Reading: Wednesday March 31

I'll be reading some selections from this blog and a short story called "Going West" at the Barnes & Noble open mic night Wednesday, March 31 at 7 p.m. in Kennewick.

"Going West" is currently available in Issue One of the independent literary 'zine Font & Frock.

Frog Chorus

Tonight's self-imposed assignment was to write something incorporating the senses. I imagined taking a walk outside in the dark. I managed to use four of the five, but couldn't quite get taste in there. I think the prose is a bit overwrought, and I need to work on varying sentence structure and composition more.

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The frogs are singing tonight. No one has told them it's winter.

Their voices overlap in the dark: trilling, chirping, rumbling. One speaks from beneath a tree next to the creek trickling toward the bay. Its voice is a deep and throaty bass. Another answers from next to an overturned, weather-beaten canoe. Its response is a sharp and shrill amphibian soprano.

I cross the planks that serve as a makeshift bridge over the creek. My tennis shoes sink into the saturated ground on the other side where the tide has come and gone. A lingering brackish scent hangs in the air. The mud slurps as I lift my feet for each step forward. Moisture seeps through the fabric of my shoes, dampening my socks. I hold out my arms for balance. I'm afraid of tripping in the dark. I should have brought a flashlight, but I wanted the thrill of walking in the dark, wanted that little bit of safe danger afforded by having the warmly lit house just yards away. That's all the distance that separates the comforting civilization of the house from the wilderness, from moss-covered evergreens stretching toward the night sky, coyotes lurking in secret dens, rabbits nestling in overgrown thickets, and frogs singing in chorus from watery hollows.

The air bears the damp chill of spring, thought the calendar says that season is still weeks away. It's the kind of air that just a few degrees warmer or drier would feel balmy. But it isn't a few degrees warmer, and I'm just on the verge of shivering without a jacket. I like this damp cold. I feel primal and elemental as I trudge through the trees to the shoreline of the bay.

Books on Writing: This Year You Write Your Novel

This Year You Write Your Novel
Walter Mosley

This was a fairly surface-level treatment of the writing process and elements of fiction, as it had to be by necessity considering the 25,000-word length. Yet there were some good nuggets of advice, the main being "Write every day and don't stop." Every writing how-to book will tell you that, but I liked hearing it from someone whose books I see on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. May 2010 indeed be the year I write my novel, although I'd also satisfied by a nice pile of short stories.

A writing exercise

I sat down last night having set myself the task of writing for a minimum of 30 minutes even though I was exhausted. I intended to write a meditative description about how it felt to be exhausted, but my eyes rested on an old stain on the quilt covering the bed in my rented room and my imagination took off for roughly 250 words of fiction.

Hmmm. Looking at this in the light of day it doesn't seem like much, but it felt like quite the accomplishment in my exhausted state last night.

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I lie on top of the old patchwork quilt, the one stained with wine from our first night together. I run my finger over the faded brown spot, picturing how my glass tipped when he leaned in to kiss me. I had jumped back and the glass fell from my hand. I had jumped back even though we were sitting on my bed and the magnetic pull of sex was tangible. I had jumped back even though I wanted him. I wasn't accustomed to getting what I wanted.

I fumbled an apology and swung my legs over the side of the bed, intending to go get a towel to clean the spill, but he grabbed my wrist. There was no violence in the movement, merely a gentle insistence that I stay. He pulled me back. I offered no resistance. We fell across the quilt and the wine soaked into my blouse. I threw away the blouse. I kept the quilt.

Was that months ago? Years? How many nights? I lost count when I stopped believing one of them might be our last.

The air in our room is cold. No. Not "our." I correct myself. The air in my room is cold as I lie on top of my quilt, on top of my bed, no longer shared. It occurs to me that I should crawl under the covers but I can't move. I can only lie across the empty bed staring at the wine stain in silence.

NaNoWriMo Blues

I am once again attempting National Novel Writing Month. This is my fifth year participating. In that time, I've never crossed the 50,000-word finish line and seem unlikely to this month. I came down with a cold on Day 2 that's been difficult to shake and it's affected my productivity significantly. This virus also has eaten up a chunk of my vacation time, which is annoying.

