Rumor is that there exists a room filled with his unpublished works. Novels, short stories, poetry, journal entries. God and his muse alone can know. He was a private man when it came to his association with the pen, arguably more personal, more private than anything that ever goes on between the sheets.

He seldom spoke to the press again, except in 1974 when, trying to fend off the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories, he told a reporter from The Times: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”  – From the New York Times.

This brought me back to my blog. Salinger is dead and the first thing I thought was:

“He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.” – For Esmé — with Love and Squalor, out of Nine Stories.

Then I cried and it was humor. There is nothing here but me wanting, so very badly, to read those unpublished works and attempting to reconcile that with the fact that the man who wrote them did not want them to be published. Why do I want to read them? Why wouldn’t I?

I have nothing miraculous tonight save his words. Good night, Jerome David. Some say you turned your back on fame and adulation, and others say you but did it to safeguard all that was both beloved and squalid.

“What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by.  I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them.  I hate that.  I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it.  If you don’t, you feel even worse.” – Catcher in the Rye.

The words do not want to come though the clouds crowd together, jangling and humming, promising a down pour they may yet renege upon; but I’m a girl who once dedicated a thing to a thirteen year old’s promise, for promises are meant to be kept. So I’m stalking tonight, eyes reflecting the light, biting my patience for my prey. There’s a fine half of a book left for me to fall in like a pit, and so maybe I’ll be ambushed (oh, if only I could be ambushed) and the next stories come while half a baker’s dozen worth of make-believe people eye me and I lay my traps for their tongues.

Yeah, I’m in a weird mood. It’s almost midnight and I have nowhere to be tomorrow but another world. I know it’s been a while. Things happened in that while. Some wonderful. Some less than. Soon I’ll have a more cohesive entry for you. Until then, leave me to hunt for the glue.

- Augustine of Hippo-Regius, See of Numundia (presently Bona, France).

Little time, less words. Dive in. I’ll be back Sunday.

Spit and kleenex.

I think the sentence that contained these three words was referencing a wall, a “tissue-thin” wall. Clearly, it fails to matter. Spit and kleenex is all I got from it and I don’t know why. I’ve used those three words numerous times between thirteen and awkward and twenty-seven and still awkward.

They reverberate. Because they came with something that felt forbidden? Or maybe that in combination with the fact that they came in something I already knew I had it bad for: stories. Books. Words.

post script: if anyone was curious, that nameless, screaming character doesn’t have a zombie mother and I don’t regret that post.

- Neil Gaiman writing for his characterization of William Shakespeare, portrayed as looking back over his career as he finishes writing The Tempest as one of two plays commissioned by Morpheus (aka Dream, aka The Sandman). “The Tempest,” issue #75 of The Sandman (1996), collected in The Wake.

Life is passion. Love, hate, rage, joy. Grief, triumph, desire. This is a list inclusive. To life but add your own adjective. Jeanette Winterson said, “If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.” A goal, then, but the writer’s goal is to improve life by portraying it; and so, in writing, I endeavor to portray passion. Passion, that is, in all of it’s forms.

And so we come to characters. People. They don’t always begin with names or frames into which to place them. Characters, like people, when one dares to engage in reproductive acts can be born without wanting, without intent and even, sometimes, utterly against your wishes. There are in writing prophylactics, tissue thin pieces of aversion and containment that you slide over your consciousness; and, like those you slide over other, far more tangible things, they sometimes fail.

Here we have a story, over crowded, and the last thing you require to reach it’s circular conclusion is another gods bedamned bloody character raising his hand and tromping all up in your plot’s business shouting, “Pick me! Pick me!” Only he does, typically while you’re not watching, eyes on the prize, the finale, the end game and when you’re entirely too involved with typing up jagged, loose ends into picture perfect bows and composing your exeunt, he inhales. And screams. Screams like church bells tolling, like winter’s wind howling, like the bean sidhe your protagonist locked securely away into his zombie mother’s basement cries while clawing at the bricks’ mortar screams and… And. You cannot ignore it. There is no ignoring it.

The show, my friends, must go on.

And tomorrow? Tomorrow this post will go on because tonight he’s screaming, ringing down the sky in endless lines of poetry or chicanery, only the next paragraph will tell. So here we pause, but somewhere else, a window and yet a world away, I’ve a man whose name has been erased tap-tap-tapping on my veins and come hell or eight a.m., he’s going to kick against the walls of my creative uterus until I bear him to breath or scrape him out like a disease.

I’m going to regret this blog tomorrow. And him. I just know it. Passion. Regret’s in there, in that, somewhere, right? Write.

The best answer I’ve heard to the question “Where do you get your ideas?” was delivered by Neil Gaiman. “I make them up,” he said, “Out of my head.”

Little bits of bone and bio matter must, I thought upon hearing this, cling to a great many words. Warren Ellis, too, once addressed this question in a most reverberating way via his blog; however, I more fully appreciated his expression of what ideas feel like. A clip of the full entry (which you may find transcribed here) that I highly suggest you take the time to read anyway:

“That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.

From my chair.“

Mr. Ellis, if you were previously unaware, apparently enjoys his whiskey too.

I’d say “more later” as Willy Shakes still waits for his lines, but I’ve a vomiting shadow king to bring back the spring to an otherwise doomed world. From my chair.

As a result, being a teller of tales, I desperately try to pen extraordinary first sentences. Nine times out of ten, I fail; but every now and then, when I’ve woken up lucky or the stars have struggled themselves into the perfect alignment or perhaps I’ve imbided in just enough of the blue demon, I succeed. These successfully extraordinary first sentences are few in number, but I’m disproportionately proud of them. From one of them I once wrote an entire six months worth of related short stories that were, you know, not too shabby.

Sadly, I’ve yet to put together such a first sentence for my trashy romance novel; therefore, I’ve skipped the first sentence altogether and moved on to the rest of the first three chapters wherein the heroine and the down in his heels hero have their first, messy encounter. The encounter, I like.

I have more I want to talk about tonight, so I might return later to discuss the horrors and misconceptions of from where ideas do and do not come and/or why Neil Gaiman writing for Will Shakespeare managed to reaffirm (p.s., I actually hate that word, “reaffirm”, in all of its overused, self help, sloppy glory which is exactly why I use it) artists everywhere and/or why convincing bloody, stupid ass characters to do what you want is always harder than coming up with a good plot.

“The English language is my bitch. Or I can’t speak it very well. Whatever.” – Joss Whedon.

On other news, Dan I have bought our two kittens a scratching post in the desperately hopeful endeavor of stopping them from further destroying our couch. It’s a nice couch and it doesn’t deserve to be so fouly treated. We have tried tempting them upon the scratching post, our whipping couch, if you will, with the treats they love, by putting their toys on it, and a great deal of queer hand gestures between them and it while saying things such as, “Use your scratching post! Look! It loves you.. Scraaaaaatch…”

I believed all our efforts doomed save for their intrensic entertainment value until this morning. Portia, a sleek, attitude infested little huntress, sashayed right up to my feet and began to scratch at the couch. I glowered at her and said, “No. Use your scratching post.” I said this, mind you, in my best mean mommy voice (and if you have ever met my mother, you are aware that I learned from the best). To my surprise and delight, she did! Here is a picture of her bonding with the scratching post right before she gets to some good old fashioned shredding. Yes, that torn up bit of couch beside her is just that.

Portia and the scratching post.