suzanne's tumblr

“I hate writing. I love having written,” is what I keep saying to myself. Maybe repetition will help me believe it.

More times than not, in the past month I’ve been shaken awake at 1 a.m. by words desperate to be formed. “Art in your head doesn’t count,” they say before I decide to shut them up and make them not count.

My murder weapon of choice for them is a game of Minesweeper I installed on my phone to help my brain unwind, go back to sleep, sleep, sleep, to ignore the stupid thoughts that think they are good enough to interrupt my sleep and be shared with the stupid world.

Minesweeper never works that way. So I try Facebook to distract me to sleep. Also, as it turns out, never works. I end up consuming so much, ugh, I’m gonna say that word, CONTENT. And the more I consume, the more I realize I do not create.

I wish I had an iPhone so I could download Robin Sloan’s app Fish, so I could consume that story and be inspired to create. (Translation: I can’t create unless I have an iPhone.)

I wish I had more time to create. Like, I dunno, say 1 a.m. when I am going out of my way to not create, because my thoughts are stupid and Minesweeper is better.

I wish I could sleep, so I can dream, so I can envision my next creative act, so I could wake up the next morning and be late to work and think about work and go home and be tired and dream and envision some other creative act I never put into reality.

Someone in this town cut through my bullshit cycle with a can of spray paint on the wall of a long-closed-down bookstore.

The graffiti simply said, “Consume less. Create more.”

So here you go, Tumblr. I finally closed my game app at 1:48 a.m. and wrote this very meta piece of writing about writing, which is a stupid thought.

One of the many stupid thoughts I have to burn through to get to the good ones.

Maybe it’s not all that stupid, then.