Category: Ink Spatterings

On Writing. Or Not Writing. Or Writing a Little Bit, and Now I’ve Probably Jinxed It.

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Dear Lord I hope this isn’t inspirational

Essay graphic with a brushed-metal background that reads: "On Writing. Or Not Writing. Or Writing a Little Bit, and Now I've Probably Jinxed It." By Jackie Pick.

How is the writing going? Must you ask?

My computer crashed while I was writing this post. Windows announced that it had encountered a problem and needed to restart. Oh, YOU’VE encountered a problem, Windows? Fascinating. I was under the impression I was the one with the problem, seeing as you just deleted my work.

Then Windows started collecting information about the problem. WHAT INFORMATION? You’ve destroyed the document! There’s your information! What else do you need? Witness statements? Perhaps I can identify missing paragraphs from a lineup.

And before anyone writes to explain the importance of saving one’s work, THANK YOU. I was hoping to lose an entire draft and receive a lecture about it. Two birds, one stone.

The computer took its time rebooting, presumably readying a report that would establish that the problem had been me all along. I had a choice between pounding my head against a hard surface or putting away laundry. I chose the latter despite the considerable appeal of the former.

This series of ambitious attempts to think interrupted by opportunities to fold underpants is an accurate representation of my writing life.

Would fridge magnets stick to him?


Yeah, so let’s step into the confessional. For a while this past year, I stopped writing my novel.

I’d been working on a novel for several years. Hundreds of thousands of words came and went. That’s a lot of words. You could fill several perfectly good books with that many words, provided you arranged them in a different order and replaced most of them with better ones. Eventually, I stopped enjoying writing the novel. Then I stopped enjoying the novel. Then I stopped enjoying the person writing the novel.

Oh, I could still enjoy the work of people whose brains apparently hadn’t gone on indefinite leave, but mine had become a rather joyless place. I could still write my own shorter pieces, and did so here on the ol’ blog. That machinery was functioning and often amused me. But I’d lost the part of my brain that wanted to play in longer form, generating ideas that led to other connected ideas. I’d stopped entertaining myself, which is a nasty thing when you’re a writer. You spend hours a day inside your own head. Might as well enjoy being there.

Many other writers seem to have approximately eleven bajillion ideas at the ready. Ideas in saecula saeculorum! I had that one idea, and it flopped around for years. Was it a bad idea or was it a good idea that I was bad at writing? The distinction seemed important until I realized that both explanations ended with me feeling stupid and also not writing.

Eventually, I started a different novel. I’ve written so extensively about my difficulties writing these novels that I may have inadvertently completed a different book. Thank you for your continued support of this franchise.

Yes, I felt like a failure. Yes, I know all the old chestnuts, no need to cite the Deep Magic to me. “You’re not a failure. You’re learning how to write this book. You only fail if you quit. Show up to the page. You’re not too old. Trust the process.”

It’s entirely possible the process is a bastard. The process requires one to show up, and showing up requires time. Writing is my JOB. And yet life insists on treating it as something I can squeeze in between other things. (What other job do you squeeze in? Surgery? “Keep that chest open, Frank, I’ll be back Monday. October at the latest.”)

Is he dishwasher-safe?


Summer was spent working, parenting, recovering from a medical procedure (all is well), enjoying the final guaranteed summer with all my children at home, and fulfilling various obligations. There was also a construction site approximately twenty-five feet from my office that required every power tool ever invented.

When I could find a few minutes to write, I couldn’t write. There was no Zone to even approach, never mind get into.

Had I lost something essential? Had the part of me that had once been curious and inventive and occasionally gloriously stupid decided it had endured enough? Perhaps it had gone into the woods to live in a small cottage, eating the occasional unfortunate traveler.

Does he come with attachments? Like a dough hook or something?


AND YET.

A few weeks ago, I started listening to my writing playlist again. I started occasionally cowriting again and I welcomed new ideas as one might welcome returning birds after an unpleasant winter, even if the birds turn out to be pigeons.

A glimmer.

If his son climbed into his suit and they jumped up two floors, would he need an elevator permit?


But I knew I was really getting back to it when I resumed ruining terrible movies for my husband.

Hear me out. Human civilization has reached the extraordinary point where we can access an almost limitless entertainment (countless videos about drywall anchors!) at the touch of a button. Despite this, last week my husband chose to watch the 2014 remake of RoboCop, thereby demonstrating the heroic tolerance for nonsense that has sustained him throughout our marriage.

I had excellent questions. I voiced those questions, mostly during major plot points. I was delighted. My husband was less delighted.

