Wednesday, August 12, 2015
You Are
you are
What you lay claim to or what you do,
Where you live, what you wear--skin
Outward.
you are
Breath, composition, thought patterns,
Religion, philosophy, political
Affiliation.
you are
Just what I define you to be
When I imagine your life away
from here.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Oh, Great and Powerful Slushy Machine
More plate-glass window views but less freeway--bagels rather than breakfast tacos this morning, hopefully to put me in a more writerly mood. So far, I'm staring out at the trees diagonally across Cypresswood. There's one large pine near the edge of the road, branches spread like arms while shorter trees gather at a respectful distance behind. It could be leading the forest of them to the road to harangue the drivers or just to demonstrate why the forests are shrinking and the heat is building. Perhaps it is trying to keep its children out of the road.
Trees along the edge put in mind of spider webs--the orb weavers might be out in force in the arboretum but it is far to hot (heat index of 110) for me to go and see. Just thinking of them gives me a slight (much appreciated) chill. October is lurking beneath a few calendar leaves and then the season of Christmas lights. November and another NaNo will be here before I know it.
Meanwhile, the novel that I intended to finish this July during summer NaNo is still dribbling out, notecard by notecard. I feel as if it's wrapped in webbing, drained of motive force by changes in setting, character shifts, and my own fear that I just don't have anything to say. Or that my voice is just so much more noise in an already noisy bookshelf, full of crowded, crying novels as the shelves shrink and are given over to puppets and puzzles and upmarket candy.
Something about the heat of summer and so many clearcut areas boasting soon to arrive gas stations and strip centers makes me feel as if we're slowly scrubbing ourselves off the planet in favor of artificially sweetened and intelligent soda machines and Lotto boxes. At some point, that sugary blood and chance-dependent outlook will birth a kind of fatalistic manic AI that will turn our corners into temples of semi-frozen worship.
Or not. I think I remember dreaming about my novel last night and being unable to tell the person to whom I was talking the novel's title. I feel as if all the sweetness has been pulled from the idea already, leaving not even a titular carapace to remind me of what I originally thought.
And I find myself in a strip center, full of sweet frozen coffee and staring across the road and thinking about the trees on their summer vacation at the edge of the road. Come in. Sti down. Take a chance and cool down. The hum will calm your fears and the words just aren't necessary. There's always another idea and the slushy machines are always hungry.
Trees along the edge put in mind of spider webs--the orb weavers might be out in force in the arboretum but it is far to hot (heat index of 110) for me to go and see. Just thinking of them gives me a slight (much appreciated) chill. October is lurking beneath a few calendar leaves and then the season of Christmas lights. November and another NaNo will be here before I know it.
Meanwhile, the novel that I intended to finish this July during summer NaNo is still dribbling out, notecard by notecard. I feel as if it's wrapped in webbing, drained of motive force by changes in setting, character shifts, and my own fear that I just don't have anything to say. Or that my voice is just so much more noise in an already noisy bookshelf, full of crowded, crying novels as the shelves shrink and are given over to puppets and puzzles and upmarket candy.
Something about the heat of summer and so many clearcut areas boasting soon to arrive gas stations and strip centers makes me feel as if we're slowly scrubbing ourselves off the planet in favor of artificially sweetened and intelligent soda machines and Lotto boxes. At some point, that sugary blood and chance-dependent outlook will birth a kind of fatalistic manic AI that will turn our corners into temples of semi-frozen worship.
Or not. I think I remember dreaming about my novel last night and being unable to tell the person to whom I was talking the novel's title. I feel as if all the sweetness has been pulled from the idea already, leaving not even a titular carapace to remind me of what I originally thought.
