Imbolc Valentine Moon
Here we go. A perfect day. Revising Missing before 11:00 am. A sentence from Ovid before lunch. Nap. Working with pre-Raphaelites until 4:00. Some chess until 5. Workout. A movie with Kate. As I said.
Monthly Archives: March 2013
III
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Considering a strategy for revision. How do I utilize the comments, opinions, various thoughts from my beta readers? Where do I begin? Do I proceed from front to back or do I manage certain structural issues first? How much time should I give myself to complete it? May 1st seems good. That would give me six weeks accounting for the D.C. trip and beginning work in the garden and with the bees.
OK. May 1st. Beltane. Finish revision III in time for the growing season. A good time to start full bore on writing Loki’s Children. And getting that revision in the hands of an agent. I have a March 30 class on publishing at the Loft, so that should work well with that timing.
Given the time frame, which if you notice I set as I wrote, I can reason backwards to plan. Review all the comments. Have done. Note down all that needs to be done. Their ideas, my impression of what they mean for Missing, and my ideas sparked by the reader’s impressions, then set to work.
(note, I revised my ideas on revision after I found this handy pyramid. I’m gonna follow it.)
Make sense to me to deal with structural issues first. Transitions, movement of the story as regards John and the unmaking–their relative weights and interleaving. The POV issue is structural, too, in this case. Finding those areas where the action flags and cutting them out.
After those I can attend to the character development/recognition matters and the map/diverse number of places, plus revamping the action in light of the cuts above.
Finished up my computer upgrade this morning by installing the speakers. Now I have a Pandora station playing, Early Music. Nice with the snow falling.
Putting on the Moves
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Well, got in my hour, actually 2, of chess. Don’t know whether I want to play actual games. The lessons are brain twisters, requiring spatial thinking and logical thinking combined with strategic planning while executing tactical decisions. A weird sort of fun. Similar, in fact, to translating Latin.
(Samuel Reshevsky, age 8, defeating several chess masters at once in France, 1920)
Also translated my sentence in Ovid and got post cards out to the grandkids. Kate made a great supper with a chipolte butter on chicken breasts, our carrots from last fall and salad. The carrots have a bright color and a sweet, earthy flavor.
Otherwise trucking along.
Chess. Again.
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Calibrated the TV, put the WII onto component video. The last of the tasks I decided I 
wanted to finish this weekend. Did that last night.
Now I need to get some work done. First task. Doesn’t seem like work, but I’ve decided to devote an hour or so a day to learning chess, from the almost ground up. I’ve played chess off and on over the years and have had various spurts of trying to get better, but I’ve never given myself the training I need to improve. Now, I’m going to do it. Poked around on various chess sites and found this one, Chess.com, that has very useful tutorials. I’m doing the free ones right now, then I’ll pony up for a year’s subscription, if I’m still into it.
Keeps the mind working and it has a puzzle aspect I enjoy, too. Like astronomy I’ve gone in and out of enthusiasms with chess, but I have a sense this time will be of longer duration. Not sure why I feel that way, but I do.
Second task, another sentence in Jason and Medea, then on to the grocery store.
When the Student is Cold, Winter is the Teacher
Imbolc Valentine Moon
“When the eyes and ears are open,
even the leaves on the trees teach like
pages from the scriptures.”
Kabir
What then can the winter teach us, when the leaves have fallen and the plants are quiet? Our gardens fall away, buried by white snow, their shapes changed, smoothed, flowing. No evidence of their fertility, or, rather, the only evidence is of its end, brown stems above the snow. A lesson that the same place can be two things. Green and white. Fruitful and barren. Hot and cold.
On very cold days the air has a clarity, a snap to its presence. It insists on your attention and your care.
The cold and the snow preach purity, the willing of one thing. Change by lowering the temperature. Think of the things in the world that could be made better by lowering their temperature. Winter is witness to the power of such change, its possibility and its possibilities.
Blue sky, clear air, snow shaping the earth and wind driven snow. Then, low clouds, gray skies, snow falling fast and faster, the onrush of blizzard. The humbling of the machine. The reconstructive surgeon of the landscape. We do not own this place; we’re visitors. It comes with its own reality, one in which we exist by sufferance.
Winter teaches us humility.
Quotes IV
“I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.”
| — | Charles Lamb, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” |
“Full bottles are quiet; it’s the empty ones that make all the noise.”
| — | Chinese proverb |
“The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.”
| — | Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion |
“I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening…like a light in the midst of the darkness.”
| — | Vincent Van Gogh |
“The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing they are doing in their life.”
| — | Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev |
“To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
| — | Bertrand Russell |
“I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.”
| — | Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms |
“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.”
| — | Henry Miller |
“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.”
| — | Friedrich Nietzsche |
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.”
| — | W.C. Fields |
“I love to smell flowers in the dark,’ she said. ‘You get hold of their soul then.’”
| — | L. M. Montogmery |
“You either like me or you don’t. It took me Twenty-something years to learn how to love myself, I don’t have that kinda time to convince somebody else.”
| — | Daniel Franzese |
“Her lips drink water but her heart drinks wine.”
| — | E.E. Cumming |
“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.”
| — | Charles Bukowski |
“No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.”
| — | Edvard Munch |
“I want a trouble-maker for a lover, blood spiller, blood drinker, a heart of flame, who quarrels with the sky and fights with fate, who burns like fire on the rushing sea.”
| — | Rumi |
“Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.”
| — | Georges Seurat |
“Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do.”
| — | Bertrand Russell |
“When the eyes and ears are open,
even the leaves on the trees teach like
pages from the scriptures.”
| — | Kabir |
“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”
| — | Walt Whitman |
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
| — | Marcel Proust |
“The true paradises are the lost paradises.”
| — | Marcel Prous |
Waiting for the Green (Enjoying the Snow)
Imbolc Valentine Moon
As the sun climbs the sky, the days take on that remembered glint, the one that comes with green and growing things; yet, because this is halfway to the northpole, it does so glancing off snow cover and enlightening cold air. It feeds no flowers, no leaves on trees, no viny processes. Even its warming leaks away as it bounces off the high albedo white. No season gives way in straight sets. Well, not usually. Though here in Minnesota it does sometimes seem that we skip that warm and scented time plunging instead into the heat and insects of summer.
Still the heart knows and so might that tiny organ located somewhere inside our enlarged brains; you know, the one that would help us navigate by the northstar if only we stopped thinking so damn much, the one that says, oh, this is the time to pick up our family and move to the valley where the warmth will have broken free the streams and perhaps some edible grasses have begun to grow. Let’s go. Let’s go.
But no. We no longer listen to that impulse. Instead we investigate the numbered calendar, read thermometers, measure the angle of sun. Wait anxiously for the whirring and blinking of large machines eating those numbers and so many more, past numbers and ideas of how one effects the other. Then, the model speaks. But, like early man who built his tower toward the sky hoping to join the Gods, these machines cannot speak in one voice. This means we wait. Watching the sun climb, the ice melt. Waiting for the green.
Nick
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Checked in a couple of weeks ago on a friend’s step-son equivalent convicted of murder three years ago. How’s Nick doing, I asked. 3 years in; 3 years to go. He’s still the “head ape.” Still cautious. Hungry for intelligent conversation. ” the boredom and the inability to have any one with a brain to talk to ” Apparently his mom’s monthly money gives him enough food to maintain his health and put warm clothes on his back. As my friend says, the basics. She worries about him all the time.
Think about Nick as you go about your business today. Making choices, bad or good, about what to do next, where to go next. What you might have for lunch. There are those, and they are multitudes, for whom those oh so casually engaged moments count as luxuries far out of reach.