Caveat: Notapoet

My longago friend, Colin (who is, apparently, an amazing visual artist), said in a recent facebook note that I should share some of my poetry. And he insisted that I was a poet. He knows my soul (or at least has read between the right lines in some bit of my confessional writing that’s floating around the internet). But I’m not. Not a poet. Maybe, just barely, I’m a writer.
Writing. I style myself a writer. I style myself poet, even. But really, I’m just a “poser.” I don’t do that much actual writing. It’s an ambition. A destiny. But it’s far from a vocation. Far from an avocation, even.
At least with respect to prose, I can say that I do, in fact, do some “writing.”  Which is to say, I have a large number of self-generated texts swirling through my personal cyberspace: on USB drives, uploaded to secured servers, or stored on my harddrive. I once lost over 200 pages to a Microsoft Word fiasco, which is why they’re now all in the form of raw .txt files. But they’re nothing I’m comfortable sharing, ultimately.  My perfectionism prevents me.
I’m desperately uncomfortable with the fact that basically, what I do, is write naked skeletons for complex but not particularly original fantasy and science fiction novels. Some of my friends know that I have a fondness for inventing imaginary worlds. It’s a fondness with an aftertaste of obsession. I think of my imaginary worlds as the possible spaces for speculative novels which, naturally, I never seem to get around to writing.  Another way I have often explained it, is that I am much better at writing the appendices to my novels than the actual content of them. Imagine a written corpus that consisted only of Tolkien’s appendices, without the main novelistic texts of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, etc. That might be an approximation of what I have achieved, over the years.
There are two novels that have at least some germ of existence.
Only one has a good working title: Self-reliance. Despite the title, it’s basically a space opera genre work, set in a very complex future history called, alternately, “Rahet,” “Corporation Space” or “Rasf Sayan.” Unfortunately, it has yet to develop any kind of compelling protagonist. I have some characters I rather like, but no one has leaped out to take charge of the narrative, the way that good characters must. It’s not really just one novel. I have outlines for about six, which are interconnected in that they belong to the same universe, but not so interconnected that they constitute a single epic trajectory.  More like different snapshots on the same subject, where that subject is a future point in human history around circa 20000AD. I suppose if you have to compare it to something, you could look at something like Dune, though that is a bit hubristic of me to say.
The other novel is utterly devoid of a good working title, but is actually much clearer in my mind. A much more ambitious undertaking, from a genre standpoint, I guess you could say it is a bit “high-concept.” Littered with shifting points of view, odd Joycean (or Burroughsian?) turns and discontinuous narrative, it’s set in a sort of alternate present / alternate past (with unclear connections between), a la Nabokov’s Ada or Pynchon’s Vineland. And, like Vineland, it includes a fictional coastal county with fictional coastal college town somewhere nonspecific in California, which, for those who know me, will be of easy-enough-to-understand origins. But my little town of “Onirica” in “Las Urnas” county has nods to lots of fictional otherwheres, from Lovecraft’s Arkham to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County to Pynchon’s Vineland to Garcia Marquez’ Macondo. Hah. Sounds ambitious, indeed.
Will these mythological spaces ever see “light of day”? My mother’s record as a novelist does not bode well for my own progress. Not that I’m that much like my mother, nor am I specifically imitating her in any way, but nevertheless it’s worth observing that she’s written some half dozen novels, all more publication-worthy than much of what’s “out there.” Yet she seems for the most part utterly uninterested in putting her ego on the line by attempting to publish. And I understand that, viscerally.
There are risks the fragile ego does not crave. I write plenty of garbage for this blog, but when it comes to things close to my heart, like my novels or my mostly virtual poetry, I have too much ego invested to risk sharing. I don’t dare face the potentially deafening indifference. So I guard it close. I don’t talk about it much. And in fact I don’t actually dedicate much time to it, for the most part.
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