And I find myself in a strip center, full of sweet frozen coffee and staring across the road and thinking about the trees on their summer vacation at the edge of the road. Come in. Sti down. Take a chance and cool down. The hum will calm your fears and the words just aren't necessary. There's always another idea and the slushy machines are always hungry.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
By the Side of the Freeway
There are about six lanes dividing the view from the window in front of me: below, there are cars moving slowly through the drive-through, cars accumulating and being flushed through an intersection, along the road that runs beneath the highway there are single-story buildings visible in that minature, small-town strip of gas stations, storage facilities, and brown strip center offiers; above the roadway, there are flashes of semi-trucks, flashes of car roofs, and a stark black powerline.
If the cars thin out, I can see the deep shadows beneath the overpass, the dark cave humming above and below, breaking trips into sections of town, bivouacking pigeons in the heat of the day. I'm still thinking about voices, about how one voice can dominate a meeting, can divide the participants into producer and consumer. It's difficult to find a balance in a communal enterprise. The highway keeps my attention on the motion outside, dims the chatter in here ao that I can keep a stream of words running from my head to my fingers.
Lately, I've been finding other voices too dominant to write. Short stories, essays, novels, blog posts, radio interviews, status updates chatter through the day, interrupted by the ding of a dryer or the insistent paw of either Merlin or Varda. My own voice, rolling through the quiet house, playing with the text of the latest book I need to read or want to read or think I should read. Eventually, it feels like there is enough language in the world. There are ponds and lakes and oceans and puddles. It has been raining for so much longer than forty days nd forty nights. I am drowning or I am living at the bottom of the ocean.
I am briefly a node on the highway, singing with the radio.
And I am here, breakfast crumpled on a plastic tray to my right, staring out the high windows toward Highway 59 and the clouds that look like they come from a separate sky, one that belongs to the highway and not to all of the cars down below.
If the cars thin out, I can see the deep shadows beneath the overpass, the dark cave humming above and below, breaking trips into sections of town, bivouacking pigeons in the heat of the day. I'm still thinking about voices, about how one voice can dominate a meeting, can divide the participants into producer and consumer. It's difficult to find a balance in a communal enterprise. The highway keeps my attention on the motion outside, dims the chatter in here ao that I can keep a stream of words running from my head to my fingers.
Lately, I've been finding other voices too dominant to write. Short stories, essays, novels, blog posts, radio interviews, status updates chatter through the day, interrupted by the ding of a dryer or the insistent paw of either Merlin or Varda. My own voice, rolling through the quiet house, playing with the text of the latest book I need to read or want to read or think I should read. Eventually, it feels like there is enough language in the world. There are ponds and lakes and oceans and puddles. It has been raining for so much longer than forty days nd forty nights. I am drowning or I am living at the bottom of the ocean.
I am briefly a node on the highway, singing with the radio.
And I am here, breakfast crumpled on a plastic tray to my right, staring out the high windows toward Highway 59 and the clouds that look like they come from a separate sky, one that belongs to the highway and not to all of the cars down below.
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Cover to Cover
There is that moment when the book is finished, the last page pressed against the face of its opposite, and the entire book sags against your palm. The weight of the book seems to pull the last of the story away from you and you decide whether the place you have left was pleasant, whether it sank knives into your heart or your head, whether you are yet released from the rhythm of the words that carted you across the book's terrain.
This is a good space for laundry. Pull soft, dry towels from the what could be the bowels of an interstellar pod and stack in them in warm drifts in the bins balancing on the dryer. Towels that have been traveling in darkness, in the slush of a watery cave, in the tumble of a hot, spinning metal cabin. It's a good place to realize the book hasn't left you yet. You're still in the mood to argue its certainties, to debate whether the definition of good literature is still Everyone Dies in The End.
Towels, as Douglas Adams rightly intuited, are a perfect, a necessary, accompaniment for this activity.
