The internet is equal parts blessing and curse for me. It’s like the world’s largest library at my fingertips, ridiculously easy to instantly access information about any topic you can conceivably come up with. I no longer need to buy the latest edition of a dictionary, encyclopedia, or thesaurus. Need some random piece of trivia? Done. Need info about 16th century Japanese combat techniques for a story? Right there. It’s amazing, but it’s also evil.
I mean, what a time suck. I spend hours every day on this damned machine, twiddling around wasting time I could be writing. Don’t worry, I berate myself constantly for it. I feel guilty all the time. Before the internet I procrastinated, sure, but it was procrastination spent reading, or listening to music, or being with friends, or *gasp* actually creating other things. It was time spent doing something. Now when I procrastinate, five hours can go by, nothing’s gotten done, and I come out of this LCD haze shaking my head and thinking, “What did I just read?” Most of the time I can’t even say – it’s just random shit I find on websites. I hate it. I love it.
Yesterday I finished “Traveler,” my country singer vampire story, and sent it off into the wild. I may get a million rejections on it, like I always do, but I have to say I’m sort of proud of it. I think my writing is definitely getting better. Ok, let’s qualify that, since I’m technically still learning the craft and “better” is definitely a subjective term, but it’s better for me. I can certainly tell the difference between the stuff I write now and the stuff I wrote three years ago. Big improvement. The LOML is always quoting me a statistic he learned somewhere, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice for one to master any skill. So yeah, I’ve got a long way to go. I’m getting there, though, even if it is by slow degrees.
Tuesday night we watched [REC], a Spanish language horror film about a group of people trapped in an apartment building in Barcelona with a bunch of zombies. Of course, nowadays zombies doesn’t mean what it once did – we’re not talking Serpent and the Rainbow zombies, we’re talking 28 Days Later kind of stuff. Viruses run amok. It’s the great horror of our age, science gone all drunk with hubris, producing some bug that turns everyone into raving lunatic cannibals. Fear of science as a god-like tool that we don’t have the moral compass to wield; the bastard child of the giant radiated bug movies of the 50′s. Still, it was a good film, full of shocks and scares in all the right places. And it didn’t end on some cheery, stupid “we shall overcome” note either. It ended like you’d expect it to end, which was satisfying for me.
Baby girl is getting a little cramped by now I imagine, as her kicks and wiggles have gotten progressively more vigorous. I smile to myself when I think about it – I can just imagine her in there, trying to stretch out and move around, like sharing a too-small bed with someone. “Mom, move over!” Of course, on my end there’s this huge stomach that I can no longer bend around to even tie my own shoes, back aches and muscle cramps and numerous trips to the bathroom every night. Still, this time is special to me. This is the only time in her whole life when she’ll belong entirely to me. When she’s born, she’ll be her Daddy’s little girl, a sister, a granddaughter, a friend. One day a wife and mother and colleague. Right now, she’s just mine, and I’m hers. I hold her closer now than I ever will again. She breathes when I breathe; her heart beats a cadence in tune with mine. It’s magical, and like everything else in the life of a child, fleeting. I love her, and hold her close, and we wait together.
Now, damn-it, enough procrastinating. Jeez. I gotta get off this computer and get to work.
