Instinct with Handrails

Last week I was on vacation, and I made a sincere attempt to go "screen-free". I didn't watch any television, or use the iPad to watch movies, or look at Facebook, or type anything on a laptop, or send any emails. I did look at my emails - the single one I hoped for didn't arrive, but I got six from Facebook in four days (six!), reminding me of all the cool stuff I was missing by not logging in. With one exception, all the others (25+) were not-really-needed notifications or junk.

But I'm not here to write about the meaning of that little experiment. I'm here because the main things I did on vacation, in place of my usual screen-focused activities, were 1) read Proust and 2) write. Volume II of Remembrance of Things Past is just as all-encompassing and gorgeous and tedious and witty and self-indulgent and YESTHISFOREVERPLEASE as Volume I.* School starts in just about two weeks, so I don't know if I'll finish it before then, but I'll make room thereafter if need be. I tried to find the best blog post from last summer that talked about the experience of reading the first volume, and found that everything old is new again; last summer I started it on vacation and hadn't finished before school started. Ol' Repetitive, that's what they call me.**

Anyway, I took intermittent breaks from Proust to read David Shields's How Literature Saved My Life. Though I've owned and wanted to read Reality Hunger for some time now, I'm glad I started where I did. It was just the right book to slingshot me back and forth (yelping in joy) between the early years of the twenty-first and twentieth centuries. The writing I'm doing is in some ways positioned closer to Proust than Shields, but the collagist sensibility of Shields is exactly where I want to live, creatively. So the work proceeded apace.

I've now told two people what the secret project is, and both were very interested, so I'm a little reassured about the idea. I'm on the ninth pie piece, of twelve, but I know already that there will be lots of rewriting, lots of wholesale throwing into the fire and starting over. What I'm doing now isn't quite down to placeholding, but it has the distinct sensation of impermanence about it - Play-Doh instead of real fireable clay. I needed to write all these thousands of words to get to where I am now, which is: everything starting to hang together, a better understanding of the characters and their conflicts, an utter exhilaration at how ideas are sprouting out of the earth of the draft. I had no idea that I was writing about at least two of the themes that are at the very core of my life and work, but poof, up they came, like onion sprouts in the pantry. So I'm writing in that direction, vaguely, tottering, half-blindfolded, hoping that the work will lead me as ably as it has so far.

I'm sure this method, drafting first before theme enters into it, contradicts questioning and assertion that I've done right here on this very blog, because I resisted the idea really strongly when it came through Pam Houston to me in 2013 - that putting theme first makes for crappy writing, and you should let the sentences lead you to theme instead. Maybe other projects won't work this way. But this project is evidently going prose first, whittling second, themes third, rewriting fourth, and after that I have no idea.

I mean, what am I doing? Is this a quantum leap in my work or just a muddle that no one will like except me? I'm pretty sure it's teaching me a great deal (and what else is there?), but it's so different that I'm nigh consumed with what even is this?!? It's like writing was when I was in high school and knew thimbles about it: instinctual. Yes, that, but now with handrails. I think of Mary Gaitskill and the fucking power in her sentences, of Joanna Newsom and the bizarro brilliant songs she makes, of Lidia Yuknavitch and the library full of rules she breaks when she uncaps her pen, of Kate Bush and how she allows others' ideas to swim peaceably into her own. These are artists I couldn't call on when I was a teenager. Plus, to no small effect, there's the writer's toolbox I've equipped over the past decade via enormous expense and personal irresponsibility. Somehow all that makes a line to grasp when I write into that weird dark room where I spent so much time last week.

As ever, iunno.

