Category Archives: Writing

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.

Literature, Writing

Novels and Fiction

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Imbolc                                                              Woodpecker Moon

Starting Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.  Kate read it a couple of weeks ago and liked it.  I picked it up along with a couple of others after reading David Wallace’s last, Pale King.  Trying to catch up on at least some of today’s fiction.  I tend to read fantasy, horror and classics, skipping over literary novels of the current day.  Don’t know why, just always have.

When I began writing, I never had any ambition to write so-called literary fiction.  Not that I don’t admire it.  I do.   I haven’t particularly enjoyed Russo, but I like Richard Ford, David Lodge and Dom Delillo among several others.  I liked the Rabbit novels, too.  Still, that sort of writing doesn’t appeal to me.

When my imagination goes to work, it veers off toward magic, the Celtic faery faith, fantasy in the mold of Tolkien and horror like H.P. Lovecraft.  Again, don’t know why, just does.  My work does have a structural base in myth and legend, ancient religions, so I’m never in the modern American fetish with realism.

The closest I could imagine coming to realism would be magic realism and I’ve not yet written anything like that either, though Jorge Borge is one of my literary idols.

Fiction needs solid, clear prose, an exciting premise, narrative flow.  The fictive dream, as John Gardener calls it, must be coherent and internally consistent, but it does not need to anchor itself in the here and now.  Hardly.

Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

The Week Ahead

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Imbolc                                       Woodpecker Moon

Hello.   Another week of spring is upon us.  If puddles are here, can mosquitoes be far behind?  We may have to suck it up and adapt, folks.

The Great Comet of 1996, Hyakutake as photographed from latitude 56 north near Ketchikan Alaska. As noted by the photographer “By including the north star in this short time exposure, Hyakutake and the night sky are given a real sense of motion”. Chip Porter

Tomorrow morning the novel gets first pick of time and attention, this time until I’ve finished this draft.  Then Stefan’s paper will go in the printer and I’ll crank out the first complete rough draft.  I know already things that need attention, amplification, cutting, but I’m going to leave those alone for now.

My new schedule with the Latin:  an hour or so on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and a full day on Fridays seems to be good.  In the paper this morning there was a story about a kid, 16, who is a hyperpolyglot, who knew there were such people?  He learned the arabic alphabet in four days, then it took him, he said, a week to read fluently.  That’s just one of many languages he reads and speaks.

Well, he’s him and I’m me, still slogging through the grammar and the vocabulary almost two years on.

Reimagining has not got much attention this last week or so, but it will pick up again.  I plan to work on it episodically over the next couple of years.  I do have to crank out 3,000 words or so Groveland by April 1st.  That’s a good target.