Needless to say, I was entertaining myself.

My brain is revving up again, which makes not being able to sit down and just WRITE on a SCHEDULE of SOME SORT particularly infuriating. I’ve got ideas. I’ve got things I want to say. I’ve got a book poking me in the noggin and a renewed appetite for doing the work.

But, you know, September in all of its double-stuffedness.

Can my writing brain be a little more patient? MAYBE. But patience is a virtue extolled by satisfied people. Or maybe dissatisfied people. Definitely folks not in a hurry to get to the good stuff.

Anyway, I’ve got a novel to write and some questions about RoboCop’s extended warranty.

Hemingway on Perimenopause

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An encore post

I have hunted lions. I have watched the sun rise on days when I was certain the world was ending and drunk enough whiskey to be sure of it. I have fought against the marlin, an enormous wet metaphor for my masculinity.

All of it was nothing compared to perimenopause.

I am a man, a matter of some regret in this context. I have observed and made notes. They are incomplete, as all honest accounts are.

It is unknowable, this Red Ledger of Womanhood, but I will explain it anyway.

Perimenopause, a word with too many vowels, is from the Latin for “the threshold between fertility and glorious cronehood.” It is a time when ovaries, like exhausted grenadiers, abandon their post and estrogen evaporates. Much like absinthe, for which it is also time.

Don’t bother deciphering if it’s happening or not happening. Most things halfway happen. You will know when you find yourself crying inexplicably in the grocery store as “Landslide” plays.

Having set down my credentials plainly, it remains only to tell you how it is in the borderlands between the era of spring-loaded hormones and the years that follow, which are less buoyant by degrees.

These are the things that must be endured:

  • Insomnia: The nights are the first to betray you. You will lie awake counting your regrets and your nemeses as a fisherman counts his catch, except you will throw nothing back. In the mornings you will feel like you’ve been hollowed out with a grapefruit spoon.
  • Bleeding: It will happen without pattern or mercy. It will lull you into complacency, then strike with malice. Like when you’re on your boss’s white office sofa. Do not speak of it to your boss. They can only pretend not to notice, and the awkwardness is yours alone. Soon enough, you will get to not miss this.
  • Hot flashes: A traitorous inner furnace ignites when you least expect it, which is to say, always. You will feel a powerful urge to strip naked in public and become visibly furious at the air. There is no dignified way to do this.
  • Moods: They will rise and fall like monsoon squalls. You will slam doors, then return and apologize. You will disassociate as the dermatologist removes questionable moles. You will bellow at the toaster if its settings are untrue. Know you are not hurtling toward operatic collapse. Probably.
  • Carousel of Other Indignities: Everything negative and mysterious you experience from now on is perimenopause. Physical discomfort. Metabolic chaos. That asshole who cut you off in traffic. Thinning hair. Itchy earlobes. People telling you to “let that sink in.” The betrayal of your bladder when you sneeze. Chi-Chi’s vague promise to reopen. Anything that causes the urge to hurl a shoe at someone indiscreetly.

You will seek a system to manage it all. It will fail because everything happens anyway. You will be tempted to try yoga, catalogue your ordeals in a leather-bound journal, or fill your online shopping cart with items terrible and proud.

Do none of this. If you must, cry behind a rack of discounted shapewear at T.J. Maxx. They’ve seen it all at T.J. Maxx. Just do not purchase the waist cincher. You will despise it.

Steel your resolve and proceed.

I hope to leave you with something other than recommendations to age gracefully. Perhaps punch a sandbag and, as you enter this season of dissolving composure, remember: it will pass.

When? A few months. A decade. Maybe longer than Friends, certainly not longer than Grey’s Anatomy. Don’t try to track it. Uncertainty is part of the process.

I warn you so you won’t be startled when chin hairs sprout like a godforsaken harvest. Fortunately, the forgetting will also begin, and you’ll be left holding tweezers. You will tweeze nothing. You will remember again when you touch your chin and wonder when you became late 1970s Barry Gibb. Those colorless bastards will be nearly impossible to remove. Your eyesight will also have gone to shit.

The point is, this is not the end of all things. Soon enough you will be alone with your pulse and the knowledge that no part of you was ever permanent except that tattoo you got one ill-fated evening with a guy known only as “Little Bowser.”

Perimenopause is natural. Also intolerable. This is the paradox you will ponder as you cry under the Zombie Wasteland Sewer Tunnel at any given Spirit Halloween.

That is the sum of it.

