New Year's comes on Jan. 22

Wow, been a while since I've been back here. Since then, I've finished my final projects and exams for my fall courses (thanks, procrastination, for allowing me to save it all up for one insane, life-consuming month), registered for spring courses, and started a novel among other random things. I think life is finally beginning to normalize in the wake of all that homework, but my plan is to try to capitalize on the frenzy that was, channeling it into the first draft of the novel.

So the novel. I know this blog was supposed to be a way to get an idea to take shape, but as I rode on the back of my dad's motorcycle, surveying the frozen tundra that is home (yeah, Christmas with the Hemens is like that...), ideas that I had been kicking around since September kind of... crystalized (sorry, bad pun, I know. Also a Hemen tradition). 

Anyway, now that I have the story idea, what to do with the blog that was supposed to help generate it? I plan to refocus things here (pretty easy to do when there is only about two or three post's worth of tradition to overcome) and write about the novel writing process. Since it's sure to be much more difficult, time-consuming, aggravating and joyous than I have capacity to imagine, it's sure to make for some interesting reading at the very least.

Should be fun...

Breakfast (1)

It's nearing 6 am. The winter dawn's still about an hour away but they drive with the headlights off. Kate's somewhere between groggy and dreaming. She's swearing every other word of the few she does speak. Even so, her temper'll melt off like fog once she's truly awake. 

"When's the fucking heater gonna start goddamn working?" She asks. She's laid herself out over the seat using Evie's lap as a pillow. She's got the quilt from her bed wrapped over her wool coat and tucked under her feet. The snow boots she's borrowed from their mom stand empty on the floor.

"You better be awake when we get there." Evie warns. She's a morning person from way back. 

"I'll be awake. I'm just getting a little more fucking rest."

Evie shivers when Kate's head shifts and the heat collecting under it escapes. She can see her breath. It colonizes the windshield in camps of ice crystals even with the defrost on high. "We'll be there before the car actually warms up," Evie says.

Outside individual tree branches are plush, furred with frost. Taken as a whole, the landscape is a hazy blue blurring past the windows. It'll be stunningly white once the sun comes up. An endless expanse of clean, enameled plains, enough to confuse the senses. 

Where the speed limit signs change from 45 to 75 Evie slows, pulls off the highway onto the access road. The diner and gas station's here, just on the edge of town. 

Homework Blues

Kinda frustrated with not putting up a new post in a while. Unfortunately, procrastination plays a major part in my homework routine so I'm still playing catch up. Mercifully, the term is almost over. 

I want to get a few more things up and out of my notebooks and online. These are the fragments that lost steam after the allure of a good opening line wore off. They are the evidence of me needing a better system. 

I think it's that I get caught up in time. Of course we write in time. We draw, we play, we work, we live in time. There is no getting around it. But for any creative pursuit, you need to let yourself slip out of time, or at least that's when I'm at my most productive. I need to let the process breathe, to grow the words on the page. If I'm lucky, I'll get caught up in it, find it taking me somewhere that I hadn't planned but that is exactly where I need to be. In my experience, it's almost impossible to get into this kind flow when you're worried about how many more minutes until you have to get back to the office, or that you really should go pick up the dry cleaning before the place closes on a Saturday.

I know, I know, written like a true procrastinator, right? Time waits for no man or woman, and here I am waiting for it to make an exception for little old me. I let it become my excuse because there is some truth to it-- there's a lot to do in a day. There's work and schoolwork and if it's not that, there will always be random ongoing chores. 

But I think time expands to a certain degree, depending on what you demand of it. Think about it--on certain days time seems to go on forever because you have just one more thing to do. No, it's not limitless but there is enough of it, more or less, if you need it. If you push yourself to take it. (But after a weekend of writing papers, I'm kinda tired just thinking about this...)

There's got to be a better way for me to outsmart myself, my procrastination, and let myself feel that timelessness in the moments I do have. There's got to be a way to create some mental space, not so far from where my head has to be to get me through the day, but a place that I can easily slip in and out of. So that when I get the chance, I take it. 

Know, accept...strategize? One of my profs said that when he was in grad school, one of the things that helped him develop a more regular creative output was to break it down into something so small as to be utterly attainable on a daily basis. Five hundred words a day. I think I can do that, even with a nasty amount of homework still breathing down my neck for the next month or so. I'll try to keep migrating sketches from my notebooks here in the meantime, but I'm hoping it won't be too long until I'm slapping my usual five paragraphs up here daily (or close to it)... 

