This week I did not meet my writing goals, and I joined four groups.
The groups are activity-optional, so I can’t get too bent out of shape about signing up. One of them sends me recipes I have no intention of trying.
Although I didn’t achieve my target would count, I worked on plotting Molly. A couple of knotty problems appear to be unraveling. It’s about time.
I also offered to read and comment on three novels. I initially volunteered to read only two, but the one I left on the table had a very pink cover, and the face of the young man across the table from me was very pale. Because if I didn’t read the pink book, he would have to.
Sometimes you just have to give in and do the decent thing.
For the current Round of Words in 80 Days, I set a goal of 1000 words a day, exclusive of blog posts or the newsletter I edit.
Tuesday, the first full day of the round, I wrote 921 words. That number doesn’t meet my self-imposed standard.
If, however, we round 921 to the nearest 1000, then I achieved my goal. Exactly. On the nose.
While I’m on the topic, I’ll admit Wednesday’s word count won’t meet yesterday’s. Because I began drafting those words at 10:00 p.m., after the Austin Mystery Writers meeting, and finished at 2:00 o’clock this morning.
Yes, you’ve read it here before, and yes, you’ll read it here again, because I’m at my most creative in the middle of the night. And because when it comes to connecting the dots between staying awake all night and being a bear of little brain the following day, I can’t even find the dots.
Now I’m going to un-gracefully transition to another topic:
I’ve been reading Roger Rosenblatt’s Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing. I may have more to say about the book in later posts. But I came across something today that, even though it has nothing to do with the rest of this post, I have to share.
Discussing the nature and the importance of poetry, Rosenblatt says, “It may be that poetry is favored by my students, including those who do not write it or intend to, because it seems like history’s protectorate, kept safe for no other reason than its aim of beauty.”
He continues–and this I find startling and beautiful–
In ancient Ireland, poets were called The Music. When one king would attack another, he instructed his soldiers to slaughter everyone in the enemy camp, including the opposing king. But not The Music. Everyone but The Music. Because he was The Music.
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To see what other ROW80 participants are writing, click here.
The assignment was extraordinary because someone asked me to write it.
People don’t often ask me to write. I usually ask myself, and then I either grant or refuse my own request.
If I want me to write a blog post, I write it.
If I want me to write something requiring effort, I make a list of all the housework I need to do, and then I sit down and start an old P. D. James mystery on Netflix and immerse myself in e-mail.
Or I take Ernest to the vet.
Never mind. That was last week. Monday has arrived, and with it new resolve.
Today: Draft new Molly scenes and send to critique group.
I’d like to add a sunny little punch line here. If one occurs to me later, I’ll add it.
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Image by Dmgerman at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons
I did not wail, Alas!, and fall to the floor in a faint. I said, Okay, I’ll send the story out again.
A fair and balanced response.
#2 was a little more difficult. I held out until the last day, weighing my options: Retreat or new chair, retreat or new chair…
Friend Emmie helped me with the decision. She said, “Listen, the chair will fall apart whether you go or not. And when it does (after you’ve gone to the retreat) you will be amused at the incident and will write a great bit on your blog which will make all the folks that read it very happy.”
I value Emmie’s advice. She knows what I want to do, and she always tells me to do it. Her justification misses the point, and I don’t know how I’ll blog, or make anyone happy, after the chair collapses and I’m buried in the rubble. But I’ll think about that tomorrow.
#3 proved more difficult. Because of street maintenance scheduled for today, David parked my car on a designated side street. I forgot to ask which side street. Wanting to use the car, I called David at work and asked where he had left it. He told me. I tramped down the street and around the corner.
The car wasn’t there, but the street had been plowed up. We hadn’t been told that street would be plowed up. We had been told to park there.
I asked two young men manning some kind of truck where they thought the car might be.
They said they were just subcontractors and didn’t know anything, but that it hadn’t been impounded, just towed somewhere else so they could plow up the street, and they were sorry. I said I understood and it was okay.
One of them gave me John’s phone number. The number bore a Fort Worth area code.
I called John and got his voice mail. I left a message. Then I tramped back to my air conditioning.
Did I mention the temperature was approaching triple digits?
John called me. He said he was just TXDOT and he didn’t know where the car was and he was sorry.
I said I understood and it was okay.
He said it was probably on Summersby.
I said, No, that’s the street we were told not to park on.
He said he was sorry but he didn’t know anything and it was definitely on Summersby.
I said Summersby is only two blocks long, and I had stood on the sidewalk and looked both ways, and the car really, really wasn’t on Summersby.
