Catherine Egan's Blog, page 8

In 2013

Dear Blog,

Every year I peer over the edge of December into January and make the same resolutions I made the year before and the year before that. You’d think that by now I would have given up. That I would have learned something from my failure, year after year after year, to become some ideal, polished version of myself, the movie-highlight reel of me, instead of the blooper reel. You’d think I would have learned to be OK with blooper-me, sort of settled into it. You’d think.

I don’t know if it’s optimism or just kind of pathetic, the way I always think I’m really going to change, that tomorrow night I’ll clean the house and go to bed early, that from now on I will be the kind of patient, energetic, focused, unselfish parent I want my kids to have, that I will no longer waste my precious minutes reading awful, stupid, immediately forgettable things on the internet. That I will make time to exercise, and bake healthy muffins, and read challenging works of non-fiction. That I will eat better and be more organized and more productive. That I will be nicer and more fun and more clever. That I will figure out what to do with my hair. That I will stop biting my fingernails. That I will improve my posture. That I will sweep the back porch. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will sweep the porch, and everything else will stem from that.

This year, I’m done with it. I am trying to be more realistic about the limitations of life with very young children, and the limitations of being a big lame-o. I am going to prioritize sleep and cut myself some slack. Here are my resolutions:

In 2013, I will bite my nails to the quick.

In 2013, I will eat a lot of crap, and feel bad about it.

In 2013, I will let my 3-year-old watch more TV than I think is good for him, so that I can write, and I will feel guilty about that too.

In 2013, I will too often lose my temper with my kids, which is stupid and ineffective and unpleasant for everybody, and I know that, but I will do it anyway.

In 2013, I will not change my hairstyle, but I will acknowledge that I cannot really use the word “style” in relation to my current hair.

In 2013, my apartment will be a dump. Not just messy, but truly, genuinely dirty.

In 2013, I will not do any exercise beyond running around after the kids.

In 2013, I will drink too much coffee and too much wine.

In 2013, I will buy books on amazon that I could get at the library, because I’m too lazy to go to the library.

In 2013, I will not make time to listen to good music I like. I will only listen to stuff my kids like.

In 2013, I will not challenge myself, I will not break out of my rut, I will not do anything to discourage the near-total calcification of what I’d like to call my intellect.

In 2013, I will not waste time and energy being angry with myself for these failures. I will tell myself that there will be time, sometime, to tackle a few of the most important ones, but not in 2013. I will think to myself, So What, and Who Cares, because I can count on a few things I’ve been doing for years, without trying.

In 2013, I will read books that shake me and change me and work magic inside me, I will write every day and have something to show for it by the end of the year, and every day I will hug my boys (including the man one), and every night we will read stories together before bed, and every day we will go outside, and every night and every day I will be grateful for this abundance of love and story, for the trees outside my window and for my warm bed, and it won’t matter at all that my hair is too frizzy and the laundry is piling up, nope it really won’t matter at all.

Happy New Year Blog (I hope to goodness you are resolving to be more witty and pithy and whatnot),

Catherine

PS Here is a present for you:

Stocking Stuffer

Dear Blog,

I bet you thought I would forget about you over the holidays. I bet you thought that what with my parents coming to visit and trying to find space in this small apartment for even a very small tree and trying to think of something, ANYTHING to get for That Guy (who is impossible to shop for, I tell you, IMPOSSIBLE), that I wouldn’t remember to get anything for you. Not so, blog! I have a poem for you.

Years ago, lifetimes and several other selves ago, long before motherhood, before That Guy, before cycling down the hill towards Ogasawara harbour and filling up with more joy than I thought was possible, before I had tasted sea urchin or read anything by Jean Rhys, before I had seen the Sistine Chapel or a single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, before I had tried and failed to write a novel and certainly before I had tried and succeeded, I found this poem printed in the Times Literary Supplement in the bathroom at my parents’ house. I cut it out (I did ask permission first… I think), and taped it on my bedroom wall. Eventually, I bought the collection of Carol Ann Duffy’s poems that this one appears in (The World’s Wife), and I don’t know what I did with the clipping. Maybe I still have it somewhere with all the odd little things I used to have on my wall and then carried around in notebooks when I was changing walls too often – the cartoon of Virginia Woolf with a landlord in a bare apartment (I just assumed it would come with a bed of one’s own, a desk of one’s own, a chair of one’s own…), the postcard of a man riding a giant fish through the night sky (He held on for dear life because he knew in his heart this fish was his), a Marilyn Monroe quotation (She was a girl who knew how to be happy, even when she was sad. And that’s important – you know). Or maybe I don’t have any of those things anymore, maybe they got purged on one of our many moves. The book is still on my shelf, though, and here is the poem, which I have loved for years now and I hope you will too. (I know it’s Christmas, but we’re going Old Testament with this one):

