Master of Death, Master of Nothing

It's been a while since I've written anything here, and I suppose there should be an explaination forthcomming. First, I am actively writing again. If I'm writing here, I'm not writing my book. It's exceedingly hard to write good literature during every second of spare time I have, and then to squeeze yet more time out to write a 500 word blog article. To blame it all on my book and my time restraints isn't entirely fair, or honest, for that matter.

I have been decidedly distracted lately, though I haven't really been forthcomming about it. The issue has been plaguing me since I was 12 or so. At that point in my life I experienced, for me, the most tramatic thing I could have then, Death. My grandmother died, and she and I had become increasingly close during the last year and months of her life. I'll never understand it but the death haunted me, in ways that I can never really explain.

I've tried to explain them, in thousands of poems and free writes and pieces of verse, I've tried. I've tried to understand death, and in this I lost myself I think. What I had thought was my grieving process was, I think, just an obsession with death. Or perhaps more apropriately at that time the pain that death inflicts in the fallout of it's merciless grasp.

In my poetry I saught to conquer this pain, to overcome it, so that I never had to hurt that badly again. But the scariest part I'm only realizing now, is that I succeeded. And in what then I would have seen as my greatest accomplisment, I now see as my greatest failure, my dramatic flaw.

A year later my great aunt died, and a year after that my great grandmother, then my grandfather. Each time it hurt less, and less, and less. The deaths kept getting closer and closer and the pain kept fading. I didn't take much notice then, I just kept writing, working. It was like every emotion that pained me, I could, I would, find the words to describe it on my pad, and in doing so lock them away forever.

It's only now that I understand exactly what I've done. It took the death of a great woman, someone I admired and respected deeply, to help me understand. When a friend's mother passed away and I felt nothing, not sadness, not regret, nothing, some part of me questioned it. Why doesn't this feel bad? And it bothered me. Shook me, really, shook me deeply and I began to wonder how well I really knew myself, how well I understood myself.

I've been kind of lost lately, spending more time trying to understand myself. I've spent a great deal of time analyzing my past, trying to discern the turning point, trying to find the way back. I don't know, I do know that I've gone numb in a sense and for some reason the pain in the painlessness hurts that much more.

The Perilous Comma

If you've read much of what I write, or you've ever been my English teacher (or professor), you probably know that I have a problem. I hate admitting it, but the first step to recovery is admitting that one has a problem and well, here I am, on my way to recovery.

I tend to over use the comma. I'm a huge fan of run-on sentences. I've practically mastered the ability to write, what I've dubbed, the "paragraph-sentence." It is just as it sounds, a whole paragraph comprised of one sentence, or perhaps it's a sentence that should have been a paragraph (or could be). However you'd care to define it, you get the picture.

I don't know why I don't use periods more often, it's right beside the comma. Perhaps I tend to write like I speak, fast. Too fast sometimes with little sepparation between my sentences. So where I should actually be ending a sentence and starting a new one, it feels to me like it should be a natural pause in speech denoted with a comma. I guess I talk in paragraph-sentences. I'm working on it though.

If you visit this blog regularly, and re-read an article a day or two after it's been published you notice some minor changes. Usually it's me going back and re-reading what I've written and fixing the giant run-ons. This is another terrible habit of mine, I seem to treat proofreading like an after thought. Usually because I'm crazy tired when I get home and still have an article to write not to mention a chunk of my second novel and in delirium I click publish. Despite my constant effort to stay a few days ahead, (I've been trying to write several articles at once for some time now) I can't seem to manage it. This is another matter entirely but I'm working on this as well.

I'd intended this article to be more of a grammar lesson than anything else, however it has evolved into what it is mostly because a grammar lesson would bore you to death whereas this is, at least mostly, bearable (I hope).