And where the fuck am I with it? Trying to get a grip on this, to find a way in. I know of no way!! I could smash my way in, I suppose. Tap a hole in a window and reach in and turn the knob. What would that look like in real time? Find a gap in Chapter 3 where I left off? Am I still really beating my head over Chapter 3? Isn’t it time to move on? The rest of it though I am equally unsure about, so there is that. Chapter 3 has always been a…
I feel virtuous and clean. I don’t know if the words are any good, they might not be! No matter. They accumulate. They give me raw material to work with. I feel content and like I belong in my world. 30 minutes @ 500 words. All it takes for that.
It’s a modest number, but do-able. Better than 100. Better than nothing. Not as daunting as 1000. Gives me time to sit and stare and meditate on the words, but still holds me to account for actually getting something down. Current tactic is navigating by feel. No forced marches. There is a lot of scaffolding, some of it permanent, some semi-permanent. I can orient myself with the permanent markers and within that write what I feel like writing. So far, so good.
before I do anything else, because the minute I start making a daily list, the rest of it seems more compelling than writing, every last mundane item, feels more urgent than sitting here contemplating what I’m working on. So let’s contemplate writing. What the hell am I working on, the Catbirds? Yes. It is a wide field of not knowing. Not knowing if I should give it up. Not knowing if I should write new material and if yes, what. Not knowing if I should just slap the new stuff I’ve written for it together, like glue it on there,…
Where am I? Writing has not been a thing really this month, neither with the Catbirds or DOAB. Why? Because of busy-ness, yes, but is that all? Well, yes. Maybe it just is. I haven’t been willing to struggle, and it is a struggle to work it in. I don’t know what it is. I have been reading more. Maybe it is just a necessary lying fallow-ness, and I am allowed to trust it. I know how to follow the thread of what I am supposed to be doing, and it is just not what I am supposed to be…
It pays to visit them though, to hold their hands. Should I join a writer’s group? Should I take this one lady’s class? Should I change the name? What I am actually avoiding is actually writing, though there are a ton of other figure-it-out kinds of things that I am avoiding too. I would like to remember the feeling of flying to New York: the way in which it was terrifying made it also exhilarating, and I remember thinking: I need more of this feeling in my life. Things that make me feel that way: to go to the writer’s…
and focus on the Catbirds for the next hour, earn an x. Feeling a good energy today, perhaps it’s the full moon. Let’s do a huge sweep of the arm on everything else. Mind is jumpy that is fine, just bring it back. Yesterday I was able to state clearly to myself: what we are doing here is rewriting the book and we are on Chapter 1. Clarity is good but I do not want chronology to become a burden. I am not in it for speed, we did speed last time and we ended up with this current draft,…
despite not going straight in but looking at shoes and buying concert tickets first instead. And despite all the distractions I came back and I picked up the thread of where I was yesterday and I wrote and I got a red x. And I think I would like to try to train myself a little in this. What if I had six hours? How much of it could I spend writing? The time constraint has been helpful in ways but what if I had six hours and also the discipline to use them? That would be amazing. That is…
Feeling like I can’t get anything done. Like even the red x’s aren’t enough. Like some people have published many things and I can’t publish one. (I saw a web ad for a new book by Kate Dicamillo, children’s book author, and my impression is: SHE’S prolific, and about my age, wtf, but I just googled her and she’s 52 and published her first book, by the looks of it, 16 years ago, so she was only three years younger than me when she started. So let’s calm down.) Part of this is because though yes I have accumulated three…
actually written. True, I sat with the energy of the book for a bit and that is something. What if I actually wrote some words? Let’s do the just-fucking-write thing where we write blindly and fast, it almost always nets something. Going going going in.
