Still waiting

As usual, visiting Christine -- who is not only an ex-lover but a painter and former collaborator, back when we were both performance artists and choreographers -- gave me cause to do some thinking about my career as a writer. And I also had cause to consider it the week before, when I sat down with my friend Anna. Christine's 47, I'm 45, Anna's 25, but we're all dealing with issues of where we're going with our careers as artists, writers or whatever. We're just in different places.

With Anna, I can legitimately give a perspective based on where I've been. When I was 25, I was creating wildly on one hand, and filled with doubt on the other. Because I had a full-time day job (I always have) instead of trying to support myself through my artwork, I wondered if I was just a dilletante who would never turn out to be a serious artist. Now that I've managed to publish a magazine for four years, followed by two full-length books of short stories, that concern is lessened. I've got a track record I can look back on, even as I look forward and wonder when I'll get to the next plateau. Anna, on the other hand, is right there. She does lots and lots of journaling and has started a putative novel and wonders whether she's "serious." I tell her I've been there, try to reassure her.

Christine has always been more self-assured than me; her artistic vision has never failed her. She may go off on tangents, but she has faith they're where she needs to go. Since moving from San Francisco to the desert five years ago and stopping performing, she's taken up writing and painting. Curiously, the Twentynine Palms area is full of second-career artists. Debora Iyall, the singer of the great 80s new wave band Romeo Void, lives a couple of miles away and is also a painter. The desert is a hell of a great place to be a painter -- all that light.

So Christine and I went hiking and had a long talk about where our art was going. It's like nourishment to me, to talk to another serious artist -- and someone who takes my work more seriously, sometimes, than I manage to -- about the creative process, what we're making now, our doubts, our techniques, our ways of keeping faith in ourselves and our visions. I spent the rest of the trip -- through Death Valley, out to Las Vegas, and through the rain the next day from Barstow to Bakersfield -- thinking about spending more time working on my novel. Then I thought, "The problem is not finding more time, the problem is wasting less time on unproductive crap -- watching TV and so forth." Even this website is a distraction, although it's good for me to have a place to post things publicly.

On Sunday, after I got back to San Francisco, I went over to my friend Bob's house to help him move some stuff. Afterward we were sitting and drinking beer with a few other helpers, and Bob told them I was a pornographer. "Oh yeah?" one woman said, "talk about the issues!" I was game, but I asked her which issues in particular she had in mind. She struck me as straight and kind of political and I wasn't sure where to start. But she didn't really give me any place to start, so I didn't talk about any issues. (The individual pages I posted on this website for Too Beautiful and How I Adore You do have discussions on the "issues," as do the afterwords for both books.)