An empty book would be nice

I’m beginning to wonder if I will ever be a competent storyteller. It’s who I am, what I’ve always done and always wanted to do, but… lately I find myself with nothing but rambling pages of… well, nothing. It makes for somewhat… interesting… reading, I guess, maybe, but even so, that’s not what I want. I can ramble on to my friends (until they get bored, or annoyed, or they want to ramble in which case I listen and am interested). Hell, I can ramble out loud, or for that matter, keep a blog. …Right, exactly.

What I want, like I said, is to tell stories—to tell A Story, something big, something that matters, but I’ll settle for amusing people with five-page drabbles. I just want to WRITE. Stories.

When I was maybe four or five, I made up the story of “The Wawa Penguins,” which was exactly the story you would expect from a five or six year old with a voracious appetite for literature, who could only access literature approved by her strictly Fundamental Baptist parents. (Also, “Wawa’s” was the name of a convenience store that was pretty much everywhere at the time, we had one two blocks from our house, and they sold the BEST ice cream, which was the focus of the story.) But my parents, as parents of five/six year olds are wont to be, were tickled pink, and proud, and whatnot. Once, in a long ride to Queens, New York, I amused the other three kids in the back of the car with a story about a gigantic red horse, whose farmer owner constantly entered in high-stakes races, until people got suspicious and started trying to catch the horse’s secret—he was chased to the top of a very, very tall tower, and it was discovered that the whole thing was an illusion, created by the use of magnifying lenses. (I remember that my throat was sore and I had run out of twists and just wanted the story to be over, and even then I was annoyed with myself for such a Deus ex Machina ending, and also, though this didn’t occur to me, how the magnifying lenses gave the animal super speed is anybody’s guess.)
Now, I have about six different short stories only four or five pages in (which are going to be way too long, when I finish them in the shadowy realm of Eventually), and a novel that I started for NaNoWriMo 2008, and, predictably enough, never finished, and a mind full of wanderings where I see stories and can’t transcribe them for reasons I’m not entirely sure about. And now, apparently, I write like an Pre-Revolutionary French Scientist (have you ever read their papers? Their sentences are longer than their paragraphs! Text blocks o’ Doom galore.). Man, I just can’t win these days. I should go pick up Sean and play until someday I’m Edge-quality, and then I’ll just hang around outside the recording studio panhandling until maybe… I don’t know.

Was I saying something? Oh, right, storytelling.

Yeah, anyway what this world needs is another Hans Christian Anderson, and everyone’s going to hate me but I Don’t Care neener-neener-neener, Freedom Of Speech1 and so on.
Anyway, I keep trying for stories but they don’t seem to go anywhere, I wind up with a paper to write… I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, I should just find Jeffrey Rowland and demand that he tell me what the secret to his Awesomeness is, or just go panhandling in Northampton in disguise until I find him, and then kidnap him and… I don’t see this going anywhere good either. Damn. I can’t even come up with a good crazy plot of action! I could ask Serra for help or something, but her style and mine are critically different. She doesn’t need things to be story-shaped, or at least, her story-shaped things are shaped differently from other story-shaped things… I don’t know. I write like …nah, that doesn’t work either. Comparing Serra to Dali or Picasso is fair, but exactly whom do I compare my own writings to? DaVinci? The man was a genius! Escher? Again, a genius—same with anyone here really. I’d have to look up some crazy artist who tries to paint wildlife from a house in the suburbs but can never finish anything.
1Note: Freedom of Speech® is subject to change and adaptation and other possible improvements and can be removed at any time decided by USGOVT© or modified if content is determined to be of some possible non-beneficial consequences to the general public or USGOVT© itself.