Delilah (Carol Ann Duffy)

Teach me, he said -
we were lying in bed -
how to care.
I nibbled the purse of his ear.
What do you mean? Tell me more.
He sat up and reached for his beer

I can rip out the roar
from the throat of a tiger,
or gargle with fire
or sleep one whole night in the Minotaur's lair,
or flay the bellowing fur
from a bear,
all for a dare.
There's nothing I fear.
Put your hand here -

he guided my fingers over the scar
over his heart,
a four-medal wound from the war -
but I cannot be gentle, or loving, or tender.
I have to be strong.
What is the cure?

He fucked me again
until he was sore,
then we both took a shower.
Then he lay with his head on my lap
for a darkening hour;
his voice, for a change, a soft burr
I could just about hear.
And, yes, I was sure
that he wanted to change,
my warrior.

I was there

So when I felt him soften and sleep,
when he started, as usual, to snore,
I let him slip and slide and sprawl, handsome and huge,
on the floor.
And before I fetched and sharpened my scissors -
snipping first at the black and biblical air -
I fastened the chain to the door.

That's the how and the why and the where.

Then with deliberate, passionate hands
I cut every lock of his hair.



Merry Christmas, blog, if you are into that sort of thing,

Catherine

Reeling

Dear Blog,

So we’ve been having what passes for a crummy week when you forget to be grateful that none of you has been shot. LittleJ got sick first, then LittleK, then me, which is the order it usually goes in. After breakfast on Friday, I mopped the snot off their faces, ran around looking for matching socks and mittens and boots, wrapped us all up in our coats and winter wear, hauled the rarely-used double stroller out of the trunk of the car and put them in it, and pushed my two bundled sick boys to the market up the street for hot chocolate. It was a beautiful day. They shared a cookie and each had a bit of hot chocolate and we said hello to all the dogs passing by (and their owners) and we were all starting to feel better by then. It was one of those perfect blue-skied winter days that I love on the East Coast, crisp and clear and everybody out looking happy because how could you not be happy on such a glorious day? And so off we went to the park, while 28 miles away a bunch of little kids were being gunned down at school by yet another heavily armed lunatic.

And of course, we are never really safe. From guns or cars or fires or floods, from lethal viruses, from our own failing bodies, from shifting tectonic plates or raging storms, from accidents, psychopaths, the wrong street corner, the wrong boyfriend, the wrong time and place in history, and so on. We all know that. But mostly, around here anyway, we set out bravely into the world every day, assuming it will be a good day or at least a day we’ll all survive, because that’s the usual thing. That’s why we drop our kids at school, kiss them goodbye and carry on. We’ll see them again, in just a few hours, we’ll have supper together, we’ll tuck them into their beds. It’s a relatively safe assumption.

Like everyone, I am sick with grief for those parents whose kids didn’t come out of that school, cannot imagine how or if they were able to sleep that night and if they did, how it felt to wake up. Cannot imagine what they are doing today, or what they’ll do tomorrow, or on Christmas, or how it will be for the rest of their lives, she would have been ten this year, he would have been twenty, what do you think she would be like now, would he have done this, or that? And all these little kids, who would have grown up, and now they won’t. Just a few years in the world to be themselves, and then this brutal, bloody ending. It leaves us all helpless and reeling, just reading about it.

LittleJ asks me about death almost every day, because it’s something he’s trying to figure out, I guess. “Why does nothing last forever?” he asks, over and over, and over and over, I say, “That’s just how it goes,” because fuck, I don’t know.

That Guy and I are just trying to act normal, not talk about it when the kids are around. LittleJ, the older boy, is not quite three and a half – much too little for a conversation about what happened at Sandy Hook elementary school. He doesn’t know what a gun is, though he knows how to play at shooting, somehow they all learn to do that. And he says, almost every day, “I don’t want to die,” and I say, “Me neither, but we don’t have to worry about that for a long, long time.” And then he says, “When will we die?” and I say, “I don’t know, but not for a long time, not until we’re very old,” and he says, “I think you’ll die before me,” and I say, “I sure hope so,” and he says “Why?” and I say, “Which dinosaurs are we bringing to the playground today?” and he says, “The T-Rexes, because they like to eat sand.”

