Struck by the Cold

Last weekend, I was knitting and listening to a formula romance, a Regency tale very similar to the sort of stuff I read as a teen, when I was struck by a description of the cold. The scene was the one where the heroine is forced by inclement weather to take refuge in a shelter with the hero, much steaminess ensuing. In this variation, a looming storm causes her to take a shortcut across thin ice (bringing in the damsel in distress motif), which breaks, providing him the perfect opportunity to save her (heroic action leading to indebtedness), take her into the hunting shack, strip her clothes off in front of a blazing fire, and … well, the rest can be surmised (passion aroused or rekindled through circumstances beyond control—though why that isn’t a form of psychological abuse is a subject for a novel I plan to write after I finish the manuscripts on my hard drive).

I don’t remember what detail struck me, but it was one or maybe two that put the cold on my skin and into my hands. Two things happened:

1. I marveled at the power of language. I was fine one minute, knitting cozily in a well heated house. A few sentences later, I was tucking my fingertips under my legs to warm them, noticing they weren’t cold only after I pressed them on my palms.

2. I got an idea for a poem. I spent the rest of the weekend surfing the web for information on hypothermia, exposure, and other topics connected to my idea. I haven’t written anything. In fact, the idea as inspiration (as physical lightness) is gone, but I’m interested enough in it to try writing anyway. I’m not sure of the point of view. I had one notion of that when the idea first came to me, but as I read, that changed, and now it’s going back to the original.

My plan for the weekend is to update my NOTE TAKER in order to write a draft. I have other things I need to do (get a writing sample sent off and get some manuscripts ready for the mail), so I may not get to the draft by Monday. I don’t normally write anywhere except at this computer, Pax, a sturdy desktop in my office at home), but since I want to start writing on Chulo, the NOTE TAKER, I’m going to experiment drafting this poem on it.

Old habits are hard to break. The transition from writing by hand to typing into a keyboard was not easy. I’m expecting the transition from qwerty to Perkins to be rough too.

Past and Present

Because one of the therapists I work with told me there’s a place in town that shreds crap for three dollars per cubic foot, I spent most of Tuesday cleaning out my office. I got rid of some of the boxes and clothes baskets on the floor and all of the kindling under my computer keyboard.

On Wednesday, I woke up with incredible lower back pain, which was mild when I was merely standing, sitting or walking, but excruciating the second I tried reaching, bending, or doing any of the things one does when shifting from one position to another—really an unfortunate set of limitations where the bowels and bladder are concerned. Dressing was a long slow process, and managing shoes and socks involved third party assistance.

I spent the day sitting in a plywood frame, knitting a sock, and finishing The Woman in White. I don’t usually take this long to finish a book, but this month has been a month of mood swings and distractions, so progress has been slow.

It was interesting to read a Victorian version of the sort of light reading I do now. Characters really haven’t changed much: the brave hero, the smart sidekick, the intriguing villain, the damsel in distress. Nowadays the smart sidekick would be the heroine and the damsel would be someone’s sister or dear but useless friend. I like the multivoice narrative and plan to use it sooner or later, and I was gratified to discover that such familiar motifs as evading the tail and the fruitless recourse to the authorities have been with us for over a hundred fifty years.

What was more surprising still was how much more modern the novel felt than the literary works of the era. This one talked about everyday things–like indoor plumbing, matches, the business of going out to work, the practical points of day-to-day etiquette—in ways that were far less ethereal than anything George Eliot or even the more commonplace Charles Dickens put together, and the characters themselves had a sense about them of being modern people that made them indistinguishable from their twenty-first century counterparts.

By Thursday I was well enough to help with the Thanksgiving Day preparations (i.e., slicing, chopping, kneading, tossing, and yes, dishwashing).

Today I’m almost sound of back. I’m reading something called The Labyrinth While working on the same sock. I’m hoping that tomorrow I’ll have finished the sock and feel well enough to write.

Art As Metaphor for Art

Today is a day of completions. The maestro finished replastering the house and painting the trim, and I finished my seamless slippers. Both events are worthy of record because

• both began weeks ago,
• both evolved over time,
• both required input from others,
• both lapsed into immobility and meditation,
• both concluded satisfactorily after a low point of frustration near the end.

The work on the house began in early October. It started with a simple replastering/repainting (both substances shooting out of a compressor hose at the same time). After a week or so of rest, my mom thought it would be a good time to fix the sagging overhang above the stoop, cover a brick wall with the same paint/plaster mixture as the rest of the house, frame an outdoor shrine, properly finish the eaves below the roofing, and whitewash the trim. The maestro did it all—between real construction jobs and mysterious absences.

As the house progressed, the sound of sawing, filing, scraping, brushing drifted down in short, unobtrusive puffs, and I worked on my swatches, read patterns, thought about drab Amanda, a teacher of what used to be called Home Economics. I imagined her knitting some slippers of her own in a glitzy rayon blend for Hernan’s design gallery. Yes, he is a designer of women’s clothing.

She would do exactly as I was doing: sit over the slippers, her needles idle, reviewing what she knows, brooding—very much the antithesis of Ursula, a short story character who went from poet to knitter during my last bout of revision. Ursula casts on, experiments, frogs, her mind elsewhere.

Amanda is constant, steady. That is her predominant characteristic. She perseveres with her work, perseveres with her secret love of Hernan, perseveres with her theories about her sister, perseveres with her job and her seething obedience at home, perseveres.

I haven’t quite figured out what Ursula’s thang is, what makes her give up her craft, what motivates her very strong, very negative reaction to another character: protectiveness, scorn, pity, satisfaction.

