A Bit About Writing (Or, Life In The Eighth Circle of Hell)

I get a visceral response to a creative idea. It’s physical. It’s exactly like that feeling when the person you have a huge crush on walks into the room when you weren’t expecting it. It’s a barely contained giggle that sticks in the bottom of your gut. It feels both delightful and excruciating at the same time.

If you keep it in it’s terribly uncomfortable and itchy but if you let it out people are going to stare.

I’m starting to really understand why writers and alcohol seem to be so intrinsically connected to one another.

Which brings me to why I haven’t been posting here so much lately. I’ve probably been drinking a wee bit too much.

But, also, this past few months I’ve had a bunch of these little crushes walk through my addled brain. Regrettably, none of them have been in the form of a blog post. So, sorry to say, I’ve not been very focused on this particular outlet.

Instead, I’ve been sucked into Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, which is also called “screenwriting”.

I feel particularly comfortable in Circle Eight, which is Fraud.

I know this because I looked up the nine circles of The Inferno in order to avoid actually writing anything.

(As an aside, check out this super cool rendering of Dante’s Hell in Lego form….sometime it really pays to fuck off on the Google.)

This circle is also special because it’s narrated by the voice of my father telling me that I’ve, once again, chosen a direction that will ensure I will live in poverty and die in obscurity.

Thanks Pop!

I’m hoping, at some point, it will re-emerge as the fun rambling that I’ve enjoyed writing, possibly at the expense of your valuable time. But, for now, you seem to have been given a reprieve from having to read my inane verbal diarrhea that is the equivalent of an old man yelling at kids to get the hell off his lawn.

So, there you go, the first blog post in a while that explains why I haven’t done a blog post in a while.

I really wanted to go out on some quip about one of the other circles of hell. After all, I did spend time on that research and I want as much intellectual bang for my buck as I can get.

The best I can do is Gluttony, the third circle, because I just ate a plate of nachos and am feeling mildly nauseated.

Until next time!