“I see myself staunching wounds. All the pages of all my books going into a great hole in people and slowing the loss of blood.”

Talking with an old friend about art.  Her philosophy came up, and mine, and my place in the world through art.  That’s what I came up with.  I don’t really think about myself in that capacity, because I’m not important in that way.  My words are.

Class has been tough this quarter.  Life has been tough.  The writing, as always, has been good.  I’m coming up on the end of this book and whenever I do that, in my experience, I get a little nervous.  No reason in particular, really.  It’s the same with starting a book.  Anyway.  I’m about 30,ooo words away from the end, maybe a little more.  It’s a treat to hold cards to your chest and finally get to lay them down.  The writing comes fast and somewhat easy, lately.  I should be finished in a few months.

Was laid out for the last week or so, sick.  Had a good and ridiculous time bar-hopping the weekend before that.  The places life takes me, sometimes.  The Antagonist came for a visit, on her way to Australia.  She cooked for me, we drank, we watched movies, we wrote.  She changed the alarm on her phone to a recording of me singing the beginning of Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”. Went to LAX for the 8th(?) time.  I’m now going steady with the 105.  Bought her a promise ring and everything.

May have some good news for you next time.  Meanwhile, I enjoyed the vlog thing, so, requests?

With the first installment, I told you, young writer, to have something to say. I should add that this something ought to be something you feel strongly about. I hope that goes without saying, but to be sure. You don’t want to start a novel about animal cruelty if you aren’t a vegan or a member of PETA, or something. Remember that this is the soul of your book, it’s what should drive you when the pure joy of writing itself is temporarily exhausted. You want to get up in the morning, and think, “Right now, people all over the world are massacring innocent carrots. I must save them.”

Or something like that. Moving on.

Knowing Your Story

This is equal parts personal and universal. Sequentially, this should occur almost concurrently with the next post in the series (which will talk about inspiration).

I’ve never been one to plan my story. Except when writing a screenplay, I’ve never mapped events out, only kept a loose list of things I wanted to happen. Between these nodes of concrete events was the rest of the story, and that I made up as I went along. I follow this mode of operation in all aspects of my writing. The characters develop subconsciously, as does the theme and plot. This may not work for all of you. And it doesn’t always work for me. Sometimes I get stymied. So it’s important to know what you want conveyed, and whether in a concrete fashion or not, what you want to happen.

The method of your conveyance is character. All themes and I’d say half of the actions in most any novel need to be brought across by your characters. This means you can’t break in with a deus ex thema to explain your morals, nor act like some weak-kneed Evelina and let outside forces speed the plot. So, briefly.

Characters- I’ll be the first to admit that I can’t handle a great number of characters at once. I don’t deal with mobs well, and my writing style doesn’t allow for multiple voices to be heard at once. But it’s equally hard to say anything but “pretty scenery” without some exchange. Hence, two main characters in my first novel. Keep this in mind when coming up with your characters– you probably don’t want a Power Ranger cast worth of main characters, unless you plan on relegating them to the depth of ROYGBIV.

Once you know at least the quantity and type of main characters you want, a good exercise (that I’ve never tried) is to write, whether in brainstorm format or no, their backstory. From birth to present. Age 3, fell off trike and skinned knee–formative event, first sight of blood. Age 7, showed his to see hers. Age 8, father left. Age 9, met best friend.

That sort of thing. Maybe even write a short story or two with them. Or scenes from the book that you’ll never put in. (You’ll do this anyway, via editing. End up cutting scenes from the book that the reader will never know about but happen in your head, nevertheless, and end up impacting the course of character development.) Remember that, at the most basic level, the relationship the reader has to have with your characters is love. Love the protagonist. Whether it’s love or love to hate, that’s inconsequential. But you can’t have an unlikeable character. If you do, you have to be ready to give them their just desserts.

Once you have a solid conception of your characters, you let them roam free in your…

Plot- Which, if you’re noticing my theme, will happen organically. You’ll find your characters bouncing around in this world you created and acting nearly independently of you. That’s how it often happens, anyway.