I’m at the low point of frustration with the short story. With Amanda, I’m at immobility and meditation, but I’ve got the maestro to draw inspiration from: plodding, intermittent, and unobtrusive. The slippers are a good symbol to take strength from too.

While Not Writing

The life of a writer is full of the tedious and ordinary. I liked that about the last Harry Potter book: the great hero of the wizzarding world spent at least half of the book sulking and cooling his heels in a succession of camp sites while he figured out what to do.

Most of my energy this week has been taken up by work. For the last two years, my employer has been reading parts of our contract literally and pretending other parts mean the opposite of what they say (i.e., the-whole-is-unrelated-to-the-sum-of-its-parts syndrome), so my coworkers and I have been banding together. Last night we met to plan strategy for a big meeting today. Before that, I just stewed and felt bitter, picking out elements of this situation for my novella, which is about an awful person with a more awful boss.

When I drafted it, I had a boss I didn’t like, so many of her attributes made their way into the manuscript. Since then, I’ve had other noisome employers, and over the years, more of my characters, like the boss’ secretary, who were nondescript in the original draft, absorbed their personalities as well.

Makes me question scholars who spend their careers tracking down the source of this character or that. In my own case, I steal details from people who embody a Type, recreate the characters or moments that help me understand how to represent something, or amalgamate people so I can vent all my puke and pus.

But I started by commenting on how ordinary life is between writing sessions, how easy it is to get sidetracked by going to work, planning the month’s expenses, and remembering that this weekend the toilet must be scrubbed. I’ve only thought about writing once or twice since my last post and only fleetingly while confessing to a couple of friends that I have a blog, and really, those giggly admissions aren’t actual thoughts about writing.

The first writerly thought I had came to me Tuesday morning. I’m forty-one and have matching skin, so moisturizer has been integrated into the hygiene routine. When I got out of the shower, I realized that the single remaining droplet would not meet my needs. I went to work sans dermal hydration, and as soon as my first appointment was out of the way, I hurried over to the nearest drugstore, replenished, and slathered myself flexible as soon as I got back in the van.

Not a woman to wear make up, I had my first moment of sisterhood with the millions of women who put on their faces on their way to work and touch up in staffrooms and on lunch breaks the world over. Until then, I had never imagined writing about anyone who would bother with that because I could never imagine her leaning over the makeup counter deciding on the shades. That is, I didn’t know where she’d be coming from, What she would be doing after the purchase, and whom she’d have in mind as she chose (herself or the people who would see her).

But suddenly, I was her, standing in front of the shelves of bottles, tubes, and jars, comparing labels, deciding that anti-redness is good, but anti-wrinkle, premature. I had a tiny twinge of sympathy for Gabriela, her cosmetics boxes, and her pleasure at seeing herself as even better than she is, and a smaller moment of annoyance with drab Amanda, whose plain, round face rises like a watery moon when she can be a sun.

The other writerly thought came at today’s meeting. One of my coworkers objected to an issue. He railed so theatrically that I thought, “If he were a character in a book, he would not be believable.” Funny how some fiction is more believable than fact and some fact less believable than fiction.

I did have one of those I’m-a-poet-and-I-can’t-help-it moments while I was listening to him. His railing took the form of long impassioned pleas, lots of emotional appeals and personal attacks. the whole thing went along the lines of “Here I am: just trying to do an honest day’s work in the best way I know how, when I find that my own friends are stabbing me in the back, even though I soldier on …, punctuated by the refrain, “But little did I know that there was an invisible hand.” At one point, when he seemed to be at a loss for words, I prompted flatly, “The invisible hand.”

Getting to Know the Book

The working title is Fat Girl. Yeah, I know, it’s awful and politically incorrect. At the time I started, I needed a title that would help me keep track of the book’s controlling idea. When I was a student taking first- and third-year comp, I wrote papers called “Abortion” and “Sex Education: Why It’s So Important” for the same reason. Now that I read and write a lot more than I did then (and now that I’ve read ten years worth of student essays as stunning [and that really is the word] as my own), I know that the title and the controlling idea are two separate entities and that getting the former to express the latter takes a great deal of thought and experience. I also know that titles can be changed, so I’ll leave mine alone for now and deal with it later.

The plot is simple:

Amanda, the plain and plump, and Hernan have grown up together. She’s madly in love with him, but she knows he’s got a crush on her beautiful but disdainful sister Gabriela.

Those really are the only characters in the novel. A few other people (their parents, Gabriela’s boyfriend, some of the people who work with them) wander through the text from time to time, but they’re not well developed, serving as window dressing, as one of my professors would say.

The setting is a spacious house in an upscale neighborhood and an equally upscale boutique. Having just skimmed the first chapter, I think I’ll tone the upscale down. Most likely, I was going through my Danielle-Steel-diamond-cage phase.

The point of view is first person singular: Amanda. I remember that at one time it was third person, but I think I may have gone through the text and changed that twice.

The first paragraph is this. I’m not sure that I like it:

I stood on the landing above the great room surrounded by potted plants and cooking smells, looking myself over in the mirror beside the fanlight, and wondering if the dress I’d tried on in Hernan’s shop would really help. Hernan had said it would, and they always did. But scanning the homely face and the plump body in the oversized T-shirt with baggy jeans, I reminded myself that Illusions could only do so much.

The third paragraph may be a better start:

I shook my hips in the landing mirror, remembering the feel of the dress: the gauzy fabric, the dark background, the discrete white bouquet print. It had taken at least twenty pounds off me, and if I kept my back straight and my chin up, it actually gave me breasts, a waist, and hips.

Or deciding now may be premature.