Lamb Of God vocalist Randy Blythe has finished the first draft of his upcoming memoir Dark Days. The frontman has taken to the Tumblr account dedicated to his book to detail what it was like to write his very first book. The excerpt below makes one thing clear: it was not an easy task to undertake. You can read the full post here.
Contrary to my ridiculously self-assured assumptions, I did not write the book with the greatest of ease. I did not breeze through it with style and grace. I did not just sit down, start typing, and watch the words appear before me like magic. I struggled hard with it, every single step of the way. And not only did I fail abysmally to give the book writing process a Bruce Lee-like Fingers of Fury typing beat down, in very short order I began to manifest every clichéd writerly behavior I had ever read about. Wild mood swings. Long periods of depression. Inexplicable and overwhelming urges to get up from my desk and do housework. A bad case of Ye Olde Imposter Syndrome. Multiple trips to the grocery store in one day for entirely unnecessary single items, things like hot sauce and hummingbird feeder nectar. Lengthy journeys down the cyber-rabbit hole after I stopped writing to look up some historical tidbit pertinent to my book, only to wind up an hour or two later on some ridiculous website dedicated to some grotesque “fitness model” internet celebrity I had never heard of. The only two things I didn’t do that a lot of writers seemed compelled to do were: #1- drink way too much (I mastered that skill a long time ago) and, #2- become “blocked” (actually, I did have a two week period when I couldn’t bring myself to write a single sentence, but a friend very dear to my heart had just died, so I cut myself some slack there).
All that other neurotic “writer” crap took root in my life like crabgrass, though. Yes, I was one of them now. How ridiculous.