I can’t lock into the mindset of working on the book lately…

I wouldn’t mind it as much if I didn’t go out of my way to ensure I had the time to work on it… only for it to then not happen. I could have been outdoors most of Saturday or, more realistically, at the movies. Anywhere, really. But instead I found other things to do. Busy work.

Tomorrow, I will try again… as I have the evening/night to concentrate on the book again. As long as I find the zone this weekend, I can manage it on top of work again, but it is even more elusive when I am working and not in it.

As I save more money, I am approaching the time when I may have enough money saved to quit my job, but still have an unfinished book. That was one of the conditions of leaving the job. I was supposed to have a lot of money saved and a sold or saleable manuscript. The goal was always to reduce the amount of time between the first and the second books, never to leave my job to finish the first one. And I will stick to that.

I just sent an e-mail tonight to Dennis at the Chuck site saying I’m not seeing how I can continue my role as running the book club. I really have almost no interest in modern literature at present. the other day on Amazon, I ordered a bunch of book, and aside from David Sedaris, every author is dead. One of my next big reads, after I finish Pale fire, is to start Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, and then read the Nabokov Lecture on the book, and then re-read the book again with that dissection in mind. And there are many books in his lecture book for me to go through…

It is time to start taking writing seriously, as opposed to making something I do when I make the time, or I’m inspired… I need the same energy in writing as someone who is reading a book they can’t put down. I know where I’m hung up on my book, but that has yet to lead to any resolution. I hope to blow through it by Monday.

I need to work as hard as possible to get serious about writing. I can’t collapse in a heap on the floor when I finish this book, drained and relieved. I need to be able to take some time away, write some smaller things, and then drill into book two. It can’t work any other way.

Tomorrow afternoon, my dance with the novel begins again… and the bitch is going to dance whether it wants to or not.

I recently learned two important things. The first is that it is not a good sign when your computer hard drive starts making clicking sounds. The second is that, if it does start to click, you should probably start copying things immediately onto CD. I opted to restart the system and see if the problem went away. The only thing that went away, though, was my hard drive and more than a decade of files.

E-mails. Photos. Journal entries. Essays. All gone. My novel is the only thing I was diligent enough to backup on a regular basis. Everything else almost entirely existed on the hard drive.

When I was told the data cold not be recovered cheaply, my heart sank and I began thinking how much I would have to pay to get everything back. Within ten minutes, though, another thought pushed through the loss and resonated even more deeply.

I’m free.

I called my friend Chris to tell him about my computer woes, less about the hard drive crash than about Apple Computer’s insistence that I didn’t own the broken hard drive and they would get to keep it after I paid for an entire new one. When I mentioned the lost e-mail, he brought up in a moment’s notice my first e-mail to him from 1993.

As he read aloud my first e-mail to him, it wasn’t shocking what it contained. It said I was writing a novel and losing weight.

In fact, most of my journal entries that were lost will contain similar information. Like clockwork, I always wrote an annual e-mail essay and send it to friends around the end of June, typically after gay pride. It was about feeling that I was missing something, that I was watching a party I crash every year but don’t feel a part of, or welcome at. I wasn’t one of the fabulous skinny boys with a huge group of friends in pride-chic clothes, or shirtless, celebrating our lives. Pride always made me wonder when my life was going to start.

The novel thing is a bit vaguer as I was always on some sort of diet, but I was rarely working seriously on a novel. When I wrote a Viewpoint piece for The Advocate in 1994, they wrote back and said they needed a short bio to tag at the end. So, I sent back “Jeff Walsh is a reporter in Kingston, Pa., and is working on his first novel.” Of course, I hadn’t written a single word on a novel at that point. I was a horrible reader. But it sure sounded nice. At that point, the most I had written was half a screenplay called “Getting By,” which contained a gay character named Paul whom I used cathartically to accept my own sexuality a year earlier.

A few months back, I went through more files I had saved over the years and deleted hundreds of them. It was always my intent to do a big backup of all my files. I just wanted to go through everything and get rid of the junk first. Every essay I opened read the same. Writing. Weight.

If anything, reading the e-mails made me feel bad about my friends who have constantly had to hear about my two-pronged life that just goes around and around, yielding minimal results.

Sometimes I wonder how much of my current novel not being completed can be attributed to fear. I don’t know how to not be an unsuccessful wannabe without results. And change is always spooky.

I haven’t posted this on the public blog before, but I don’t plan to be at my current job within the next 12 months. Instead, I plan to focus more on the writing and get my money instead from waiting tables or being a bartender. There are a multitude of reasons for that, but one thing I know is that being overweight will not help me in those fields. So, there is a direct, tangible reason for which I really need to get serious about this.

After fighting with Apple, I now own my busted hard drive. It is in a box near my computer desk. I can pay hundreds of dollars and get back everything, or I can just let it sit here for a while and decide at some point – like a box of stuff you don’t ever open a year after moving – that I don’t need it anymore.

So, as geeky as it is, I see the hard drive crash as wiping my own slate clean. A new beginning. A way to abandon reminders of my past and create a new future.

This time next year, I hope to throw that broken hard drive in the trash.