He said what kind of car was it.
I said I didn’t know, because I wasn’t sure which one my husband had taken this morning.
He said there was a blue car down on Silverdale.
I said that was my car, and thank you so much.
He said he was so sorry but he was just TXDOT.
I said I understood and it was okay.
I hung up.
As soon as I did, David called to say he had found the car on Silverdale and was driving it home.
Technically, I suppose, I didn’t really find the car. David did. But I did extensive research that produced the desired result. Except by then I couldn’t have cared less.
I had no intention of hiking down to Silverdale until Hell froze over.
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To see how other ROW80 writers are doing, click here.
A business teacher of my acquaintance, when asked by a student what arrears meant, answered, “It means you’re behind.”
Not the definition her class expected.
But a good story for the teachers’ lounge, and a fitting introduction for this post.
For I am in arrears.
In reading blogs, in answering comments, in answering e-mails, in reading books, in preparing for tomorrow’s meeting of Just for the Hell of It Writers, and in submitting Wednesday’s A Round of Words in 80 Days report.
Last things first: the title of this post will have to suffice as my ROW80 report.
It will have to do for the rest of the post as well, or I shall also be in arrears with respect to sleep.
One specific item: This morning I shot off my mouth and announced to a Facebook group that I would submit a story for publication as soon as I’d proofed it five or six more times.
But after a good twelve hours, I still haven’t clicked Send.
I’m not afraid of rejection per se. I’m afraid of rejection because of some idiocy on my part: omitting the word count, formatting incorrectly, forgetting to do some tiny but important bit of business.
So the story sits in the draft folder, waiting for one more proof.
When it ran, in the early ’60s, TV sets hadn’t yet reached peak efficiency. Things went wrong: static, snow, vertical hold not holding, antenna blown cattywampus by a strong breeze.
Periodically someone would have to jump up and turn knobs on the front or jiggle wires in the back. The worst was the dreaded horizontal hold. When that got loose, the repairman was a phone call away. (Back then we didn’t just chuck electronic equipment.)
That was during the Cold War and the Space Race. Satellites and flying saucers and who-knew-what-else were up there. When the picture suddenly blurred and the order sounded—”Do not attempt to adjust your set”—viewers knew an alien force was in control. It stayed in control for the next sixty minutes, minus time out for commercials and station identification.
(During commercials, Earth reasserted control. But viewers helped continue the illusion by leaving the room or talking amongst themselves.)
David gave me a set of Outer Limits DVDs for our anniversary. (Please do not sneer at his choice. I gave him a towel shelf. Romance is not measured in bonbons and champagne. Anyway, we’d gone through Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone and were ready to move on.)
To date, we’ve watched four episodes.
First there was the story of the radio broadcaster who makes contact with an alien civilization. “I’m not supposed to be doing this,” says the human. “Neither am I,” says the alien. “Because your race is dangerous.”
Yeah, I thought, we are.
Then there was the one about the scientist who, for the sake of greed and glory, creates a microbe that destroys all but a remnant of the human race and turns survivors into freaks.
Yeah, I thought. Biological warfare. Drug-resistant bacteria.
Then there was the one about Orbit, a top-secret program designed to spy, eventually, on everyone on earth. The military supports research and development until the general who okayed the program becomes frightened of it.
Yeah, I thought. Drones, CC-TV, web-cams, little cameras in ladies’ dressing rooms.
The only part that seemed unreal about that show was the general saying he was frightened. I don’t know of any generals who’ve complained about drones.
To be candid, Outer Limits plays today like a documentary with bad lighting. What began as movie night has become depressing.
Tonight’s episode, however, afforded hope. Harry Guardino’s brain takes over Gary Merrill’s body and sets out to destroy everyone at a polar scientific installation. Sally Kellerman recognizes that Merrill’s brain is in Guardino’s body and helps Merrill subdue Guardino, and it’s all due to the power of love.
A vision of an Abominable Snowman makes a couple of appearances. I didn’t catch its significance, but David said it represented Guardino’s guilt for not going into a crevasse to save a fellow soldier.
Now is the time to confess that I wasn’t paying attention during the crevasse scene. I was writing this post.
And therein lies a solution: when fifty-year-old sci-fi makes me feel like Winston Smith, I’ll grab the laptop and type myself into my own literary reality.
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P. S. Now is the time to confess that the Merrill-Guardino-Kellerman show wasn’t nearly so good as the others. Sappy and insignificant. Like 1984 would have been without all the…Never mind.
