Ups and Downs

Fortune is a fickle force. The day after Puntitas’ cartwheels of celebration, she received a rejection (form email with her name), and she received news that she did not get very far in the selection process of a job she’d expected to interview for. Then today she received birthday flowers though her birthday was several weeks ago. Ups, downs, and ups again—good thing chocolate is both a reveler and a consolation.

Puntitas has been knitting socks, Three pairs in a two-week period. She wasn’t feeling particularly poetic, so she couldn’t get up the nerve to read her latest set of revisions. Today, in a moment of heel annoyance, she pulled up a file and discovered a burst of poetic mojo.

The incoherent poem she’s been revising is pretty much done now, after more brutal trimming and lots of editing. She used the search-and-replace feature to strip out the hard returns and put pipes in their places. Then she edited as if she were reading prose, and used search-and-replace to turn the pipes into hard returns again. The poem is still one or two readings away from official “finished” status, but Puntitas doesn’t think the future changes will be significant. In fact, she went ahead and put today’s version into the book-length manuscript.

She also read another poem, the one she recently added to one of the books. She made a few minor changes, more editing than revision, and one change that is significant indeed. The literal situation described is one person helping another. Puntitas has worried that, given other details, the person being helped will be perceived as helpless, an interpretation which can obscure the point of the piece. Today Puntitas found a way of redirecting the reader’s perception. She named the character after a well-known literary figure, a truly inspired decision since the character in the poem is doing the sorts of things the literary character is known for. She’s feeling much better about that poem now too.

There’s only one more poem (already in the books) that Puntitas wants to reread and significantly revise, and there’s one draft and one idea she’d like to develop for these books, but she’s feeling comfortable about sending the manuscripts out as they are.

Puntitas reads _The Shadow Wife_ by D. Eden and more of _The Art of Setting Stones_ by M. P. Keane, which is beautiful, but too slow for someone who is often sleepy.

Penelope and Life Choices

These last couple of weeks have been quietly eventful for Puntitas. After Jerk and Spurt, her sticky handed drain-on-tax-payer-money of a boss, offered his interpreters and translators the chance to sign a three-month extension of the contract he hasn’t bothered to honor for about two years, Puntitas notified him that she wasn’t planning to renew. Since said notification was sent via email, Puntitas wasn’t present when he received it, but she imagines the scene involved wild desktop dancing and choruses of “Ding-Dong the Witch Is Dead,” because, a few short hours later, Puntitas’ voicemail included several messages from regulars whom she hadn’t worked with recently, telling her they’d miss her and wishing her luck. Sadly, J&S isn’t as adept at processing contractors’ payments as he is at being petty and useless.

About the decision itself, Puntitas had come to it long before she told her boss, but it was a decision that was ninety percent made, a die that wanted very much to remain uncast. Puntitas genuinely enjoys her work, and she thinks it’s important, so she finds a lot of satisfaction in it, but what convinced her not to renew were the obvious realizations (1) that the contract was being extended only for three months and (2) that J&S would simply continue to ignore the inconvenient parts of the agreement as he has with the current version. Giving notice was an easy decision to make once Puntitas articulated that for herself: if both parties aren’t willing to play by the contract’s rules, signing is an empty ritual.

The process of searching for reasons to renew was slow. Puntitas used her idle waiting room time to knit socks, a pair of anklets with short-row heels she’s near-completed and frogged four or five times since March because they didn’t fit just right or because some technique or other didn’t turn out very well. At some point in all of that, she lost interest in finishing the pair but continued to work on them because knitting small projects that can be picked up and put down at a moment’s notice is the best use of her waiting room time.

So she knit and frogged desultorily, and Penelope came to mind, the woman who spent twenty years weaving and unweaving her work to put off marrying one of the louts occupying her home while her husband had adventures and got laid. Even as a sister fiberista, Puntitas has always thought those twenty years had to have been tedious in the extreme.

But over the last few months, Puntitas has realized that the tedium gives way to an idle kind of curiosity. It’s probably the minds way of engaging with something. Puntitas went from just whipping up a pair of socks; to keeping her hands busy; to trying different pattern stitches, wrapping techniques, cast-ons, and bind-offs; to experimenting with methods for interacting with the work itself (holding the needles, counting the rounds, sliding the loops along the shafts, etc)—all minor variations on more finished results. It became the Zen of knitting with a twist of hyper neurosis.

