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Back to Journal  « Bias Wars: Headline vs Copy | Incremental Soldiering | Eras End » Incremental Soldiering March 9, 2008 Obligatory head injury tag. My friend Steve turned me on to Jimmy Amadie, a jazz pianist with tendinitis and nerve damage so severe that he's "unable to play for more than five or six minutes at a time, on a piano whose keys are specially weighted to cushion his touch" (from a review of Amadie's Savoring Every Note). It'll take two years of working in these increments before he'll compose, record, and finish his album. With considerably less talent and with large concentrations of caffeine, I can manufacture (almost consistently) a similarly short period of relative lucidity/productivity each day, so I can steal back my productivity from the twin gods of STFU and Convalesce. This is how I've technically written something every day this year with unbelievably little to show for it. This is because the same rules apply as before the head injury: some writing days are (relative) winners, most aren't. It's just that now the writing windows are smaller and foggier. I'm never near my peak performance. And for the most part, words and thoughts still just won't do what I want them to do. Stupid words and thoughts. Would I be the first to write with colors? Not entirely convinced these last ten (!) weeks wouldn't have been just as well served had I purchased a video game console in December, but I have trouble seeing the difference between that and giving up. I owe too much of my sanity and identity to reading and writing. And if I understand correctly (and ha! that's unlikely these days), the athlete who fully rests after an injury comes back nowhere nearly as strong as the one who works at rehabilitation, pushes herself, and exercises those stubborn muscles. Which brings up the big assumption: that I'll come back from this. Except for those caffeine-grabbed moments (which hell can't be good for me in the long run), my ability to think clearly is worse even than it was last month. Now, that could be a perceptual issue; of course normal seems worse compared to the caffeine high. But even if I'm not getting worse, it's become pretty hard to believe I'm still getting better. Even assuming I could be good at something else... it's only because I've put nine years into it that I'm on cusp of being good at writing. My father died at 53 (and his father at 52), so that doesn't give me a lot of time to practice a second calling. On the other hand? If I'm ten years away from making headway on my next big pursuit? I should probably get started on that ASAP, huh? Filed under Brain Injury, Journal, Prose and Poetry, Vanity Smurf  
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Alex Wilson writes fiction and comics in Carrboro, NC. His work has appeared/will appear in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Rambler, Weird Tales, The Florida Review, Futurismic, Shimmer, ChiZine, FutureQuake, Pif, and Dragon. Locus Magazine has called him a "promising new writer," and Publishers Weekly also has nice things to say. Alex runs the audiobook project/podcast Telltale Weekly and the writer wiki Guidevines. He publishes the minicomic/zine Inconsequential Art. He is a 2006 Clarion graduate.  
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