Temporarily Out of Commission

I’m sitting in my bedroom with a humidifier, trying not to cough. Illness is such a humbling experience, stripping us of all the airs of grandeur we dress in daily. This morning I got out of bed, smelling of menses and urine from when the cough was so bad I voided. I went straight to the shower, unable to stand myself. After that, it was breakfast, a conversation with my mother, and more cold medicine. I think I’m back to the yearly thing, the one that requires antibiotics and a stronger than usual cough suppressant. My mother says it’s time for the doctor, but since I haven’t had this long enough to obviate the lecture about how colds and viruses need a week to work themselves out of the body, I disagree. I want my $100.00 and my two-hours wasted to result in a prescription, not a follow-up (i.e., no prescription, one condescending lecture, an appointment for another $100.00 and two more hours wasted). By this point in my life, I know my own body and my own ailments well enough to distinguish between a cold and something more serious.

I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up here, in a blog about writing, except that Adrienne Rich has a poem about how coming out of a fever is like a resurrection, how you feel like a survivor afterward, like you left someone else behind. I always think of that poem when I’m sick because she captures exactly what it is to be well again.

I think too that it’s hard to write about the way the mind betrays us when the body doesn’t respond to whatever power we think we have over it. My novella is about a person who is falling apart in mind, body, and spirit. While each collapse has its source, the collapse of the body exacerbates the other two. It affects her judgment and her responses to things. When I had a friend read an early draft, she could not understand why the protagonist couldn’t just do this or that more obvious and normal thing, so I realized that I hadn’t done a good job of reproducing that mindset.

Speaking of mindsets, I started the story I mentioned last time. I got 345 words down. I don’t really know where I’m going with it. Usually I’ve got a good idea. But I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead with it because I’m afraid of talking myself out of it the way I talked myself out of writing the poem with the ball, the swing, and the woman at the foot of the stairs. This story is about extraterrestrials, not at all my cup of tea, so developing the right mindset for the characters and in turn for the reader is important.

Now I’m going to stop. I’m rambling far too much. Between the humidifier and the last of the cough medicine with codeine, I’m having to work less hard at not-coughing, so I may be able to sit here and knit while listening to one of my famous audio books. The one I’ve got on the player now is not very good. It’s called The Lost Diary of Don Juan. Normally, I love retellings, hearing the story from another character’s point of view, etc., but this very obviously made-for-film novel has so little to do with the play that I suspect its writer hasn’t actually read the source of his narrative. The two clearest details in support of that fact are that the galanteador of the retelling is in love with a woman named Ana while the one in the source play is in love with a woman named INEZ and that the Don Luis, best friend of Don Juan and betrothed to Dona Ana (with whom Don Juan has a payback quicky before meeting the saintly Dona INEZ), of the play is no where to be found in the novel. I haven’t read the poem by Byron, so it’s possible that this novel is based on that. Anyway, aside from giving me an excuse to be pedantic, this book is helping me understand that I stop reading altogether when I lose interest in something. I still can’t bring myself to not finish a book, however crappy, so I suppose that finishing it slowly is better than not finishing it at all.

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.

Hitching a Tow

Yesterday the van lost power while we were out in the middle of nowhere. I take that back. We were out on a dead stretch of San Joaquin Valley farmland on Avenue 7, which more or less marks the boundary between Fresno and Madera Counties from Highway 99 to Root 33. My father kept the van going by sheer force of will over a small rise, but even his oaths and flatulence couldn’t push it past the Avenue 7-1/2 Exchange, a y-intersection six miles outside of Firebaugh, California. Now that’s an ag town as tiny and forgotten as the one I grew up in.

When our vehicle was well and truly dead, we called the roadside assistance number on my sister’s auto insurance card, also with my name on it, and since the purpose of the drive was three-hours worth of work, I interpreted psych appointments from my cell phone between shorter exchanges with the road-side dispatchers who live in cities and don’t know how to transmit information like, “Standing out in a field next to a sign that says ‘Avenue 7-1/2 Exchange. Firebaugh 6 miles.’ … yes, we were heading westbound on Avenue 7 from Highway 99. … No, we’re nowhere near 99. We headed west. … Yes, it’s a field. … No, no fence: farmland. … right, no houses anywhere. … Yes, really, no houses. … Yeah, pretty empty out here.”

Of course, the tow truck arrived when I was working again, so I had to interrupt my rendition of “Any self-harming or assaultive behavior?” to deliver, “Ma, he’s asking if we want to ride with him or in the van.” Fortunately, my mother had the good sense to move herself, my father, and the tow truck driver up the road far enough for me to finish my phone call and observe HIPPA all at the same time.