So I’m lying, I guess, because what am I going to say? That I can’t keep him safe, not completely, not really? That I could die today, tomorrow, in a year or two, and he’d barely remember me? That every day is a gift, and that’s not just a cliché, it’s the truth? That I’m not just blowing my nose in the bathroom all the time, I’m crying, because a bunch of kids not much older than him got shot, at school, because that’s something that can happen? So the president is crying on television and angry people are typing angry comments at each other all over the internet, and that part, the same angry people on their same angry sides, that part feels so devastatingly business-as-usual, hell, it feels like election season.

I should know better than to look at comments on the internet because it makes me lose hope for our sorry species, it really does. (And of course, I don’t mean that “the gun discussion” doesn’t need to happen, because it does – only that the comments sections of internet articles are so rage-filled, so contemptuous, so rigid and vicious and vacuous, that “discussion” isn’t really the word for what is happening there at all).

We went to the corner market to get falafel and hummus on Saturday and the owner waved the newspaper at me, “did you see this?” I nod, I did. He gestures at his kid playing a game on his iphone in the corner, and at my kids. “What are we supposed to do?” he says. LittleJ points a stick at the guy and pretends to shoot him, pow pow, with his most charming three-year-old grin.

I’ve been up all hours the last couple of nights with LittleK, who is suffering with awful congestion and a chesty cough. Every time I drag myself out of bed, I think, this sucks, and then I get to his bedside, where he is snotty and sweaty and calling for me, and I wipe his face and rub his back, and I remember that we are OK, and this is life, and we are, for lack of a better word, blessed. What are we supposed to do? In the morning we’ll get up for another lucky day in the beautiful world, the terrible world.

And if you’ve read all this then you know by now I’ve got nothing to say about it, but this is a space where I write something on Monday, and I’ve got nothing to say about anything else right now either. This is just me reeling.

Catherine

On Being Less Awesome Than Mervyn Peake

Dear Blog,

My oldest friend, after reading a draft of my fantasy spy story, gave me a copy of Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, which I had never read.

The reason, in part (or in full?), was because my friend was decidedly unimpressed by my lackluster (or lack of) portrayal of Spira City, my made up version of early 20th century Paris, or the island fortress where the final chapters take place. Mervyn Peake’s castle-fortress Gormenghast was meant, I think, to inspire me to greater ambition, to give me a sense of what might be done with Place, in a novel. (I put up a wee review of the novel here).

In fact, this very dear friend of mine had nailed one of my biggest weaknesses as a writer. Well, maybe it’s one of my biggest weaknesses. I suppose that’s really for a reader to judge (though I’d prefer they didn’t). I am no good at describing places. And buildings in particular. I do a little better with natural scenes. Maybe.

I’m not sure how to get better at it. When I was a kid, I used to skip over the descriptions of places. I just didn’t care all that much. And I’m sure that it is linked to my lack of skill as a home-decorator. So anyway, I finally opened up Titus Groan a few weeks ago, and here is the very first paragraph of the book:

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

Wow. Right? Me, I probably would have written “surrounded by poor huts” and “tall, dark tower” and hurried on to the Character Has Feelings About Stuff That Happens bit.

Of course, most books that aren’t set in space or in the middle of the desert have buildings in them and not all writers dwell as passionately on their buildings as Mervyn Peake does. You can read any writer and feel insecure that the thing they do well is not the thing you do well, and maybe you should be doing the thing they do well as well. Sometimes the things I can’t do well loom so large in my imagination, and seem to overshadow the things I can do well. I want to be better, of course. A better mother, a better writer, a better person, a better interior decorator. I am trying to be better. I am hoping that when the friend who gave me Titus Groan reads my second spy story, he won’t think that the city of Tianshi is a total flop. (Yes, I know, Tianshi is awfully similar to Tian Di and why is that? I will tell you sometime, blog, but it is all Chinese – randomly in the case of Tian Di, and not at all randomly in the case of Tianshi!). But the sad fact is, I will never be as fine a writer as Mervyn Peake. Even so, I hope that when the book is done, its successes will outshine the failures, and the failures will not be so noticeable.

