A Productive Day By Any Standard...

So I wrote a few sentences in the background fiction for my foreground fiction, and almost a whole page for that short story that's been sitting in my .doc folder since last semester. w00t, as my chronological peers would say.

Now that I'm no longer burdened by a modern serfdom gig or school for a few weeks, I'm quickly getting my sea-legs back under me for the whole creative process. It feels good, as it always does, to sit down and just create, gettin' that sense of doing what you were made to do.

Of course, being an emotional masochist, I cannot possibly let myself feel good about anything before tearing it to tiny crinkled shreds.

Reading Aasimov's Complete Robot, flipping through my copy of The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower and catching up on a few reviews, I sit here asking myself just what the hell it is I think I'm doing.

I have no idea how it is or was for other artists, but I am constantly racked by feelings of self-doubt about my skills. It's probably not fair for a journeyman to try and compare himself to masters of the craft since you're always going to come up short there, but even the earliest stuff from Lovecraft or King shows a promise that I just don't know if I have. I just don't feel as possessed of the same penetrating eye or protean genius that my heroes seemed to be.

I comfort myself with the perhaps false comfort that few people probably set out to be geniuses, and few succeed. It's something that's there or isn't, I suppose. I hope that I'm a great artist deep down inside, and somewhere in me I've got one of those genre defining, generation inspiring works of fiction kicking around in the ol' noggin, but if not I don't really care. Right now I'm writing about dragons and magic and a ranger in ruddy leather, because goddammit that's what I feel and that's what I want to do.

There's a lot of "I" stuff in that last paragraph. Already this blog is turning into some self-absorbed bleeding heart affair. Ai-ya...

The thing is, the real reason I'm worried about all that crap is because I don't want to disappoint the one audience that matters. That if I can't bust out that save-the-world-through-my-art masterpiece I won't be good enough in their eyes.

Ah, well. Someday it'll come. Who knows, Weyard might even be it. Right now though, I think it's best to just make sure those dragons and rangers come out the best they can. I think she'll like that...