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ROW80: Doing okay. Sent two short-short stories to my beta reader. Started revising first part of novel draft. To see how other ROW80 participants are getting along, click here.
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Image of satellite by NSSDC, NASA[1][see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons. This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that “NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted“.
Another round of ROW80 begins today, and I’ve signed on. I would like to say I’m doing it because I was so successful the first time, but that would be overstatement bordering on a lie. In fact, it would be a lie. I became so tired of reporting that I couldn’t even remember my goals that I stopped reporting and just wrote whatever came to mind.
(Oh, joy. The Internet is down again and I must reboot the router. It’s okay. I get a lot of exercise walking across the room and toggling a little switch.)
Back to ROW80.
One of my CPs came across the following post on the blog Letters of Note. It’s a copy of a letter in which Pixar animator Austin Madison tells aspiring artists how to handle times of “creative drought.”
“In a word,” he writes, “PERSIST.”
So I dive into ROW80 once more because I’m persisting.
And because I want to. I discovered some interesting/entertaining/informative blogs during the first round, and I hope to discover more.
It’s also good to write in the company of others. Not to be accountable to them, but to share their energy. We’re all working toward the same thing.
Part of the ROW80 contract is a statement of goals. I’ll keep it simple.
During the next 80 days, I will spend a portion of every day WRITING. Not answering e-mails, not composing blog posts, not commenting on blogs. Not playing Bejeweled (I’m getting pretty good at it). I will WRITE (which includes revising, editing, organizing) something intended for submission, and not for self-publication. Five hundred words a day is a nice round number, and something to shoot for.
During the next 80 days, I will submit chapters to my critique groups. The other members haven’t threatened to kick me out if I don’t get back to writing, but they are beginning to look at me with a different expression. Sort of like the Aggies look at Reveille. As if they’re going to start giving me little head pats and perhaps a dog biscuit if sit quietly while they’re discussing their manuscripts.
My third goal is to eschew perfectionism, but I’ve been eschewing so competently that I don’t need to put it in writing.
I hope everyone reading this post will click over to Austin Madison’s letter. His ideas aren’t new, but they’re often forgotten. Sometimes we need to read them in new words, from new people, and we need to read them again and again.
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Image of Reveille by Patrick Boyd (cropped from [1]) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
In the pool three days this reporting period. Sunburned Thursday morning, slathered on Neutrogena SPF 60 Saturday afternoon, slathered on SPF 60 and waited until after 5:00 p.m. and found a spot in the shade of an umbrella today. And all three days, wore a hat.
For the record, I am not the woman in the photo. I looked like that once, and it was unintentional. I sat beside the Frio River in Concan one August afternoon, painting the scene and managing to forget that no amount of shade protects against the sun reflecting off the water. I burned through the white tee-shirt I was wearing.
The other time I risked looking like that, I answered the call to garden by creating a twine lattice for the queen’s crown to climb around my side porch. At high noon. On a 100-degree June day. I didn’t burn, however. I broke out in an itchy rash on my face, neck, and arms. I went to the doctor and begged for steroids, my only hope of stopping the misery. Two weeks later, I walked in on a group of my colleagues taking a break from the library’s summer reading program.
“I have a job interview on Monday,” I said. “Should I mention the rash, or just ignore it?”
The response was unanimous. “Mention it!” After disposing of my question, they asked their own, beginning with, “What in the world did you do to yourself?”
Frio River in Concan, Texas--Image via Wikipedia
I’ve spent time in the sun–on bicycle, on horseback, in river and pool–but I’ve never been a sunbather. The heat, the sweat, the glare (which made reading impossible), the boredom…Soaking up rays for the sole purpose of turning into toast is not my idea of fun.
I learned about ultraviolet radiation when my family joined my aunt’s family for a day on the beach at Galveston. I was three years old. My mother spent the day rubbing me down with Sea-N-Ski and dragging me back into the shade of the big umbrella. She later explained she was afraid that if I burned, she would have a very sick child on her hands.
As it turned out, she should have made my father, who shared my black hair and blond complexion, spend his day under the umbrella as well. He was unable to work the next day. My mother assigned him and Lynn, my thirteen-year-old cousin, who had come home with us, to twin beds in the large, airy back bedroom. Several times a day, she applied her favorite burn remedy: Foille. It had been used on our soldiers in World War II, she said, and was therefore the best balm for civilian burns as well.
