The twenty-day absence

Well, that’s how you make a new blog successful.

I am home from Oregon — have been for those twenty days, in fact — and the house has become musical in my absence. Felicia is playing the piano again, and has rescued her guitar from the garage. I’ve buckled and purchased drums again, and have sacrificed our office space to the god of soundproofing. The walls are padded now, double- and triple-thick in some places, much to the relief of the neighbors, I’m hoping. The discovered bonus of such a room is that it is the coolest spot in the house, walled off as it is from sunlight. This makes me happy, since the warm nights are seeping back, and the strategically-placed oscillating fans are fairly useless against the slow boil.

On to the real questions, I suppose. How was the trip? Did I write very much? Have I written since? The writing vacation was a great success, I am pleased to report. I arrived in Oregon with my laptop and notebooks and fresh ink and about twenty thousand words of manuscript. When I packed the car again to return home, that number had grown to fifty-three thousand. I spent ten days there, writing at all hours of the day and night, taking breaks to soothe my aching brain with crappy movies — the crappier the better for easing my tired head, I discovered, and so I gorged, a little bit, on movies that I ordinarily don’t even like to acknowledge that I’ve heard of. I found myself a substitute breakfast nook, and by week’s end the waitress knew my order by heart. I wrote through a succession of pleasantly gloomy days, and wrote furiously for the duration of a short but intense snowstorm.

Ah, but have I written since I returned? That’s the real mark of success, isn’t it? So I’m quite happy to report that I have in fact written since returning home from Oregon.

I wrote fifteen hundred words the day after coming home.

I haven’t written in the nineteen days since.

I am, however, reading a massive amount. My book being about a purported spiritual journey, and the stumbles and mistakes and minor coincidences that follow, I find myself reading almost ceaselessly about such topics. My Kindle contains some forty books, more than two-thirds of which are forceful denials of the existence of god, and their counterpart, more-cheaply-published rebuttals, and historical texts whose subjects are the Bible and its validity. I break from this weighty material now and then for a little science fiction, lately the short stories of an author I’ve just stumbled across named Robert Charles Wilson, and whose work, of course, deals quite heavily in the tools of belief or disbelief in higher powers. There are no breaks from this subject for me of late. Don’t be surprised if no small amount of this bleeds over into my posts here.

It has just occurred to me that I wrote the “I’ve just returned from my writing vacation” post about, oh, twenty-something days ago. This, you see, is how you know I’ve let things slip a bit around these parts.

I’ll see what I can do about not repeating myself so often from here on out.

Shorts: Two Cords of Wood

For five years, my friend K. published The Paumanok Review, a fine journal of fiction, essays and poetry — and, on two or three occasions, my short stories. (Don’t mistake the friendship for an easy ride — K. was always a tough but fair editor, and I had to run the gauntlet just like anybody else.)

One of the stories that appeared in Paumanok has always been a favorite of mine. “Two Cords of Wood” was written, I thought, in the months following a divorce and my escape from Reno to the Pacific Northwest. Searching for the original manuscript now, and finding the address marker on the top of the page, I realize it was written two or three years earlier.

Suddenly this story says an awful lot about the things that were on my mind back then.

In any case: The thing I love most about the story is the dialogue. There’s a sparseness to it that I’d never written before.

“I want you to go up there,” she said, pointing at the tangle of forest that sprang up around the crest of the short hills beside her mobile home. “There’s some old trees there, fallin’ apart and broken down. You can cut those.”

“You got an axe?” he asked her.

She stared dumbly at him. “No. I thought you’d bring one.”

“You didn’t tell me you wanted firewood.”

“I figured you had one in your truck.”

“Why would I carry an axe in my truck?”

She sighed and a mist blossomed from her lips. “Because,” she said. “That’s what men carry in their trucks.”

The Paumanok archives are partially offline, so I’ve posted the story instead. Read it here.

Rebroadcasting, all channels

Too soon, the writing vacation has ended. These things always seem so long at the start — ten days of nothing but writing — and then you fill them up and you realize you’re just getting started. I could have used another week.

The last time I traveled to Oregon to write, I split my time evenly between writing and sightseeing. This time, I’d seen the sights, and I settled in to work. I’d tentatively planned to spend my mornings writing longhand, and my evenings transcribing/editing the day’s progress. That plan didn’t last long. I’d forgotten how slow my writing hand is at keeping up with my brain.

When I left for Oregon, the draft I carried with me was approximately 17,000 words long. Eight days later, I was leaving Oregon with a 53,000-word draft. I’m very pleased with the progress, and with most of the work (some of it’s going to need a careful revisit later).

Something that surprised me, a little: by the time the manuscript reached the 35,000-word mark, I was only just beginning to awaken my protagonist from her coma. Which means that this novel, as long as I thought it might become, may end up being quite a bit longer than I’d imagined.

Focusing on nothing but writing for a little over a week had my head feeling a bit stressed-out. The story I’m writing is an exercise in heavy situations, and requires more than a little soul-scraping, it being a story very close to my own experiences. I write in bursts of two to four thousand words, and then I’m in dire need of a break. The solution to all that seriousness? Crap movies. I watched an endless stream of movies that I had zero interest in before my vacation, and which I have zero interest in now, but which served as invaluable head-clearers. I’ve now seen too many Dane Cook and Ben Stiller comedies for any one person’s lifetime.

The manuscript is full of markup that will need further research later — TK this, TK that — and I have a vague idea of the chapters that are going to need some serious strengthening in the second draft.

Minor snowstorm on my third or fourth day there. Set me on a bit of  a writing frenzy. One of my notes to myself as I passed from one major act into the next:

My handwriting is fairly atrocious, so to translate, it reads Think this through.

Probably should have said Think this through, dummy. Because that act’s beginning is still in need of some reconstructive surgery. Ah, well. The challenge now: to keep the progress in play, and not wait for the next writing vacation.