The truck was huge. It had three foothold-like steps, each at least a foot apart, and two grab bars that were absolutely necessary for climbing up. The cabin ceiling was high, and the spaces between the seats were wide, except the one between the back of the driver’s seat and my knees (really my crotch since I had to sit with my knees splayed to be comfortable). Everything rumbled and rattled, and when the driver honked at lousy drivers or police officer friends, the bellow filled the cab and resonated in my chest. I was a little kid again, everything so big, loud, and exciting. Even the dull bong as the driver tapped his onboard computer’s touch screen with knuckles, elbows, and cell phone antenna gave me the same Wow! Neat! Sensation that children have, that I haven’t had since I was seven or eight and my parents would take us out to the local cherry orchard to pick one or two buckets of fruit.

I got so caught up in the shift in perspective that having to climb down those big grownup steps to hand over the insurance card and sign the slip felt like coming out of another person’s skin. I realized that one of the things that differentiates the adult point of view from the child’s is that ability children have of losing themselves in the sensory, without analysis, without agenda, without even the goal of escape. It’s a very different feeling from the desire to transcend or to saturate oneself. It’s so much more spontaneous than all of that.

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.

When I consider How My Light Is Spent (Some more)

Ah, the post partal effluvia has receded. I read my Miltonian sonnet last night, and it has ceased to be the quintessential Miltonian sonnet, the one he would have written if his sensibilities were mine.

Fortunately, I still like it. I revised, of course, more editing than real revision, and I haven’t changed my mind about sending it out soon.

Most of the changes involved adding more periods. The poem was basically two long sentences, and while grammatical and perfectly clear, they made the whole thing overly dense. I broke it up, not easy when meter and rhyme need to be taken into account. The effect is to make the tone more anxious, angrier. That wasn’t quite what I was going for, but I think it works, so I’ll probably leave it alone.

The most significant changes, the ones that were real revisions, happened in the last line. It sounded very cryptic to me sans post partal effluvia, so I spent over an hour writing and rewriting it. Now its sense is clearer, but I’m not sure that it will have any meaning to the general reader.

What does that mean?

I made the mistake of Googling the sonnet. The blog entries I read discuss it in very conventional terms: the speaker wonders if he will be judged by God for not exercising his gifts to the fullest, then realizes (1) that God, the giver of all gifts, doesn’t need humans to do His work for Him and (2) that standing and waiting is work enough. Of course, the bloggers emphasize the tragedy of blindness, which is what prompts the speaker’s musings in the first place.

For the general reader, a sighted reader, that tragedy is one of the assumptions of the poem. For the speaker, blindness is a fact, and it’s a hardship, but its tragedy is that it may be a possible obstacle to salvation. My own reading of the situation, not the poem, is that what impedes the speaker from exercising his gifts is not his blindness, but the small mindedness of others, who, in not recognizing that he can be an instrument of God as well as they, fail to exercise the gift/responsibility of loving their neighbors as themselves. Saying all of this in a few short lines is hard. It’s even harder when the reader is unwilling to rethink the nature of the tragedy and his or her roll in it.

Another thing I noticed about my response to Milton’s sonnet is that one of the images (the bony whore) that was key during the writing seems to be unimportant now. It isn’t altogether irrelevant. It suggests by analogy. But what I’ll have to decide is whether that analogy or another will work best.

I should reread other poems now that I’m sitting in the arid glare of reality.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

Tonight I wrote a poem: a whole poem from beginning to end. I haven’t done that since graduate school. It took about two and a half hours to write.

Mostly it wrote itself, not quite dictation. I had to stop to look up the parable of the talents, and I had to stop to reread one of Milton’s sonnets, and I almost shut down during the sestet, but the write image came into my head (empty houses like tombs),,. With that, I was able to compress it from a line in order to push on to the end, where I now had more syllable space for the clincher, another image (digging in a field).

Yes, it’s another sonnet (Miltonian no less). It’s a response to Milton’s “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” which I’ve always wanted to rail against. In many ways, his final image is perfect: servants spend a lot of time standing and waiting, and having done a lot of that myself, there’s something to be said for the strength required to do it. But there’s little comfort in accepting the fate of living on perpetual hold until one is acknowledged to be human.

I think my response is clear, but this may be one of those situations where point of view gets in the reader’s way. I can’t really explain what I mean without going into detail about the poem, and I’m not ready to do that. The only thing I can really say is that we all have biases, some so deep we don’t know we have them. When we encounter an idea that goes against one of these biases, our response is incomprehension or anticlimax. Knowing how to write for that biased reader is really difficult because the risks are obscurity and dogma. For now, I want the poem to sit for a week or two so I can read it fresh.

The writing was amazingly fast, and I’m excited. It feels good, a little weird, a little hard to believe.

It still doesn’t have a title, except maybe “To Milton,” but that’s pretty sucky.

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.