Observation: I really go out of my way to avoid other humans when I'm doing laundry, checking the mail, taking the trash out, etc. Something about chores makes me want to accomplish them totally alone.
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Semester's done. Papers are all handed in, classes are all attended, professors are all thanked, readings are all clapped at. I feel anticlimaxed. I was not much stressed at the end, there, but many of the people around me were, so I got stressed by proxy.
Is it dumb that I can't wait for the fall? I'm looking forward to getting some stuff in my personal life back on track this summer, and reading for fun, of course, but there's so much to be excited about come September. The aforementioned people around me who were stressed, I imagine they don't feel this way.
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No writing news right now. If inclined, this week I'll do up an essay I've been considering for a while. No significant fiction ideas at the moment. I have a thematic idea, but no realistic skeleton to hang it on, and I'm not sure I'm wise enough to write it yet anyway.
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In March I bought a five-year diary, a little book with a few lines of space for each day of your life, five sets of lines on every page. There's room for little more than impressions, or recordations, or maybe one thoughtful thing. I have tremendously enjoyed keeping it. I don't go back and read it, like I do most of my diaristic writings, but I'll be interested to see what happens when I'm a year in, and I'm reading, you know, this day one year ago.
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I am a thorough failure at budgeting. Most recent purchase:
I MEAN. YOU TRY TO RESIST THAT. I needed a backpack anyway (sort of).
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I'm still planning to write an AWP summary post, I swear. The topic feels dated, so I keep deciding to write a post about the current stuff instead, and then it feels even more dated the next time. But it will happen.
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Last weekend I spent a not insignificant amount of time in my big pillow napping and reading intermittently. I'm trying to feel guilty about this indulgence, but I can't. It was bliss. And now I have a bunch of catching up to do.
I look at the word count - 41,345, 1,934 of which are definitely getting chucked and rewritten, but still - and I look at the page count - 71 pages, single-spaced (I don't double-space until it's time to edit, I don't know why, but it's how I roll) - and I just...I just don't believe it. Surely it's an error. Surely I haven't cracked 30K yet. But it isn't.
I told Matt it was because the work hadn't been difficult, and then immediately took it back: of course it's been difficult. It's been labor, hard work, I've put many hours into it and sweated and struggled and plotted and rewritten and tried again. But it hasn't been arduous. That's not quite correct, either, because it has been a great deal of effort, but it's the closest synonym I can think of. I guess what I mean is: I breezed past 40K without a thought, instead of feeling like I accomplished something when I looked at the left corner of my Word document and saw that number there.
Because there's been so much confidence. So much for me to believe in about this project, so much surety that every word I put down is another word on a book that's going to kick as much ass as my main character does. It's like when you sit down to do homework (or...you know, some adult kind of work), and you are definitely putting mental sweat into every minute, and then you look up and whoa, it's two hours later. You certainly worked hard, but the work and the time passed much quicker than you thought.
So now I'm at 41,345 words. And on Saturday I wrote another, oh, 4,000? longhand in my notebook. Funny story about that notebook. I'll get to it in a moment. That 4,000 was the second emotional peak in the book, when my MC learns that she's been rather a fool, and she has to draw on her reserves of strength and move forward with unfortunately less dignity. I was so inside the story that I had adrenalin butterflies in my stomach about what I was going to write, because I knew exactly what was going to happen and she didn't. This isn't the weirdest emotional reaction I've had when writing, but it's definitely one of the strongest. I had to drink an overly potent tequila screwdriver to calm down enough to write the damn thing.
I looked up once, and it was 8:00; I looked up again, and it was 10:15.
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So, remember how I said I bought a Moleskine? By the end of last week, it was half full. The damn thing cost me $30 and I was definitely going to use it up long before I finished writing this book. Matt offered me several helpful suggestions for writing in such a way that I didn't Moleskine us out of house and home, and I couldn't accept any of them because I am a picky jerk. Instead I lolled about on the couch bemoaning how rapidly I'd used up half the Moleskine. He asked me what it was that bothered me so much about that, and I said it was just one of those moments that showed me how lifehacking my brain just doesn't work on me. "It's one of these times where I look at myself," I said, "and think, oh Kat, you tried to be smarter than yourself, and instead you showed that you were stupider than yourself."
On Saturday, after going to an extremely long opera (yes, yes, one thing at a time), I drove to the Barnes & Noble in Calabasas, because the Barnes & Noble twenty minutes away was just too convenient and now it's been closed and I have to go to the one that's thirty-five minutes away. I hate you, corporate America. I returned a couple of books and bought a two-pack of the flexible notebooks that Moleskine makes, full-sized but with soft covers instead of hard moleskiney ones and with many fewer pages. They're not as posh as the other but they were much cheaper, and they'll satisfy my need for paper and pen without making me feel guilty when I inevitably use them up (in a couple of weeks? That's what it's looking like, which means I'll have to go all the way the fuck back to Calabasas again).
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So, the long opera. It was Les Troyens, it was five and a half hours long, it was unbelievable, and I am basically in mourning that I'll probably never see another staging of it. Most of the operas I've seen this season have become my new favorite opera, and with Troyens I'm tempted to protest "but I really mean it this time!" It was bigger than I thought it could be, more moving and beautiful than you'd believe if I told you, with more unique and fascinating music than I imagined. It rang through my every cell. But I would be a fool to recommend a five-and-a-half-hour opera to anyone, so I won't. Still. It was such an experience. The kind where know you'll never have quite another like it.
