“I’d break the back of love for you”

I’ve been writing, though you wouldn’t know this because I haven’t been keeping up with this journal. It doesn’t matter. I don’t really see myself focusing on it too much in the coming year. And damn, how is the year not over yet? I don’t foresee 2011 being any better than 2010, but as long as I don’t die, it will be a success. Then again, it all depends how I die, if I should die.

I started writing The Poet of Boroughs, Texas a few nights ago. It’s coming along great, working on no notes because they’ve pretty much been burned or thrown away. Instinct, my friend. That’s what I’m writing with. Of course, it sucks. What story doesn’t suck the first time around? Aside from growing old and getting fat, this is where my heart is at least at the moment.

Forever the romantic, Poet is a love story based on a routine character/pseudonym I created a handful of years ago. What originally was going to be a story of my ex and I, transformed to one about a embittered guy named Poet (whose real name, like most of my characters, is never really established) who meets a random girl at a bar and starts a relationship. Somewhere along the lines, they get into some trouble and blah blah blah – who cares. What I’m working on is a frame story in which Poet speaks to a Detective Mansfield about the events leading to the death and burial of porn star/director Dick Masters – with a name like Dick Masters, there was very little I could do with the character. The Dick Masters story is actually what started the transformation of this particular tale. A few years ago, I wrote a story called “Ash Wednesday,” which is going by “Digging Graves” these days, in which an unknown narrator talks about a burying a body of a Dick Masters with a friend only known as The Poet of Boroughs, Texas – hence the project’s name.

Poet has taken a new persona from the previous versions – borrowing the personality of another routine character/pseudonym I specifically made up for Tumblr. After I feel that the story’s at a good point, I’ll publish a excerpt here – very unedited, I might warn.