Category Archives: Writing

Art and Culture, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

10,000 Hours

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Summer                                               Under the Lily Moon

OK, I’m late to the 10,000 hour rule.  You probably know about it from Macolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers.  I missed it or, if I noticed it, I passed it by.

It did make me think when I ran across it recently.  What would be worth spending that much time to polish?  First question, is there anything I’ve done repeatedly, for hours at a time, over several years?  Yes, writing.  Being a student.  Engaging in political activity.  Studying Art.  And most recently, translating Latin.

Second question.  Are there any of those that I want to continue that I might pursue at a pace to reach 10,000 hours or so?  I’ve already reached that level in being a student and, I’m sure, in political work.  That pares the question down to writing, art and Latin.

I will continue writing, so writing at an increasing pace makes sense to me.  Studying art is fun, but I’m never going to put in 3 hours a day at it.  Just not that interested.  But.  The Latin?  Maybe so.  Maybe so.

That would mean pruning my close attention and active time to two activities, writing and Latin.  Might make sense.  Hmmm.

Bees, Translating Metamorphoses, Travel, Writing

When It’s Time to Live, Live.

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Summer                                                          Under the Lily Moon

“When it’s time to die, go ahead and die, and when it’s time to live, live. Don’t sort-of-maybe live, but live like you’re going all out, like you’re not afraid.”

Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

With Paul and Sarah on the road, this quote jumped out at me. (oh, toby, too) I so want to live on the very edge of my life, risking it all, trying to be the best me that I can be.

It probably doesn’t look like it from a moving to the wilds of the Maine coast position, but for me learning Latin and keeping bees put me out there, in a place no longer familiar, on lands foreign and challenging.

If I’m honest, and why wouldn’t I be, the big challenge for me is getting my work out there into the world.  It terrifies me and excites me, just not in equal measure.  The terror easily swamps the excitement.

Those of us with quiet treks, ancientrails walked alone or in private, can fall prey to adventure envy when the adventure has a physical component.  Climbing.  Skiing. Moving. I’m acquainted with this envy and envy is bad for the soul.  It diminishes the envier and the envied with a false comparison, a comparison between different journeys, neither more nor less profound or difficult.  Just different.

Traveling fills that adventure component for me, but I like returning to the familiar.  In fact, for me to walk my own ancientrail, I need a quiet home, peace during the day and a place to work.  With Kate I’ve found all these things.  A blessing in my life.

Now there’s that submitting my writing.  That’s an adventure.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

What Now?

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Spring                                                                Beltane Moon

Now what?  First draft put to bed.  In Kate’s hands now.

Kate asked how I was doing this morning during our business meeting.  I’m not an immediate answer to that sort of question kind of guy.  So, I paused, reflected.

“I always knew I would mature late,” I said.

Long ago I read a monograph on the development of people in various fields.  The longest was the philosopher/theologian, somewhere in the 50’s.  Since I’ve battered my through more than one field, I figured I’d be later.

“With Greg (Latin tutor) asking me to collaborate on the commentary (Ovid’s Metamporphoses) and the completion of Missing’s first draft, I’m feeling like I may be hitting my maturity at last.”

I’m beginning to feel grown up, as if I’ve retrieved my birthright from the convoluted labyrinth of my life.  This is not, interestingly, about achievement, but about individuation, about becoming who I am and who I will be.

“So,” I told Kate, “I’m feeling pretty good.  Not jump up and down, yippee good, I’m too northern European for that, but pretty good.”

That’s how I am this morning.

Writing

Later

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Spring                                                           Beltane Moon

There is, too, always a let down after finishing a first draft.  All that time, writing novels for most of us takes at least 9 months, sometimes years, and stepping away feels like losing a friend, a close friend with whom you’ve hours of very intimate time.  Not there yet, but it’ll hit me tomorrow or Monday.

 

Also, the upside.  Staying with it.  Hefting the printed pages of the draft itself, a physical embodiment of the inside, the mind.  Having some free time, or, rather, time to do other things, things perhaps set aside while focusing on the writing.  In my case that will be reading, reading a number of books I have that I want to use in the Reimagining work.

Not sure where I’ll start.  Maybe that one on Emergence.

More morning time on Latin, too.  Accelerate my work over these next few months, get my proficiency up.

Then, too.  Digging, hive inspections, weed pulling, chain saw work.  Outdoor time.

 

Art and Culture, Writing

Novel Endings and Art

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Spring                                                   Beltane Moon

Still reading Missing, catching up to the end, so I can write it.  That’s an amazing aspect of writing a novel.  I can read what I’ve written so far and I can decide how it resolves.  Of course, the entire corpus before the end represents limits on that ending, it’s not entirely open, yet there is a plasticity to it, a fungibility that is mine to shape.

Then into the Minneapolis Convention center for two hours of volunteer training for my four shift on Sunday.  Some big museum association is in town and all us museum volunteer types were solicited to help out.  I said yes.  I’m still trying to recall just why.

After that training, I drove the short distance to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts since I had a 7 pm Sports Show public tour.  As I approached the museum, the streets had cars parked everywhere.  There was a stream of people going in and out of the museum.  On a Thursday night?  Not a third Thursday.

Then it hit me.  I’d taken a substitute tour on the opening Thursday night of Art in Bloom.  OMG!  There were no takers for the Sports Show tour, not a big surprise.  The people watching was great though.  Lots of women in very, very short skirts.  I mean practically non-buttock covering.  Men rolling their eyes as their wives exclaimed.  It was a sub-cultural moment.