The plot is the least subconscious thing you’ll be working with in your book. It’s something that requires harder thought and it’s the framework that you want to have most in place by the time you start writing. However, you’ll find, like everything in writing, that you’ll be surprised in the middle of the night by some twist that your characters bring you to, and you’ll have to break things apart and reorganize them. Oftentimes your prof or teacher will tell you it’s a good idea to put all of your plot-nodes onto notecards, or organize them in any other such way. Not a bad idea. Again, something I’ve never done.

When I started writing my first novel I had a good basis for my work in both temporal directions–that is, I knew what the past was, and I knew what the far future was. What was in between, I’d fill in. Don’t fight it if you get lightningstruck and your last scene comes to you before you write the first. You’ll be amazed at what you’ll make span the gap. But, for the breakdown, it’s really, truly important to have guideposts set up along the way. Know your beginning, middle, and end. And if not that, know what’s near the end. Have little scenes planned out, those little inspirations you get throughout the day, set up like signposts. It seems forceful, maybe counterproductive to the creative process, but you’ll be surprised, again, at what your own skill will produce. A scene here and there keeps your plot linear.

Aristotlean writers will tell you that plot comes first in a book. It is prime. I don’t agree, but. A strong plot is never a bad thing. A way to get a strong plot is to craft a Major Dramatic Question. This is what drives a reader to turn the page if love of character and prose fail or don’t register immediately. What’s going to happen next? In thrillers, mysteries, etc., the MDQ is easy to pin down. Will Dan Brown’s stock professor character stop the pope from crushing the Sphinx with his giant hat? Will Nicolas Cage’s hair terrify the bad guy into submission before he crashes the plane into Alcatraz, with the Constitution in hand?

In more literary fiction, the MDQ becomes harder to suss out. In The Sun Also Rises, what’s the MDQ? Seriously, I defy you to give me a good one. What you’ll end up with is something like, “What will happen to Jake, to Jake and Brett, etc.,?” But that’s not the whole of the book. The play between Jake and Brett, while crucial in providing tension in some places, is half the book, tops. So what of the other half? In All the Pretty Horses, the same problem arises. “Will John Grady woo Alejandra?” Maybe, yeah, not bad. But he meets her nearly a hundred pages into the novel. So don’t be afraid to be at a loss for an MDQ. If you can break your book up into several, so much the better.

Before I sign off I want to stress two things. One: I put plot secondary for a reason. In literary fiction, I think today’s readers want to get to know characters more than they want to discern plot. So put your focus on lifelike, endlessly deep protagonists and antagonists. If you do well enough here, the reader will follow them to the dentist and back.

Two: Take everything I say with a grain of salt. Writing is not something that can be taught without flaw. It takes a certain amount of talent that I don’t think can be given by anything after birth, along with a lunatic dedication. Remember too that I’m writing this guide for the semi-literary to literary fiction crowd. If you’re not in that corner, play fast and loose with these guidelines.

Here’s a good link to Aristotle’s Theory of Tragedy. Very valuable stuff, there. Smarter than me, surely.

Lesson the first: Have Something to Say

When I enrolled in my first creative writing class at Wittenberg, I had only the vaguest conceptions of what my philosophies were re: writing. Toward the end of the semester and into my next class, and probably after that, I fought with my professor over whether or not a story has to have some deeper meaning, a message to go with the story. This message goes by a bunch of different names and has many variations. Thesis, moral, theme– but it boils down to the question: “So what?” What is the writer trying to tell the reader?

As I said, I fought with my professor over this. I was of the opinion that art for art’s sake was enough. The beauty of a story is worth its telling. Now I’m of another mind. But! It’s important for a writer to not, underline, go wrapping a novel around a theme. For this reason my first piece of advice is simple: Have something to say. Don’t go into a novel with nothing at all guiding you. Shelley said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and since nobody reads poetry anymore(I’ve learned this is untrue.  I do!), writers need to take up this mantle. Make this idea, this moral, the seed or kernel of your work. Plant it and forget about it. But everything should spring forth from that point.