Puntitas’ haphazard penchant for knitting things with some flaws, but not too many screeching errors, gave way to a desire for perfection (esthetic balance in the stitches used, tidiness of construction in the heels, etc.), , without caring about how long it took to make the socks. Then as she frogged the heel back for the second or third time, she discovered that her sense of perfection had changed, less emphasis on the esthetic balance and more on the tidiness in the heel construction. Last year, she came up with a short-row heel of her own. It does a better job of covering the holes, but it’s not very elegant in its appearance, so she’s been shifting back and forth between smoothing out glitches in the more usual short-row heel and tinkering with her variation.

And all that tinking and frogging gave Puntitas the calm to think about whether to sign the contract or not, and when she finally gave notice, she felt that sense of lightness and relief that indicates it’s the right decision for her, but she’s also scared because … well, she’s essentially quitting her job in the middle of a recession. She’s taken a few steps in the way of preparation by working a little harder at picking up other jobs and other clients, but work will be slow for the next year or so while she builds up a new set of regulars and while something else comes along. Ultimately, Puntitas wants to work for someone other than herself because she wants benefits, stability, and less travel.

The subject of her more recent waiting-room-sock jams has been that one of the positives of leaving a job voluntarily is that the leaving becomes associated with encouraging memories. Several of her regulars have been very sweet, giving Puntitas kind words, small gifts, and even a little party, so she presently feels strong and confident enough to find another job, emotions that she knows won’t last. They’re the same feelings she has every time she sends out a book manuscript or a batch of poems: she is certain beyond a doubt that something will be accepted, but it’s not.

And that’s another thing Puntitas is in a funk about. Her book-length manuscripts keep getting rejected (one or two more form letters since last post), and so do the individual poems (one more letter to a journal she’d forgotten all about). She knows this is part of the game, and she knows she just needs to keep sending out, but she’s feeling no real motivation right now, and she’s feeling entitled to a good sulk about it.

Puntitas reads _The Year of Living Biblically_ by A. J. Jacobs, _Gods Behaving Badly_ by Marie Phillips, and _the Secret Pearl_ by M. Balogh.

Puntitas Has an Interlude with the Muse

A friend and I went to hear Naomi Shihab Nye read her work tonight. She was great. Her poetry is accessible, vivid, and compelling, using ordinary things to talk about profound truths.

I came home feeling poetical and wishing I could write something as simple and meaningful as her work. Then I sat down at my computer to check my email, startled by a lovely message from a yarn craft list about knitting hexagons and all the wondrous possibilities in such a simple form. I experienced that writerly burst of energy that turns to restlessness or … crime (it’s a real possibility) … if it isn’t channeled into some aspect of a manuscript. I typed out a rough draft of a poem (my first in months) about knitting (a subject I’ve wanted to take on for the longest time). I’m so excited that I would spend the next couple of weeks revising if I didn’t have my translation due.

I’ve written as much as I can now to get the general structure of the poem down and to create toe holes for the expositional details that give the knitting meaning beyond the literal. The actual knitting part needs little revision. Most of those details are concrete and clear. But the other parts (the thing I’m comparing to knitting) need lots of work. I plan to do some knitting to refine some of the images and details that connect the knitting and nonknitting elements of the piece, but the bulk of the revision involves developing the thing for which knitting hexagons is a conceit and whithout which I’d just have a set of rambling instructions.

I really enjoy the discussion list that gave me the idea for the poem. We talk yarn and drift off into other realms. When I told them about my book rejection, one person commiserated with me by saying something like, “That’s awful. It’s like being told you have an ugly child.” that felt so exactly right that it made me laugh and went a long way toward cheering me up.

Puntitas reads _the Abduction_ by M. Gimenes.

Personal Fictions

Puntitas has been away from her blog because she has been cherishing a number of fictions that make no sense at all except to individuals living in denial. I’m not ready to get into them now. They’re material for another post. So I’ll resume as if my last post had been earlier in the week and backtrack later.

I do need to understand denial and the habit of sustaining personal fictions because a couple of my protagonists engage in this sort of behavior (shocker). One, the protagonist of my novella, in fact, has a breakdown when she discovers that her reality is an elaborate façade constructed by herself. In my own case, façades have to do with what is most convenient.

One issue, for example, is that, as someone who is self-employed, I don’t have health insurance. Yes, I can buy it at a high price (six to seven hundred dollars a month) and with a high deductible (twenty-five hundred dollars) because I’m over weight, which puts me at risk for many possible illnesses, and because I have the preexisting condition of seasonal allergies, which potential insurers consider an “incurable” disease. But if I do that, I spend what I do already on medical expenses plus an extra seven to eight thousand dollars a year on healthcare I don’t actually use, leaving me to put off such things as the purchase of a new washing machine for another time and another place.