Image via Wikipedia
Unfortunately, Foille, a nasty-looking yellow ointment, had a doubly nasty odor. Daddy didn’t complain–I don’t think he said much at all that day–but Lynn did. The exchanges went like this:
“Oooohhhh, Crystal, that stinks. It’s going to make me sick.”
“No, it’s not. Now be still and let me put this on your back.”
“Ooooooohhhhhhhhh, it sti-i-i-i-i-i-nks. I’m going to be si-i-i-i-i-ck.”
“Lynn, stop that right now. They used this on the soldiers in the war. Be still so I can put it on your back.”
I remember all this vividly because I observed it first-hand. Every time Mother went on a Foille raid, I trailed along behind. I spent the rest of the time making raids of my own to check on the invalids. Exchanges went something like this:
“Lynn, when are you going to play with me?”
“Uuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Go away.”
“You want to play Chinese checkers?”
“Go away.”
“Will you draw me a picture of a horse?”
“Crystallllllllll, make Kathy GO AWAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!”
Mother made me go away, I sneaked back, Daddy went to work the next day, Lynn got up and drew me a picture of a horse. And for years after, I periodically reminded everyone of the time Lynn and Daddy got sick from too much sun and I didn’t.
I was an insufferable child, but cute.
This began as report on my progress regarding exercise, sleep, and writing, but, as so often happens, it drifted. Since there isn’t a lot to say about sleep and writing, I’ll stop in mid-drift. There’s still time to work on sleep before the sun comes up.
I am too tired to speak of goals or progress. I will say that I got to bed by 11:00 p.m. two days in a row, and that I’m about to make that three.
I am still trying to come up with just the right way to begin Molly Chapter 5. That means, of course, I’m fighting a losing battle. It’s interesting, the things you do when you know they’re not going to work. Or perhaps you don’t. But I do.
My conclusion: I must go back to pen and paper, slow myself down, write what’s wrong, leave it there, scratch it out, whatever, but–live with it. Let it stare me in the face while I keep a-going. End up with a mass of scribbled-on paper instead of a screen blank from repeated deletions.
Someday, when I’ve broken through the need for perfection–or at least the idea that I can attain it–I’ll return to the keyboard.
Regarding exercise, I ran all over the house this afternoon trying to get out the door to an appointment. Last-minute tasks kept calling me: find keys, find socks, find purse, find sunglasses, find cash, take clothes out of dryer, put clothes into dryer, put note on door for AC technician telling him not to let cats out…
It wasn’t the last-minute things that caused me to run late, though. It was the amount of time I spent trying to put on a pair of David’s jeans.
Write 500 words / day on Molly: Who knows what might happen before midnight?
Exercise 30 minutes / day: 1
Go to bed by 11:00 p.m.: 2
It’s time for some specific, short-term goals:
Monday 5/16: Write 500 words on Molly, exercise 30 minutes, go to bed by 11:00 p.m.
Deal with Tuesday when it gets here.
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Writer and editor Russ Hall, on accepting the Sage Award at today’s Barbara Burnett Smith Aspiring Writers Event, said that we learn to write by a process of “smart recognition”: making mistakes and recognizing when we’ve made them. As Anne Lamott’s father advised, we “take it bird by bird,” knowing that each time the red pen touches the paper, the manuscript gets better. We learn to enjoy and embrace the process, knowing there is still room to grow.
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To see how other ROW80 participants are doing, click here.
1. I was away from Molly too long. The words are coming slowly, slowly, and they are dull, dull, dull. Of course, all words are dull until the flow begins, and flow doesn’t begin until the words–dull words–are on the page. And then revision takes care of the rest. The trick is to remember the process and put up with the seasickness until the rocking motion subsides.
2. Monday I waited all day–or enough of it–for the appliance repairman.
Ernest lounging
Yesterday it rained. But today I did what I said I would, sort of. After looking over the Zero to 700 program, I decided the program I needed was more like Zero to 2. No sense in pushing things too quickly.
3. Tonight, definitely. Zero to 2 helped with the decision.
To see how other ROW80 participants are doing, click here.
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Like the cats, the photos have minds of their own. Someday, perhaps, they’ll stay where I placed them.
I’ve had a couple of minor epiphanies regarding Molly, and I was, when I broke off to post this, making some changes in Chapter 1 that will aid in plot development later.
I wish I were not OCD. I wish I could just make some notes about changes I need to make in Chapter 1 and then go on with writing Chapter Whatever. But I can’t. So I do it my way.
To see how other AROW80 participants are doing, click here.
M. K. Waller 