The picture at the top of this post, in case you were curious, is of a Last Straw. On Friday night I closed the lid of my time-worn spillproof travel mug, which contained a little leftover tea from the prior Sunday, and dropped it in my carry-on bag to schlep upstairs with the rest of our luggage, and IT SPILLED FIVE-DAY-OLD TEA ALL OVER MY PROUST AND MY DRAFTING NOTEBOOK, and so I am throwing it away. It is a rather elderly travel mug, in travel-mug years, and I'm kind of sick of looking at it and didn't ever love its appearance much anyway, so after this appalling insult, in the trash it goes. Shallow as I am, I hate reading water-damaged books (I still remember which Beezus & Ramona book I dipped in the bath as a girl and had to read with an accompanying crinkling noise ever after, grrrrrrrrr), so I ordered a new Volume II from Amazon, a total waste of $16 but HONESTLY, TRAVEL MUG, YOU HAD ONE JOB. The stains are kind of distinguished on the drafting notebook, but I'm still very disgruntled. At best, it made for an interesting picture, and a nice visual overview of the post, thematically.

See? Writing into the theme. Pam Houston knows what the hell she's talking about, folks.


*I have the silver Vintage paperback editions, which are bound in three volumes: Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove in the first volume, The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain in the second volume, and The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained in the third volume. These seven "individual novels" (which they aren't) were split into eight volumes, rather weirdly, when À la recherche de temps perdu was originally published, and have been published in many different ways under various English titles in the intervening century. To say that I'm working on "the second volume" is extremely confusing in conversation, but I know I sound pretentious when I talk about reading Proust anyway, so whatever.

**No one calls me that.

The Quality of Not-Knowing

At the beginning of the year, the band Foster the People put up a mural in downtown Los Angeles. People apparently liked it. According to ABC7, its location is in an "area with beige-colored warehouses and office buildings," so "local residents welcomed a spot of brightness." However, on July 11, it emerged that the city had told the band to remove the mural. The image they put up as a mural is exactly the same as the cover of their most recent album, Supermodel. Evidently there are city regulations about advertisements vs. murals that meant their permits were not appropriate, because the image could have been construed as an advertisement.

Pretty colors, to be sure

I don't really care about Foster the People, but this story caught my interest. The band claimed that they were just trying to add art to the daily routine of ordinary citizens, but I wonder. If that was their only purpose, couldn't they have chosen another image? Surely it occurred to somebody along the line that this was a good way to get jumbo-sized advertising without paying jumbo prices. If not, if that's a cynical way to look at this incident, let's go the other way: is it fair for the city not to take into account that the band was just trying to make art? Should they give the band the benefit of the doubt, and let the mural stay up? Well, but even if the whole thing was an innocent mistake and this was just an image that the band believed in enough to plaster it on everything, letting it stay might create a foot in the door for genuine advertisements that are cynically masquerading as murals.

I find both possibilities valid, the cynical one and the innocent one. And I love news stories that demonstrate the existence of this split in life, that an incident could easily be one way or the other and there's no way to know from reportage what the truth of the matter is. That middle ground is exactly where I want to write, what I want to explore through fiction: when all sides of the story are equally plausible, and only the participants really know what their motivations were, and no one external to those participants' skulls will ever know.

One of the longest (and best, IMHO) stories I've written in the past year is about this - "Carlotta Made Flesh," a.k.a. the journalist story, which I wrote after reading many articles about catfishing, but specifically this one. The wikibook also has this split at its heart, although I'm not any closer to writing that blasted thing, so I guess I should stop bringing it up here, because I need to just put my money where my mouth is. The point is, this often comes to mind when I sit down to the notebook, this we'll-never-really-know thing, and it always gives me a little jolt of inspiration when I see it in real life. Some of the news stories that bring me food for thought about this issue are very unpleasant, but here, it's only a mural, and the stakes and harm are nice and low.

Incidentally, here, citizens petitioned in favor of the mural and Mayor Garcetti made an exception. The mural stays. And - maybe - some PR guy across town just put his feet on his desk and gave a satisfied sigh. Or maybe not.

Dreaming My Way to Work

Most of my big ideas come from dreams. The central ideas for both the Greenland book and the time book came from lengthy, specific dreams that I wrote down and fleshed out. Other dreams have been used either as a starting point for something that wandered far afield from its source material, or as filler for a central idea that I attained elsewhere.

