, and jobs are almost never art.
2) I don’t like who I am when I’m not writing, because I’m not me when I’m not writing. Because I’m a writer.
I’m writing this in the second sun of this long, miserable winter, with a cup of licorice tea and a brand new(ly refurbished) MacBook Pro. I spent a little of the morning working on the Marlon score (I laid down the demo tracks for a bluesy dirge called “Gasoline” that is probably definitely going to be the opening credit song, and which is enormous fun to play), reading Trigger Warning (Neil Gaiman’s wonderful short story collection), and walking around town with my dog and my wife.
But what I’ve really been dying to do all day, and, I realize, the past year, and all my life, is this. Exactly this. What I’m doing right now.
Writing.
So yes. The movie is getting done. We’ll take it out and show it to the world, at any festivals that will have us. But it’s high time I wrote again. More than blogs and facebook updates about a punk rock horror comedy. I’ve got a novel to finish. (And a comic book script to send off to my wife, and a dozen or so short stories that could use a polish, and a stack of poems that are just a few short of a submission-ready manuscript, and...)
“Writers write.” I read that somewhere, a long time ago. I can’t remember who wrote it. Ray Bradbury, or Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King, or somebody equally as mythic and influential to me. It doesn’t matter who wrote it, I suppose. Just that they wrote.
Max Peterson
In the Sun. March 11, 15