I have just finished Marina Keegan's The Opposite of Loneliness and Michael Moorcock's Wizardry and Wild Romance, two books that are similar only in that they contain essays. TOofL was a revelation. It did the hard work of showing me, when I would have rather avoided it, the perspectives and pain of others. Reading the essay about why people care about whales, I was reminded of the constant FB status questions about how we care about Cecil the Lion but not other people! I want to make an easy answer--we can surely do both--but the essay was about the effort we make to find solutions for problems that appear to have a solution. The man who killed Cecil cheated. It's an easier thing to comprehend and be angry about (which doesn't make it wrong to be angry) than about the more complex issue of faked videos and proper sex education and healthcare. Outrage is simple enough to cram into a FB post. It's too soon for me to go into greater detail on the stories and essays: I'm still sorting out my responses. I know that once I started reading, I wanted to keep going. That I'm glad I read the stories and that many of the characters--Audrey, Ellen, and Claire, in particular--will stay with me when I think about people I know. That they will help me give myself a break and hold myself to standards because, hopefully, I will be (at least for awhile) paying closer attention.
W&WR just reminds me that I disagree with more F&SF readers than I agree with and that I wish read more when I was younger. I can't make myself love certain books anymore than I can abandon books I love. However, thanks to the suggestions in this book, I have started The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and think I would have liked it if I'd read it at the same time I originally read Susan Cooper and Tolkien. Except maybe for some of the slow-going dialect in the earlier parts of the book. It's atmospheric. And the lead characters (brother and sister) don't have to automatically encounter potential romantic partners along with the rest of the story, a balance that it sometimes reversed to the detriment of the story in contemporary YA fantasy (IMHO, of course). W&WR reminds me of the way I read when I was younger and that is just as appreciated as the additions to my reading list.
Books have been finished and laundry has been sorted. It is a good time to slip into the kitchen for a snack. :)
This is a good space for laundry. Pull soft, dry towels from the what could be the bowels of an interstellar pod and stack in them in warm drifts in the bins balancing on the dryer. Towels that have been traveling in darkness, in the slush of a watery cave, in the tumble of a hot, spinning metal cabin. It's a good place to realize the book hasn't left you yet. You're still in the mood to argue its certainties, to debate whether the definition of good literature is still Everyone Dies in The End.
Towels, as Douglas Adams rightly intuited, are a perfect, a necessary, accompaniment for this activity.
I have just finished Marina Keegan's The Opposite of Loneliness and Michael Moorcock's Wizardry and Wild Romance, two books that are similar only in that they contain essays. TOofL was a revelation. It did the hard work of showing me, when I would have rather avoided it, the perspectives and pain of others. Reading the essay about why people care about whales, I was reminded of the constant FB status questions about how we care about Cecil the Lion but not other people! I want to make an easy answer--we can surely do both--but the essay was about the effort we make to find solutions for problems that appear to have a solution. The man who killed Cecil cheated. It's an easier thing to comprehend and be angry about (which doesn't make it wrong to be angry) than about the more complex issue of faked videos and proper sex education and healthcare. Outrage is simple enough to cram into a FB post. It's too soon for me to go into greater detail on the stories and essays: I'm still sorting out my responses. I know that once I started reading, I wanted to keep going. That I'm glad I read the stories and that many of the characters--Audrey, Ellen, and Claire, in particular--will stay with me when I think about people I know. That they will help me give myself a break and hold myself to standards because, hopefully, I will be (at least for awhile) paying closer attention.
W&WR just reminds me that I disagree with more F&SF readers than I agree with and that I wish read more when I was younger. I can't make myself love certain books anymore than I can abandon books I love. However, thanks to the suggestions in this book, I have started The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and think I would have liked it if I'd read it at the same time I originally read Susan Cooper and Tolkien. Except maybe for some of the slow-going dialect in the earlier parts of the book. It's atmospheric. And the lead characters (brother and sister) don't have to automatically encounter potential romantic partners along with the rest of the story, a balance that it sometimes reversed to the detriment of the story in contemporary YA fantasy (IMHO, of course). W&WR reminds me of the way I read when I was younger and that is just as appreciated as the additions to my reading list.
Books have been finished and laundry has been sorted. It is a good time to slip into the kitchen for a snack. :)
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Peas, and Then More Peas
I feel like I'm on the Good Intentions subduction zone, heading straight for the heat. Currently, I'm sitting in Hastings in LJ wasting my already iceless iced tea on considering all the ways this cafe is made of fail. Starting with being staffed by the Tiffany Clique and continuing through a table that faces a row of dudes on their laptops in a way that makes it seem like I'm the moderator of a particularly random standardised test.
