Echoes in a Hollow Space

1. “Stupid is not to be underestimated,” I told my friend J. “Stupid things can save your sanity when life is out of your control.” And it’s true. An hour or two of doing something silly and mundane and all yours is a precious thing. My most fervent hope for this evening is that I get to spend an hour alone in my sitting room watching a new episode of Ghost Hunters. If that happens, I will not think the day a total loss. If it doesn’t happen, then I will watch the tape during some other precious hour, and having DVR’d it, the day will not be a total loss. One has to stay flexible.

2. And speaking of flexible, I’ve lost roughly 30 pounds in the last month. (My God, has it only been a month? Feels like several weeks more than that.) I say roughly 30 pounds because I made a decision some time back to live without a scale, so that’s based on the last time I stepped on a doctor’s scale. I may have lost a bit of that before the current month, but I’ve definitely dropped a lot of weight since September 14. What do you know? Eating less and running around a lot do help you lose weight. Fewer aches and pains, too. I haven’t got time for them, so they’ve been banished to the aethyr.

3. I poked at my novel, The Numberless Stars yesterday. I don’t know if I have the energy/time to write new prose again, though. I thought of revising something already written, but I didn’t have the stomach for that. Sustained focus is difficult these days.

4. My mother decided to make mini cheese cakes because a friend is coming to dinner tomorrow. Mom has always been someone who loved feeding people—and overfeeding people. I encourage her to do things like this because it makes her feel better about herself, and stronger. I thought she’d make her usual dozen, but when I got home from work last night, she’d made three dozen and was in the process of making another two. “What??” I asked. “I decided to make some for the girls at the dialysis center, and some to send home with L. and some to send with you to work.” We didn’t finish up until about 9:30 last night. I’m glad she’s feeling better. It was not how I’d planned my evening, however. Flexible!

5. J. and I were just discussing the strange culture of tipping. I am usually a 20% straight across the board tipper. Service is hard work and I want people who do work for me/serve me to know that I appreciate that. (Plus, 20% is so much easier to calculate than, say, 18%.) I realize not everyone feels this way and some are scandalized at tipping over 15%, but these days that seems a little on the low side to me. I say this even though I am feeling something of an economic pinch these days myself. If I can’t afford the tip, I should not expect the service.

J. was saying how the first time he went to his barber it was Thanksgiving, so he gave him a larger tip than he otherwise would. The second time was Christmas, so again he gave a larger tip. Now he feels like he’s always got to give that same tip or risk insulting/hurting the man’s feelings. “If you’ve got a barber you like,” I said, “best not to make him mad.” J. concurred.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Some of you who have known me for a long time, and read my stuff for a long time, may remember Hortensia Bustamante. She’s the strong-willed sister of the Bustamante Brothers of Dos Lunas County, the first white settlers to invade the Kintache Indian homeland.

Ever since I finished Venus in Transit, my Dos Lunas County novel, strong-willed Hortensia has been bugging me. “Where my novel?” she’s been asking.

I’ve explained patiently that I’m working on other things now, to make a change from Dos Lunas, but Hortensia has never been one to listen to the reasoning of her writer when she’s made up her mind about something. “Where’s my novel?” she repeats at every chance.

I staved off her insistence some time back by writing a 30k plus novella, but—although she liked it quite well—she’s informed me that it isn’t sufficient. Her story deserves expanding and exploring. I have been thinking along those same lines myself for some time and even had several ideas on how to do that, but I hadn’t thought of taking on that challenge at this juncture.

“It’s time,” Hortensia insists.

I find myself sighing fatalistically a lot these days. My imagination ping ponged all last week between chapter two of the Carmina novel and a short story, and I’ve been considering that maybe it’s time to start the rewrite on Venus in Transit. All the while Hortensia kept crooning in my ear: “It’s time. Where’s my novel? It’s time.”

I pulled the novella out today just to, yanno, look at it. Hortensia squee’d with glee. I told her not to get her hopes up. She scoffed.

So I don’t know what I’m working on now. Perhaps Hortensia would be the antidote to my restless. I’m sure Venus would be. Maybe I’ll let Venus and Hortensia and Carmina and Sea Eyes from the short story fight it out amongst themselves. Just let me know when you’ve figured it out, gang. Only, don’t start sending me tweets advocating for yourselves. That would be one step too far over the line.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Quote of the day:

"I remember what somebody said about nostalgia, he said it's okay to look back, as long as you don't stare."

—Tom Paxton

Writing talk of the day:

After six days of not writing nuthin' I wrote 1000 words today. A very productive lunch hour. Yay me. I'm closing in for the kill. Night Warrior/Born to Darkness, for all its unmarketability, is closing in on Doneness. (Born to Doneness?)

I was still home sick yesterday, but not too sickish, so I worked on another Dos Lunas story, "Closes Within a Dream." This one involves JK at age nineteen when he first discovers his power. It's an ungainly 12k, and very stubborn about those 12k, too. It's too novelistic. If I'm determined to make it a short story and not a lead in to a novel, or a part of a novel, then I'm going to have to get ruthless about cutting out some colorful secondary characters. The thing is, for me that's the life of this story. I could be wrong.