Some comical examples of morals:
The Sun Also Rises: War sucks. Getting your junk shot off sucks more.
A Farewell to Arms: War sucks.
For Whom the Bell Tolls: War sucks.
Long Way Home (My book): War sucks.
The Handmaid’s Tale: Men suck.
Blood Meridian: War is awesome. Not really.

In all seriousness. Whether you want to decry war, pick up the affairs of veterans, speak out against racial or sexual inequality, what have you– you need a moral. But don’t get caught up in it. The best books evoke these things organically*, and you may never even realize you’re getting these opinions disseminated to you. But this is where you start.  If you’ve got your characters and you’ve got a kickass first line– hold it.  What you do here is the difference between genre and literary fiction.  Well, partly.  If executed correctly, this kernel of justice, coupled with strong characters, will help whatever you write transcend genre.  And even if you write about space elves, you shouldn’t frown on a Nobel Prize because your space elves happened to eradicate moral relativism.  Or something.

*You’ll notice a particular word will be repeated throughout these posts, and that word is “organic”, or a form thereof.  Don’t get tired of it– I repeat it for a reason.

Butcher’s Crossing is set in 1870, and centers on Will Andrews’ search for the ineffable and ultimately untameable wildness inherent in the American landscape and in, John Williams’ seems to posit, most Americans.  Andrews leaves Harvard to seek this spirit out, coming to Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas.  Having a decent amount of money, Andrews gets hooked up with a veteran buffalo hunter named Miller.  Miller had, years ago, found an undiscovered valley in Colorado that was almost completely inaccessible, and in which a veritable sea of buffalo live.  Now with the buffalo nearly extinct, Miller uses Andrews’ means to assemble a team and the two set out with a skinner and moderately insane ox-driver for the valley he found long ago.

Williams’ book has quite a lot in common with Melville’s Moby-Dick.  Andrews is an easy descendant of Ishmael, and Miller is quite clearly Ahab.  Miller’s dedication to the hunt, his arrogance and ignorance, ends up trapping the hunters in the valley for the winter.  Shy of 300 pages, Butcher’s Crossing is not a particularly big book.  Williams spends quite a lot of time with the set up and leaves himself about 200 pages for the execution.  The actual hunting and the whopping six months spent in the mountains take up a comparatively little space for being the point of the novel.  Where Andrews is supposed to develop, where we’re supposed to be in, dirt-level, with these men, Williams gives us an all too brief glimpse and moves us on.  This contrasts strongly against Melville, who, some would argue, throws the reader in too deep.

I argue that the greatest short work of fiction ever told will not match up to the greatest long work.  I’m not about to claim titles for those positions, but I’ll say that Butcher’s Crossing and Moby-Dick have similar premises, dissimilar lengths, and dissimilar places in the literary canon.  Williams has written a forgettable story because the reader is not submerged in it.  Butcher’s Crossing is easily a book of another hundred pages than what was written.  The author flies over six crucial months and skims the slaughter of thousands of buffalo.  It’s this sort of detail and depth, even repetition, to a degree, that imprint themselves upon a reader’s mind and make the story live on.  I had to look up Miller’s name, and I finished the book about two weeks ago.

To bring things full circle, Blood Meridian is not a very big book, but there isn’t a moment in it that’s really skimmed over unnecessarily.  McCarthy spends 4 pages introducing us to the Kid and his backstory, throwing us immediately into action and spending the rest of the book in dizzying detail until he again scoops us up through time in a few pages and sets us down at the end.  Williams manages the opposite.  By cutting through the middle, racing past the changes in these men (and letting Andrews state the changes rather than reveal them) Williams undercuts his ending, which I think would have been excellent had we spent proper time in the events before.  The disorientation and frustration the men experience on their return is on the brink of being powerful, but ultimately the reader has been distanced, and the ending falls short.

