A cross-sectional drawing of the planet Earth
showing the "Interior World" of Atvatabar,
from William R. Bradshaw's 1892 science-fiction novel
The Goddess of Atvatabar
"This, too, should ultimately pass."

Much of what constitutes Authoring amounts to isolated effort. From ideation through writing, collating through editing, everything could occur in solitary confinement, and does, or might just as well. Especially during This Damned Pandemic, alternative activities seem few and ever further between. When even heading out for a haircut gives pause, and should, this author most often chooses to simply anti-socially distance. The cats have come to know me too well, they sense my intentions better than I do myself. I live at their beck and call since I'm always nearby, never gone, but increasingly absent for myself here, too, as January degrades into HollowingDays.

The outside temperature has not varied more than three degrees in weeks, freezing plus or minus two. Chilling. The sky has maintained a uniform grey haziness, horizons obscured and distance foreshortened. Suspended in a fog globe, the snow globe's boring second cousin, I busy myself with unrewarding effort, lining up manuscripts for future promotion. I sense that my Authoring process needs some serious reconsidering, for I feel more stuck with it than gifted. I possess a wealth of material which seems like King Midas' breakfast, beautiful but inedible, gilded irrelevance. I've grown sick to death of my own voice, my own perspectives, my own increasingly predictable wisdom, my lame jokes. I plod through the necessary Proofing, unable to properly goof off. Sole proprietors can never successfully slough off at work, and work loses its relevance if one's unable to get away with something while engaging in it.

These, I guess, serve as the doldrums, the horse latitudes of the business. The writing might have been enlivening. The first few collations might have felt like genuine accomplishments. The heft of the first few manuscripts might have suggested success, but all that glitter turned to shit after the n-teenth iteration of it. I can see around the next corner and the one after that but I cannot quite yet see an end to this: the isolation, the repetition, the increasing indisposition. I would gladly trade this plodding cow for a single magic bean, if only I might feel creative again, some passion, some promise, some genius. I fear the old well's run dry.

We speak of adventure without usually acknowledging its typical mix of numbing boredom and seconds of terror, which nets to mostly and largely nothing especially noteworthy. The grand adventurer, the serial wanderer, will have spent more time playing solitaire than any ten people serving life sentences in solitary. Sure, he will have also discovered a short-cut to the South Pole and back and barely survived the trek, but he will also have drifted for months upon an indifferent sea on his way back. His overall productivity rating might have almost approached three percent, as idle as he mostly was. And so it goes, I guess, from outside the fog globe, it might seem that magic's brewing behind the obscuring cloud, and magic might well result, but mostly nothing's brewing back there. An author's stewing in his own meager juices, bored spitless through the more virulent HollowingDays of his effort. He will not likely survive intact, though he's fairly likely to eventually come out some other side of this. This, too, should ultimately pass.

©2022 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Authoring, #PureSchmaltz