No lead in my pencil

In an attempt to bitchslap myself back to life, literarily speaking, I’m going to lay bare my insecurities and deficiencies as a writer.

At this moment I am experiencing what we in the writing biz call “writer’s block.” It’s like performance anxiety, only there’s no woman sitting next to you telling you that “it happens to lots of writers.” Also, there’s no magic pill to straighten out your problem.

I blame it on my day job. I’m convinced there are a finite number of words I’m able to produce each day, and whatever I have left at the end of the day is what I have to work with. They’re never the good words either. I’m stuck with words like goiter, dour and berber. Hence, the steaming pile of crap you are reading right now. If I could do a better job of managing my words during the day, you could be reading a wonderful ditty about a young bassoon player whose car breaks down in front of the Playboy Mansion on the way to his first big gig and is gently guided into manhood by a cadre of women for whom gravity apparently has no sway.

That’s completely made up, by the way. It never actually happened.

Dammit.

So I’m sitting here with the literary equivalent of erectile dysfunction, sharing this rather embarassing condition with you, good reader. Because I’m not writing this stuff in an attempt to land a sweet deal writing for Conan O’Brien or Saturday Night Live. It’s about the art.* I do it for you. So I’m going to use every trick in my bag — imagining the audience naked, thinking about baseball, humming the theme to “Sanford and Son” — to get the job done and make sure your experience here lives up to the standard that you have naturally come to expect.

* -It’s not about the art. Follow me on Twitter at #whoreforanentertainmentcareer.**

**- Please, don’t.

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