Steam coils from the bath

Befogged glasses slide tubward

The book is reshelved

The wham zing, here’s our world, hooktastic beginning has been laid out, baby, whiz bang–magic fingers, do your work!–and now . . .

well . . .

Now we see that we don’t in fact know this character that well, we’re not really that clear on what would drive them from point A to point B and we certainly haven’t gotten to their deepest fear yet. Lord, there are a lot of players in this little drama. Why does this world need this particular feature? And moreover, how does this feature work and why does this other character keep fiddling with it? If I keep naming this stuff after things in Star Wars, is that gonna be a problem?

Le freaque, can I just write the ending already and leave it to you, Dear Highly Intelligent Readers–yes, plural! So I’m an optimist!–to fill in the gaps as I know you want to? Call it critique, call it fan fiction, maybe Dad was right about medical school? This part is supposed to be half the book?

I’ll start at the end and work my way back. Except this one part–I totally know this part and it’s gonna stay in, no matter what else happens. And once it happens, I do at least know that the fuzzy character has to confront the neighbor. What’s this–the neighbor has the letter? Yeah, there we go. Another couple days with something to do . . .

I’m going the rebel route this time: rather than one 100-page project, I’ve had a few shorter things in the hopper for a while that will come in around 150 pages when finished, so I’m taking advantage of the party over at Script Frenzy to get back in the habit of getting new words on the page.

An advantage of doing these things more than once is that I start to see that my reactions come along every time–it’s not something about a particular project or wording or problems with a plot or. . . . (It is sort of wording: I may have a very clear idea of what happens in a particular scene, but figuring out what actual word to type in next, in this sentence right here, can be freakin’ hard.) But it means I know my effort is better directed toward pushing through, not analysis.

It’s a busy month–they’re all busy–so this weekend was my first chance to hit it hard. The Brain Trusters were very tolerant while I whin–er, worked the kinks out and got myself back in the page-count running. Now I remember this story and I remember the fun parts of getting it on paper.

• Open the document for your current MS/WIP
• Go to page 77
• Go to line 7
• Copy the next 7 lines (sentences or paragraphs) and post them exactly as they are written. No changing or cheating!
• Tag 7 authors and let them know.

Okay, Jenn Spiller–you . . . you tagger, you–I thought I was off the hook because I’d lost the log-in info for my blog and my webmaster is on a week-long silent Zen retreat (damn these helpful support files). My next resisting strategy was legalism: which manuscript is my current WIP? The draft or the current revision? Double-spaced manuscript or raw text?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seven lines from Rite of Return:

“Where do you go for that?” Julie asked as she poured herself some of the brew. Yipes, no wonder Colleen could keep the hours she did. Julie ran some water into her cup. “Today’s revised errand list: buy mattresses and hire an exterminator. I’m assuming I have to go out of Claregarvan for both.”

“Mr. Ferris is already up there with Michael O’Hara and Seamus O’Malley seeing to the mice. They’re not exterminators, exactly, but the farmers around here can tell you as much as anybody about getting rid of mice. Although I can tell you now O’Hara will tell you to get a cat.”

Scott, I figured out how to log in (and *cough* tag). And hello, Ali, KD, Christian, Lane, LK, and Trisha.

You haven’t already been tagged, have you? You aren’t going to freak out and this be the absolute last straw on a to-do list that makes Sisyphus look like a whining towel boy? But we want to see your stuff!

This week the activity has been thinking concretely about goals for the year. We e-mail our list to the group and cheerlead. I like reading what the others are cooking up and how their year ebbs and flows—kids at home and university campus neighbor, I know that really the new year starts in August (you even get new supplies), but I’m willing to play along with the January people.

But I’m having a rocky week. Work? Argh! Family? I’d like to put the “diss” in “dysfunctional.” Writing plans? I’m quivering. But I’ve done this before, and I’m starting to see that I go through stages.

Grandiosity: This is the year, baby! I’ve got this nailed! I will draft that FBI trilogy and a screenplay and I’ll sell a TV pilot! You can hardly tell I’m not thirty! Letterman, save me a chair!

Around this time the Christmas candy runs out.

Despair: Oh. My. God. I can’t even get the dishes washed in the same day that we eat off them. I’ll be lucky to finish a poem—no, a haiku. No, wait, don’t they have rules about lines or something? A free-verse tweet. Nobody wants to read any of this claptrap. I need glasses. I need a haircut. I need to spend my time looking for a real job. I’m going to put on all my fleece clothing and go back to bed.

Resignation: I’ll just keep slogging along . . . like I’ve been doing. It’s not glamorous, or fast, but I’m chipping away. Make the list, roll up the sleeves–and Facebook games are the Devil’s spawn.

A whiff of excitement creeps in: Some of this stuff is lame, but this one here is a pretty good idea. Yes, spring break never turns out to be Novel Writing Retreat Week, but I get inspired and get tons done in April. This is doable.

These next you might flicker through pretty fast. Recognize that feeling it doesn’t make it permanent.

Abandon the whole thing: This is crazy, I feel crazy, I’ve got things to do.

Paralysis: Where the heck do I start?

Research: With more background information, I’ll really be ready to launch this thing. In fact, here’s a whole stack of vital background info.

And finally . . .

Launch: Sitting down in front of a fresh piece of paper, a new notebook, a blank screen. Do you dip in a toe or dive?

I might be moving out of the resignation phase. Unlike my writing buddies, I’m having trouble making a numbered list. My main project is a revision, where the predicted timetable has been thrown out of whack as I realize that it needs a period of percolation before it gets another pass. My goal is to finish it (where “finish” means “get into readable shape”) rather than make myself frustrated missing more deadlines. So my other goal is to keep working, on other projects while this one rests. My plan this year is less about counting and more about process.