Still, Place / Setting is important. I am working on it. This is the second paragraph of my New First Draft:

Spira City would be brilliant with gas lamps, but Tianshi, the walled capital of Zhongguo, is pitch black at night. There is the odd flicker of a torch here and there, the dim glow of a candle in a window; the rest is darkness. Tonight I am restless. I don’t want to sleep, I don’t want to drink, I don’t want to talk. I am thinking of home, The Twist; its winding streets, raucous laughter spilling out of the brothels, half-starved cats stalking rats, the smell of spice and snow and smoke. The sounds and smells are all different here. Wet stone from the afternoon rain, which came down in a torrent while the bells of Ei-ji chimed their magic for it. The click of dice and low voices as I pass a torch-lit courtyard. Chicken feces and the faint scent of fried pork mingling in the air. They call it the Heavenly City, and by day the many-coloured tile rooftops shine in the sunlight, the markets overflow with silks and spices, terribly thin but strong young boys run through the streets with rickshaws calling out for rides, slender trees hang heavy with spring blossoms. With the dark, a hush falls. Where Spira City comes alive at night, Tianshi nestles down close to the earth, the people withdraw, the lights go out.
For years I’ve longed to get out of Spira City, to see the world. Now I find I’m feeling homesick.

Not exactly knuckled masonry and swarming epidemics of hovels, but we all do what we can.

Yours, Peake-enviously,

Catherine

Better yet, don't write that novel?

Dear Blog,

It is December. That means it is no longer November. And that means NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is over. There are thousands of new, very rough first drafts out there, about to be revised, or not.

Anyway, not everybody likes the idea of NaNoWriMo, and I have noticed, with my remarkable powers of Reading Stuff On The Internet, that some people can get quite cranky about other people doing stuff they think is dumb. For example! Laura Miller, whom I have enjoyed reading for years and whose reviews have led me to some of my favourite books (I will always be grateful to her for introducing me to Kelly Link – but more on Kelly Link another time!), was really cranky about NaNoWriMo in this article.

If you don’t feel like reading it, the title is “Better Yet, DON’T write that novel!” and the gist of it is, there are too many bad books, there are too many narcissistic, petulantly entitled bad writers, and there are not enough readers, and so, NaNoWriMo is a dumb idea. I’m paraphrasing. She puts it better, and more crankily, than that.

Maybe it’s true. Maybe in some cases writing is a narcissistic past-time (I’m becoming increasingly convinced that blogging is, anyway … no offense, blog), and it does suck that “people” don’t read much and the book industry is suffering and there is so much stuff out there, I mean SO MUCH, that even for an ardent reader, it’s impossible to read everything you want to read (which actually is sort of a nice problem if you ask me, which you didn’t, blog, I realize that), and having a book published feels a little bit like dropping a pebble into the ocean.

But.

First of all, writers and readers are not separate blocks of people. The article seems to portray would-be writers as a too-large, self-obsessed, and un-self-critical mob and the readers, noble but too few. I don’t know any writers, published or otherwise, who aren’t passionate readers. Writers are probably reading more books than anybody else.

And also.

Nobody has to do NaNoWriMo. If we were all required by law to sit down and write 50 000 words in the month of November, I would totally understand the griping about it. I might carry a NO NANOWRIMO placard myself and rant about the Obama administration thinking they can just force people to be novelists. But as it is, it’s something you can sign up for, or something you can ignore. If you think it sounds ridiculous, that’s fine, blog. You can go have a cup of coffee with Laura Miller and complain about how Everybody Thinks They Are A Writer These Days. If you do, tell her I love her articles. Usually.

So anyway. Now that it’s over, I am hereby declaring to The Internetz that I disagree with the brilliant and accomplished Laura Miller. I salute you, NaNoWriMo-ers! You’ve written your awful first drafts ridiculously fast, and they are done! Revise them! Then there will be some good books, and probably even more books that are still bad, and what is wrong with that? As someone who has written a few bad books myself, I am totally in favour of the practice.

You know what? I am kind of annoyed with myself for writing this, but I’m going to post it anyway, because my OC side wants me to put up an entry every week, all tidy-like. The thing with The Internetz is that it can sometimes feel like an echo chamber for a lot of belligerent ranting. I get overwhelmed sometimes by “the whole opinionated din” (to crib from Ani DiFranco, in Silence), and really, who cares what I think about what Laura Miller thinks about NaNoWriMo? I don’t even care, and I just wrote a whole blog post about it.

Clearly I need to get off-line for a bit.

Yours, irrelevantly,

Catherine

First Drafts: Some Final Thoughts

Dear Blog,

I remember asking my mother, when I was five or six years old: “When do you play?” I was behind her and she was at the sink, wearing an apron. Doing dishes, or washing vegetables? I think it was before supper. She said something breezy about how she was playing all the time inside her head, letting her imagination wander and tell her stories. But I felt terribly sorry for her. It seemed to me she was always busy doing something chore-like, and we were always playing, and of course, that’s exactly how it was.

