The Room Doesn’t Change

August 20, 2005 @ 6:00 pm

I’m done. Dermaphoria’s in the hands of the typesetter, once and for all, and I’m looking at the black void of September to make some serious decisions on a number of fronts. Book number three blinked, this morning, in the form of a few lines scribbled into my notebook. I’ve left San Francisco for the time being, and the coin’s still in the air as to whether or not I’ll stay there. For now, I’m at a friend’s beach house in an effort to ward off the post-partum depression. On the bright side, Publisher’s Weekly came through with a very kind review, especially in light of how they slammed the Handbook. It seems I’ve gone from “underplotted” in the first, to a “labyrinthine storyline” in the second. Nothing much else to say, other than to offer up the thoughts about the process I wrote for the Fall MacAdam/Cage catalogue:

Another writer once said to me, “Being a writer means spending many years alone in a room doing work that no one on earth can assure the worth of.” Eighteen years later, I’m staring down the double barreled business end of my sophomore effort as a novelist. This time, the critics would redouble their efforts on my own, and reviews wouldn’t carry the coddling ‘first novel’ qualifier. However, I had been through the process from start to finish, my work habits were solidified and I had the benefit of hindsight with regard to my earlier shortcomings. I was a different writer, this time.

Writing Dermaphoria, I sat alone in my room, paralyzed by that staredown. While I had changed, the room had not. The room remained the room, empty but for my machine, my notebooks, and the dueling voices in my head who, in concert, constitute my muse. Creator versus Cremator, they neither sleep nor wear gloves. One says, this is good, stay with it. The other says, fraud. Both say to me, this isn’t about you.

I spent the better part of two years trying to referee their fistfight into a tango, these voices who refuse to get along but refuse to leave the room, who sometimes listen to me but most of the time don’t, both of whom I need in equal measure.

After eighteen years, I understand how much of writing is being alone in a room, regardless of how much finds its way onto the page in a given work day. No one on earth can assure the worth of what I’m doing, because if I need assuring, the voices can’t be bothered with me. I can’t afford that. They’re all the company I’ve got while I’m working, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.