The Yellow Notebook

In my introductory post for this blog, I mentioned something about working on a short story entitled "The Yellow Notebook." Incredibly, even though I started that story on the 5th of November, over a month ago, I still haven't finished it, and it's not as if it's even supposed to be that long. Yet I'm only on page 15. Part of the reason why it's been going so slow, I suppose, is that I've only been working on it during my breaks at work: I'm writing out the first draft by hand in one of those black Gallery Leather journals that was handcrafted in Bar Harbor, Maine, with the idea that when it's done I'll type it out and that will be the second and final draft. Were I not toiling on other projects, I could have finished it awhile ago.

I suppose, at some point, I'll have to choose to focus on either doing novels or short stories. But I'm so indecisive. On one hand, short stories are a good fit for me because they're easier to edit than novels and one can really work hard making each individual sentence stand out (whereas with a longer novel it's harder to polish it like that). But one thing I like about novels is creating characters one can feel an emotional connection with: it's hard to do that with characters in short stories because you just don't spend as much time with them. What I might end up doing is this: any horror-orientated ideas I'll save for short stories (because as both H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti noted, the short story is the ideal format for tales related to the horrific or the supernatural), whereas my non-horror ideas I'll try to turn into novels.

As for "The Yellow Notebook," the idea for this new story came to me one night at work when, a half hour before we closed up for the night, I was approached by a customer who looked a lot like that science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. He was looking for some very unusual New Age type books (mainly ones revolving around communicating with angelic hierarchies), and he had this really weird yellow notebook with him, the pages of which were filled up with all kinds of bizarre sentences, recorded dreams, notes on weather patterns, weird New Age terminology, stuff like that. God, I'd do anything to get my hands on that notebook so I could read it at my own speed. Anyway, this guy's notebook gave me an idea for a horror story. It's funny, how random, everyday events can give one grist for fictional creations.

In theory, I suppose I should be writing right now instead of writing about how I'm not writing, but somedays one just can't force it.