My current health insurance complaint is that I just discovered I’ll need four thousand dollars worth of dental work, something not generously covered in most plans anyway, along with the cost of a visit to a gum specialist and two probable extractions. So far, it has been convenient for me to think about what I need and want to do with the money when the reality is that my flabby forty-two-year-old body is probably as deteriorated as my mouth—a thought that leads to a long, long series of depressing musings about the money I’ll be spending over the next few years and … well … mortality and what not.

Some of the “what not” has been sparked by my father’s latest tussle with death. He rolled off the roof and landed on concrete while putting Christmas lights up in November (let that be a warning to all premature Christmaculators). Save for a few minutes of unconsciousness, lots of bleeding, fourteen staples to the back of the head, and massive bruising, he survived unscathed: a miracle, to be sure. The chaos of anger, fear, sorrow, gratitude, and all the other undefined feelings came days after the event. The whole how-would-life-have-changed-if-the-scans-and-x-rays-hadn’t-turned-out-so-well inner monolog is going on still.

What do my dad’s roll and my pending root canals and other procedures have to do with denial–you ask. The former prompts me to face a major job related decision I’ve been putting off for about two years, and the latter is yet another instance of how well I indulge my wishful thinking, despite all logic.

But back to the writing. I did nothing until last weekend. I wrote a poem I’ve been thinking about since my mother and I visited my sister at the end of September. I’ve had the idea in my head and a few lines since then, but I didn’t have enough to start writing until a couple of weeks ago. I wrote the bulk of the initial draft last weekend. I’m still in the phase where I think the poem is brilliant and should be published by anyone and everyone, so I need to wait a few weeks to read it again more objectively.

On a positive note, I learned to knit gloves during my hiatus. I’ll post a pattern eventually. I’m still working out the kinks.

Puntitas reads The Discipline_ by M. Anderson, _The Power of the Dog_ by D. Winslow, _The Heretic’s Daughter_ by K. Kent, _The Brass Verdict_ by M. Connelly, _The Pillars of the Earth_ by K. Follett, _The 19th Wife_ by D. Ebershoff, and _The Keepsake_ by T. Gerritsen.

Coming To

I don’t remember when I last posted or what I was going on about because the previous month has been a blur of chaotic hormones and the same old neuroses, my last period creating more misery than its recent sisters. Then after two weeks of almost no sleep, serious mood problems, and a manic obsession with my knitted shoe project (Puntitas has made a pair and is very, very proud of them though she does admit that improvements are called for), I can think again and have started catching up with ALL the various things I didn’t do for a month. For example, I translated thirty-two pages in four days (between interpreting appointments, reading, knitting, and general lounging around), something I’ve done only once or twice. The translations need polish, but the bulk of the work is done.

I hadn’t at all been inspired to do any writing or even to sit at the computer and tap out a rough framework for the poem made from large chunks of other pieces not bad enough to actually delete. I did think about it, but the writing didn’t seem very important, hardly more than verbal masturbation, so I resisted the urge to pull up a file and turn writing into a negative experience.

What I did instead was to delete a lot of teaching files. I haven’t held forth at the front of a classroom since May of 2006, and since I’m not sure that I’ll be doing that any time soon, given the current economy, I decided that cleaning out the hard drive might help put me in a more realistic frame of mind, where trying to find stable and benefitted employment is concerned. Though painful, deleting, deleting, deleting was overall a good thing, a way of breaking free from the sort of hope that anchors, when sailing is what is best. It has been one of the great ironies of my life that positive change happens when I don’t have the burdens of hope. I’ve always wanted to write about that, but so far, I haven’t found the right conceit.

Anyway, I’m being productive again in things not related to writing, and as of yesterday, when I finished reading the Cheever book, I’ve been feeling interested in writing again. The small community of writers she describes—Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, and Thoreau—are great because they wrote about themselves-their ideas and experiences—and because those ideas needed to be written about. Fuller wrote about the plight of women; Alcott wrote about their day to day. Emerson wrote about the potential value of nature for an urbanized individual; Thoreau wrote about the experience of it. Hawthorne wrote at a remove, reacting to the other four. It occurred to me as I read that some of my experience is of value in that it is representative of a certain kind of person and of a certain kind of experience, and for that reason, it is worth writing.

