Ready set fail!

I have no illusions that I'll achieve everything I want to. There's not enough time.

So here it is, the stuff I intend to fail at in 2012. Mostly because there's so much of it, and I need something to post.

1. Reunite with my band in Texas and attempt to pull off an actual, live guitar solo.

2. Finish the goddamn novel. By finish, I mean get all the edits done and get it out there, self publishing if necessary.

3. Finish a second novel. Can this be done? Absolutely not. This is just goofy. If I finish Resolution #2, it will have taken three years for the first novel. But hey, dreaming is free. Just ask Blondie.



4. Get a bigger house.

5. Be able to call my own shots in my professional "straight" life. I'm actually pretty close to this.

6. Learn Spanish. This one's been sitting on the list so long it's starting to rust.

7. Get healthier. That's all I'll say, lest I incriminate myself. Look, I'm not getting any younger. It's about time to put some old habits to bed, dust off the Jack LaLanne juicer and get started on the mid-life, run-every-day health kick -- or at least something approaching it.

8. Get smarter. America is getting dumber and instinctively, I know I am, too. Basically, this boils down to hanging around people smarter than me, reading more, and watching less Family Guy.

This one's a little personal. Eighteen years later, I'm still trying to live down this faux pas:


(For the record, I can't say what kind of state I was in when I gave this quote to a Newsweek intern. But HE certainly knew.)

9. See more bands. Gotta have at least one easy resolution.

10. Meet more writers. I'm lucky to know a few great ones, but I ought to be branching out more. In fact I ought to write more, too, and submit more, and go to more readings...

And see, this is where I have to end the list, because there's always "more." I need to travel, write non-fiction, get my business off the ground, fix up the jeep, fix up the back bathroom. Blah dee-dee blah blah blah.

Just more stuff to fail at. But when it's all over, I expect I'll do better than I thought I would, which is pretty much how things go with me. And that's OK.

Fear, failure and f*cking wastes of time

Yesterday I picked up Janet Burroway's book, "Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft," which I understand is something of a staple in creative writing courses. I used to have another copy of it somewhere, or maybe I loaned it out and forgot about it, I don't know. I think I'm on my third copy. But it was worth buying again.

It's a dense book -- not physically, but thick with information and examples. You can tell a huge amount of effort and thought went into it. It's not easy reading. Anyway, I cracked it open again and ran into this bit from an extended quote about fear, from author Dorothy Allison:

"...The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in sweat of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough..."

This made me think of something Scott Kempner of The Dictators said in "Please Kill Me, The Uncensored Oral History of Punk." Kempner was talking about The Stooges and being "psychically wounded" watching Iggy Pop perform:

"...Iggy put life and limb into every show. I saw him bloody every single show. Every single show involved actual fucking blood.

"From then on, rock & roll could never be anything less to me. Whatever I did -- whether I was writing, or playing -- there was blood on the pages, there was blood on the strings, because anything less than that was just bullshit, and a waste of fucking time."

As I was thinking about these things, I was reminded how -- a bit of knowledge I picked up from my straight gig -- most small businesses fail. I don't know what the exact stats are, but the vast majority do no better than break even. Yet among the over 100s of CEOs and small business owners I've talked to over the years, most seem to have a practical outlook toward failure that I think writers could learn from.

I suppose it depends what your idea of failure is, of course. But I'd much rather fail than create something that was "just bullshit." Because my worst fear is doing exactly that.