While Googling, I found out that Joe Penhall, screenwriter for The Road, is actually adapting Butcher’s Crossing into a screenplay. I happened to catch The Road a little over a week ago.  Pretty good.  I teared up a few times, which is strange for anyone who knows my reaction to the book.  Apparently I’ve grown enough to relate in the past few years.

In other news, I read Brian Hart’s debut novel, Then Came the Evening, a little while ago, and am currently powering through Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, which I am enjoying immensely.  I think I’ll try for a true review of the former.  Will let you know if that comes out anywhere.  Chauffeur won the race by 3000 words, as I got a little too tied up with some craziness over break that I might let you in on sometime.  My novel currently stands at over 60k, and I just finished a rewrite of the beginning of the first novel.  Great to see how much my characters have matured over time.  I think that’s it.

1. California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade ~ The Decemberists. Making Samuel’s playlist was a challenge at first, because he’s a relatively new character, and other playlists have focused more on tone and content of writing, rather than the personality of a character.  Once I got near the POV switch I began splitting the extant playlist for the novel in two, one for Samuel and one for Sam’s father, David.  I came to realize eventually that what I was trying to contain in the playlist didn’t need contained at all.  A kid is scattered, pulling himself together anew daily, finding and losing his voice constantly.  With that in mind, I set out to make this playlist contain multitudes but more importantly weaker voices.  This Decemberists track achieves quite a lot.  It’s anthemic, it sets a strong tone, and yet very clearly it’s for the more tremulous among us.  A huge thank you to The Tall Brunette for introducing me to this song.
2. The Black Crow ~ Songs: Ohia. This is as dark as things get.  This novel more than any other is marked by death–slightly odd, considering the subject matter of the others.  When I listen to this song I can’t see anything for the iridescent feather-black in my eyes, and its desperation is perfect for both Sam and David, characters who feel helpless to change the world around them.
3. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) ~ Arcade Fire. As made clear by the award-worthy preview of Where the Wild Things Are, Arcade Fire’s Funeral is an album for youth.  Every note hums with the weight and significance all events have when you’re younger.  Running away seems possible.  If you could walk as far as the horizon what was behind you would no longer be there.
4. 16, Maybe Less ~ Iron & Wine and Calexico. Another youthful song that speaks to the mythic, ethereal presence our earlier years have on our lives.  Where Arcade Fire brings snow to mind, this song is deep green, trees and vines and cut grass, a song of summer.
5. Crosshair Chapel ~ Knife in the Water. This is a band few people have heard of, and I can’t sing their praises loud enough.  Excellent stuff.  Soothing, menacing, entrancing.  Like staring into the eyes of a snake.  Crosshair Chapel in particular has an apocalyptic feel to it that’s mirrored in my work.  Sam is a very perceptive kid, and he sees things are going wrong everywhere you look, and it colors his views.
6. Bottom of the World ~ Tom Waits. The world seen through the broken lens of Tom Waits’ head.  There are enough bridges for everyone to sleep under, and just enough beans and barrel fires. Sam will dream of this sort of existence from time to time, but of course he hasn’t been knocked around like the narrator in this song has.  He doesn’t know what’s out there.
7. New Doomsdays ~ Mimicking Birds. Another dark song.  I imagine this floating through my head at the bottom of a well.  This song is probably too mature for Samuel, but it hints at a depth to his character that he’ll grow into.

I thought of adding in a few of my postrock picks, but the explanations would be boring: “makes me think of the end of the world”, for every one.  And the postrock is all in another playlist anyway, for the less-human moments in the book.  I tried to make my mentions at least somewhat lesser known, and I hope I’ve exposed some of you to something new.  Next up I’ll talk a little about Butcher’s Crossing and maybe a book I just picked up, a debut novel from Brian Hart called Then Came the Evening.