Now to hang on to that while I finish getting all this other work done.

Puntitas reads _The Gathering_ by A. Enright, _Fidelity_ by T. Perry, _American Bloomsbury_ by S. Cheever, and _The Wonga Coup_ by A. Roberts.

Trying to Get Back to Work

During its productive phases, a writer’s head needs to have room to forget the world is out there. It needs the world to find material and to verify it, but once the mind starts the process of turning emotions, impressions, and ideas into linear text, it needs to know that the world is unimportant enough to detach from.

Lately, my head has been a mess. My dad has been ill. Walking pneumonia, high blood sugars, and shingles—all of these conditions need to be attended to, and all are the source of concern (he’s not a young man after all), but because he’s active and generally healthy, none are reason for alarm either. He was given an antibiotic for the pneumonia and responded beautifully. The only problem was that his blood sugar, which he ordinarily manages very well, went through the roof, so he had temporarily to take a second diabetes medication while his body dealt with the pneumonia. Then as he was finishing up with the antibiotics, he developed shingles, which are supposed to be even more painful in the elderly.

I’ll preface the next set of comments by saying that my tendency toward the dramatic comes entirely from my father. I have no doubt that he felt miserable, and I have no doubt that he felt fear. There were several days when I felt fear for him and for myself as well. But mustering sympathy without indulgence or snappishness was quite the feat because he was a difficult patient and a perpetual reenactment of Camille, each cough and twitch prompting what in his mind was a moving death-bed scene, the phrase “one-way ticket to the other side” figuring prominently on the script.

Since he coughed and twitched by night as well as day, he soliloquized and managed stage property (kitchen utensils, doors, television remotes, and other noise making devices) whenever the spirit moved him, which meant that no one else slept very well for about three weeks.

Finally, he’s back to good health. We’re expecting the prognosis to be official later today, when he goes to his last follow-up appointment. Everyone’s been sleeping for a week, and the one-way ticket to the other side comes up only when lawn mowing and other chores are mentioned in his hearing.

The first week of my father’s illness, I was concerned, as much by his health as by my mother’s inability to distinguish between his real complaints and those brought on by fear or a need for attention. After that, my sense was that things were under control for him, that he twice needed to go back to the doctor for a med adjustment, and that less drama would probably make him feel better. Still, the niggling uncertainty that I could be mistaken had a way of pushing other thoughts aside, especially as I felt increasingly certain that the drama was the product of an ever growing fear.

my concern for myself during that and subsequent weeks was that I wasn’t sleeping well and was having greater trouble focusing at work and at the computer. Fortunately, I had few jobs during those weeks. I was able to do a little writing, and I did a little revision. But I got almost no work done on either my big translation or editing project. This week, when my dad is going about his normal routine, I’m incredibly sleepy and exhausted. I’ve done a lot of editing, but some days are more productive than others, and I’m suddenly experiencing lots of wrist pain, which I’ve been treating by taking OTC antiinflammatories and resting the hand. Yes, for most of this ordeal, I’ve been unable to knit much or to type except when necessary, so the two things that can help me keep my head on straight have not been available to me.

The only real writing news is that I reread some poems and was happy with the revisions. I’m still tweaking the really long one, but I’m thinking that it’s good enough and close enough for my purposes now. The other longish poem I’ve been working on a lot this spring is frustrating me. The last time I worked on it, I noticed a gap about three fourths of the way through, so I added some back-story. Then I read it about a week ago and thought the back-story was not necessary. Confused, I sent it to a friend of mine for her to walk through her reading of it with me. She’s very good at that, so I’m sure that will help. Finally, I did read one poem, where the revisions did not help. I’ve made some changes, so I’ll need to reread it again.

Puntitas reads _The Soul Thief_ by C. Baxter, _The Secret Magdalene_ by K. Longfellow, and _At Some Disputed Barricade_ by A. Perry.

Fear and Procrastination

Fear has so many odd manifestations. Yesterday I finished my long poem, one of the few truly new ones. It turned out to be nine pages. I spent much of the day fiddling around on the web, not returning to it until three hours into my computer session. It’s done I think though several weeks from now, I suspect I’ll have to do some tweaking.

Today I spent six hours searching for the right sock yarn. I was hoping for a double-knit weight in mostly cotton, but I’m thinking pure cotton (for toe, foot, and heel) and pure acrylic (for cuff) can work too.

