Limitless Desire

The gaping maw of free time is quickly approaching as spring term comes to a close, and it has gotten me thinking about what I want from this newfound freedom.  The answer is everything.  My downfall has never been my lack of interest in the world, but an overabundance of it.  I want to know everything.  I want to experience everything I can in this life because I know it is so short.  The result is an overabundance of desire.

I desire a consistent writing practice.  I want to read voraciously.  I want to train for a duathalon.  I want to spend time with my family.  I want to run through the sprinklers with my daughter.  I want to take Spanish classes, voice lessons, guitar lessons, and dance classes with my wife.  I want to go fishing and camping.  I want to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.  I want to travel to British Columbia, New Zealand, Vietnam, and Africa.  I want more time for intimacy with my wife.  I want to write letters to friends and to have long phone conversations with them.  I want to catch up on my Netflix queue.  I want to go to live theater.  I want to perform live theater.  I want all of these things and more.  I yearn for all of these things, and it sometimes paralyzes me.

The thing I understand about myself is that all of these things come from the same place, a place of love.  I love the world too much and, like a lover, I want to know every inch of the world and this lovely life we are given.  I want to explore it, to revel in all the pleasures and pains a close intimacy brings.  In the meantime, I have to pick.  

I've never been good at picking.

But I know I must, so I choose writing/reading, family, and travel for now.  These are the things I will actively pursue through the summer months.  I will work to deepen my connections to these people and practices and leave the others to the future.  I'm not giving up on any of my dreams.  That's not something I'm comfortable with.  I will be a dreamer and a student my whole life.  I will strive and push to have all the things I want while simultaneously providing for the wants, needs, and desires of my wife and child.  They deserve all the wonderful things the world has to provide as well, and I hope their lives are as abundantly blessed with desire.  

So, cheers to today and tomorrow.  Each day is full of our own potential, but potential begins with the dream, the desire to strive past our current self.

A Rich Poor Life - An Experiment in Lifestyle

I recently refused a contract for continued work at a small private university.  As a person with an advanced degree in the arts, this seems like a ludicrous tactic.  After all, I know many a fellow classmate who would be grateful for the contract and a chance to work inside the walls of academia.  I was too, grateful that is, but I was also exhausted. 

I came to teach writing at the college level because I loved to write, but in the pursuit of a full time job, I overbooked myself and did not write.  In order to advance as an university level writing professor, I must publish as well as teach.  In order to publish, I need to write.  In order to write, I need to teach less.  In order to teach less, I need to make more money in another way, or I need to live more frugally.  This meant cutting out the $400/month fuel bill and the 2 1/2 hour commute on days I taught at the university.  As such, I've had to rearrange the structure of my life and my family (thank you, Tracy and Shea). 

Without getting into all the details, I will simply say this, "It's time to live a rich, poor life."  In the coming months, it is my hope to reconnect and reground myself into my own home, my own family, and my own creative practice.  I'm stepping off the hamster wheel and actively working on engaging with those people and those activities I love the most.  In doing so, I'm hoping to ignite the creative spark that brings me back to the page.

My quest over the summer and in the coming months is to find ways to spend quality time with my family in a way that is both cost-conscious and engaged.  No more late nights grading papers while my family sleeps.  I'm looking forward to swimming with my daughter, hiking with my wife, competing in a duathalon with my brother, camping with friends, and rediscovering my time and my energy when I'm not dedicating it to all things work. 

I'll be using my blog to update folks on my results, but I'm not going to put myself on a schedule of posting like I've tried to do in the past.  I'm being forgiving of myself as I court and woo myself back into the writing practice.  This is a loving reconciliation, not a stressful new commitment.  I hope the experiment yields results.

Nanowrimo - Libraries

A student cancelled her appointment with me today, which freed me up for one hour.  I should have used the time to grade essays, but I'm all about putting those on the back burner this month in favor of dedicated writing time (I will get to it, but I'm going to be selfish about my grabs for writing time).  