Now that I am technically an adult, and have children of my own, chore-like things threaten to take over my life, and my kids are always playing. Their play is intense and important, to them and to me. Building lego towers, hiding from dragons under the covers, fighting bears, making leaf piles or snow men, taking a tour of the solar system in the rocket ship under the dining table: they are so busy, so completely caught up in it. And there is, always, this chorus: Play with me, mom! Play with us!

I have to confess that, while I love to be part of their fun, I do not, myself, enjoy waving a stick at an imaginary bear, or crouching under the kitchen table and commenting on how big and smelly Jupiter is. Lego, likewise, bores me. I do like leaf piles and snowmen and the world without walls in general, which is why we go outside as much as possible. But even then – I wouldn’t build a snowman by myself, for my own pleasure, anymore.

But if my kids ever ask me, concerned, when I play, I will tell them that when I say I am "working," when I am seated at my computer and typing faster than I can think (I don’t think very fast), that is when I am most at play.

The revision process is crucial to creative satisfaction, but it is hard. It is work, albeit my favourite kind of work. First-drafting, on the other hand, feels an awful lot like my adult version of running outside and creating an imaginary world for my younger brother and next-door-neighbour, who were always eager and willing to be the heroes of whatever story I was concocting. Playing was what I wanted to be doing whenever I was doing something else, and I pitied my mother so desperately for not having time for it in her busy days. As soon as I got home from school, as soon as supper was over, as soon as we were released from whatever chores we had to do, there was this bubbling up of excitement and impatience. And I feel exactly the same way now. As lunch wears on and the boys are munching oh so slowly, wanting more of this and none of that, squabbling and chatting, asking for stories and songs, I start getting more and more foot-tappy and irritable. I bundle LittleK into bed as soon as he is done eating, set the clock for LittleJ’s Quiet Time (which is not particularly quiet but that sounds nicer than don’t-bug-me-time, and I am ashamed to say it precedes a movie on the kindle), put on the coffee, open my computer, and there, there – I am running outdoors, bursting with story. This is playing.

Yours, cheerfully after a few very good writing days,

Catherine

On Gratitude

Dear Blog,

Here in the US of A it is Thanksgiving, and I am working on this whole gratitude thing. Of course, when I pause to think about it, I am deeply grateful for my ridiculous good luck. But seriously, blog, want to guess how often I have time to pause and think about it? Right. So I’m working on living it, on having gratitude be a natural ingredient in my minutes, even the really annoying minutes.

On paper, this has been an amazing year. That Guy got his dream job, complete with a Real Salary. I got my book published (does not come with Real Salary, but still, awesome!). LittleK has gone from baby to little boy, walking, talking, chomping cashews and raw tomatoes. LittleJ has started preschool and can leap small lego buildings in a single bound. We moved to a city and neighbourhood we like, and we have found wonderful friends here easily and quickly. The boys are healthy and, most of the time, happy. We are all OK. We are better than OK.

They like to hide under the covers on our bed together, calling “find us Mommy!” – and I feel like a jerk for too often not wanting to come find them because I just want to read my book, or write my book, or putz around on facebook, or whatever. I want more space inside my own brain. I want it all at the same time. I want to be with my beautiful children, snuggle them all day long, and I want them to leave me alone. I feel like a jerk for being tired and cranky, for whining at That Guy, for yelling at my kids (who, in my sort-of defense, can also be total jerks at times – I get it, the apple doesn’t fall far from the jerk tree, etc. etc.). I feel stretched too thin, and then I feel like a jerk for feeling stretched too thin because almost everyone I know is stretched so much thinner and they seem to be more on top of things than I am. I am not on top of things. I am way, way under things. I look up, and there is my life coming down on top me with the speed of an avalanche, messy and rushed and sleepless.

But this messy, rushed and sleepless life is everything I chose and choose, and I know none of this is guaranteed, that the shadow great love casts is the possibility of unimaginable loss. I know that my boys will never again be exactly who they are right now, and even if I want to laugh maniacally and then check myself into an asylum when people tell me to “cherish this time,” they are right, too. So I am practicing gratitude, looking at my life through gratitude-coloured glasses, training that little voice in the back of my head to stop saying “you suck!” and to start saying, thank you, thank you.

