Monthly Archives: July 2011
Note to Self: It’s Not the Plot
I swear I’ve been here before.
I’m working with this draft of Book 3, and I’ve been revising along pretty steadily from the beginning, knocking out characters and scenes, deepening what remains, and I’ve reached a place where Gaia gets out of trouble. She can catch her breath for a minute, which is obviously a disaster as far as writing goes. The two of us sit back and look ahead at the next few scenes, and the links between them are simply not there. In fact, all… Continue reading
Playing Death at the Lake
The gutsiest thing I ever did at the lake nearly killed me. The color of our family’s lake in Minnesota, where four generations of Geist-O’Brien-Walshes have happily cavorted for as many decades, is a deep, rich brown. Rumor has it iron turns the water that color, while other theories lean toward peat, but whatever the reason, the result is unlike any lake color I’ve ever known elsewhere. The water feels extra heavy in your palm, too, and it’s deceptively easy to float on. It’s like… Continue reading
Company
Things happen when company comes. In the last two days, warning lights appeared on the dashboard of the car, the electricity spontaneously stopped working on one side of the house, and I lost my cell phone. These events were purely coincidental and in no way caused by my lovely college friend’s arrival, but having a witness did make me a bit more aware of how I handle things.
We don’t get thrown much by the little stuff here. I looked up the warning lights and dropped the… Continue reading
How Do the Bugs Get In?
One summer, fine green
grasshoppers came in pairs to linger
on my bedroom ceiling.
A two-inch-long stag beetle
crawled behind the garbage can
the other day.
This morning there’s a moth
on the sink pedestal.
I suppose the bugs fly unnoticed
in the door’s gap when we’re passing
out and in all day long, but
it does seem strange when
unusually large ones appear
unannounced, most often
when we’re barefoot
and vulnerable in the bathroom.
I do nothing about them but
marvel and wait
‘til they die, when I collect… Continue reading
Head People and Pie
Lately, a fellow writer friend* asked me enviously if I’m one of those writers who has characters in my head demanding attention. He said his characters were more likely to tell him to go watch TV and leave them alone. It was the envy that surprised me. It implied that writing is easier when you’re possessed by voices, like you’re just a crazy person getting paid for yielding to your psychosis.
It’s not like that. Here’s what it’s like for me. I have a character… Continue reading