I did that because today is the day I had set for myself to read the last finished poem, one that is three pages long and is also new. Finally, I read it ten minutes ago, and it really is mostly done. All of the pieces are there, except maybe for one that should go in around three fourths of the way in. Most of the language is working, so most of the work to be done is surface level stuff, but the long technical section in the middle is still hard to follow and still sounds like an excerpt from an encyclopedia article. Additionally, I may need to build more of the speaker’s history into the poem, and I will delete some details that seem to come out of nowhere.

Thinking in concrete terms like that is so much more manageable than putting off reading a draft that, after weeks of work, may be awful. That’s the terror of the process, confronting the possibility of failure. What complicates it even more is that the fear generates energy. Some people clean house. I spent my weekend recreating a lace pattern from a shawl that gets wider and wider in order to make a shawl that gets narrower and narrower. I spent the weekend dwelling on the fact that several people my parents’ age have died recently. I spent my weekend mustering up the courage to sue my current employers. The energy generates more fear.

Just reading the poem after so much procrastination is a relief. I’m trying not to dwell on the fact that I’m not quite at the tweaking phase (well, I’m tweaking, but not making small changes to the poem), and I’m trying to focus on the fact that I managed to make the previous piece not-sound like an encyclopedia article.

I definitely have work ahead of me.

Puntitas has been too unfocused to read much of anything.

The Shawl

I’ve been down with another bug (chills, vomiting, and diarrhea), and before that, I was doing some high speed knitting for a friend, so I feel a little disconnected from my writing and from this blog.

That isn’t a bad thing necessarily. A clear head will help me with the last few poems of the book, and once that’s out of the way I can focus on fiction for a while and start planning the next book of poems.

The knitting episode did keep me from becoming discouraged about the book. I was making a shawl for a friend who is having a vow renewal ceremony this weekend. I wanted her to have it before the ceremony in case she decided to wear it, but I only had four weeks to get it done. That first week, I made good progress, working up between 100 and 150 grams of sport weight yarn. Then I didn’t work on it for another week because I got sick, then again for another because I was cracking down on the poetry. Finally, I picked it up again, and I knit morning, noon, and night to get the remaining 250 to 300 grams in.

The last couple of skeins were hard going, The shawl was in the Faroese style (triangular beginning at the center top), so each row got longer, and by the end, each skein covered only two repeats of the pattern stitch. I kept asking myself whether I really wanted to give my friend this gift, whether it really had to be this size, whether the vow renewal wouldn’t work just as well in August, whether I couldn’t keep the damn thing since she didn’t know of its existence. I’d sit and knit and think that the pattern stitch was unattractive, that the work was uneven, that the fabric was too drapy, that giving the thing away was embarrassing.

Then I finished, and I put it on, and my mother said it was beautiful in a tone that sounded like she really thought it was, and I believed it was less ugly. I called my friend right then to let her know I’d be dropping it off later in the week so that I couldn’t chicken out and hide the thing, and today, when she received it, she sounded pleased with it too.

I thought—hope—my book would be like the shawl, awful in that final stretch, but worth the effort in the end.

Puntitas reads _In the Wake of the Plague_ by N. F. Cantor.

Regrouping

For most of my life, I was organized in the extreme. I used to be one of those people whom the small minded mock for alphabetizing CDs and arranging clothes by type, weather, and degrees of formality. I found order natural and convenient, and it was easy to maintain. Then one day about ten years ago, I popped a sphincter, and all my lovely anal retention ended in a splat.

Today I engaged in the first feat of spontaneous organizing I’ve done in years. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks: sorting through the boxes and mega envelopes of yarn, semi-completed projects, random audiobooks, and other oddments stacked to shoulder height behind the comfy reading chair in my bedroom. A few times, I’ve even felt that I would do it the minute I stopped reading email or talking on the phone, but something, probably the laziness alluded to in my previous post, prevailed so masterfully that I’d manage to forget to head straight for my room, pull the chair forward, and dig right in.

Today, however, I just did it. I didn’t even think about it until I was in the middle of an email to a friend. Out of nowhere, I said I’d do it, and two hours later, when I finished replying to messages and simultaneously reached the end of a knitting row and disk in my current book, I turned off the player, got to my feet, and got to it.

I thought I knew what was back there before I started— a couple of tote bags with knitting projects, a few audiobooks, and some yarn boxes—but when I actually started moving things around, I discovered I had enough unopened audiobooks to fill a plastic container that is two by two by three feet in size, half a dozen tote bags, twice the number of boxes of stash yarn than I ever imagined, and a nightmare of baskets and miscellanea, including four sealed packages of cassette head cleaner and a battery operated roll-up piano keyboard, which can make a perfect doormat.