The very coolest thing about the opera was the tenor lead, Bryan Hymel, who had a simply colossal voice. Tenors don't usually do much for me, but he speared me to my seat. One of the other cool things about it, though, was this little Asian guy who had a supporting role. I don't know how tall he actually is, but he was shorter than most of the women on stage. He came in as a servant to the queen, and when he opened up his mouth to sing I got the shock of the week. I don't know what I expected from his voice, but not this:
That's him in Lucia di Lammermoor, but you get the idea. Gorgeous rich baritone, itty-bitty living space. I mean no disrespect, it was just kind of fun and surprising to have my expectations turned upside down like that.
And now that you've had your opera PSA for the week, I'm off. Heed me: don't get used to writing in fancy pretty notebooks. Stick with notebook paper (or the computer you already paid for) and you'll be a happy writer.
Throughout my whole childhood, well-meaning adults bought me journals as gifts. Sometimes with crappy locks, sometimes with absurd themes, generally with flowers on their puffy covers. I look back and am complimented by this pattern, as it means that adults generally thought I had something to say. At the time, though, it annoyed me, because even if I'd written a two-page diary entry every day for my whole childhood I never would have filled up all these little books. There were TONS of them, given me by all sorts of acquaintances both close and distant. And besides, most of these journals had flowers on the cover. They were so not my style. (A memorable teacher gave me a wonderful sun/moon-themed journal. What a kindness this was.) Alas, as a lass I was an intermittent diary-keeper, and I wish I hadn't been, because most of my childhood is a blank and I'd like to have recorded the real experience of it rather than my faint impressions.
In college, I got into Anaïs Nin, and subsequently into obsessive journal-keeping. I wrote and wrote and wrote about all the things that happened to me, whether significant or trivial. Later I discovered online journals (they weren't yet blogs), and kept one of those until it inevitably got political, since college-age women and thoughtful discretion don't really mix well.
I am forever chasing a journal I bought during the Nin phase: roughly 8.5x11, pebbled black cover, well-spaced lines, bright white paper. It was the simplest journal in Barnes & Noble, and I adored writing in it, because the pages laid flat very well and they were so nice and big. (Diaries that are half-sized with standard binding completely suck for actually writing in, btw. The sun/moon journal had metal rings instead, which is better but bears its own woe.) I filled it completely and next found, in blind luck, a dramatic red velvet swirled journal with much narrower lines on its paper. It, too, was around 8.5x11 and it, too, laid nicely flat when I wrote in it. It was even more satisfying to fill up a whole page in that one since there were so many more lines, but it was also more of a challenge to do so. I think I got that one in Europe. I know it was in a non-chain bookstore. Anyway, I filled it all the way up, too, but it was around the time I finished that I abandoned paper for keyboard.
I still covet journals, still walk past that tall shelf at B&N with greediness in my heart. For a short time I bought beautiful, flat-lying journals when I spotted them, regardless of whether I needed them. They began to pile up like the gifts of my childhood, so I stopped; some of those books are empty still.
I have not yet relocated the black pebbled journal I held so dear, or any like it. Every time I think I find one, I open it up and it's unlined. Sketchbook strikes again.
I've been using a medium-sized notebook with nice lines, lamely "aged" pages, and clocks on the canvas-ish cover for my notes since the spring. I've also taken to using it for writing full text when sitting at my computer isn't turning my creative crank. Having notes and outlines for half a dozen projects mixed in with full text for two other projects has gotten confusing, and not the good kind of confusing where you flip through and bask in wonder at your own marvelous creative brain. The bad kind where I don't know how to find notes on one story or another, whether they're before or after the six closely written pages of a different story.
The book's now more than half-full, so I thought maybe I'd just buy a full-sized journal for the full text writing I seem to want to do longhand, and fill up the rest of this one with notes. So I did; I went to the mall and bought a Moleskine yesterday. I'm pretty sure I heard an angelic choir when I took off the plastic. The cover is so soft I thought it might melt in the heat of my hands, and while it's a little taller and narrower than I would like, with a thinner rule, it's still the closest journal I've yet bought to the vanishing black pebbled one.
Within the Moleskine was a little brochure with, in eight languages, the most absurdly immodest history of anything I've ever read. Apparently Pablo Picasso would not have succeeded without the obvious ancestor of Moleskine, which in my universe is known as "a notebook". It was like the goddamn J. Peterman catalog. A sweater's a sweater, yo.
SHEESH.
After spending an hour on that errand, I of course was no more ready to actually write than I was before I spent $30 on blank paper. But now I will be ready to write, that's the point. Yeah.
This brings my total of active notebooks to four. One private diary, one mini notes book, one larger notes book (clocks), one large full-text book. Which is pretty sad, and totally unnecessary in the writer-in-a-garret scenario into which I always romanticize myself. A voice echoes down the years: Finish what's on your plate before you go back for more. But there are just too many beautiful journals out there.
Ironically, my private diary has flowers on the cover. But it looks like this,