Dreams are bizarre; everyone knows that. I write them down, and then look at them a week later and go whaaaat? Dreams that are insanely engaging as I experience them might turn out to be useless either from a story perspective or a symbolic, figuring-out-my-life perspective. But the notion that a dream by which I am still fascinated months later is too bizarre to shape into a story...I finally decided this week that I can't truck with that. Some of the stuff I'm proudest of writing in the past year has seemed too odd for public consumption at the outset, and I've written it anyway, winding up with the opposite of regret.

I keep returning to Jim Henson at moments like this. (I feel like I've written about this before, but I can't find it on a blog search, so at the risk of repeating myself...) The idea of a prime-time variety show for adults starring felt puppets must have been, to understate the case, extremely hard to sell. But he worked really fucking hard, and he did it. And he created something unforgettable. It inspires me that he did this (and it especially inspires me that his success didn't really get going until he was 40), because his ideas were just weird, but it turned out that a lot of people loved them anyway.

Yesterday I wrote the first draft of a story about a boy who lives on a garbage scow. In the big picture, the story is supposed to be about the cruel limits of charity, but ever since I had the dream that inspired the story, I've shied away from developing or writing it. I kept rereading that set of notes and thinking "boy who lives on garbage scow...nah, too weird, no one will believe it" and turning the page. Yet I'm growing tired of doing throwaway work I'm not especially proud of, and I decided to try writing it anyway. Maybe I can frame it as a fairy tale, I thought, and make it more of a genre story.

It didn't come out that way. It came out in a first-person roughneck pidgin, set vaguely in the Victorian era, veering into a narrative structure which I think I'll have to pitch and rewrite. But it felt good in the doing. It didn't feel like a waste of time. It felt like something new, something weird but inspired. We'll see, after it's done resting, if it goes in the drawer or out into the world.

I also wrote a poem yesterday. I virtually never write poetry, because I don't understand it well and I doubt I've grown at all as a poet since I wrote angsty teenage junk. But I feel quite good about this one - good enough to seek feedback and maybe even publication, once it's been redrafted a couple of times. I was inspired by reading three issues of The Sun nearly back to back over the past two weeks; the magazine publishes poetry that agrees with me in small doses. Although I find it pretty unfair and unrealistic, there's something to magazines' insistence that you read a few issues before you submit work to them. I only just feel like I have an idea of The Sun's mood and intention now that I've held a subscription for six months.

On Tuesday, I sent a query package for KUFC to an agent. Please cross your fingers for me.

Tonal Shift

No Deep Thoughts for today. Books & pictures.

--I'm reading Haruki Murakami's After Dark. It's the first book of his I've read. It's good. Not thick and difficult, but definitely thought-provoking, which is kind of a relief; it's been all one or the other for me for the last six months. Nice to find a literary writer whom I cotton to.

--...especially after investing 90 pages into Chuck Palahniuk's Tell-All, which was crap. This is strike three for me & Chuck. Critics generally didn't like Tell-All either, so I'm thinking I'm going to give Choke or Lullaby a go, just to give him a third swing that's actually meaningful. But I'm willing to bet that I won't like him then, either; there were bits of Tell-All that reminded me of the stuff I didn't like about the other books of his I read. Specifically, that he manages to include irritatingly excruciating detail and still leave me with almost no idea of what really occurred in a given scene or chapter.

--I'm also reading John Dies at the End in between other stuff, which is by turns totally delightful and overly outlandish. Like, outlandish beyond delightful and into "Um, are you sure you had an editor?" It's already been made into a movie which I'm looking forward to a lot, but the tone of the trailer is entirely opposite the tone of the book. A little like this. Facts are all there, tone is radically different.

It's near about time for me to change out the pictures on my pinboard; they've stopped being awesome and started being visual background noise. So I wanted to note here what they were as of today. Marlene and Salvatore I've already talked about, and I also had this picture up to remind me conceptually of KUFC's main character when I'm writing about her.