I am typing this sitting on the floor of our tiny bathroom, the part of our apartment I thought I’d hate but I don’t mind it really. My coffee is on the toilet seat. LittleJ is having a bubble bath, a “quiet” activity while LittleK sleeps. He is painting the walls with bubbles and carrying on a running monologue about the solar system, half-fact and half-invention (it turns out there are dinosaurs and bears on Mercury but we have to go there for the only shop in the universe that sells Magic Medicine – I can’t believe they’ve got such a total monopoly of the magic medicine market but he assures me this is true, we can’t get it anywhere else, and we are going to have to fight the bears and the dinosaurs, there is no way around it). He is mostly satisfied by an intermittent “wow!” and “oh really?” That Guy is making cranberry sauce. The turkey is in the oven. Lovely friends with lovely children are coming over in a few hours. After his bubble bath, LittleJ will watch the movie Brave, and I will try to make our apartment look less squalid, which is my only job on Thanksgiving. That Guy is the chef and will have none of my inexpert meddling with his Feast – I have had years to learn how right he is in this, and to be grateful for it.

So I’m working on the gratitude thing, for everything I thought I never wanted, for That Guy making cranberry sauce in the kitchen, for the boy in the bath and the boy in his bed, and for friends and family near and far. For the strange luck that has led me from that to this, to here and now. A while ago, I read this poem, and it resonated, for me. I’ve been thinking about it, and will copy it here, because it says everything so much better. Which is a poet’s job, right? (Oh poets, please – I don’t really think that! I have no idea what I think. I rarely think anything at all. I’m working on that, too.)

starfish by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.


Happy Thanksgiving,

Catherine

First Drafts: The Elaborate Excuses

Dear Blog,

I’m not just writing a New First Draft because I am too lazy to revise my spy story. I swear it is not because writing a New First Draft is more fun than struggling to turn a finished draft into something more like a finished book. It is totally not because I have no idea what to do with my finished draft in order to pull it all together and make it something other people might enjoy reading.

Nope. This is my process. (She says, pompously, with shifty eyes that might make you suspicious, if you were that sort of blog . But you aren’t that sort of blog, are you? You believe me, don’t you?).

This plunging on ahead with first-drafting is pretty much how I wrote the Tian Di trilogy. I wrote a draft of the first book. I gave it a quick once-over, sort of like checking for lice and removing extraneous limbs (as one does). Then I wrote a draft of book 2. I revised book 1 a little more – the book-equivalent of combing its hair and giving it a dash of make-up. A gentle snipping and clipping and smoothing of book 2, and then I wrote a draft of book 3. With the trilogy all drafted, I went back into book 1 with a machete and remade it. Got book 2 a new outfit and a dashing haircut. More book 1, ruthlessly. Blow-torching, blood everywhere. A bit of revision on book 3, all kindness here at the beginning of the process: you’re not so bad as you are, just a little touch-up honey, don’t look over there, those aren’t book 1’s guts on the floor, I promise, just don’t look, here, put this in your mouth and bite down if it hurts. Back to book 1, for repairs and rehabilitation, until it looked (and felt!) whole. Then I sent book 1 out into the world, to find itself a home, which it did, at Coteau Books. More blood-and-guts revisions on book 2, between other projects. It is ready for the editor’s knife. And I just finished a rewrite of book 3, but it needs another go-over or five. It also needs to simmer a while. Like soup. Add some ingredients, take out some ingredients (that’s how you make soup, right?). Let it simmer for a year while you make another batch of different soup.

(Why are makeovers, torture and soup-making the best metaphors I can come up with for book-making? I have only ever tried one of those three things, and don’t do it well – I will leave it to you, blog, to guess which).

I am impressed by and curious about authors who write the first book in a series and get it published (or submit it for publication, if they are new authors) before they have written the next book(s). Maybe I just don’t have that much faith in myself. I’m so afraid of writing myself into a corner. I didn’t want the process of writing the third Tian Di book to be bound by unchangeable events or rules from the first. My most substantial rewrites on the first came after drafting the third, and a big part of the fun, then, was in laying tiny clues for what was to come later.

So I am writing a New First Draft… OK, because I am lazy, because it’s fun, because I’m not sure what to do now with my spy story, fine … but I think and hope that more first-drafting will actually help me with the revisions. I’ll learn my characters and their world even more. It’s part of my process. Quit looking at me like that.

