“On a small planet, where minute follows minute, day follows day, year follows year, where tradition marches on with a deafening, orderly beat—sometimes the order is disturbed by a dreamer, an artist, a scribbler — sometimes the beat is changed one person at a time.” ~ Mary E. Pearson, from Scribbler of Dreams
Saturday afternoon. Sunny and mild, mid 60’s.
Well, it’s been an eventful week. The dems won Virginia and Ohio. Obama won reelection, and Corey came home. This is good news for you also as it means that my political posts will go back to almost nothing for a while.
The ship pulled in Thursday night, and Corey was officially signed off yesterday afternoon. So he’s home for a bit, which is really nice. They hit some rough weather off the Outer Banks, which delayed them a bit, but not too much. I’m hoping that now that he’s home safely and now that the election is finally over and I can rest easy because no politicians are going to interfere with my personal health issues that I can regain the focus that I lost at the beginning of the week.
When I changed the direction of my story on NaNoWriMo, I was full of words, and they came pouring out unimpeded, and then I hit that wall, the one that always does me in. Since Monday, I’ve only written about 600 new words, which puts me sorely behind in my word count and my month’s goals. My plan is to try to get a lot written this weekend, but I really wanted to do a real post for today before going back to the novel project.
“Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance.” ~ Henry Miller, from Sexus
The other night I had the strangest dream: I was crippled, as in my legs weren’t functioning. I was attending a wedding for my friend Rebecca; she was remarrying her ex-husband, something that would never happen. For the first dance, her ex offered to dance with me, but I wasn’t really sure this would work as I couldn’t walk or stand on my own, and then someone brought in a walker for me. Very, very strange.
I haven’t heard from Rebecca in a while. She moved out of Hampton Roads this past August, not too far away. I’m terrible at maintaining friendships these days.
Anyway, this past week also saw yet another bad anniversary for me: Caitlin’s death on November 7th. Honestly, I was more upset on Monday than on Wednesday, though. She died on a Monday afternoon, and all day on Monday I was in a fairly deep funk. I never know from one year to the next how this date will affect me, if it will affect me, how bad or not so bad things will be. My reaction is as unpredictable as the days. I suppose I should just be thankful that I am no longer completely paralyzed by the anniversary in the same way that I was in the first decade after her death.
For those of you who are wondering if I really meant to say decade, yes, a decade.
“I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence . . .” ~ Gabriel García Márquez
So getting back to the whole writing thing . . . I really like my protagonist, probably because I have her doing a lot of stream of consciousness/internal monologue stuff, but I’m wondering if it’s sustainable. As in, can I keep this going for a couple of hundred pages? And I finally got clarification from the NaNoWriMo people: I keep my existing word count even though I switched subjects, so I’m not as behind as I thought, but the four-day lapse really didn’t help.
Sunday afternoon. Sunny and mild, low 70’s
Yep. I packed it in yesterday. Just couldn’t think of anything to write here. Nothing to write on the novel. Nothing to write anywhere except bills, which is what caused the complete cessation of anything creative. I found out that in my attempt to pay some bills, I overdrew the joint checking account, which caused one of those domino effects. I really hate that. I really hate taking care of the finances, even though I managed to do it fairly well while Corey was gone. Money management just isn’t my thing. I mean, even when I attempt to do the right thing, pay down some past due balances, I manage to screw it up.
WHY??? (That’s the sound of me shrieking.)
“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.” ~ Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Corey has begun the arduous task of cleaning out the garage, which in the past few years has become that place where just about everything has gone to rest: Christmas decorations, boxes of books, boxes of other stuff, whatever. If you can think of it, it’s probably residing somewhere in our garage. Just to attempt to breech it is akin to preparing for battle. Boxes placed precariously atop one another. Picture frames from which the glass has fallen and broken on the floor. Loose nails and wires. It is a room filled with traps, and many times I have stood before it and wanted to tackle the mess, but I know that what I once could have knocked out in a weekend would knock me flat, so I’ve left it, and now, it’s Corey’s.
We’re going to rent a storage space so that the garage and shed can be emptied of all of the stuff (all-encompassing term, stuff), and the goal is that Corey can get back to his renovation projects next year.
T’would be wonderful, indeed.
The plan is for the garage to become a small den, and for the part of the garage that abuts the kitchen wall to become a small second bath and pantry. I would love to knock out the end wall of the kitchen to expand that by six feet, but we’re talking major reno there. Actually, it’s all major reno. And each project is dependent upon another project. I keep telling myself that it will be worth it as we will add value to the house for resale. I’m just glad that we’re not trying to sell anytime soon. It will be far better to wait for the market to continue in its rebound, which it will, although I seriously doubt that it will rebound to the unrealistic market of 2004 or so, during which anything that went on the market sold for well above asking price.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
“I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
So I’m hoping that today after I post this I can knock out a couple of book reviews and then perhaps attempt to get back to the writing project, although to be truthful, I’m still not feeling it. I know that there are scads of writers out there who contend that there is no such thing as writer’s block, that it’s just an excuse. To whom I say beh. I know writer’s block, just as I know reader’s block. My mind shuts down, or it becomes selective in what it will process and how.
When I finished a book last night, I was overjoyed. I am used to knocking out a couple of books a week, at a minimum. When I go through these reading blocks, I really feel the loss acutely. I love everything about books. I would love to be able to say that I’ve written one, a real one, not just one I’ve been hired to write about a man I didn’t particularly like. That wasn’t writing; it was regurgitating.
So why am I not writing? Why am I letting the days slide by me like shifting sand? I have no answers except that November is not a particularly propitious month for me under the best of circumstances. A month-long writing project would serve me much better in, say, January. Who chose November? Why? Again, no real answers.
Are my words lame excuses? Probably. Will I try again? Definitely? Will I succeed? Who knows.
More later. Peace.
(*All images were found on “20 Entrances That Are Clearly Gateways to Narnia.” I tried to track down original sources, but was not very successful.)
Music by Eliza Rickman, “Cinnamon Bone”
Finding the Scarf
The woods are the book
we read over and over as children.
Now trees lie at angles, felled
by lightning, torn by tornados,
silvered trunks turning back
to earth. Late November light
slants through the oaks
as our small parade, father, mother, child,
shushes along, the wind searching treetops
for the last leaf. Childhood lies
on the forest floor, not evergreen
but oaken, its branches latched
to a graying sky. Here is the scarf
we left years ago like a bookmark,
meaning to return the next day,
having just turned our heads
toward a noise in the bushes,
toward the dinnerbell in the distance,
toward what we knew and did not know
we knew, in the spreading twilight
that returns changed to a changed place.
~ Wyatt Townley, from The Afterlives of Trees
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 
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