Über Critic

The Über Critic woke me up at 4. He's a huge help. Not only does he keep me from sleeping, he ridicules me! Neato. I normally get up before he does and crawl into a gossamer chair and write in the Dawn Zone and by the time he's ready to tear into me and tell me that I suck, I've got two pages I can shove right back in his face.

Sometimes it's a good idea to let the old boy have his say and get it out of his system. He mostly says the same thing over and over and he says the same things to all of us and he does tend to chose the sharp end of the knife, but after a while you can tell him, like a child, that that's enough and that he can sit in the corner because you've got some work to do.

However, if you keep him bottled up too long, he'll visit when you least want—like at 4.

I wrote that blog yesterday about blogging. So original. Ouu! A blogger blogging about blogging. (This is not me; this is him talking and I think it's time I gave Herr Über Critic a name… How about Dick. ;)

So Dick woke me up at 4 telling me how stupid it was to have written a blog with quasi-existential humor. Sartre is sooo funny, you know. "I exist." Hilarious. Dick went on to tell me that a blog is actually the truncated form of the word weblog. Now that's interesting, Dick. Thanks for the info.

The name weblog reminds me of Weebles (Weebles wobble but they don't fall down), which is a perfect metaphor for writing. The immediacy of throwing your stuff up on the webwall is gratifying, but I am used to writing something for, you know, a couple years and then I go back and reread what I wrote and man was the Über Critic right. The old writing is bad, rank, like duck guts rottin' in a barrel.

I don't know… I mean it's taken me four, five years to get up to the level of writing that most people would call crappy. Take Suzanne Young. A Coors Light and a free afternoon and she's banged out eight chapters; me on the other hand, I'm hitting maybe eight beers (good ones, not Coors Light, thank you very much) and maybe add eight light years and I got a couple of good pages, sort of.

So just before the alarm goes off, the Über Critic is still hammering away but he's coming around to the idea of blogging and he tells me, "Yeah, I think you should blog, Paul, I think it's a great idea. In fact, keep clicking that 'Publish This Blog' button, buddy, because that is the only thing you'll ever publish."

To which, I replied, "Thanks, Dick."

I got up and wrote this blog and I'm sure when I read it in a year, it'll suck. But I'll just make it better. It's an iBlog; not a weBlog. We write and write, but we don't fall down.