There is a word count that I'm not making while I contemplate Counter Tiffany and her thankless task of telling customer after customer that they don't carry bottled water and then filling orders for iced tea while she is reminded that it's hot outside. We are all becoming heat puppets through which this oppressive weather can contemplate its navel--am I hot enough? Have I achieved my potential? What is my thermal goal? How many heat puppets can I bake on a single stretch of asphalt in one afternoon? (All of these questions will be on the test. None of the answers appear in the moderator's guide.)
I keep thinking that being in LJ will make the story flow more easily, that there is an aspect of writing practice that is just as much place dependent as it habit. So far, it seems that the disruptions of the past few years, the new roads, new stores, new blank spaces, serve to make me want to run around to each familiar location, make a talisman of the map, and promise myself I'll catch up on the word count when I'm not distracted by the half-familiar. Or distracted by a little girl repeating over and over again "I hope she dies, I hope she dies." Creep quotient achieved!
So...the peas. Mom bought a basket of unshelled peas this morning before realizing that shelled ones were also available. Part of the afternoon was spent shelling purple hull peas, something I think both of us thought would go faster and produce more discussion than it did. Instead of talking, we spent the time trying to get all the peas in the bowl (instead of on the floor) and talking about how many, very, very many, pea pods could be stuffed in a basket. Most discussion topics petered out. You think an activity supports talking or writing and all it really supports is the activity itself. I should know better by now.
There is a word count that I'm not making while I contemplate Counter Tiffany and her thankless task of telling customer after customer that they don't carry bottled water and then filling orders for iced tea while she is reminded that it's hot outside. We are all becoming heat puppets through which this oppressive weather can contemplate its navel--am I hot enough? Have I achieved my potential? What is my thermal goal? How many heat puppets can I bake on a single stretch of asphalt in one afternoon? (All of these questions will be on the test. None of the answers appear in the moderator's guide.)
I keep thinking that being in LJ will make the story flow more easily, that there is an aspect of writing practice that is just as much place dependent as it habit. So far, it seems that the disruptions of the past few years, the new roads, new stores, new blank spaces, serve to make me want to run around to each familiar location, make a talisman of the map, and promise myself I'll catch up on the word count when I'm not distracted by the half-familiar. Or distracted by a little girl repeating over and over again "I hope she dies, I hope she dies." Creep quotient achieved!
So...the peas. Mom bought a basket of unshelled peas this morning before realizing that shelled ones were also available. Part of the afternoon was spent shelling purple hull peas, something I think both of us thought would go faster and produce more discussion than it did. Instead of talking, we spent the time trying to get all the peas in the bowl (instead of on the floor) and talking about how many, very, very many, pea pods could be stuffed in a basket. Most discussion topics petered out. You think an activity supports talking or writing and all it really supports is the activity itself. I should know better by now.
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Excellence or Madness
Possibly because the writing has been slow going of late and because I'm trying to blow through a stack of books before it experiences a catastrophic balance failure, I've been full of things I've read rather than things I'm writing. Which led to a conversation last night about books you remembered and the dearth of books that remained with you over time.
Last week I happened to finish two books, one that I loved and one that I felt was wildly oversold. Given the fact that I'm no longer twelve and the books I'm reading are less and less likely to be the first variation on a theme, I hope that I'll remember the former and let the latter fade into...but I fear that I will remember the latter mostly because it disappointed me and then pissed me off.
This is actually a great way to remain in my memory: occasion the kind of rant that lasts all afternoon and is basically a variation on the theme of "started out great, imploded, can't believe I read the entire thing!" The effortless remembrances of disasters (not unlike romantic or embarrasing events from your past) indicates that perhaps I should strive for a tale that fails in a spectacular shower of missed opportunities, cliches masquerading as fundamental truths, and endings that plunge down into baroque dungeons of WTFery. If I can tread the fine line between wall-flinging (as the last of the Twilight books did not, for me) and outraged force-march to the end that would be ideal.