Now go and swoop through the world like a hormonally-imbalanced falcon, taking sweaty dominion over it all.

Or go punch a sandbag.

I Yelled at a Bird

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On Writing While Having Ears

Simple graphic with a cartoon woodpecker on the left, facing right. To the right of the bird, the title reads ‘I Yelled at a Bird’ in large black letters. Below it, the subtitle says ‘On Writing While Having Ears.’ At the bottom left, in smaller gray text, it says ‘by Jackie Pick.’ The background is white and uncluttered

The other morning, I yelled at a bird. He was pecking at the side of my house right outside my office like he was trying to Morse-code Infinite Jest into the drywall.

In his defense, that’s his job. He’s a woodpecker. Nominative determinism at its most bloggable.

In my defense, I was attempting to write. That’s (allegedly) my job. Writing requires concentration, intention, structure, and little-to-no bird drama.

Inspired by Maya Angelou, I woke early to try to be one of those Excellent Writers™ who catch the Be-Brilliant-Doing-The-Writing-Thing motes that supposedly float through the dawn.

Well, I woke up early. The “Be-Brilliant-Doing-The-Writing-Thing” is more Dr. Angelou’s domain.

Early morning, it turns out, is when my brain picks at itself then presents a show called Every Mistake I’ve Ever Made and Also Let’s Workshop Future Ones! There are musical numbers and everything.

An imperfect start to the day, but at least it’s terrible.

I do not write first thing, although I get organized. Coffee focuses me enough to craft a to-do list. Then I’m organized and stressed. This counts as multitasking.

These last few weeks, the woodpecker has been clocking in by 7:00 a.m. I call him The Contractor. I should call him Sir Aneurysm Incoming.

As a writer (allegedly), I’m supposed to observe the delicate, shimmering miracle of existence. And I want to. I try to. It’s hard to notice anything other than the bird face-hammering my office wall into dust.

The household wakes.

There is one rule to getting teenagers out the door: engage only when summoned. It’s best not to care out loud. But I do. Catastrophically. Usually by saying “good morning.”

You can count the syllables in their sighs.

There are daily logistics to coordinate with my husband: forms, appointments, who is attending to which child where, who is giving the dishwasher emotional support, and …wait, we’re out of ketchup?

Before my workday starts, I’ve absorbed everyone’s emotions because my empathy is an open-concept floor plan. Add to that the simmering impatience of the man in the Subaru behind us who believes my insufficient acceleration jeopardizes the spirit of American progress. I fear he will tailgate one or both of us directly into another dimension.

Sir, I am driving a practical mid-size SUV, and I am doing my best.

I do not want to ruin his day until he honks.

Finally, I sit to write. Whither my Muse?

My Muse is draped across the couch, wearing my robe and eating pastries. “You’ve got this,” she says, waving strudel in my general direction.

This is unhelpful.

At its core, writing is solving one small problem only to discover it was guarding a nest of larger, slipperier ones tangled in a Gordian knot of plot and character and the ability to put words in some kind of order.

It is noble, irritating labor.

I can do noble, irritating labor. Muse-less, even.

Tap. Tap. Taptaptaptap.

Just as I consider offering the woodpecker a co-writing credit if he’d please shut up, my neighbor steps into his backyard to practice trumpet. Backyard trumpet. Right by my office.

Then someone revs a car engine like they’re summoning the ghost of Vin Diesel (who, it should be noted, is not dead).

This does not deter the woodpecker. He is a professional. He should take up writing.

I’ve read the Internet. It says that if I were truly committed to my craft, I would simply not hear all the noise.

Yes. Thank you. I hadn’t considered the bold strategy of not having ears.

Look, distraction is not always avoidance. Sometimes attention goes to the loud thing because the thing is loud.

The world is committed to being loud. I am committed to being a Good Enough Writer™ who li — aaaand now leafblowers are forming some sort of demented quartet with the backyard trumpet-noodling neighbor.

Taptaptaptap.

I opened the window.

“Bird! Stop!”

Quiet.

It felt good. I added “Deal with woodpecker” to my to-do list, then crossed it off.

Except…

I yelled at a bird.

This doesn’t make me feel observant of the delicate, shimmering miracle of existence.

It makes me feel like an asshole. The sort of asshole whose command of language evaporates under pressure, leaving me with nothing but “Bird! Stop!”

I wandered over to the couch for reassurance from my Muse. She shook an empty bag of kettle chips at me, wanting a refill.

Tap. Tap. Taptaptaptap.

That bird’s Muse is clearly better than mine.