Mischief Managed

I made a promise and while I'm not always good at keeping them unless blood or marriage or money are involved, this one I'd like to. I said that when I'd finished editing I'd write about something else, and that something else is the life I'd like to have now. Or the life I'd like to have until I begin working in earnest on the second novel, which won't happen until I've read everything ever on the business of publishing. Meanwhile, back in the real world, I'll be making pesto from the basil in my garden. I'll croon to green bean buds curved and pale as festuses beneath womb-veined leaves. I'll slather Mod Podge on bottle caps and balsa wood and anything that dares to reveal a blank and boring surface in want of a bird. Friends I haven't seen I'll see again, games I haven't played I'll play again, favorite books will be thumbed and loved and read over for all the very same reasons and new ones, besides.

And in good time I hope to see fruits of a literary kind. I might still be thrilling from having finished, really finished, with a novel that no longer feels like a draft to me, but I hope my hope isn't only that. But now I'm talking about writing again when what I really ought to be doing is planning and dreaming and growing. Though not, I hope, my hips. With time enough now to be a warrior of another kind, I'd like to lose the eight pounds I've been wanting to all year. Priorities, right?

Heigh-Ho

I'm thinking of the last few weeks as The Big Push, but I'm not doing anything so brave or useful as child birth. We're in the business of making books, not babies. I'm in my last edit, and because this isn't the first time I've said that, I have to really mean it this time. Here's hoping it won't have a cover (or contents) only a mother could love. I can feel myself getting sloppy. I'm close enough to fog up the glass in this manuscript, and it's time either to draw a heart with some poor bastard's name in it or a curse word. Maybe both.

I find chapters too long or too short and they're like bowls of porridge I think I'd rather throw at the wall than eat, strings of adjectives and orphaned commas like the seven fucking dwarves. Happy, Dopey, Sleazy, Garfunkel. Less telling and more showing, but not too much. Keep it in your pants.

At least until book two.

Genrecide

The last time I had cause to go to the laundromat I ended up writing my wedding vows, the words sticky-slipped from ink pen to page, sucked reluctant as my thighs from the seat of the plastic chair when I rose to move laundry from over-sized washer to dryer. I remember thinking it was almost as romantic as having written them on a napkin, which says a lot about what I think of romance. Today a trial of another kind, without my husband's heart to consider but my own - which must be put aside utterly, it seems, for edits. I didn't need a score of industrial dryers or a wall of glass windows at my back to heed the excessive heat warning. My fingers slogged across the keys, each keystroke a sacrifice to the gods of copy and paste, murdering more than my darlings. I've reached a point in the editing where there's no stepping back, no perspective but the biggest, and the word "continuity" is like to give me nightmares. I don't know up from down. Right from left. Context from crap.

I'm raising the stakes, alright. This one's going straight through my right ventricle.

Down the Rabbit Hole

As a child, the start of every month would mean I'd wake, gummy-eyed, and mutter softly to myself before saying good morning to anyone, Rabbit, Rabbit. Before the age of Google and despite having been rather a voracious young reader, I heard this on Nickelodeon, and latched on to it as I always had and would always be terribly superstitious. I had no notion of why I was doing it, only that if I didn't, I was cheating myself out of a very real opportunity to plot the course of the next thirty-odd days with a little more luck than I would have otherwise. And I felt - jinxing, horoscope-reading, avoiding stepping on cracks even when I was very, very angry with my mother child that I was - that I needed all of the luck that I could get. To earn better than a B on my math tests. To get picked to play the xylophone. To hold hands with a boy. To turn invisible when it was my turn to do a somersault in gym class (or dribble a basketball, or get picked for kickball, or climb the rope).

Now a new month just means I get paid and can, after paying my credit card bill, break my financial fast from iced coffee and frozen yogurt. I am especially guilty in the summer of finding very little to look forward to but autumn, each month one nearer to November - which is when it comes to Ohio, these days. There is nothing so wondrous or flexible as the faith I had as a child that something small I did could change the whole course of things, unless it's averting an argument with my husband by loading the dishwasher. How grim and dull adulthood is.

I think that's why I write.

Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living

I've always loved that particular folk rhyme, or perhaps it was the book I read as a child where the children - named after the days of their birth - are all turned into the foods they like best and nearly eaten by a witch. I was born on a Saturday. For me at least this doesn't mean I'm living by the skin off my hands or the sweat on my brow, but by the drive I have to do and be, to feel guilty for every moment of rest away from the work of my life: writing. It isn't that I consider time spent away from my work necessary, because I totally do, but the murderous, ruler-rapping impulses courtesy of my Type-Triple-A personality - kind of like the T-888, only soft and prone to tears - make everything that isn't something feel like I ought to flog myself. I could and did skip any number of classes in college without warranting this kind of response, but if I elect to read before bed instead of tap-tap-tapping out a few words I might even end up deleting tomorrow, it's on.

Maybe I ought to have been Wednesday's child?

But I do give myself a break, even when I don't feel like I deserve one. With that in mind and my desire for something here to cater to my exhaustive hunger for geek culture - and what my obsessive fervor often transmutes to geek culture, like honing my gardening and sewing skills for the zombie apocalypse - I bring you Saturday's Child, where I am admitting the opposite of what I ought to be doing. What I'm reading, watching, playing; the things that just took my heart and squeezed it like a naughty cat.