Of course, the uneasy acknowledgement that perhaps I can't avoid the above even if I try to do so...and that I'm more likely to hit dead center of obscure puffery that evaporates from the brain instantly...well, pick a target, right? Excellence or madness.
Will the excellent book be as memorable as the one that failed? I hope so. The story of the witch who fought a forest (Naomi Novik's Uprooted) was a great fairy tale. I loved discovering its secrets and catching glimpses of half-familiar characters whole and living in a land I would visit again.
But the one that made me mad...well, it's hard to pass up a good rant.
So the question remains. Excellence or madness?
Last week I happened to finish two books, one that I loved and one that I felt was wildly oversold. Given the fact that I'm no longer twelve and the books I'm reading are less and less likely to be the first variation on a theme, I hope that I'll remember the former and let the latter fade into...but I fear that I will remember the latter mostly because it disappointed me and then pissed me off.
This is actually a great way to remain in my memory: occasion the kind of rant that lasts all afternoon and is basically a variation on the theme of "started out great, imploded, can't believe I read the entire thing!" The effortless remembrances of disasters (not unlike romantic or embarrasing events from your past) indicates that perhaps I should strive for a tale that fails in a spectacular shower of missed opportunities, cliches masquerading as fundamental truths, and endings that plunge down into baroque dungeons of WTFery. If I can tread the fine line between wall-flinging (as the last of the Twilight books did not, for me) and outraged force-march to the end that would be ideal.
Of course, the uneasy acknowledgement that perhaps I can't avoid the above even if I try to do so...and that I'm more likely to hit dead center of obscure puffery that evaporates from the brain instantly...well, pick a target, right? Excellence or madness.
Will the excellent book be as memorable as the one that failed? I hope so. The story of the witch who fought a forest (Naomi Novik's Uprooted) was a great fairy tale. I loved discovering its secrets and catching glimpses of half-familiar characters whole and living in a land I would visit again.
But the one that made me mad...well, it's hard to pass up a good rant.
So the question remains. Excellence or madness?
Thursday, July 9, 2015
Fear
Sometimes, you just have to turn off the radio/tv/internet until you can catch your breath and get over the frenzy. But there's always the frenzies waiting on the silence: what is that weird twinge? What exactly did I say last weekend? Was it as rude as it seems now? Was that a shadow or a bug? OMG, what is that freaking twinge?!?
It's summer not far from the Texas coast, so hurricanes and crazy weather are always a popular area of concern, but Houston has already had been partially submerged this season and I suspect it would happily float down the bayou and keep spreading.
And how do you process the information that comes in, the shouting and the implications and the stories that spiral ever more shrilly into apocalypse? I have a draft in front of my about a simple sadness and it floats from my head on the flood of darker fears and deeper anger that, as yet, refuses to be channeled in a story. Last night's good advice was to keep your eyes open but to understand that you have to keep moving forward. Be aware, not paralyzed.
It's not fear, exactly, that slaps the pen out of my hand. It's that awful attention, the face pressed against the glass that refuses to turn around. The need for distraction or horrified attention.
It's summer not far from the Texas coast, so hurricanes and crazy weather are always a popular area of concern, but Houston has already had been partially submerged this season and I suspect it would happily float down the bayou and keep spreading.
And how do you process the information that comes in, the shouting and the implications and the stories that spiral ever more shrilly into apocalypse? I have a draft in front of my about a simple sadness and it floats from my head on the flood of darker fears and deeper anger that, as yet, refuses to be channeled in a story. Last night's good advice was to keep your eyes open but to understand that you have to keep moving forward. Be aware, not paralyzed.
It's not fear, exactly, that slaps the pen out of my hand. It's that awful attention, the face pressed against the glass that refuses to turn around. The need for distraction or horrified attention.
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