“There’s nothing like duck grease to oil a pan.”
–Grandfather Chick
Or maybe he said goose grease? . . .

I used to work at the public library, and I was scheduled at the reference desk on Wednesday nights. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the desk was fully staffed but the public was not, and we had plenty of time to “familiarize ourselves with the collection”–scour the cookbook collection for what we would take to the dinner we’d been invited to the next day. Oh 641s, how you whiled away our hours!

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the library stayed open. The night before and after Christmas, however, the board looked at the traffic data and started to close for a few days. My mom and I seized the lull and dashed up to Chicago to spend Christmas with my grandfather. He hemmed and hawwed but his wife got them a tree; we got up at a reasonable hour and opened gifts, him having to reassure that he was not senile, he knew there were more presents for him but this one was very interesting, thank you very much. One year I guiltily rewrapped the white elephant I’d gotten at the staff Christmas party and gave it to my step-grandmother; she loved it and it remained on their counter for years after.

My grandfather was old school. They had goose for Christmas dinner when he was a kid. They went skating on rivers, not rinks. He could happily eat turkey and all the trimmings year round (“no, I am not senile now, either”), but his favorite was the cranberry sauce–the real stuff that you could see the berries in, not the canned gelatinous cylinder. A cylinder was served one year–schlooooped out of its can by someone saying, “Oh lord, Chick’ll have to have cranberry.” He pretended–I think he was pretending–not to know what it was.

So one year at the library two cranberry recipes crossed my desk at about the same time, and I decided to give them a whirl. Cranberry and sage, together–how could you miss! The other recipe was from Julia Child, a hero of my grandmother, who got some ribbing for her food experiments but everyone kept showing up for meals. Better yet with these cranberry recipes, you could jar them up and give them as gifts (solving another ongoing problem: what do you give the ninety-year-old who keeps hoping you’ll apply for a job at Monsanto).

I found interesting Mason jars and made some up. I left the sage leaves and onions chunky. It was a hit with my grandfather and me, but I suspect no one else ate it. No one else eats it when I make it down here, which I do about every third year when I remember to grab fresh berries.

This year I made the sauce in the middle of all our duck experiments.

Our own Thanksgiving dinner was Asian and I forgot to bring it to the traditional one, so I’ve got the full batch, all for me, in the fridge. And the first time I got it out to eat, I cried. My grandfather has been dead for nearly twenty years now, but still sometimes the missing him blindsides me–some smidgen of rules or carpentry or curmudgenness clenches my throat tight and I must chant “Monsanto” until it passes, eating this relic cum snack on what used to be his dining room table. But it does pass, and I go on to the next building or cooking or reading project knowing that some he would love and some he would hate and that I knew him! As an adult, I was there enough to know him, and what a gift is that.

==========================

Chutney is a generic name for fruit and spice sauce; ketchup is tomato chutney.

I semi-combine versions of the below two recipes to make this year’s sauce.

• Julia Child and Jacques Pepin’s cranberry chutney
• Cranberry sage chutney

I almost never have nuts handy, use regular ginger instead of crystallized, and figure the cranberries are the fruit course–no need to make a special trip for raisins.

How Grandfather Chick sometimes signed his letters

So we were staring at our shoes, younger son and I, instead of at the birds, the cars, the passersby; wedging our chins into the openings of our jackets and wondering whether it was time to look at the time again, when we noticed something on the sidewalk.

You see, last summer a new water main was installed, and there’s about thirty feet of fresh smooth concrete on this section of the block.

One word on one edge, another on the other, and eyes in a different direction.

The fancy manicure, twenty minutes in

I’ve been shredding my nails and it’s time to stop. One thing and another, I decided to glue on fake nails–give me some time to get out of the habit of picking at them and give my fingers a chance to heal.

It’s jarring catching a glimpse of this foreignness at the ends of my hands. I can’t pick at my fingertips any longer–but neither can I smear on lotion (it gets gunked under the long nail tips), open soda cans, or let my hands soak in water (the glue isn’t that great).

So I can’t wash dishes without rubber gloves (would that I could palm that task off on someone else) and I can hardly get the gloves on over my new talons. I can’t soak in a bath; I can’t knead dough. I can’t pick papers up off the floor. When I type, the nail tips clack on the keyboard (until I filed them down–that couldn’t stand). It’s easiest to grasp things with the pads of my fingers, tips (and fancy nails) curved away from the object. Whatever substance the fake nails are made of, polish gets chipped just as fast as on my real nails.

In short, there’s a raft of body language I’m learning, and all it cost was seven bucks at the the drugstore. That woman you see at the coffee shop with some affected way of picking up her change–how long are her nails?

What’s the fallout of a character’s appearance? If you can’t use your finger tips, how do you work with stacks of paper? (What jobs require agile hands?) If you can’t do anything that might scrape your nails, what can’t you do? If the manicure gets dinged, how do you react?

Dogs breathing, fridge purring, a squeak from a bird and a click in the heater sound the broken gait ending the day’s action. Corralled in her kitchen, she reads. Night hours are the hardest, the anguish rides in on the backs of old memories or sticking to still-fresh details of today. She rises and knocks around boxes and jars of verbena, spearmint, slippery elm, lemon balm, some she picked leaf by leaf and dried in the still atmosphere of her cellar, knowing she would concoct the sleep-gift combined from these. She searches for an herbal-induced calm. Through the window she lists the colors in the halo of the streetlamp; she rereads the letters; she remembers wind in her hair, a gallop, the free rein she believed was her automatic gift to her offspring. She knows there’s no open range, there’s no grassland, there’s no herd.

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