Creative Diversion

I'm producing a video project for Malcolm's school's graduation this week. Back to work next week. I miss my ladies.

Language and Architecture

Started last Friday, an hour's architecture this morning, a work in progress: Language and Architecture.

Sneak Peek

Usually when the front door opens at this time of year, the cold sneaks through the entry and lingers at the kitchen entrance like a vagrant outside a downtown shop. This time, the bum carried a sullen mood, and Nonna braced for Gabby to follow. On cue, a long fushia wool coat with its brown mink collar and matching mink pillbox hat turned the corner. The mood didn’t have a chance. Gabby jumped back and shrieked in an unearthly pitch and volume otherwise unthinkable for her slight form in dressmaker clothes. Her expression, contorted, and the scream, more biological than emotional, rooted down through Nonna’s being and located a fright so primal it erupted through her intestines. She screamed back, and in an instant Gabby’s expression turned to recognition, which just caused her to yelled out again. This one sounded more familiar, more fear than terror. Instantly, Nonna regretted her decision to surprise the girls.

I had the choice to create for my blog or create for the novel. If Brian comes looking for a blog entry, he'll get it, but this definitely cheats. A paragraph that needs more time in the cooker, but I like its potential.

Back on Track

If you read his comment on my "Bad Day" post, you caught the gentle ass-kicking my employer gave me after he came out of the mountains and had a chance to check in on my work. "Stop it with the Stegner whining". . . or something like that. "The guy didn't his his stride until he was in his 50s." (That puts me on track, as a sidenote.) He's right. I did manage to get Stegner's prose out of my head; it was just after I watched "Bull Durham" the other night: "Annie? Who's this Annie? Get her out of your head, meat. Don't think, meat." You know what I mean if you've seen it. So, I got him out of my head and had a pretty compositional afternoon. It was one of those writing sessions that feels like I have swum miles out into the ocean, and I'm bobbing in the middle of purple green swells that promise doom in their depths, nothing around me but their glassy mountains and an open sky above. Nothing changes but the rhythm in my body. To keep afloat, I have to swim a little, float a little, tred water some, then swim some more. I get into a character's head, then back out, move to the setting, describe an object, get bored, swim around it, and start writing from the other side. Never leaving the open sea. It wasn't but a few hours, but I could have stayed out there til my skin got so pruney, I'd require a day on intravenous fluids for anyone to recognize me.

I'm happy in my hermitage, to answer the few inquirers about my social needs. I'm suited to it; the signs have always been there.

A Bad Day

Oh, I hope I don't have many more days like today. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the inkling of brilliant summer days full of possibilities. Maybe I just wanted to go to the beach. My writing today bored me. I caught myself yawning several times. Honestly. I think I need to stop reading Wallace Stegner. My work isn't nearly so literary, although I hoped it would be. He simply awes me, the way he originates, makes the ordinary extraordinary, collects the ingredients of a remarkable moment and then articulates it in the fewest possible words. I'd be like blah blah blahbbing on and on, insisting on a description so intensely, I end up overwriting it. A few hours on the books today. Lousy. Blah!

I'd like to say some other things: about a long-overdue phone call with Deb, my bon(ne) vivant(e) girlfriend from Rhode Island, falling in love with her all over again, with her exuberance and lusty spirit; about Winnie coming home from New Mexico with shrunken and/or missing tumors, praying for some cooperation from American doctors and higher red and white blood cell counts (bubbles, bubbles, bubbles swarming all around her); about the utterly delicious feeling of holding a watering can over potted plants. But I'm too afraid to let today's clutsy wordsmithing ruin the moment. Maybe another day, huh?