There's also this one:

The Great Gatsby was one of the first books of adolescence that really bewitched me, and I spent a lot of time and energy reading Fitzgerald in my early teens. And writing about thinly disguised teenagers arguing over how awesome Fitzgerald was. Thank God that stuff has mostly been lost. This is on my board for lots of reasons, but one jokey reason is that Dr. Eckleburg knows when I'm procrastinating instead of writing.

And this:

To remind me that human life is almost never exactly as it's been recorded. I love pictures of Victorians smiling (and thank goodness there are more of them than you'd think), because really, people have always lived in the same world we live in now, and there's the proof.

And this:

Not quite the same picture, but close enough. This is where I got married. There's a lot more about this place that's inspiring to me, but it'd take all day to explain.

And then there's this:

I am a visually oriented person, and I love looking at things - especially attractive or interesting things - more than I can really put into words. This image is one of my favorite things I've ever seen. You can't imagine how happy I was to find it in postcard form in a box during our move in June; I thought I'd lost it forever.

There's also a picture of a happy dog in a field, but I'm not planning to take that one down. It does make me feel a bit guilty every time I look at it, because it's the front of a card that was actually sent to Matt, not me, by his aunt and uncle. I just love stealing his stuff.

In Which I Stumble Around

All right, motivation gland, you wacky trickster, I'm listening. Today is not the day for work, you say. I mean, obviously. Since it's one-fucking-thirty in the afternoon and I have done ZERO paid work. Since all I can think about is big swirly questions, and since last night's mood happened, and since I've written e-mails to both the Metropolitan Opera of New York and the author of the last book I finished. And also gotten splatters of cherry juice all over the unfinished wood surface of my desk and honestly don't know how to clean unfinished wood. It's been a chaotic day, sitting here staring at my computer for the last six hours.

I went to Der Rosenkavalier last night, the last of the summer encores from the Met. I stayed through the first act and most of the second and then gave up and went home. This opera did almost nothing for me, especially compared to the last one I went to, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, which shook me and delighted me and made me think slightly differently about art than I had the day before. Rosenkavalier felt like pop fluff, felt like Strauss wanted to write a sitcom to put talented singers into it to show their stuff, where Hoffmann felt like it was an entire, whole piece of art even without standing back to admire what the singers brought to it.

On the way out of the theater, driving home, walking from the parking lot to my apartment, I had this awful paranoiac anxious feeling, like the shadows were full of thieves and blackguards out to do me harm. Generally I find the world to be a positive place, and the number of people who want to commit crimes against other people seems quite small, but last night I felt vulnerable and unsafe. I don't know why.

Although I think it has something to do with my intake. I am very, very tired of reading fierce and eager words about guns and violence and presidential candidates and war and cancer and starvation and poverty. I know that putting my head in the sand doesn't make any of this go away, but I don't want to consume it anymore. I read something the other day that I don't remember clearly enough now to make a point about it, but it was something about the mad-eyed perspective that heavy TV watchers have (heavy = 6+ hours per day, I remember that detail), how they're more anxious than most about what goes on in the world. I was thinking about it in the shower, and I think it's the constant motion on TV that can drive you mad, the advertisements and the scrolling headlines and the pop-up coming up nexts and the credits of one show boxed below the cold open of the next. When I compared that to sitting quietly in a 19th-century home, an inadequate fire, a poor candle by which to read, uncomfortable ten-year-old clothes, I felt numb and sad and unsurprised about all that's happened in the last twenty years.

I might take a week or so off of Facebook. Just to sit alone and percolate in what I've already acquired, instead of searching for new! new! new!. I just hate missing things. Some of my friends, and some of my "friends", are so clever, and have access to such fascinating and unique stuff. If I miss it, it could be lost, and it could be a thing that improves my life. I nearly didn't go to Les Contes d'Hoffmann, either, and it's already enriched my life despite the short time between when I consumed it and now. But one of the things I reread on my bookmark day earlier in the week was this, which I read many months ago and still has more to tell me every time I read it. Surprising for a silly CNN article with uniformly evil comments on it.

