Little Musings and Delusions of Grandeur

I watch a lot of TV. At night, and so as it is with drinking, it is OK. I was watching FlashForward last night, and I got to thinking about physics, and time travel and great works of fiction. The first thing that struck me is that I need to start reading again. Good books, reread the oldies, read some of the oldies that, likely due to their banishment from our home for espousing witchcraft or something of that nature, I never read, read some newbies, read some differenties, read some bad books-because sometimes you really can't judge a book by its cover. The very act of reading makes a person smarter, sharpens the mind. Plus, reading expands vocabulary, informs, teaches, entertains and is all-around good for you.

The next thing I thought of is how much I have always harbored a secret desire to write a great American novel. Something on the order of East of Eden or The Great Gatsby or Fahrenheit 451. (Yes, this is where the delusions of grandeur come in.) In my mind I am a great writer. In the minds of most of my English teachers throughout the years, I am a C student. My writing is too stream of consciousness, too poorly researched and lazily put together, too fraught with spelling mistakes, too whatever it was they didn't like about it. It hurt, and colored the way I thought about writing-I began to hate writing and think I was a bad writer (and perhaps I am, and yet again maybe it is all subjective, feel free to REFRAIN from commenting on this line of thought). Their destructive words colluded with my tendency toward laziness to rob me of more than a few good years of writing.

More recently, someone near and dear to me wrote an amazing novel that, for several reasons, chased me away from the idea of writing anything of my own. The first reason is pretty straight forward, its sheer awesomeness made me think "ugh I could NEVER write anything this good, I couldn't even try." The second is a little more convoluted, and quite honestly, insane. Because this unnamed person is so close to me, the simple fact that she wrote a novel in light of the Pauli Exclusion Principle (no two electrons may occupy the same quantum state-from which we get the idea that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time)means I may not write a novel. Insane, I know. IIIIIIIIII KNOOOOOOOOOOOW.

Not that I even have an idea WHAT I would write this chef d'ouevre about, nor that I have any real idea how one would go about writing a novel. Research and discipline and editing and rejection-I'm sure-all stuff I am really not interested in. I just have this delusion of grandeur. Well, at least I have this blog, and practice writing less than once a week. There's a step in the right direction, right? Although, by the same token, how many millions out there will be writing a book as a natural progression from their blog. Speaking of millions, there are millions of literal morons who have written books, and QUITE a few of them have done so with great success. And so goes the see saw, tug-o-war, back and forth inside my mind.

Lemme take you back to the subject...Reading. A good place to start all this (or stop it) novel writing would be to get back on the horse and read, because reading is FUN-damental.

PS: I would probably have to come up with some original material. Mostly, I would have to overcome a lot of deep-seated laziness (I had originally planned on blogging about a couple of other delusions I have, but I've tired of writing - QED) so the world is safe for now.