PicoBlog

Hello there, situation normies!

Last week’s post, To live in and leave LA inspired some really great suggestions for movies about Los Angeles. There were no wrong answers, but there was an underrated answer: Repo Man. That movie kicks ass, thanks for mentioning it

For those following my crime spree, I’m currently reading One-Shot Harry, a slow-burn of an amateur sleuth story by Gary Phillips. I love mysteries that show me new worlds, but I’m especially fond of mysteries that show me Los Angeles in a new light. One-Shot Harry is a story told by a Black freelance photographer covering crime and Civil Rights in 1963 Los Angeles. It gives me Walter Mosley vibes, and those are very good vibes indeed.

Time for shout outs! As you know, Situation Normal stories are free, but some situation normies pay because they love this newsletter and they get their kicks underwriting joy for strangers. That’s pretty damn cool. There no new paying subscribers this week, which also totally cool.

If you want to change that, please consider a subscription. Or, if you prefer PayPal, send any amount here. I’ll give you a shout out, send you good vibes, and add you to the list so you receive the annual stakeholder report.

It was either Sisyphus, or my little sister Allison, who first asked the question I grapple with whenever I’m working on a novel: Are we there yet?

Obviously, I’m using the royal we here. When I write a novel, it’s just me and the blank page. Or, sometimes it’s just me and a lot of pages. And other times, I’m alone with those pages, but also not alone, because I’m in a crowd of people, like at a coffeeshop, and some of those people, I assume, are on their own Sisyphean journey through Novel Land, or this being Los Angeles, Screenplay Land, which looks like Novel Land, except there are more explosions and sex scenes, and those scenes are always written in 12-point Courier font.

But back to the question. The operative words in the question are “there” and “yet.” Let’s take them in order.

There refers to the finish line. But there are many finish lines. In roughly chronological order, they are:

• a completed outline

• a revised outline

• a first draft

• a second draft

• another fucking draft

• a draft that feels like a lateral move

• a “fuck it” draft to exorcise the all-demon rock band called Self Doubt that won’t stop playing in your head

• a rewrite of an earlier draft, which wasn’t “half-bad,” but nevertheless needs work

• another rewrite for shits and giggles

• the querying of agents

• signing with an agent

• finding a new agent because your previous agent stole money from their clients to fund their cocaine habit, then skipped town, then surfaced in a non-extradition country where they rep social media influencers who sling dodgy wellness products and questionable career advice

• signing with the new agent and hoping to hell that those sniffles are just a cold and not a harbinger of another commission-based cocaine binge

• rejections from publishers

• a publishing contract

• seeing your book in a bookstore

• talking to someone really cool, like Terry Gross, about your book

• selling the film & TV rights

• using the money from the film & TV rights to put a hit out on the first agent

• attending a friends and family screening of the movie or TV show that’s based on your book

• searching social media for comments that say the book was better than the movie / TV show and feeling a smug sense of superiority

• facing the blank page all over again

Yet is a motherfucker. In the strictest sense, yet is defined as: up until the present or a specified or implied time; by now or then. But in the context of a writing a novel, or a screenplay, or pulling off any long-term project, yet is a taunt, a one-word reminder that you wouldn’t know the difference between spinning your wheels or racing toward the finish line. Yet is every inch of the mountain Sisyphus climbed, except the base and the peak. Yet is every mile of the car ride, from the time we buckle up to the moment we pull into a parking space and switch off the engine. Yet is the impossible burden of boulder that Sisyphus pushed up the mountain AND the constant mockery of the kid in the backseat asking the same question over and over again. Like I said, yet is a motherfucker.

I’m not saying I think about the “are we there yet” question a lot. I think about it constantly. When I’m working on a novel, I’m either sinking or swimming, but can’t tell the difference between sinking or swimming. Over the years, I’ve tried a few different ways of coping with this question.

Yeah right, LOL.

Helpful, then harmful, but ultimately, absurd:

Judge Smails: Ty, what did you shoot today?

Ty Webb: Oh, Judge, I don’t keep score.

Judge Smails: Then how do you measure yourself with other golfers?

Ty Webb: By height.

Scene from the movie Caddyshack (1980)

Feels like progress, until you realize that writing is rewriting, which means sometimes a good writing session is deleting words. When that moment arrives, word count turns into a busted compass where North is South and progress is regress.

Same problem, but with bigger units of measurement, which only increases the absurdity of the situation.

This one seems reasonable, at first. Lawyers track time. Sex workers track time. Subway sandwich artists track time. There must be something to this time metric, right?

Wrong.

Here’s why.

Question: how long does it take to write a novel?

Answer: No fucking clue.

With apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche and Rust Cohle, time isn’t a flat circle. Time is trap. Ask Admiral Ackbar.

This one has its merits, at first. If you quit the journey, there’s no need to ask, “are we there yet?” Unfortunately, quitting the journey raises other questions. Uncomfortable questions. Questions like:

• What the fuck am I doing with my life?

• When I’m old, and I have more perspective on success and failure, how will I deal with the crushing realization that I did not fail, but rather that I failed to try?

• Also, what the fuck am I doing with my life?

A few years ago, I’m not sure exactly when and I’m not exactly sure why, I stopped writing novels. In other words, I stopped asking the question: are we there yet?

At first, quitting was a relief. But I think that relief lasted about an hour or two. After that, I felt like a cork drifting in a calm sea. No strong currents, no big waves, no problem.

Except, there was a problem.

Without the “there” and the “yet” things felt pointless. It wasn’t the destination, but it wasn’t the journey either. There was no journey and therefore no destination.

Initially, I thought this was ennui—a condition that isn’t covered by insurance. Later, I figured out that this was depression—a condition insurance covers in a half-assed way.

Thankfully, the half of the ass that insurance covers entitles you to powerful drugs with low copays.

Initially, my doctor said I should be a Lexabro. That drug stopped the depression, but it also made me feel like a zombie. I had no energy, no passion. But maybe zombie isn’t the right description, because there was something alive in my brain. An idea. Not an idea for a novel. Rather, an idea that had left the building years ago, the idea that I should go back to writing novels.

That’s when I started reading novels again. Mysteries. Thrillers. Crime stories. The kinds of books that inspired me to write novels in the first place.

Then I switched to Wellbutrin. That pretty much ended my zombie apocalypse experience. Suddenly, I felt alive in a way I hadn’t felt in years. I had passion. I had vim & vigor—two ingredients that are essential to kicking ass and making up names.

I started brainstorming a new novel. After a few days, I ditched that idea for another idea. I cycled through a few more ideas. Then I locked in on one idea. I pitched it to Christina.

“I love it.”

Then, as if she stepped into my mind and shinned a flashlight in the darkest corners, Christina asked how I planned to deal with the “are we there yet” question.

“I know you can do it, babe, I’ve seen you do it,” she said. “But here’s my concern: you have this thing where you make a lot of progress on something that’s really fucking hard, but you always get to this point where you convince yourself that you haven’t made any progress at all, and there’s nothing anyone can say to change your mind.”

Christina was right. The enemy isn’t the boulder I’m pushing up the hill, or the demanding kid screaming questions from the backseat, it’s me.

“How are you going to measure progress?” Christina asked. “Actually, let me put it another way. How are you going to measure progress so that when you get to that dark place you can prove to yourself that you are making progress and that you need to keep going?”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“I have no fucking clue. But I’m open to ideas.”

Christina suggested a visual marker of progress. Something I could glance at that would immediately prove that I was making progress.

“What about those calendars you see in the movies, where some guy is in prison, or Vietnam, and he marks off the calendar at the end of each day?”

That sounded good to me, except for the prison part and the Vietnam part.

“It’s a good time to buy calendars,” I said. “It’s April, so all the 2024 calendars will be on sale.”

I went on Amazon. I searched for funny calendars. I wanted images that would immediately make me smile. Writing a novel is too hard to look at things that make you frown.

When I saw a calendar called “Nature’s Dongs,” I knew I had hit pay dirt. There were pictures of rock formations that looked like dongs. Dong-shaped mushrooms. A proboscis monkey with a dong-face. It had dongs for days! Even better, the calendar costs only $2.99, including shipping & handling. That works out to just under 25 cents per dong.

Then I went to Target, where I bought two packs of stickers. I chose the circular color stickers—pink, green, and yellow. They were on sale. I spent less than five bucks and got 600 stickers. Another win for frugality.

Then I started working on an outline for a new novel. At the end of every writing day, I add a sticker to the dong calendar. The stickers look like I’m color-coding my writing sessions, but I’m not. The colors don’t mean anything, and neither do the dongs.

Actually, that’s not true.

The dongs make me smile, and the colors remind me to look for the bright spots.

By previous metrics the journey to the completed outline might’ve been measured as follows:

• 28,164 words

• 89 pages

• 14 writing days

But I prefer a different measuring stick, one with a flaccid dong-shaped cactus and lots of colorful bright spots:

The ebook versions of my books are priced between 99 cents and $2.99, so if you don’t have the budget for a Situation Normal subscription, buying an ebook is a great way to support my work. Bonus: you’ll laugh your butt off!

You know the drill. I’ve got questions, you’ve got answers.

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