I could have stayed in my office, but the risk of getting interrupted or distracted by the duties of my job (of which writing is one, I keep telling myself) was too high.  So, I packed a yellow pad, a pen, my coffee mug, and I set out for the library.  I was pleased to find it almost empty at 10 o'clock in the morning, and I had my choice of tables on the second floor.  I chose one near to a bank of windows but still in the shade.  The sunlight outside radiated that golden quality of fall, and I was able to witness the colors of the season from where I sat.  

I wrote.  

It was great, and it reminded me of how I used to write when I was in grad school.  Escaping my house, I would often drive over to hospitals or libraries so I could concentrate away from the newborn.  The technique still works today.  I began the next scene that advances my revision work from the other day.  See this post.  I started and stopped a few times to let my hand rest, and this is where the library comes into play.

In order to stretch my hand, my mind, and my body, I got up out of my seat and began walking the aisles.  I found myself in "American Literature 1961-Current Shelved by Author's Last Name."  This is my section right here and it felt great to read the spines, to finger the individual volumes, and to read a page here and a snippet there.  I wound up returning to my seat with Charles Bukowski's Factotum in hand.  

I opened it to find tiny bursts of chapters.  Chapters a paragraph long, a chapter dedicated to a setting, a tiny observation, and it inspired me.  I loved the idea that a chapter could be a tiny unit of measurement and not a volume, a catalog of thoughts.  This got me writing again.  

His language, the poetry of his lines, got me inspired and I set back to writing my own manuscript.  It was a mini-lesson in craft in the middle of a writing session.  

A dear friend and fellow writer, Katey Schultz, wrote about "writing through it" on her own blog the other day, and her lesson seemed somewhat appropriate to how I was using the library.  Without the immediate access of writing friends, mentors, or advisers, how does the writer sustain his/her focus/energy/ambition for a project?  Sometimes the answer is another writer's work.  And where do we find other writers' works?  That's right, ladies and gentlemen, in the library.  What a lovely free resource!

Nanowrimo - Moving Forward

Now that I've gotten my first 50 out of the way for my writing group, it is time to move forward.  While I have the first act of the novel plotted in a general sense, there are lots of little nooks and crannies that have yet to be explored.

I struggle with the concept of outlining when it comes to my creative work.  For essays I can understand it in a way, but I have often felt constrained by working from outlines in the fiction.  I don't know why that is because I haven't done too much of it in the past, maybe some outdated, unproven bias that I've convinced myself of over the years.

As I push into the next pieces of new work, I will be referring to this loose outline and trying to gauge whether or not I have been denying myself a useful tool due to a previous and unproven assumption about my own process.  We'll see.

All in all, today was a good day.  I wrote 776 new words on the story today and I'm looking forward to marching ahead in the coming days.

Total Word Count: 21,573
Favorite Sentence/Sentences:

The headache that struck Oliver that night might have been the first migraine in what would become the ever-increasing line of vomit-inducing blinders that lead up to him lying in bed and snooping on his neighbors. As he surfaced from his recollections, he observed that the neighbor's patio was empty, his opportunity for eavesdropping gone, and, in the lingering wash of stale cigarette smoke, Oliver again wondered if his father would be disappointed with his actions.

Nanowrimo - The First Fifty

The last couple of days have been anti-Nanowrimo in some senses.  I've been revising.  National Novel Writing Month is all about production, forward momentum, and not looking back.  I've broken that rule.

But, what happens when you need to know the beginning before writing the middle.  I've been working on this novel in many different ways over years now and I have a lot of little inconsistencies in my early pages.  Carol is the aunt, no she's the mom.  The mom is alive, no she's dead, nope alive, but she has cancer.  With all of this reversioning, I was a bit confused.  So, I printed my first fifty pages and I set about revising the good ol'fashioned way with a comfortable chair and a pen.

I had a lot to work with, or should I say on?  With so many inconsistencies in the draft, many a page was marked from tip to tail.  It felt good.  I also have a much better sense of how this thing is going to open.  I've sat down now and worked through the first 14 pages of my marked-up draft.  I've made a lot of cuts, but my word count total for my session today still amounted to 1,298.  I'm doing a lot of cutting, but I'm starting to add a little more of the necessary texture to the draft.

My first drafts are often quite lean with dialogue and action accounting for most of what's going on.  The setting, the time, the context for the story all get added a layer at a time as I move through revision.  I've got notes in my margins saying, "Describe house here."  Or, "Avoidance!  Make the conflict happen here."  Each time I come across one of these notes, I write.  I push the draft forward to a tighter, more cohesive whole.