Glad to be home.

Cinema and Television, Writing
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Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Two weeks ago Kate and I went to see Hunger Games.  This afternoon I went to see Cabin in the Woods.  Not Kate’s kinda movie.  This is the most movies out I’ve seen in a couple of years.

Let me just say this.  If you’re a Lovecraft fan, and I am, you’ll love this movie.  Nuff said.

Humanities, Latin, Writing

Just Plain Fun

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Spring                                         Bee Hiving Moon

Kate has a tendency to get into work outside and not stop.  She just keeps going, head down, tasks to complete.  I admire that but don’t find it in me when I work outside, even though I enjoy that work, too.

On the other hand, when I get into Latin, my head down, keeping going button gets pushed. The next word.  The next phrase.  The next sentence.  Stay at it.  The puzzle part of it keeps me at it, pushes me forward.

Same thing happens when I do research.  One more item. Something new may be on the next page.  In the next book or web page.

Writing can go long, too, but it’s a bit different.  There, the imagination engine runs as long as its fuel gets dredged up, is there to use.  When it’s gone, it’s gone.  No explanation, no reason.  Just gone.

Yes, I can free write past that moment sometimes, that is, pick a different idea, go after it, dislodge a different source, maybe my off-shore oil or the North Sea fields, but just as often, more often, the well has run dry for the moment.

The joy here is that I still love it, all of it.  Latin, research, writing.

The outside work I appreciate, need in the same way I used to need meditation, contemplative prayer.  The inside, head work, is just plain fun.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Writing

Creating Self

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Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” by George Bernard Shaw

Later today, beets blood, bull and golden and carrots, Nantes and one lone blueberry to replace a dead plant.  I think about it, this planting and nourishing, watching and waiting, then harvesting and preserving and eating, and I feel a part of my life being created.  This part gets its hands dirty, relishes the seasons and their graces, their vagaries.  This part looks at shades of green, knows this most important color as a friend and ally.

Another part, this one quiet and inward, wanders the halls of art museums, galleries, image collections on the internet and in books. Looking.  Seeing.  No dirty hands here.  Visual contact.  Delight in a curve, a color, an image, a remaking of tradition, new ways of perceiving.  This one knows the spread of art from Chauvet Caves to MOMA and delights in each creative moment.

Then the father.  And husband.  The family guy.  Cousins, aunts, uncles.  Grandpop.  One in a line.  A link between that great one-celled ancestor and the transformation of our species that is yet to come.  Love not abstract but concrete and timeless.  Walking with children and their children, walking on toward some unknown future.  Together.  That’s a part.

A noisy chunk, this one involved in struggle, voicing the cries of the poor, the victims, Continue reading Creating Self →

GeekWorld, Writing

School Days, School Days

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Spring                                                          Bee Hiving Moon

Second and last class tonight in InDesign, a text and image formatting program by Adobe that I plan to use for designing my own e-books to sell to Amazon.  Not sure how far I got with this program, but enough to get started anyhow.

For the first time, this was my sixth evening at Champlain high school, there were students around. Band practice, I don’t know what else.  For some reason I got a sense then of students as a river, flowing through a school, the individuals changing, but the river always moving, filled with water.  In the train of that thought came a wondering about teachers related to the river.

Kate took an Excel class tonight at Blaine High School.  She says she learned a lot.

Education always cranks me up, gets my energy working.  It was true tonight.

Writing

Writing Cowardice

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Imbolc                                            Woodpecker Moon

Not often do I trash or put into draft something I’ve written.  I don’t say this because everything I write is wonderful, hardly, but because this blog is as much about living out loud as anything else.  Letting warts and all show through.  Most of us have a wart or two and sometimes it helps to know others do, too.

Still, when I wrote the post below a couple of days ago it felt too raw, as I note near its end. This morning, though, on the way to the Art Institute with Kate, I made a comment about something I’d learned in touring the Art Show.  “It take a lot of courage, bravery, to show up, put yourself out there, let people see what you have, in public.  I admire that about athletics.”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s like that in any area where you want your talents to be seen and appreciated, where you want to be the best.  Like in sending your manuscripts out.”

As you’ll read below, the same thought had occurred to me only a couple of days earlier.

The Original Post – from Monday, March 12th

A good writing day, another verse of Ovid translated, only took an hour, picked up 30 minutes of treadmill time.  A productive day.

Missed the aurora promised by solar storm watchers.  Apparently solar flares and snow storms have something in common, at least this year in Minnesota.

I realized, again, today that I’ve been a coward when it comes to my writing.  I write it, look at it, box it up and put on the shelf.  Right across from where I’m working now, I can see 5 manuscript boxes, each with a different book.  Maybe 6 to 8 years worth of work.  And what have I done with it?  Next to nothing.

Rejections are part of the writing experience.  Well, I solved that one.  If you don’t submit, they can’t reject.  I can’t really say I have a good reason for being so lazy or frightened or reluctant or ashamed (maybe, surprisingly, mostly this one.  It seems my work should, somehow, be more than it ends up being.)  Oops.  There’s that should word.

Not entirely sure, but this one I’m working on now feels different.  It feels to me that once I  squeeze it and press it, making it more compact and at the same more descriptive and dramatic that I’ll have something I can be proud of.

This is a little to raw for me.  It’s going into draft.