Get busy and do some actual writing!

Stephen King just told me to take the act of writing seriously, and he's right.  Perhaps that is my problem: I write as a distraction, but I don't get serious; I hold back, attempting to pen poetic phrases instead of just saying "Fuck it!  I'm lost and pissed off."  Some of my best writing (at least the prose I enjoyed writing, where I felt I actually said something) came from those times when I sat down with a strong purpose and something to say.  Lately, I have been floating around a bit, reading book after book after blog post after Twitter feed after poem after poem after poem, looking for something to grab my attention and say, "Adrian, this is important!  Write about this.  Tell us now!"

Stephen King is right: I know what to say (if not exactly)l I just need to sit down and write!  My creativity isn't dead or hibernating or too ill to get out of bed.  It is just waiting for me to get busy and do some actual writing.

"If you can take it seriously, we can do business.

I know that I can take writing seriously.  I don't need a publisher, an agent, or a book deal.  I just need my pen and the balls to write down what I actually think.  I still have stuff to say.

Song of Myself #20

--Walt Whitman

Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; 

How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? 

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you? 

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, 

Else it were time lost listening to me. 

I do not snivel that snivel the world over, 

That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth. 

Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d, 

I wear my hat as I please indoors or out. 

Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious? 

Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and calculated close, 

I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. 

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, 

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. 

I know I am solid and sound, 

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, 

All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. 

I know I am deathless, 

I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass, 

I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night. 

I know I am august, 

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, 

I see that the elementary laws never apologize, 

(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.) 

I exist as I am, that is enough, 

If no other in the world be aware I sit content, 

And if each and all be aware I sit content. 

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, 

And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years, 

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait. 

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, 

I laugh at what you call dissolution, 

And I know the amplitude of time.