This week I finished reading Clockwork Heart, by Dru Pagliassotti, and I'm going to recommend it to anyone who has the time for a lovely steampunk adventure. I enjoyed it more than I've enjoyed the last several books I read, for sure, and this morning I wrote the author and told her so. Right now I'm reading a memoir, The Chronology of Water, and it's probably part of why my mood is chaotic and thoughtful, as it's profound and frightening and beautiful. It's got an astoundingly clear-eyed and confident perspective on being female, further evidenced by the remarkable article the author wrote about the boob on the cover.

I could write on about that, about the cover and the concept of Body and the trouble with overanalysis and the lesson from Last Tango in Paris that I've taken with me everywhere I go in life, but I think I better make this day worth something and get to my manuscript. I've read a lot this morning, and it's all reminded me that I have my own things to say, more than just a ramble on a blog.

This Is Not a Unicorn

There are several excellent reasons why I didn't update more recently:

• Health
• Las Vegas
• Work, unfortunately
• Staring at empty blog post window with finger in nose and drool tailing down chin

But the big one is that I haven't written anything, so I can't follow up on my previous post to let you know if I'm still a wishy-washy idiot or not. Maybe that will come in a few days, but for the moment, I'll just talk about another one of the images on my little pinboard next to my desk.

This is R.A. Salvatore standing next to a statue of Drizzt Do'Urden and his companion Astral Plane panther, Guenhwyvar. The statue was created for GenCon some years ago, I think, although I don't know what its fate has been. I happened upon this picture shortly after finishing Homeland, to date the only Salvatore book I've read, and I stared at it on my screen for minutes on end, fascinated.

See, Drizzt isn't real. Salvatore made him up. Invented him from nothing. Conjured him from the ether. He's fictional. And yet there he is, plain as day, with his scimitars and white hair and magical panther, a real, life-size statue of a not-real drow created by the person standing next to the statue.

So, put yourself in Salvatore's shoes. Can you imagine how goddamned cool it would be to stand next to the statue of a character that you invented?! Yes, interrobang, because it's so cool that it blows my tiny mind how cool it would be.

This is a goal picture. I look at it and get all grinding-jealous and then inspired-jealous and then just inspired. Because I want to make a character who's that enduring, that interesting, that people want to create a statue out of her. Maybe I'll have the humility to just smile when there's a picture of me taken next to her, but I think I'll be pointing with my jaw dropped, kind of like that college student who met the President.

Miraculous Birds

Finally some writing-esque news. Cheryl Strayed is apparently doing The Book Tour That Never Ends for Wild, and she's coming (back?) to Los Angeles in late July. I am SO going. If I said I had a special connection to her, that would be wrong, but to say that she's never helped me gain perspective on my own life, or that I don't admire her writing, would be even more wrong. So I'm really looking forward to seeing her in person. July is a banner month, in fact - Singin' in the Rain is coming to theaters for one night only, and I've already bought tickets for that.

And now back to Mi Vida, the continuing telenovela of my move to L.A.

This move has meant that Matt and I, previously spread out over a two-bedroom townhome, now live in a one-bedroom apartment. While not tiny by city standards, it's about a third of the space to which we were accustomed. Our TV/game center, both our computer setups, our living room, and our dining room now occupy a single room, rather than three. It's been an awful lot of work to make it uncrowded and homey, and I still don't love the way the tech is cheek by jowl with the comfy chair and sofa. However, we have no road noise whatsoever in our apartment, where previously we lived on a mainish road and couldn't really have the windows open and still retain peace; we have a slightly vaulted ceiling in the main room due to being on the third floor; and we have a small but pleasant balcony with a large sliding glass door, and before we couldn't use our patio at all due to its smallness and juxtaposition to the road. Even aside from these perks, I am kind of loving the effects of downsizing so far. I truly am creating a space where everything belongs somewhere, and the Raptitude guy was right, it has an incredibly positive effect on one's mental health.

