I procrastinated posting for a couple of weeks because I wanted my next post to be a short story. Well yesterday I wrote a short story, but I like it too much to not submit somewhere first (somewhere = Writers of the Future). You will most likely get that story at a quarter past three, thirteen days before the last sunset of time; if I’m feeling kind, you may get to read it sooner.

Regardless, many people crave knowledge about the life of Timothy, aka The Life of Tim, aka Two Times Timothy Squared, aka Tarantulas Treat Turtles Tremendously, aka T.O.D., aka Todd. I figure I might as well appease this Todd guy and explain why the recent, relative silence on multiple fronts (except Twitter…I seem to have figured tweets out finally, but even that leaves me a little vague).

You see, it goes something a little like this:  Once upon a time, there was a Tim, and Tim was non-medically crazy, especially when he got started on his craziness (as exemplified by this post). But that’s a boring story, so we won’t go there.

Act 1, Scene 3, Take 2:
On Writing – Through the creation of aforementioned story (see above, second sentence from start) I came to a realization I should have discovered years ago…because while I “knew” it, I somehow failed to connect the dots:  That story everyone thinks they know about, well, um, you see, it might just be that perhaps I’m maybe trying to sort of write two stories in one, by which I mean I’m trying to tell an all-encompassing story and a microscopically close story at the same time. Which I believe is why I struggled for so many years to tell said storyyyyieeeeees.

– which means? Well, I do not yet know what it means. Obviously the stories are separate, but they’re fundamental to each other as well, and yet they cannot be completely told together but they inherently are, at least to a degree (451 degrees, to be exact). Does that make sense? If you say yes, congratulations because it took me many years to decide what it means. And no, none of that has anything whatsoever to do with my post about poking writers – we swears.

All of this is true and good, but what does it mean? Absolutely nothing. You still don’t know why there’s hypothetically been a Great Silence from the Land of Tim.

Chapter 2 – In Which I Fall off the Face of the Planet Onto its Toe

More likely than not, you didn’t even notice me going silent. Less unlikely than ever, you think this winded post is more than clickbait – a book agent perhaps? A *book contract*?

No. Keep dreaming ’til the cows fly home.

At the start of last year I set the goal of finding an agent to represent me by the end of the year, kind of an ambitious goal when you know you’ve got another draft or two to complete.

Final Draft completed, I began to submit to book agents. Uncomfortably. For I sensed something was wrong with Final Draft, but I thought it was me. Few authors are ever truly satisfied with their own writing.

“But no,” wrongness told me, “there’s something wrong with the story. Wrong with how it works? Its structure? Or the tale itself?”

This called for re-re-re-re-re-re-re-reading my novel. Until (unspecified number of days) later I stumbled upon the problem.

I didn’t believe certain scenes, and if I don’t, how could anyone else? One more rough draft, one more final draft.

I completed that rough draft and got the genius idea to perform surgery on a hardcopy as my final draft, overlooking the obvious, important fact that every change I make on paper has to be entered into the Binary World.

Fortunately I’m almost done with that. But because this post has grown far larger than I intended, let me submit a summary of the rest:

Summary of the Rest:
Between final, final, final drafts (and this legitimately is the final draft worked out “on my own”) and trying to stay sane – how many drafts does it take to tell a good story? – I let all other hobbies and social skills die. Oh, and my SSL certificate as well. Everybody dies.

And “that’s the way the grapefruit squirts.”