In terms of clearing the brush, I threw out lots of plastic bags but mostly I did what my mother refers to as shuffling, audiobooks in one place, notions in another, yarn in a third, etc. I found lots of needles (when you’ve had an Addi, you can’t go back), projects, and books I thought I’d lost, some beginner knitting projects that were great teachers and are now good garbage, and a small amount of classroom junk that made me cry a little, both because I’ve been on hiatus for a couple of semesters and because, the last time I taught, I had a really humiliating experience.

By the end of it all, the only apparent difference was that the piles didn’t seem as precarious as before. They were all still there, all still shoulder high, all temporarily made to stay put for who knows how long; nonetheless, it felt good to vanquish chaos, to reclaim a little order, to have a moment of contact with someone I used to be, someone I liked and miss even though the person I am now is in so many ways stronger than she was, and I felt good because, for the first time in years, I’ve felt the kind of energy I had when I did a lot of writing, when I wrote because I had something to say and because my fingers just twitched to be at the keyboard.

Puntitas reads _Confessions of a Jane Austin Addict_ by L. V. rigler.

Step 1

Bill W. is a wise, wise man: admitting to a problem is the first step in finding its solution. This week I admitted to two friends that I am lazy.

I came to that conclusion last weekend while having a conversation with someone. She teaches high school, attends graduate school, and has managed both to translate a short story collection, which she started working on in October (right around the time I started this blog), and to continue with her own writing, which amounts to a completed book of short stories, short listed for an award. She’s a nice person, so Puntitas is harboring no petty jealousy or ill will. Instead, I have been pondering the fact that I have all kinds of time to write, but nothing to show for it.

As is so often the case lately, knitting has once again tossed me a line of practical advice. I just finished listening to two yarn podcasts. In one, Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Millhone (alphabet) mysteries, is being interviewed about the little knitting and crocheting references in her books. At one point, she talks briefly about her writing process, saying that she sits at her computer much of the day, asking herself, “What if …?” in order to develop plot, character details, etc. My immediate realization (yeah, hang on to your seats: the stunningly obvious is coming up) was that I don’t really sit down at my computer to write. Well, I do, but then I get lost in checking my email, visiting favorite web sites, checking more email, and googling for obscure work related terms, exotic recipes, and the occasional piece of writing research. I’m almost always tired by the time I actually finish doing all of that, so buckling down to any writing at that point is … toooooo muuuuuuch.

The other podcast was an interview with Vicki Square. While discussing the research involved in her book on kimono inspired knits, she said two things that stayed with me. One was that she had to really make a conscious effort to focus on the current project because she had the tendency to let herself wander off into other things. The other was that she also had to make herself stop researching and creating in order to be done; otherwise, she would still be reading books, looking at kimono, and designing tops.

As I’ve written in other posts, knowing when to finish is hard for me. Part of the problem is feeling confident that a piece is complete technically and thematically, but just as significant is the psychological willingness to let go of a poem or story, to send it out into the world and believe in it as living, breathing progeny, to escape the mystique that great works of literature take time and serious thought, not a moment or two of musish intoxication. The monkey wrench is that, while I have written some published pieces ploddingly, most have been muse born highs, and I’m really resisting the idea that I have to rely on the muse. Yes, yes, I know that, if I write regularly, etc., I invite the muse, etc., but the presence of the muse in the equation undermines the concept that writing is a disciplined profession and business, like everything else.

What reflecting on my conversation with my peer writer and translator did was to help me understand—yet again—that writing is a little of both: that it must be approached with some reverence for the muse but with a strong sense of project and timeline. I’ve also run up against the bold reality—another “yet again”—that I need to focus. I’d love to write a book of sock patterns and another one on capes, and part of my distraction is that, realistically, I’m putting more time and energy into those manuscripts than into my official writing.

The practical upshot of all of this is that I have plugged my note taker in to recharge the battery and will work on my extraterrestrial story this weekend. Another one of my friends helped me get a firm grip on where to take it by articulating clearly and succinctly her views on Martians and the transcendent, thoughts which mirror my own exactly. A couple of days after that, while in the shower, I thought of a plot line that would better enable the protagonist to play out her inner drama.

Puntitas reads _The Secret River_ by K. Grenville.