Robert Sheckley

Very Special to the Gazette

MY LIFE IN OREGON
a journal entry

    This is the online and ongoing Journal of Robert Sheckley, world famous author and world traveler. Bob is a Village guy who has lived everywhere on the Earth, almost and now finds himself in the State of Oregon, a far cry from the New York he knew and loved. So Bob is sending us his Journal, in bits and pieces. This is a rare treat, Indeed.

April 13. Thurs. 

   I think I need a way to set this day aside, because I mean it as the beginning of a new thing. But I've begun many new things, and they have all or for the most part segued into the old thing. That is, I have tapered off and ended them, and gone on with whatever it is I do without commemorating it. That is, just writing, without beginning and without end, without rewriting, revising, printing out and marketing, just writing. 

So now I hope to make a beginning without first delimiting that beginning, but doing so afterwards. I'm trying to write fiction here, but I can't limit only, to writing only, to writing a particular thing. I can't exclude writing about me and my situation, my hopes and dreams, my fears, etc. But I don't want that to take up all of it exclusively, either.

 There's the matter of how to fill up a day, but I don't want to spend all my time thinking about that, though I think I need to spend some. There is the matter of how I spend my time within the framework of the day; in what way; how much of it I can or will take up with writing. And only after that, the question of what kind of writing. In short, there's a lot here to sort out. I want to consider writing, both personal and fictional; making an effort, and the subtext, making a sustained effort, over a period of days and weeks, hopefully months, because I don't want to make this effort only one day, I want to make making an effort part of my daily life. 

So there is the question of the effort; am I to make it or not? Because as long as I question, that question is always raising itself; what's the use, what's the sense of doing this, where will I sell it, who will read it? It is ten past two in the afternoon as I am writing. How long am I to continue, and at what pace? How much may I break away, and how much is it inadvisable to break away from the task? And there is the question of where all this is to take place? In my basement, at my computer? Out of doors, with my pad and pen? To what extent am I to inure myself to the slow, dull life of writing a lot of hours every day? 

Am I really to make that effort the centerpiece of my day, what my day is really all about? But if it is not about this, what is it about? Is it necessary for it to be about something? Evidently. I wish to examine certain assumptions or near- assumptions or assumptions except when I doubt or think otherwise--That I still wish to dedicate my life to writing. 

That this is a strategic thing to do as well as expressive of my deepest sense and desire. That if you want the writing life, certain sacrifices must be accepted and made. If they elect you town clerk, you cannot run off to count the cats of Zanzibar, to loosely quote Thoreau. I've just been talking with Martin. God, how badly I've needed contact with friends! I am filled with perhaps illusory fresh hope. He's calling me back. My life is on hold again. Like it is at the best of times. That's how the hope and desire game works. Everything gives you cause, reason, to suspend what's happening now in favor of what's happening then, later. But I defy the foul fiend, I go on writing here. And Richie (Rich Schiff, Editor of The Gazette) has just asked me if I have something he could run. What better to give him than this day's journal entry, the fresh droppings of my mind?