...it comes in spurts.

I read and read and read. I can't seem to stop doing it lately. I learn something new and I think "well, that's interesting", and then I want to know more. So I read and read and read. I chew through information like a combine harvester through dilatory cropland-dwelling fauna. Eventually I get to the point where the information is just falling back out of my head as fast as I can shove it in, like a kind of reverse event horizon.

All that input and I feel like there needs to be some output. I don't like writing. I hate writing. I've heard the process described in many ways. Some people approach the task with alacrity and feel a sense of accomplishment when the task is complete. Others consider it a chore that must be gotten over with as quickly as possible.

I consider it not unlike vomiting. My brain starts to complain, and it usually happens when I am nowhere near a repository into which I might expel the offending words. So I ask, "can you hold it in?" and it says "no, I can't, I gotta do it noooow". So I sigh like a long-suffering parent and I take my brain someplace where it can throw up. It has to be someplace quiet so I can concentrate on the task at hand, and secluded because I don't like it when people watch me vomit, or write.

So I take whatever scrap of paper or notebook or napkin I managed to get ahold of and I sit there staring at it for a while, like you might stare at the toilet bowl when you know you've gotta disgorge and you're not looking forward to doing it. Then I write a few words, cross them out, write a few more, cross those out too...andthenwriteawholebunchofwordsreallyfuckingfast.

Once I get past the first couple sentences the vomi...the writing goes very smoothly. This is because I have almost always written the entirety of the piece in my head before I even found something to write on. I'll sit there, semi-catatonic, eyes unfocused and keyed completely out of reality. I will not usually speak when spoken to until my name is repeated three or four times, and when I do snap back I'm liable to be disoriented and fractious.

After that I usually read and reread what I wrote and marvel over how something that looked so good in my head could look like such utter crap in tangible form. A curious phenomena, and by "curious" I mean "endlessly fucking frustrating". So I arrange and rearrange, cross out this sentence and move that sentence up a few lines.

And then I wad the whole thing up and, in an interesting bisection of reality and metaphor, flush it down the toilet.