This is from a few months ago: Kiate Shey doing the scary black cat thing. Seems like it could go with Henry's Halloween. 

Rake Tine Tear

There's a Halloween he remembers. He had gone as a gypsy with clip-on danglers swinging from his lobes. Cis was Frankenstein's monster in a musky second-hand fedora and orange polyester sport coat. She wore green tights under her denim cutoffs and had fixed real bolts to her neck. She cahlumped after him the whole night, slowed down by their dad's heavy-soled cowboy boots.

It was a house he'd raked leaves for. He led Cis down the alley to the spot where the slab of shrubbery walling it in broke down dead. She knew it, too, from her paper route. The house was too big and too dark so she'd hold her breath and go, sprint-paperlob-dash. She wouldn't stop until the next house, the one with a porch light. She'd stand there a minute, sucking down the throat-scrapingly chilly air. It gave her a jiggery, ants-marching sound in her ears and the dark got even blacker, creeping up at the edge of her vision. 

They tentatively scuffed down the loose gravel path to the compost shed. Henry lifted up on his toes to flush out the little key hidden in one of the troughs of the corrugated tin roof. His belly stretched out of the cracked elastic waistband of the thrift store skirt. His skin glowed pale like a moonstone. He could've just a well broke the flimsy padlock, but he liked the proprietorship of the key. 

Inside-all those crumbling leaves he'd collected. The air was thick with the kind of dust you could feel in your lungs. It looked solid when the moonlight hit, like he could have cut out a chunk to take home. 

He picked her up, the light little slip of her. "Throw me high, Hen," she said in a voice barely restrained to a whisper. He tossed her. She shuffed into the pile, bounced like on her bed a t home. He crunched in and flung leaves like tissue paper out of a gift box until he dug down to her upturned face. She was laughing, choking back the sounds as best she could so they wouldn't get caught. On her feet she took a few dancing steps, like she'd tripped on something, then bounded outside. "Again!" she whispered.

"Oh, shit." He doesn't remember exactly what he said, but that was probably it. On her green tights he saw red ribboning down one leg like a Christmas package, the fabric and the blood both running from the rake tine tear in the meat of her thigh.  

"Higher this time," she insisted.

"Oh, shit," he'd probably said again. They told anyone who asked it was a part of the costume. Cis hadn't cried, hadn't really even winced, so no one caught on.

  

The Experiment

Okay, so the pseudo-prose poetic intro over and behind me, time to get to work. 

I guess what I have is an image looking for a story. Well, the image is really a collection of images, which could be filed under "the experience of the Plains": those long empty vistas and the way the weather takes over with nothing there to stop it. 

I grew up in the Plains and then spent my college years making that seemingly endless drive in rain or snow or sleet or dark of night, so it has great resonance for me. And by now I've spent enough years away to mythologize both the good and the bad of that place. I feel like there's a really great story to be told based out of this concept of transit over the flat, open land. 

But an image alone does not a story make. I've been writing sketches under this idea, but nothing holds together so far. It may be that there is no story here, but I can't seem to get away from the idea. So for good or ill, I'm assuming this means that there must be something to be written here. I just need to figure out what that is. 

The experiment is to amass various sketches and approaches to this story and see what emerges. For me, I think the most important aspect of this story is to find the right way to tell it, the right style. This may be the key, or it might just be the exact fixation that's kept me from moving forward with this project. The goal is to post two (or more) writing exercises pertaining to this project a week. 

Why not just keep it to myself? No good reason. I'm assuming there will come a point when I'll be ready to commit to a certain telling and so I'll have to work alone. But right now, the idea of the  accountability, the imperative to produce, and the possibility of feedback that comes with a public forum has gotten me excited for what's become a stymied project. Well, not that there is any public so far. But eventually perhaps...?

While the main goal is to work on this project, I also hope to post as close to every day as I can manage. Photos, random thoughts, perhaps even guest posts (?), I want this to be a daily excuse to indulge my creative life, a life that's become kind of unfocused over the last little while. 

The view outside my window this fine rainy evening. Yep, dark before 5pm. At least it's not snow. Yet.