I chose to set up my computer next to the glass door, and one morning while "working" (intermittently staring at the computer and out the window), I saw a wee brown bird buzzing up and down by the big fluffy tree/bush across the way. (I have no idea what most of the flora is out here, so, um, big fluffy tree/bush.) It was a few seconds before I realized I was looking at a hummingbird, because it hovered in midair the way no other domestic birds do that I'm aware of. It wasn't bright green and pink the way textbook hummingbirds are, it was brown and mottled, but it definitely had faster-than-light wings and a long thin beak.

Squeal! The only times I ever remember seeing hummingbirds were for fractions of a moment before they sped away, and I had to say "was that a hummingbird? Is that what they look like? Or was it just a really fast sparrow?" So seeing one was pretty cool for me.

I went right out and bought a hummingbird feeder, an antiquey red glass bottle screwed into a tray with flower-shaped holes, along with some packets of food that you mix into water. (Yeah, I know it's essentially sugar in a packet, but it wasn't expensive and I don't want to fuck up a homemade recipe and hurt the birds.) I hung it on the balcony and watched obsessively for about half a day. Nothing happened. I hung it a little further out, worried, thought about buying flowers to attract them...and then I saw a little brown thing come up to the balcony, look intently at the red bottle, and beeline away. "Looklooklook!" I shrieked at Matt (who was peaceably playing Heroes of Might & Magic), far too late for him to see anything.

He asked me what I liked so much about hummingbirds, anyway. Nothing, I told him, I had just rarely seen them. Later I realized that was mostly the reason, but there's something else, too. Something that has to do with me not being able to grow any sort of plants to save my life, and having such pale skin that I burn like a forest fire even under SPF, and being seriously allergic to bugs, but desperately wanting to be out-of-doors as much as possible, anyway. Something appealing beyond words about the idea that I could hang up a feeder and tiny, miraculous birds really would show up and hang out on my balcony.

And they have. Yesterday I worked most of the day, looking to the left 847 times to see if there were any birds at the feeder, and I had customers on and off all day long. They drank my sugar water. A couple times they even sat on the edge of the feeder and folded their wings while they sipped. I haven't tried to get pictures of any of them, because they mostly drink from the flower-hole that's farthest from me and I can only see their edges around the bottle. But it's still so damn cool.

Feeder, hummingbird-free at the moment, unfortunately

I could connect this to how awesome Los Angeles is, how much I'm enjoying it here, but there are hummingbirds in many, many places in this country. What it really connects to is the joys of this particular apartment - finding happiness in things like this balcony, which is small and directly faces my neighbors' balcony across the way, which theoretically means they can watch me at my desk all day long, but which has brought me so many little mental rainbows with its morning sunshine and afternoon hummingbirds. The surprising amount of storage space here, presently full of disorganized life-stuff which I will eventually put to order. The teeny-tiny kitchen, which is kind of like adventuring in a houseboat. The seriously cool space-saving dining room table and chairs I bought at Ikea, despite the moving guy's well-intentioned comments amounting to the conclusion that our stuff is cheap and shitty. And my new address stamp, which has a swirly bird on it.

Life is good.

PS: I am falling far behind on correspondence, including thank-you notes and e-mails. Please forgive me if you're waiting for something from me.

Open War

WELL. Home from the conference, and I have a lot of stuff to sift through.

Everyday life is sort of beckoning (...sort of), but there are some writing tasks to do, too. I have to bang out a query, in theory I should do a few things to my website, I have people to friend on Facebook, etc etc. The thing I'm still amazed about is how different the elevation and humidity feel here. It's astounding. The air feels so much more normal. No one had ever told me what a difference it makes to be 6,000 feet further up in the atmosphere. 

There's a lot buzzing around in my head that I want to say, a lot of Big Stuff about writing (and a plethora of little stuff, too), but I can't really get it together right now. So, instead, I will present you with two quotes - Tycho from Penny Arcade echoing Martha Graham, of all people. 

Like most readers, I had functionally consigned On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness [ed.: a video game project of Penny Arcade's that Matt and I loved, and which wasn't popular enough to continue in the way it had been conceived] to the furnace.  I had let it float away on one of those little lantern boats in a way that brought me closure, if no one else.  Insufficient.