Everyone thinks they can write a book.  They can’t.  Everyone thinks they’ve got a story in ‘em that’s worth telling.  They don’t.  Half of the people who’ve even taken steps to become a writer fall into this category.  Probably more than half.  And I don’t just mean get a book published.  I mean write one.  And not even a good one that goes unnoticed.  I mean just finish one.  A bad one.  Most of you won’t do it.

It’s one way or the other with folks, but often enough I think it’s both.  Writers are, as we’ve covered, mystical figures who ride unicorns and drink the moon’s laughter.  And at the same time, everyone thinks they can be one.  I met Billy Collins a couple years ago, and he had (very roughly) this to say:

I was introduced to an accountant at a party.  We exchanged pleasantries, names.  When he recognized mine the accountant said, ‘why, my nine year old daughter is a poet.  She writes poetry all the time!’ And I said, ‘you know, that’s funny.  My six year old is an accountant.  He was playing with change just the other day.

The truth of the matter is that dabbling in something doesn’t make you a professional.  I’m interested in physics, but I’m not about to call myself a physicist.  Just the same, entertaining the idea, even sitting down to begin a story, does not make you a writer.  There is no hard and fast definition, no certain point at which you can say you are one.  But you ought to know when you’ve crossed it.  And it’s not even necessarily when you’ve finished a book.  I’m comfortable with calling myself a writer after having spent three years at it, getting a few pieces published, and finishing two books while working on a third and going to school for writing.  If you took away any two of those things, I’d probably not call myself a writer.

My thesis is this: I like colons in blog posts.

My thesis is this: while writing is a job, even just a job, it is not something you can claim as a title simply because its definitions are so liquid.  Furthermore, with more accuracy than any weatherman, I can say that you aren’t a writer.  It’s gonna rain, and you aren’t a writer.  Put down your pen and grab an umbrella.  Everyone thinks they can write a book, a lot of people say they will someday, but only writers do.

I have a problem with people calling writing anything other than exactly what it is: a person sitting down (or standing, whatever works) and writing to get an idea out of their head for others to have it.  It is not a prayer, it is not a scream, or howl.  Whatever torture it puts you through comes of your own self in a way that even the idea did not.  The idea came from your life.  The need to bleed for it is all you.  Whatever asceticism you subject yourself to is of your own doing, and if that is necessary for you to write, so be it.  But because you hang yourself on a cross every evening doesn’t mean you and I are saviors.  I pay $2.50 for coffee for every thousand words or so.  What, then, would you call me?  Whether you claw at your hair or pace grooves into your floor or you travel to a mountaintop or you sit quietly in your room, it is your work that makes you what you are.  It is not the action that produced the work.  The word is all.  I have as much respect for Marilynne Robinson as I do for Ernest Hemingway, and I do because they both wrote incredible pieces of literature.  To my knowledge, Robinson never served in any army, never drove an ambulance, never hunted or played at hunting U-boats in the Atlantic.  These are things that increase my esteem for Hemingway’s life separate from his body of work.  I would love The Sun Also Rises whether written by a hero or a coward.

And let’s not inflate what a writer is.  They are simply that.  Storytellers.  A good storyteller is obviously different from a bad storyteller but it’s the story that’s important.  You can blow smoke about writers being priests or prophets but everyone has something they can do well and only artists are given to the notion that they are particularly special.  When you get your car back from the mechanic and it runs you don’t spend time thinking about the  mechanic and what brought him to where he is.  You just drive.  You ought to think about the writer the same way you do the mechanic.  Each performs a service or creates a product and it is the quality of that thing which is important.  The only thing the writer ought to have of you is loyalty if he produces a quality product.  It’s delusional to ask for more and to think that a writer deserves it.  Embrace the work, love the work.  When I say I love McCarthy, I mean that I love McCarthy’s work.  He’s an interesting guy separate from that, but my interest in him arises primarily from my desire for him to write more books.  That’s how it ought to be.  It’s bad for the ego for you to think anything else.  And despite all of our metaphysical trappings, despite that our occupation itself is a unique one, we aren’t special.  We are certainly no more special than nurses or doctors, and certainly less deserving of praise than police officers, firefighters, and soldiers.