Yours, lazy-as-all-get-out and a rotten soup-maker to boot,

Catherine

First Drafts: The True Story

Dear Blog,

OK. Writing a first draft is not like sledding down a hill. I mean, it sort of is. But sometimes you realize, oops, wrong hill! And then you have to change hills. Or sometimes you hit a tree, brain yourself, and die. (That probably doesn’t happen very often to authors writing first drafts. But you never know. NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – is an extreme sport. Wear a helment)

I do love writing first drafts. Mostly. But maybe I am sugarcoating it a bit because the last time went so well and it was a long time ago too. Maybe it’s beginning a first draft that I really love. After all, I’ve abandoned drafts that stopped being fun when they just started to suck and I didn’t see my way out of or around their suckiness. I’d like to think it’s an important skill, knowing when to jump ship, but I have no idea if I was right about the ships I’ve left behind me, wrecked on strange shores I never even think about anymore. I don’t know if I was being self-aware, or just being a wimp, or lazy.

Of course, even the finished drafts I remember as so much fun to write weren’t actually fun every day. There are days when I am writing crap, and I know it, and I keep banging away at the computer thinking I am an idiot I am an idiot I am an idiot. Then when LittleK wakes up I feel like I’ve wasted my time completely and it’s hard to salvage the rest of the day. The following afternoon I put him down for his nap, open my computer, look at what I wrote, think I am an idiot, and delete the whole thing. And I call that a good day’s work.

So, I don’t really enjoy the part where I am writing worthless crap and I know it. I do, in a perverse way, sort of enjoy the savage deletion, and starting over. If only I could do that in life as well. Just wipe out the way I yelled at my three-year-old this morning, undo leaving my favourite hat at the airport, erase the stupid rambling story I tried to tell some polite new friends. Unmake that dumb comment, unget that bad haircut, do-over, do-over! But I might never get through a day that way. At least I can erase Julia’s boring account of how she fell for Wyn, and replace it with a failed robbery and their first kiss. With a story, at least, we are lucky enough to be able to keep trying until we get it right. Or right-ish.

Bad Writing Days notwithstanding, finishing a first draft is about as satisfying as it gets, for me. Of course I know the real work is about to begin, but even so: My story has an ending! Finishing edits never feels that good. I never think it’s really done, it’s just that at some point, you have to call it done, and stop.

I need to do a rewrite or seven of my spy story, and presumably at some point this winter an editor will want me to revise The Last Days of Tian Di Book 2 (I’m sure it will have a better title than that by next fall!). But right now I am getting into the thick of a sequel to my still-a-draft spy story, with beautiful blank pages ahead of me, limitless for now in their potential awesomeness. So far, so much fun. More on the process as it progresses.

Love to you, dear bloggy blog (I am getting fond of you, see), and happy NaNoWriMo,

Catherine

First Drafts: A Love Story

Dear Blog,

So it turns out that November is NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month. I am not taking part for lots of reasons and non-reasons but mainly because while I’d like it to be possible, there is just no way I am going to produce however many words you are supposed to produce in a month during naptimes. Anyway, the idea is that you write like crazy and produce, in a month, a draft of a novel. That can freak people out if they think they are supposed to produce a good draft, but as the wonderful Anne Lamott says in her book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” first drafts are almost always shitty. In a chapter reassuringly titled “Shitty First Drafts,” she writes:

“I know some very great writers, writers you love and who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”

So, that’s good to know. The first draft is just getting the story on paper. Worrying about quality is what revisions are for, and from my experience so far, the revision process takes much longer and is much harder than the first draft. If my life allows for it, I’d love to do NaNoWriMo one day (which, as a number of people have pointed out, should be called NaNoDraMo – both for the rhythm and for accuracy, it’s a draft you’re producing, not a novel). I love writing first drafts. Writing the messy thing I will never show anybody. Getting the story down, and not worrying (yet) about whether it is any good.

The first novel-length draft I ever wrote was (is?) called Another Dance for Amaterasu. I was living in a small apartment on the edge of Tokyo with my oldest friend. I was toying with some ideas for a murder mystery set in Tokyo, since riding the trains every day made me feel murderous and I thought I ought to make some use of all that otherwise useless anger. Then, somewhere (I don’t remember where) I read about a sleep disorder in which the sufferer goes into REM sleep but is unable to go on into deep sleep. Because they are only ever sleeping lightly, people with this rare disorder become utterly exhausted, and they dream whenever they sleep. In the article, a man was quoted saying he was so tired that his dreams began to seem more vivid than his life, and he would sometimes doze off and begin dreaming while walking to the bus stop. I thought: Amazing story idea! And then, because I am not entirely heartless, I also thought: Poor guy, that must suck. I started to write about a young Canadian expat in Tokyo whose waking life and dream life were blurring and bleeding into each other. It was a jumbled mess of too-many-storylines and Japanese and Greek mythology, Orpheus and Ame no Uzume shrugging at each other across the pages, wondering, what are we doing together in this scrambled attempt at a book anyway? It didn’t work. But that first draft? Pure joy. I wrote it at home, in cafes, in parks, on the subway. I loved my characters. I still love those characters, and am sorry to have given them such a confused, confusing, fragmented story to live in. If I learned anything, it was that I am a writer who needs to outline. In detail.

