addiction and writing

I actually ridicule myself for my own addictive behavior, hanging onto the page-read counting page, in anguish when it dies out altogether. The last couple days, kind of low, less than the hundred I'd like. Today, 89, but all in India, where the whole thing is worth less than a dime. But it is a friend of mine, whom I regard highly, and I'm hoping she's enjoying my work. I don't begrudge India page reads - for one thing, it helps me break in to the market, as I have so few Indian readers. But also, on an absolute scale, a page read is a page read - if someone is enjoying something I wrote, that's much better than it used to be, and, it's that much more likely that someone will read what I write in the future.

On the general topic of curtailing addictive behavior, the problem as I see it is that I'm reading some absolute crap, that makes me bored with every page, and which, upon reaching the top of a new page, is enough to make me want to do anything else. So, being on my fast and tiny computer, clicking the page-read counter is about the easiest thing to do. But maybe a better thing to do would be to have something substantial that I'm working on, something that makes me sit for a couple of hours concentrating and making it as good as possible, so that by the time I get back to the page-read counter a couple of hours have flown by.

A discussion of "what's in it for us" was rather interesting as some writers are quite frank about reading a wide variety of work and some, it's clear to me, look upon mine much the same as I am looking upon others. Sometimes it is merely a question of genre. Or they don't really care for the traditional fare that mine reflects - a little stilted, old language, square kind of looking at the world. For these people, if there's no fantasy in it, there's nothing, it's empty, or at the very least quite boring. Why would they want to read about reality, when they have plenty of reality in their own lives? And the reality, as they know it, is bad enough to drive them to books?

I am actually finding a rich vein of life in the read-marketing world, where basically I get to surreptitiously evaluate each writer's act, based on what they have, what's presented to the world, how are the ratings, what's happening to the ratings in terms of daily ups and downs, how they present their blurbs and their author-abouts. It's like seeing someone at a party and getting some insight into why they act the way they do, learning snippets of their life one or two at a time until you see what makes them tick. We all have different motivations for writing and then, given the talent or ability, different and varying ways of getting it on the paper. There's enough here to make a collection of short stories based on the different lives of the ones I've met. Or even, based on the addictive nature of caring about such things as page-reads.

I suspect more than one of these writers is into the cups, i.e. the true addiction, alcohol, or more specifically, wine, since we are not really in the beer crowd, although some probably are that too. It reminds me of my favorite book, one which got me started, The Day on Fire (1958), about the life of famous poet Rimbaud, who fell in with the debauchery of writers in Paris but then, angry, set off to isolate himself, traveling extensively in Europe and mostly Africa, where he just hid for many years. Hid. I have no idea if he even wrote during that time; I've kind of forgotten the details of the book. It was good in that as a biography, it was true to fact and knowledge, and at the same time gave some idea of the passion of the guy's life. I admired that in the writing - if you can make history passionate, you've done something, in my book. I'm thinking of the same kind of thing with the Black Hawk War.

Enough of that for now. Back to slogging, and checking the page-read counter every few minutes.