A word for the confused:

There is something specific that happens when the muse comes to me. It's impossible to describe. It doesn't move in ways words can describe. It is a weaver, a spinner of words. When it moves, words travel across time and expanses too great to measure, impossible to calculate, unknowable. When it speaks, the sounds connect in words that tell a story - always a different story, always a new tale, always another path to wander down until the artist is lost to the ordinary ways of life.

Trying to describe this in words is a spider trying to express its web in webs.

The web is drawn and eye can see it or the arm can catch it or the insect can become ensnared into it. But, there is no web, no construct to uphold it or some pattern that could contain it or some tangle of lines that could reconstruct it within itself.

And so are the words of the muse, the movings of the wind, the pattern of the dream that comes in the night. A dream cannot dream again to re-dream itself. And these words cannot repeat and be rearranged to explain themselves.

Instead, the conduit must surrender itself and allow the current to flow through its tips, its ends, its tongue - or be lost.

And as such, I am waiting for the spark to reconnect. And when it does, I will write. As a lightbulb will light when the fire is forced through it, when the connection is made, when the motion deems that it should move.

So will I move when the words demand I do.

Publication in a Published World

In case you haven't heard, there is a book in the works. The re-plot/re-write is almost half-way done, and it's coming out like melted butter. It might be behind schedule (June 30, you say? Yeah, okay.), but I'm infinitely more happy with it now than I was, so I'm not about to complain. The richness and depth and reality of it has continued to increase both for myself and those who have (perhaps inadvertantly) come into contact with it. So, it's on it's way.

Now, let me warn you. Don't go and get your hopes up too much. You may never see this book in the sort of conventional press you are used to. You may never see it, at all (unless you request one from me directly, in such case). In fact, I probably won't be publishing this thing nationally, and I'm considering not even attempting to do so.

You will, inevitably, have a problem with this (or I am paranoid). Or else, if you are kinder, you may simply be wondering what exactly my course of action will be. So, consider this my apology.

So: Why, Rali, would you truncate yourself as an author and choose not to even attempt to put your book on the main market, on as many bookshelves in as many stores as possible?

Because I do not write for money. I have no intention of writing for money. I write because the story is there and the telling must be done. I write because, perhaps, at some point, a word here and a word there may connect and spark something wild, something unexpected, something revolutionary.

Revolutions don't happen in dollars or in Borders and Barnes & Nobles.

If this revolution is going to happen at all, it'll be in the back of tiny cafes and the corner of someone's living room. It'll be in the back of our minds and the back of our hearts and the tips of our tongues. And someone somewhere sipping tea will stand up and say something opaque that strikes a chord. And someone somewhere else will write a card and someone else will write a song and someone else will play a guitar in the dim lighting of a bar off the main drag.

If this revolution is going to happen, it'll have to be in the heat of the moment, in the flick of our wrists, in the bat of our eyes.

It will not come from following the status quo, from towing the line, from reproducing more and more of the mainstream muck that we are already saturated with.

It will come from the ground under our feet and it will rise from the dirt in a heavy rain and it will sink into our skin and drift in through our noses until we are forced to acknowledge that something has infected us. Then, maybe then, will any of us be able to move.

Until then, I don't have the postage to pay for a stack of publishing houses telling me that my book won't sell very well on the current market.

Because I already knew that.

A new answer:

My life exists between sitting in cafes and writing, running a cafe and baking, and practicing the electric bass when I'm doing neither of the other two. Picking up pointless essays if we run out of money, picking up extra hours so we don't. Picking up the bass because I can't stop.

I think that qualifies me as the classic 'starving artist'.
I think I like that answer.

Although, unlike Nathan, I haven't depended on my art solely for income. I think I'd rather not. I think I'd rather stay true to the art form itself - allowing it to flow and ebb as it does, as it chooses.

Balancing any of the two is-- complicated.
Balancing the three, near impossible.

But I cannot leave any one of them behind. Words flow in my veins like blood, music streams like oxygen in amongst it, and food is the life force. Without one, I'd only slowly be dying.

And so, the balancing act ensues, in which there is never enough time in a day, a week, a month to meet the deadlines I'd like to have set or accomplish the sorts of things I'd dreamt I could by now. Each day, I find myself making painful slow progress, taking minuscule steps forward in all directions. Occasionally, one surges forward while the others are left behind. Often, there is a sort of all-around mediocrity.

Or, perhaps speed is not the best judge. Like watching over the garden, ensuring that it is thriving. Speed is an irrelevant judge. The pace at which we move is not so important as that we are moving at all and where we are headed toward. Progress is progress all the same. And so, a single word written, one song internalized, two coffees sold can hold the same weight as eighty, a hundred, a hundred-thousand.

So, I will continue in the direction of improvement, taking time where time is able, taking rest where rest is needed. And, as I go, the skills will hone and this dance will find its mode, and I'll find the right tone and sing along.

Or, maybe I already am.