What a reader needs to take away from a book does not involve the writer.  I won’t delve any deeper in the Barthesian pool than to say that an ideal reading of any book begins with the first page of the text and ends with the last.  Any thoughts in between occur in the mind of the reader and nowhere else.  Don’t bring a dictionary, a biography, or Wikipedia to the party.  Ultimately no writer is going to quit fellating or cunniling-ing themself because I said they aren’t special.  It’s the truth, but it’s the reader I’m trying to reach, not the writer.  We’re a crazed lot to begin with.  But we’re not mystical, we’re not any more in tune with the universe because we put words on a page than anyone else.  It’s a unique occupation that’s not a little bit mysterious and more than a little attractive.  People like people who live on the edge, and whether it’s the edge of starvation, sanity, or megalomania, the edge is where writers tend to be.  But don’t love the writer.  Love the book.  If it’s good it is the best of the writer; blood, sweat, tears and all other precious bodily fluids distilled whether shed or not, into a story, a message.  Don’t ruin all our good work by wondering how dirty we got in the process.

Tune in next time for part 3, the anticlimax that I will call “In Defense of the Writer”.  Or some such stickuptheass nonsense.  Until then, here’s J. Tillman, telling it like it is.

This post will be one in a two or three parter, provided I feel like following through with it, on the capital letter issues of writing.  Truth and big W writers. Maybe a little Beauty thrown in for good measure.

Being in an MFA program, surrounded by writers, some of us are bound to get a little lofty, a bit high-fallutin’, a tad too big for our britches.  A few days ago one of my profs was trying to inspire us, I think, by telling us that writers are like priests.  We’re ascetics, like no other profession in the world.  Who else locks themselves up in a room for hours on end to make money–and that only if we’re lucky?  We close ourselves off in order to create, spend hours and hours observing, making notes, waiting for inspiration.  When you get on a train of thought like this, you inevitably get a little misty-eyed, a little mystic, and you think of muses.  It’s a subject we dance around, for the most part.  No one wants to out and out say they’re receiving messages from some divine source, right?  Idn’t that a little hokey?

While that’s rhetorical, the answer is yes.  And despite that, people do say they’re tuned into otherworldly channels.  And it’s a channel with a lot of viewers.  I submit to you two stories of disparate success:  The first is Alicia Ostriker, whose book of poetry The Volcano Sequence was channeled to her by a volcano after a period of writer’s block.  Ms. Ostriker is published, many times over, and is, I guess, considered a success.  I got the chance to hear her read.  She wasn’t any good, in my opinion.  I’m backed up by other opinions, but apparently it’s the minority opinion.  Nevertheless, this woman had a book of poems beamed into her head by a volcano.  There’s one end.

On the other is a girl from way back.  I told this story on my old blog, so if you’re an old reader you can skip on down.  Beginning Creative Writing, we’re discussing the muses, the possibility thereof, opinions thereon.  This girl pipes up, says, “yeah, you know, sometimes it’s just like someone is speaking to me, the words just flow”.  You wouldn’t question this if it came from the mouth of Marilynne Robinson.  But this girl’s contribution to world literature is a story about making out with her boyfriend “like a wild hyena”, while Disney’s The Lion King played in the background.  Whatever you’re plugged into, I don’t want to be party to it.

The higher you get in the writer echelons, the less you hear about inspiration, about muses.  People talk more theoretically about what it is that’s fueling them.  My money is on the subconscious/unconscious.  I can tell you exactly when I’m getting inspired, because I can feel it.  You, observing me, can see it.  I zone out, clam up, stare off.  There’s nothing mystic about it.  It’s cool as hell, sure.  But it’s not mystical.

