Word vomit.

"For the love of fuck," you are probably thinking. "This bitch has been unemployed for two months, and she's not even writing here twice a week! What a loser! And also, her tits are small!"

And readers -- dear, dear readers -- you would be nearly correct. Because I am a small-titted loser.

You'd be wrong about the writing, though.

Since losing my job, I have been writing every day. All day. I've never been so busy, or exhausted. Every morning, I wake up with words rattling around in my skull. They come loose overnight, leftovers from unremembered dreams or unmade phone calls or unsent letters, and they fall on the floor of my mind like objects detaching themselves from the walls during an earthquake.

And then I wake up, and there they are. Words are my all-day, these days.

So, I have a routine. In the morning, I walk the dog and buy a cup of coffee from the bodega across the street, and I think about those words while the dog sniffs the sidewalk and the coffee stays too hot inside its styrofoam container. Adjectives and metaphors and god-knows-what, all coming down the chute.

What, you don't have a word chute? I have a word chute.

I think of clever openings, grab-em pitch lines. I think of conclusion quips. I think of ways to describe the styrofoam, which squeaks and gives under my fingernails and breaks like it wants to bite me. It's not surprising, I guess, that it refuses to biodegrade. Styrofoam: refusing to unmake itself since 1940.

This is my morning. Coffee takes forty minutes. I never actually finish it, because around minute twenty, I lose myself in work and forget that it's there. At minute thirty-nine, I pick up the cup and take a sip and make a noise like a cat, like a cat dying, because the coffee has gone cold.

Morning-to-noon: I sit at my computer and write flippant-yet-heartfelt advice to teenagers with adorable problems. "Talk to your parents." "She's a bad friend." "Just tell him; he already knows, anyway." The fact that I get paid to do this is both a delight and a continuous shock.

And in the afternoon, in hours that seem to evaporate in a storm of words and the click-click-click of the keyboard, I... also write. I write non-stop. Words are falling around my ears so fast that I can't type to keep up. Sometimes I forget to eat, and sometimes I forget to move, and then Brad comes home and wants to know why I'm sitting in the dark with my eyes sinking back in my head and my stomach making sounds like a barnyard animal.

And when I sit back down and log in here, beer in hand, thinking that I ought to deposit something in my little corner of the internet -- even if it's the literary equivalent of walking into the room and taking a dump on the carpet -- things just feel dry. There are words rattling around, sure, but they're things like "egg sandwich" and "wicket" and "fleep". Is fleep a word? No, it's not. And I'd better just quit, and go to bed.

But come the dawn of 2010, I'll be back. Not because I'm making a resolution to blog more, but because I've been writing a novel.

And although something could still happen to stop me, if all goes according to plan, I am going to finish it.

This week.

Oh, relief.
(If you feel like giving me a golf clap, I urge you to indulge yourself and do so.)


And a merry, merry Christmas to all of you -- you sexy motherfuckers.