• Forest for the Trees
  • THE FOREST FOR THE TREES is about writing, publishing and what makes writers tick. This blog is dedicated to the self loathing that afflicts most writers. A community of like-minded malcontents gather here. I post less frequently now, but hopefully with as much vitriol. Please join in! Gluttons for punishment can scroll through the archives.

    If I’ve learned one thing about writers, it’s this: we really are all alone. Thanks for reading. Love, Betsy

You Were Only Waiting for this Moment to Be Free

Let’s write the fuck out of this year. I mean balls to the wall. Lunch money! Pirate teeth! Bone marrow! The eastern chipmunk! The unfurled flag! I want to eat my pages. I want to go viral, I want to direct, I want to lose myself in a holy transference. When I go out to pick up my paper at 5:00a.m., the world is dark and quiet. The leaves scrape like my dad’s razor. Every day at exactly the same time, a man walks by swinging a blue flashlight to mark the way. Sometimes I wish he would take me away.

What the fuck is wrong with us?

16 Responses

  1. We’ve got this. Thanks for the encouragement. I am so tired of the naysayers. I almost gave up. We need that push to say one more day one more page. Balls to the walls, yes! Let’s go viral.

  2. Very timely mission. Two chapters into a second novel then ground to a halt. A vow to start anew tomorrow. On y va into the wilderness.

  3. That says it all, Betsy. Very succinct.

  4. Holy fuck balls, I love this post and all of your posts because not only can I read them, I can feel them in my old creaky bones. Let’s do it.

  5. What the fuck is wrong with us? I don’t know. I wish I knew. Deconstruction finally disassembling all social structures? The rancid, rotting remnants of the revolution of May ’68 stinking up the whole house? Too much teevee? The trivial pursuits of a pampered, rattled people? Uncountable billions of chickens coming home to roost? Choirs of fat ladies screaming on the stages of closed theaters, no one there to listen? The immense, immeasurable inertia of the learned helpless, unresponding? Is the world itself the handbasket it goes to hell in? We have entertained ourselves unto the precipice — do we fall or shall we jump? Does it matter? How do we make anything matter in the maelstrom?

  6. We’re good. Everybody else is fucked up. Time slips away.

  7. What’s wrong?
    Election fatigue? Covid fatigue? Upcoming holiday fatigue?
    Everyone I know is just plain tired.
    Maybe Pfizer can add a feel good stimulant to it’s magic vaccine? I’d vote for that.

  8. Writing longhand for the first time because it seems to be the only way I can keep going… roll on 2021.

  9. I humbly suggested nothing is wrong with this tribe. But there’s a whole population of Others, loudly proclaiming their craziness, who are such a distraction to the creative mind-set. Truly, an overload of potential characters, dialog and plot twists. Let’s take reassurance in the calendar: this year ends in 49 days. The party will be in my Big Back Yard.

  10. Read this in the midst of writing a book about the eastern chipmunk!

    • For real?

      • For real! I’m a squirrel biologist writing a nonfiction book about wealth in animals (for an academic press), but I’m including fictional stories about wealth in squirrels and one of the five squirrel characters is an eastern chipmunk. Just discovered “The Forest for the Trees”, thank god, which is how I found my way here!

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