Regardless of the virus, I'd probably be struggling right about now anyway. I started the month with a plan to write a literary novel in short stories -- a character study about how the different pieces of our lives add up to the people we become. It was a deeply personal project, and one I hoped would be beautiful and poignant. I wrote roughly 2,500 words on the first day, but none of it compared to the vision in my head for what this book could and should be.

Then on Day 2, I woke up with a head full of zombies, vampires and steampunk. I decided to switch horses mid-stream and write this new idea (which really was a continuation of an old idea) because it would be more "fun."

So, aside from being sick, I've been trying to write this second idea and not having much fun. I feel guilty for abandoning my first idea. Essentially, there's a war going on inside my head between the voice that whispers to me that I'm better than this campy steampunk action/adventure I'm now writing, and the one that derailed me to begin with by telling me I wasn't talented enough or skilled enough to write beautiful prose that would move people.

I am struggling, have been struggling, will continue to struggle to figure out just what kind of writer I am. There are people who tell me to just do what I love, but it's not quite that simple. I love imagining monsters and zeppelins and kick-ass heroines, but I also love the artistic satisfaction of producing a beautiful turn of phrase or writing something that contains some kernel of a universal truth.

So I'm lost and confused and finding little joy in the writing this month, and I don't quite know how to overcome this obstacle. Maybe I'll just work on both.

I've neglected this blog for a little while now, but I just haven't had much to say lately. Work is increasingly strenuous and demands the lion's share of my time and mental energy. I'm also working on writing samples for graduate school applications, which consumes what little energy I have left after work, so not much blogging going on.

Somehow despite the rigors of work, and the financial stress of a shrinking paycheck and rising bills, and my health and fitness routine going off track, I feel pretty good about life. I don't like my life the way it is now, but I see possibilities. I like the direction I've chosen for myself. I just have to do the work to get where I want to be.

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

After a brief hiatus, the blog is back.

All our tomorrows find their own ways

About 90 minutes from now, I'm scheduled to zip off on an intergalactic adventure with a rag-tag group of spacefarers. Translation: It's game night.

Game night has been a regular Saturday night fixture in my life for nearly a year, with lengthy breaks while I temporarily moved across state for a work assignment, and now for about the last six weeks as the other gamers had other commitments. I've missed the gaming during this last break as it represents one of my only, okay the only social outlet I have outside of work and the Internet.

In the interim, I've filled my Saturday nights with reading or watching movies on DVD. I went to karaoke once -- formerly a fixture of my social life before that out-of-town work assignment -- but the fun surprisingly had disappeared, like air leaking from a tire so slowly you don't notice until suddenly you have a flat.

While I am looking forward to seeing the gamer group, I'm afraid the fun may be leaking from this activity, too, as I evolve into some sort of cave-dwelling creature who desires only solitude. I'm watching the clock tick and looking at the stack of books yet to read (at last count I have nearly 300 unread books in my apartment) and the unfinished short story I'm trying to write, and I just want to stay in. I have too many plans, too many desires, and not enough time to accomplish them all. And that doesn't even include the laundry or bathroom-scrubbing that should be done this weekend. In the words of the fabulous Greta Garbo, "I vant to be alone."

I want to dive back into The Artist's Way and start writing morning pages again. I want to finish this short story and a dozen others sitting incomplete on my hard drive. I want to read all of those books on my shelf, but these things require time, and I am nothing if not an impatient creature. Our days on this planet, after all, are finite, and each person can accomplish only so much in one lifetime. I've already allowed 35 years to slip by while crossing far too few items off of my lifetime to-do list.

But shouldn't an evening of fun, imagination and laughter rank high on that to-do list? Won't I be a happier person, if only for a few hours, if I go? I hope the answer is yes, and that The Artist's Way and those short stories and all of those books will still be there for me to tackle tomorrow. For while it's wonderful to suck the marrow from each day as though it's our last, sometimes we also must live as if tomorrow is another day.