"A zap to the synaptic cleft."

If ever there was subject with more contrary advice than writing, I don't know what it is.

Revise -- don't Revise.

Outline -- don't Outline.

And on and on.

Couple that with a tendency to get too many ideas, to have too many approaches, and then to be torn by those choices, and it's a real recipe to do nothing.


At any rate, I'm going to dig into I'M ONLY HUMAN for one more draft and be done with it. Either I'll think it's good enough to put out there, or I won't. If I don't, then I'll start working on something else.


Meanwhile, I started reading the pile of New York Times Book Reviews I've saved up for the last four months. While I've stopped reading the actual paper, I am still intending to plow through the reviews.

Anyway, there was a review of John Leonard essays (a film critic) and this is what he had to say about books:

"Like lonely kids everywhere, I entered into book as if into a conspiracy -- for company, of course, and for narrative and romance and advice on how to be decent and brave and sexy. But also for transcendence, a zap to the synaptic cleft; for a slice of the strange, the shock of an Other, a witness not yet heard from, archaeologies forgotten, ignored or despised; that radioactive glow of genius in the dark; grace notes, ghosts and gods."

I flinch whenever someone says to me, "I don't read. (I don't have time to read, I have better things to do, whatever.)" I wince when they say, "I only read non-fiction. (Or online, or newspapers, or whatever."

I just don't understand it.