So, while I broke the rules of Nanowrimo, I'm feeling good about the work I got done this weekend.  I don't think I'm going to get anywhere near my word count this month, but I think this time I'm setting aside is some of the best I've spent on the novel in months.

Nanowrimo - New material and Taking Stock

The last couple of days have seen me produce a couple of new pages of material, but not enough to meet my quotas.  I'm behind for the week, but I'm going to make a couple of pushes over the weekend that I hope will bring me back up to speed.

What I have done, which has been interesting to me, is to take stock of the work I already have compiled.  I've printed off the first 50 pages of my manuscript and I'm reading through them for continuity.  I'm using Nanowrimo to fill in the gaps of my first act, and to give me a sense that I'm moving closer to a more cohesive whole of a first draft.  So far, it's been working. 

Two things happened as a result of the work I've done this week.  First, the review of the early pages is giving me a solid sense of my opening and where my characters "live" when the novel opens.  The other is that this increased sense of structure and continuity has influenced my writing of new material.

The three complete handwritten pages I wrote today is a thread that needs to be woven into the story.  I wrote a couple of small scenes, little pieces of the storyline today and I had a solid sense of where each of the pieces would fit into the larger work that is already typed and part of the manuscript.  This is the first time this specific brand of intentionality has crept into my work, which is exciting.  I'd like to see that happen a little bit more as I work to complete my first act.

I hand-wrote everything over the past couple of days and haven't transcribed it to my Scrivener software, so I don't have word count updates.  I do have some fun sentences, I think.  This is a passage with the main character's best friend Willy.  I love writing his character.  Oliver has just told Willy that he can't hang out on Friday, but he won't say way.  He has a date with his ex-girlfriend.

Favorite sentence/sentences:

Willy stood over him as he worked, waiting for an answer.  Once it became obvious Oliver didn't intend to respond, he said, "Wow.  She must be one ugly bitch."

"Shut up," Oliver said and shook his head to show he wasn't going to take the bait.

"I mean if you won't tell me, you're best friend in the entire world, then she must be hideous."  Willy let the words hang between them.  "Unless," he said and raised his finger as if experiencing a great epiphany, "she's fat.  That's it."  Willy waggled his finger and his face broke into a leering sneer.  "She's enormous, isn't she?  How much?  Two bills?  Three?"  Willy drew his fact into a mask of disbelief.  "Four?!  You gonna have tons of fun this weekend, Ollie?"


The scene goes on in much this same vein until Oliver blows up and gets in trouble for cussing within earshot of a customer. 

Nanowrimo - Crushed Momentum

I had what I felt was a great writing day.  It was so good in fact that I was going to leave after dinner and everyone was settled in bed, but this didn't work out.  The priorities of the other parts of my life intruded.  I realized that I had to review some student papers for a lesson plan, read a manuscript for my senior thesis student, and be available for my family.  I have a wife who was exhausted (woken twice in the night by a screaming child with nightmares) and a sick child (who coughed so much she actually threw up twice this evening). 

Sometimes the energy simply dissipates a little.  As you can see by the time of the blog post, the hour is slipping into the late evening and energy is slipping fast.  I'll simply have to recapture the flow tomorrow.

Starting Manuscript Word Count: 15,985
Daily Word Count: 2005
Ending Manuscript Word Count:17,987
Favorite Sentence/Sentences (Not sure if the joke works, but I'll try it out here):
“It really was a nice party,” Carol said and peered at a photo of Sarah’s cake smeared face. “You did a nice job, Cassie.”

“You did most of it,” Cassie said, redirecting the compliment.

“I’m sorry I missed it,” Oliver said, repeating his earlier apology. Dillon didn’t even try to mask his snort. “I am,” Oliver insisted.

“Whatever, man,” Dillon said, “if you wanted to be here, you would have been here.”

“You’re right. Why wouldn’t I want to come home to this? It’s so much fun.”

“It’s not about fun. It’s your niece’s birthday party.”

Cassie snorted at this and Dillon glared at her until he realized his mistake.