1. I've got a crush on the Naz'jar Battlemaiden. World of Warcraft has some really tremendous storytelling, and as I tend only to game when there's a rich world and story involved, this is dangerous business, indeed.
2. I'm not a genius, which explains why I'm late to the Eureka party. The success of this show, I think, lies in what a friend smartly called the fact that it's "light on the science, big on the fiction." I love a space opera or fantasy epic as much as the next geek, but a romp that doesn't take itself so seriously is refreshing.
3. Jason Sanford's Never Never Stories, especially the scope and sheer weirdness of the science fiction stories, are just captivating. Every question I felt I needed answered on the first page was forgotten in the wandering and wondering pleasure of just reading.

Guilty pleasures? Spill 'em.

Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

I sit down to write at my new (old) writing desk and I am distracted by the imperfections in the wood. Before handing the man one of only four twenty dollar bills I have between today and the end of the month for gasoline, groceries and, apparently, the purchasing of antiques, he told me that he believed it was poplar or maple. But what I see is glitter, pink and silver, pixie-slick thumbprints where the smallest hands could reach. Red paint and black and glue residue. A faintly edged circle is crossed by a constellation of pencil compass points, and I wonder at the purposeful destruction, what sort of child would stop there and not pepper the desk top over with holes. The name 'Jaron' is scratched twice into the wood. I think I'll use it.

I put the desk in front of a window. It's dark now but I wonder tomorrow what I'll see, what this new space will warrant the page.

Electroshock Therapy

"Seventy percent of the world is covered in water, and the other thirty percent is covered in people who want to be writers." - Laura Resnick

I feel a little like a child who's just pried the safety plate from an outlet and is trying to decide which implement to jam inside. There are hair pins enough in every room of the house that the choice seems obvious, at least.

Though I wasn't sure what to expect, I risked being stranded following the rapture at the Clear Creek Writers' conference, 'Confessions of a Working Writer.' Laura Resnick delivered the keynote and delivered me unto creative salvation. She was candid and cool and my hair might as well have been standing on end for how charged I felt after hearing her speak, and daring to go and speak to her. I've felt more than a little helpless, a little reckless - maybe my finger goes in that socket, yeah? - querying seemingly for the sake of increasing my misery, but Laura urged us to take control of our careers as writers, to help make the rules when we must play by them, and for fuck's sake to put down the pin and pick up the pen.

On a break I escaped to the patio of the historic home where the conference was held and leapt to the spongy lawn below, current conducted down through my shoes into earthworm jazz. I tried to call M to tell him what she'd said, what she'd made me feel, but when I couldn't reach him I simply grinned, lips a lightning-slash and hot from talk.

It's not just that rejection can't unwrite what I've written. It can't unmake me, or what I want.

In the Night

Last night I had a nightmare. I might re-create the conditions - too much coffee too near to bedtime, freshly laundered sheets smelling of lemon verbena - if it meant another poem scrawled through gummy eyes by bathroom light. The windstorm that is your breath in my ear when I've woken from a nightmare. On my back, clammy with fear, your body circles mine like two links of chain; heavy limbs wound tight as sheets I might've drenched if the dream had been allowed to run its course. Instead I stir fevered from bed, eyes peeled as grapes or slivers of tape, hoping to stay awake long enough to avoid going down that dark stair into someone else's leaden arms.

I haven't written poetry seriously in years. My mother keeps a book of it I wrote in junior high school, a single dumb verse to a page, and I think it's best that's as near as she comes to my imagination.

Them's Dreary Devils

The temptation to begin a new project is overpowering. Invention is an illusion, though, no lullaby to soothe the demons stirring in my heart and in other places, too. My toes and hips and lips are fired with them, ineffectual, pinching and pricking and waving shrimp forks at every sentence I've written. More for the ones I don't.

A friend asked when I finished the last draft of my first novel if I felt I had gotten it out of my system, that now that I had written a book I could get on living, or if this was how I wanted in fact to make my living. I told him I had more ideas than I will ever have time to write, and I think I'd like to die clutching stubborn to whatever implement is best favored by writers when I'm in my hundred-and-nineties. Children will fear me, especially mine, because they'll know they've never been enough to keep me happy.

I don't have any children, of course, so I can't know. But I haven't got any published books, either, and that doesn't stop me. From anything.

Except telling myself that no, I'll finish what I've started.

Ululation

So I'm thinking if this writing thing doesn't work out I could try professional mourning. I'm becoming quite skillful at misery on demand, or at the very least, in an instant. I know I'm not supposed to feel sorry for myself, am meant to keep my chin up and my aim high, but this bow is getting awfully heavy and I'm riddled with holes. The lengths I've gone to to keep my manuscript from such a plot-fuck do not seem to matter. What I want isn't wanted, and when I think, not yet, I feel like I'm only delaying the inevitable.

Which is to say, a black fringed head scarf.

There are crazier things I could do, and won't. You know the sorts of things, the human-stupid things we have the power to do but have learned better: driving on the wrong side of the road, willfully, madly, touching hot iron or tasting boiling water, cheating on our husbands. Thinking of these things reminds me, at least, of what my hands and heart can do and never will, and keeps me from numbering seemingly impossible dreams among them.