Fucking insufficient.

You have to get back on the horse.  Somehow, and I don’t know how this kind of thing starts, we have started to lionize horseback-not-getting-on:  these casual, a priori assertions of inevitable failure, which is nothing more than a gauze draped over your own pulsing terror.  Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is.  What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you.  And it does, actually; it does.  Go look outside.  You can’t tell me that we are done making the world.

And Martha, a conversation between herself and Agnes de Mille: 

"There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open..." 

"But," I said, "when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied."

"No artist is pleased."

"But then there is no satisfaction?"

"No satisfaction whatever at any time," she cried passionately. "There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others." 

Phew

For the last couple of weeks, I've been waiting to start an at-home job, one which I hoped would solve several of our problems at once. But my start date was delayed, and then delayed again, and then delayed a third and fourth time. So I started to worry, like crazy, that in fact it wasn't going to work out, that I would have to return to the outside world and legal work. But I got some solid data about it yesterday: yes, I was actually hired; yes, the work does exist (even if it doesn't really exist this week). There is a big IT transition going on, which is the reason for all the delays, and that means that there might not be much to be paid for in the first couple of weeks. But it seems real enough, the job and my ability to do it. I think - I hope - that it's going to work out all right. There are things about it that aren't as...solution-oriented as I thought they would be, but I'm going to hope for the best. This is the third time this year that things have turned around at my blackest point of despair, and each time was accompanied by a spate of new ideas and greater hope for the future.

In other phew-related news, I did a complete read-through and first skinning of the novel. (It took me about seven hours, all told, which is not encouraging moving forward.) Oh, my dear Lord, what work I have to do. I have to rewrite and rework the whole opening, two or three chapters, and I suspect I'm going to end up adding another quarter of its length to the danged thing in new scenes and greater depth. But inconsistencies were helpfully apparent on this read, and I wrote them all down in the margins with my red pen, making notes on the backs of pages. Now it's on to write a detailed timeline and adjustment of ages, events, and spacing as needed. I also have to come up with a few more names and vocabulary, and start writing a sensible Luquenora glossary. I had suspected that I'd need to put an actual glossary in the back of the book, and yeah, on this read I determined that I do. Feels kind of like a failure, that I didn't make the language clear enough. Oh, well.

Yesterday I finished up editing a story I'd written and submitted it to a publication that's probably way over its head. (I made up my mind to reach for better publications in the future, to just grip writerly arrogance by the neck and continually presume I'm better than I am, so that eventually I'll become better. ...I think I'll write a whole post on this conflict another time.) The story was inspired by something in yoga class, as I mentioned a while back, but what's interesting to me is that the story in its finished form has no reference at all to its inspiration.

I was lying in savasana and the teacher came to give me a little thai-massage head-rub, and I used my neck muscles to "help him" lift my head. This is not helpful to the masseuse, as he needs you to be untense to give you a decent massage, and he whispered "Relax."

This gave me the idea for a story about a woman in this exact position whose reception of "Relax" was to remember a date-rapist whispering this to her as he did the deed. (Am I the cheeriest writer you know, or what?) After I thought through the story a few times, it became a man with this memory, and then I added some other elements and had a pretty good setup and conflict, I thought. I still had the yoga class in there as a framing device for the first few drafts, but when I came back to the story a few days later, it didn't fit. At all. Just cluttered up the raw experience of this poor character. I wanted to add more about him and his situation, but I wasn't writing a novel, just a little story, so all the fat got excised.

It's still really interesting to me that all elements relating to the inspiration for the story got tossed. I'm pleased with my results, but where it came from would be really convoluted, were I asked to explain.

I've been listening to Joanna Newsom almost exclusively for the last 24 hours, while I read and edited and worried over my new job. She has this strange ability to make you forget that there are other kinds of music than her own. Her music is so indubitably odd that you wouldn't think she'd have this quality. But it all seems so normal after a few spins, the harp, the voice, the symphonic construction, the appallingly poetic lyrics. What would you even need an electric guitar for?