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Not so shiny: Plenty of drama for Buffy creator Joss Whedon
– Bernard Zuel, Sydney Morning Herald, August 25, 2010

More seriously, he says that the cancellation of Firefly not only made him “the sourest man alive” but had an unexpected and potentially devastating side effect.

“I stopped having ideas, which for me is an extremely rare experience,” Whedon says. “It was something much more subtle [than losing hope], it took away my ability to think in terms of episodic television. For years.”

[snip]

“You have to have a certain naivety, almost Memento-like, and get bitch-slapped over and over. You’ve got to go in with an enormous amount of confidence because everyone is going to question everything you do. You have to be the person who believes when nobody else does.”

It seems that rather than the five stages of grief, for writers there is just one stage: wiping your memory and starting again, like the characters in Dollhouse.

“Yeah, pretty much. Anger, anger, anger. Anger. Bargaining,” he deadpans.

Reading today about how Angelina Jolie is currently the world’s most influential celebrity (& let’s not pause to wonder what she’s influencing, exactly — maybe people really are doing more about refugees now. Or maybe they’re just copying her hairstyle) leads me to wonder:

Does the world seem smaller when you have that much power?

Or bigger?

Yay! For Will Self:

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn’t faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I’d go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don’t write I’m not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

– Will Self, Guardian UK

Nobody told me writing wasn’t meant to be enjoyable. (Actually, a lot of people did, but they seemed a little glum so I ignored ‘em.)

Though I can certainly understand the bulk of the comments about the day-in/day-out work of a selling writer, it seems to me that if you really want to do something miserable, there are plenty of quite horrific other day jobs out there. I think I’ve had a few of ‘em myself.

… trade yer…!

(Thanks to J. for the link!)