I did think that I might string all these stories together into a novel-of-stories with some sort of framing device front, center, and back. I even came up with a decent framing device and a conflict/plot device that strung them together quite nicely. The trouble is, the voice is so different in each of these stories that it just didn't feel right. Hortensia's voice from "Hortensia's Man" is not the same as Eudora, who is not the same as Lunar Magnusson, who is not the same as nineteen-year-old JK. Or thirty-year-old JK, or Ramona.

I also thought of rewriting them all from the ground up, using one voice...but that didn't seem right either when I started to do it. Nobody has put me in this quandary but myself, but quandaryfied I am. I keep thinking that time will give me the answer, and maybe it will. Truth is the daughter of time, after all. But so far, she's keeping mum.

Bathos of the day: Yesterday, the mourning dove my mother has taken care of for the last twenty years (thanks to a kitty cat of our acquaintance mangling her wing too badly to fix), found her full wings again and took off into the Dreamtime. My mother buried her in the backyard (in a Mushrooms shoe box, as it happens), rather close to the grave of my cat, Mocha, the hunter who contributed the dove to mom's menagerie. The dove outlived her attacker by eighteen years. Which I guess makes this also the irony of the day.

The Rewrite progresses.  I finished chapter 12 yesterday, and that leaves only 22 + Epilogue to go.  =:0  As is usually the case when I'm firmly committed to one piece of writing, other pieces start singing their siren songs to me.  "Oh, you'd much rather be working on me."  Usually I am able to regretfully but firmly decline—even though some of them grow quite insistent as time passes. 

When I was working on the last half of the first draft of Shivery Bones I kept getting insistent calls from a young woman named Hortensia, star of my novella, "Hortensia's Man," currently up on the Online Writing Workshop: http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/

She insisted that her story was important and needed to be told, and even though I agreed with her, I explained she'd have to wait her turn.  She wasn't satisfied with that, even when I did the historical research for the story hoping to appease her.  I begged off writing by telling her I couldn't start her story until I'd finished that research.  It didn't work.  She kept insisting.  I let her out of the box on weekends sometimes, but she never wanted to confine herself to weekends.  Still, over a six or so month period, her story did get told.

After I finished the first draft of ShivBo, I took about three months off.  The first month, April, I was busy getting ready for my trip or actually being on the trip, but I let the muse know that if he was so inclined, I was open to suggestions.  Nothing.  So I worked on stories from the trunk for about a month and a half, revisiting stories I hadn't looked at in over a year, refining and reworking.  I did another big chunk of work on a (still) unfinished story called, "The Green Ones."  Even so, nothing new tickled at my brain; none of the stories in my Ideas file decided they were ready for the next step.  I decided it was time to seriously launch into the rewrite.  Of course that's when all the new kids decided to move onto the block. 

First up was a story inspired by one of my own blog entries.  Which is somewhat like picking lint out of one's own navel, but whatever.  That story, "Green Horse Bone" gushed out about 1400 words in a few days, weaving in and out of the rewrite, before going on hiatus.  "Okay," I said, "you got that out of your system, now it's time to focus seriously on ShivBo."  I did, but GHB continues to weave in and out—dribs and drabs here and there when my back is turned. 

Then the Muse started playing an old, favored trick on me.  At night when I lay my weary head on the pillow—always on nights when I have to get up early for work the next morning—the Muse launches sneak attacks.  Just as I'm thoroughly relaxed and beginning to drift off, blam!  Into my head pops a great opening line for a story that's been sitting in the Ideas file stewing for awhile.  I'm just at that stage of tired where I really don't want to get out of bed again, but these openers are killer, the obvious gateway to the good stuff to follow.  And I know if I don't jot them down, they won't be there when I wake up.  I keep a bedside notebook so I roll over, sit up and jot.  Surprisingly, when I wake up the next morning, these openers read just as well as I thought they would.  I type them up and put them in the story folder for later when I have time to expand upon them. 

Last night was one of those nights, only it wasn't just an opening line, it was a whole opening sequence that presented itself for a story I've been cogitating over for a couple of years:  "The Story Shaman."  I groaned, rolled over, sat up.  Both sides of a handwritten notebook page is almost always about 250 words.  When I'd written both sides of the page and started on a new one I reminded myself that I had to get up early and it was getting late.  I was able to go to sleep then.  That reminder—and sleep—wouldn't have come unless I'd finished for the night because if I don't get it all down, I just keep coming up with new stuff and have to get up again and do more jotting.  The Night Muse does not care if work comes early and inspiration comes late. 

Fortunately, when I do sit down to write those stories, those openers (even if I don't use them for many months) open the door and let the story flow through.  Openers are crucial.  If I make them up with the forefront of my mind, they don't work.  If I let the hindpart loose, they usually work.  Sometimes I do have to rewrite those, but they are more likely to stay in the final drafts.  The forefront openers almost always have too much preamble, don't get into the story fast enough or with the right vision or voice.  Voice is a particularly key component of these hindpart-generated openers.  I know how to tell the story then, whenever I take it up and go forth.

Which is why it's worth getting out of bed.