The second novel that I finished became Shade & Sorceress, my first published book. I was stuck with Amaterasu. If the first draft was a gleeful sprint, the revisions were a slog. I wasn’t making it work. I needed a break. I decided to write a fantasy story for my niece and nephew. It was meant to be a Christmas present, a fun little novella. I came up with the premise ridiculously quickly, and started making notes. The first thing I wrote, in a tiny room on an oil processing ship in China’s Bohai Bay (what I was doing there is a whole other story), was a conversation between my heroine Eliza and her nemesis, Nia. The delight of writing something new, of finding new voices and a new story that wasn’t the stuck story, was exhilarating. The novel flew out of me, the story kept on growing, and by the time I had a draft done, I had outlines of the next two books.

I drafted the sequel in Princeton, New Jersey, in a claustrophobic grad student apartment. It felt like my only real escape from my should-I-get-pregnant-do-I-really-want-a-baby-no-that’s-a-terrible-idea-I-definitely-don’t-want-a-baby-what-the-hell-would-I-do-with-a-baby-except-I-really-do-want-a-baby-and-how-did-we-end-up-in-New-Jersey-anyway crisis. The fun was in working with relationships between already developed characters. I didn’t need to introduce them, or introduce them to each other. I didn’t need to set anything up. All that work had been done in the first book, and the second book felt like the payoff.

I wrote a draft of the third book in the trilogy while I was pregnant. Being pregnant felt like a joke, or a horror film, or an occasionally hilarious horror film. I told That Guy I didn’t think there could really be a baby in there. I said I was going to give birth and it would be a pillow, or a mongoose, or something. (If you slept with a mongoose… he began threateningly, but then concluded that the baby would have awesome snake-fighting abilities). But the book felt real, and more importantly, controllable. Writing was so much more fun than looking for crib sheets on amazon and obsessing about how life-as-I-knew-it was about to end.

When my baby was two months old, he only took naps if I put him in a wrap, on my body, and swayed. I put my computer on the kitchen counter, turned out the lights, turned on the fan for white noise, and wrote 300+ pages, standing and swaying and standing and swaying while I typed. It was about a group of teenagers who could dream things into reality. I’m quite pleased with the first four chapters, but the decline of the novel maps out the decline of my baby’s nighttime sleep and the seizing up of my back and shoulders as he got heavier. It’s hard for me to look at it without reading my own mental / physical collapse between the lines. I finished it, amazingly, and put it away. I think I just needed to be writing. Something, anything. I needed to know that I could do it, would do it, no matter what.

When I was pregnant with my second son, I wrote a novel-draft about a sixteen-year-old spy in a fantastical version of early 20th century Paris while my first son napped (now in a crib, bless him, and sleeping through the night too). It came out like a torrent, and while it was and is still very much a Shitty First Draft, it worked, and I knew that with more work (a lot more work) it could be good.

Writing a first draft is like falling in love. It’s fun, and there’s not much at stake, not yet. The revisions are the real work of the relationship, the staying after that initial glow has worn off, the commitment to building something worthwhile out of whatever your passion has brought into being.

I’ve got rewrites to do. Lots. I’ve got unfinished things to finish. But, oh blog, I’ve got some notes, too. An outline, really, if I’m honest (which I am, on occasion). A group of characters I know so well, with others still waiting to be pulled into focus. All that stuff that feels like pulling a sled to the top of a steep hill, and from here it looks like smooth unmarked snow all the way to the bottom (even though it isn’t of course, there are rocks and tree stumps hidden in that snow). I’ve been doing purely revisions for over a year now. Over a year! And it’s NaNoWriMo, after all! So while I don’t expect to finish even a shitty first draft of anything this month, tomorrow I’m opening up a new file, and writing chapter one at the top of the page. Whoosh.

Yours, with some revision,

Catherine