One Week Late

I wrote this last Saturday on my Note taker, but I wasn’t able to upload.

I’m debating whether to work on my novella next or go with the more reasonable plan of sticking to one manuscript until I finish it. Lately I’ve been feeling stressed. As I’ve mentioned here, I don’t like some of the things going on at work (especially the part about how we’re getting paid in installments, like that check for $90.00 I just got for September and the half wages I’m still waiting on for November). On top of that, I’m in the process of trying to find a new job, preferably one with benefits and some level of permanence, and because I haven’t found one yet, I’m going through that vulnerable feeling like a pathetic-loser-who’s-begging-to-be-loved-and-accepted phase. The gist is that I sometimes manage the stress better than others.

The last few days have been bad days on the stress management front, and my novella is about a character who … well, let’s just say stress management is not her forte. Part of the reason I’ve avoided working on it much is that I’ve had to do some research about the possible setting and about eating disorders, but mostly I’ve avoided it because I feel I need to go to a negative emotional space to get into my protagonist’s head.

I know there’s a debate about whether the best writing happens inside or outside the character’s skin, and I think that, based on my current revision work, my present opinion is that revision is best outside the skin, but I’m not so sure with this piece because it’s so long and because I’ve decided to change the direction of the action somewhat. I should probably just start reading to decide.

Puntitas reads _The Observations_ by J. Harris.

Starting a New One

I’m not sure what the matter is. This week and next are incredibly slow weeks workwise (three appointments in all), so I decided I would turn off my cell phone, my umbilicus to the world of interpreting appointments, and spend the time writing.

So far, I’ve spent the time sleeping, reading email, and researching useless and obscure trivia (like whether “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was once used to help children remember church teachings—an assertion, which Snopes.com tells me is false). Right now, I’m ready for more sleep. I should probably take Claritin or something for the discomfort in my sinuses and occasional drip. But I’m not motivated enough to do even that.

I was expecting to write today. I had an idea for a story last night. It came to me about a year ago after a conversation with my mother, but that mysterious spark that makes some ideas stories and others mere ideas hadn’t happened until I was doing my pointless Googling on urban legends.

Part of me wants to research more, to get the details right. Part of me noticed that there’s enough discrepancy in the details for me to have plenty of license. Part of me wants to put things off till I make a special trip to the locale, but this last is definitely a stalling technique.

Maybe I should stop doing this and do that instead. I can give myself a word goal, right? 500?

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.

Starting with the Image

I’ve had very little inspiration where writing is concerned. Too many other things are cluttering my head this week, most of them work related, something I’ll probably write about sooner or later. I did have one tiny tremor of an idea one morning, one of those thoughts that flits into the consciousness while I lay in bed waiting for the alarm clock to ring. Three images—a child’s ball suspended in the sky at sundown, the optical illusion of a foot next to a cloud, a woman standing at the foot of some stairs with her spine arched completely back, her hands on the lower steps—came to me, starting with the last and ending with the second. There was another image, a reaching or scooping hand. At first, I thought it was random. Then it helped me gather the other images together, developing the cloud image into a playground swing, the bar overhead and the chains that attach the seat.

Before the fingers enclosed the images into a beginning, the memories just floated around in my head, shuffling like snapshots into different orders, revealing more details, fading, growing again. Each reminded me of having wanted to center a poem around it, but until the hand caught each up and held it against its palm, nothing united them, gave them meaning.

In bed, out of nowhere, I started to feel the peculiar lightness and energy of a piece of writing clamoring to make it to the hard drive, that flaring of experience. If I teach a poetry class, I will probably tell my students that images are pictures or sensory experiences evoked or elaborated to explain what something means for the speaker or why it is important. But images are more mysterious. They’re the nut of a poem, the originating impulse, the supporting detail. They tell narratives in layers, In my case, each image told the same story, but it had something different to say about that story.

As I lay there, the images became more defined. The hand came clearly and fully into focus, and I understood immediately that it was the story all the other images were telling. Part of me knew that I’d need to hang on tight to whatever was developing because I’d have to get up in five minutes to get ready for an early appointment. Part of me wanted to tell the appointment to screw itself so I could let the images play out.

What made the images a moment, rather than the draft of a poem, was that the vast descending hand suddenly seemed cliché, and the narrative, one that I’ve written about before. I know that, as with the Shakespearean sonnet, some narratives are worth telling more than once, but all at once, this one didn’t seem worth retelling at all.

That realization turned all the airiness into flat, dense disappointment. I thought about the seeds of two other poems I’ve been carrying around. They’re images and general thoughts, but something—the right detail, perhaps?—is missing. I wish I knew what would make them bloom. Maybe I can use the ball, the swing, and the arching woman to figure it out.

The Office

We all have our preferred writing environments. Mine is a cleared desk in a clean, uncluttered office. I have neither. Having been extremely anal most of my life, I mysteriously underwent a sudden and drastic change into slobdom about ten years ago. I blame it on the thesis because the downward spiral happened during that general timeframe, but it may have been a little later.

My office is a roughly 10×10’ room in my house. I’ve got a copier stand and three bookcases along one wall,; a file cabinet, a scanner stand, a computer desk, and a baker’s shelf along the one opposite; and half a dozen boxes crammed with more mostly useless paper dotting the floor at random intervals. On the horizontal surfaces, I’ve got bloated manila envelopes, shoe boxes, file folders, and office trays full of read mail—tax information, paid bills, proofs of participation or completion, receipts, blah-blah.

I wouldn’t mind the mess … I could become motivated enough to deal with it … I think if it weren’t for the shredder. I bought it because it sits tidily over a waste basket so I could shred each sheet as I needed to, but there’s so much equipment in this room that I have to open an electrical outlet up each time the shredding urge comes over me. Well, that’s happened only once in the last two years, and now I’ve got a kneeholeful of sloppily folded, wadded, and hand ripped translation drafts, student home work, and purchase printouts.

Every time I sit down to write, I dislodge some of it. Since I fidget, I discover that my fidget routine involves listening to the rattle of paper under my soles, and once I become conscious of the sound and of my wanting to hear it, the desire to stay where I am is snuffed absolutely.

I do have periods of wanting to clear the mess. This morning was one of them. Then I realize just how much work that entails: a five-gallon can packed tight and a cubic yard of kneehole.

This is an excuse for not being productive, isn’t it?

Damn!