Washing your hands of the muse is a good thing for all of us.  There’s no reason for the occupation of writer to be so mystified, unless by proxy there is reverence for the text.  I’ll never be a guitar god, but that doesn’t mean I think Jimi Hendrix was anything more than highly skilled.  Killing the muse is good for the writer, too.  I doubt you’d ever come across a professional writer who waits to be inspired.  (I could cite sources, if you like.)  With inspiration in and on your head, you do what all the pros do: treat it like work.  It’s a grind like any other.  Some of us hate it, oddly enough.  But they say they have to do it.  Feel bad for them.

So, man.  I wrote a lot and said very little.  I’m sorry you’re exposed to such diarrhea of the mind but at least it’s not getting put down elsewhere.  What I wanted this to do, in part, was attack the notion of the muse as an external force, knock down some stilts writer’s might be standing on, and build a foundation for a post down the line on big W writers.   Notice it was Shelley, not Byron, that said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  Byron was too busy getting laid and saving Greece to say something as self-serving as that.

I mostly said that to piss off the Shelley fans.  But I’ve got a little point hidden in there, and I’ll write about it later.

I love the hell out of this song.  The voice just barely holding onto its hushed tone.  You can hear Beam biting on the end of every word.  I picture teeth chopping at the microphone.  I think I’m exaggerating a bit, but when I sing it I can’t help but sing it loud.

Anyway.  That song is one of 90 on the “refined” playlist for AAM.  Refined from 221.  I wanted to share the brief story of my good day.  It’s brief because it’s been good only for about 5 hours, since I started writing at the coffee shop.  The fellow at the counter knows me by now and greets me warmly.  I asked for coffee and apparently I’d earned the honor of a house mug, as he took one down and gave me my coffee in it.  I love getting coffee in different ways from drinking other things at a coffee shop.  The first time I drank coffee and liked it was in Valparaiso, Nebraska.  I had it doctored heavily but I still felt strangely adult, accomplished, looking out at the fields around the bed and breakfast.  I’d run away from home, you could say, and came to that town through a series of odd coincidences involving my first book and second heartbreak.  It’s one of my favorite places on Earth.  I ate grilled chicken sandwiches for lunch and dinner and drank beer and got the strangest look when I showed the lady my Ohio ID.  I drove 14 hours to get there.  God, it was worth it.

Right, so, I was talking about this cup of coffee.  In a black and white mug with kitties on it.  Drinking the coffee and sitting at my laptop, man, did I write.  And I looked over earlier passages for reference.  I had myself grinning.  You know that’s a good sign.  Or that you’re delusional.  I chose to believe the former today.  I wrote, and things showed themselves, and the dialogue was sharp and the threads came together.  I finished a scene and started another and I feel good about the openness of it and about what’s coming.

There was an MFA reception today, and I zoned out for a good part of it, sitting in a corner, and for the first time in a while I felt my tanks getting refilled.  I can’t remember if I’ve talked about it on here or not, but my subconscious sometimes puts the rest of me on hold and makes me sit wherever I am and space out while it drinks something in.  It did that today, and I remember getting a few looks, had a fellow come over to me and tell me I was marginalizing myself (nice guy, pretended he was my dad so I could pitch my book to him–I guess as an exercise in clarity).  But lately the only voice that’s been coming to my mind was that of Samuel, the main character’s son, who will eventually take the reins of the book.  It’s great to feel that voice, and it’s great that it’s so insistent.  He’s hounding me.  I know I’m bordering on hokum, here.  Believe me when I say I don’t plug myself into the ether like some writers feel they do.  But there is an element of writing that you can’t pin to the conscious.  And it’s lovely when that element shows itself.

I wrote about 1,500 words today, 500 over the weekend, and I’m set for another easy 500.  Gravy.  Now let’s just hope I can find the time through everything else to keep up this pace.  Might have to start foregoing sleep.  It’s not like I really need 8 hours a day anyway.  Not like I’m working, or anything.  Looking back, this post wasn’t very brief at all.  Guess I lied to you.