Averil Dean's Blog, page 8

Bricks

What do you think about in the middle of the night? Do you wake at 2am as if at the clapping of hands, one moment dreaming and the next intensely awake, eyelids twitching, feet unstoppable, your shoulders creeping toward your ears, hipbones like a stack of bricks under your forearm? Does the pillow always bunch the wrong way? Do you beg yourself to sleep? Do you flop, roll, flop, roll. Count sheep, count unicorns, count the flaws of Donald Trump. Count the hours you might get if you go back t...

Project(ing)

So I’ve started the new project. Sure, it might have been better to take the time to plan this out a little better and give myself a road map, but if I’ve learned anything from the fallow fields of yesteryear, it’s that doing something is better is almost always better than doing nothing, and if you feel like writing you should write. As a result, I’m sort of flashlighting around with this story, hoping to stumble onto a plot without breaking a toe.

It’s not my usual modus operandi. I don’t h...

Sweetie

I have waded into Twitter. The election coverage in particular drew me in, partly out of a certain dark-hearted perversion which is par for the course with me, and partly arising from a genuine curiosity for the subculture that seems to have evolved there: the Twitterverse. Such a beguiling word that I just had to see for myself what it’s all about.

And now I do see. It’s where the trolls live. Where people make up silly handles and call each other names, where we post triumphant links to act...

Lift

I could hardly sleep last night. I’ve been engaged in a back-and-forth with an old friend who took one look at my book idea and knew immediately how to make it nine thousand times greater than the smallish thing I had in mind. What’s more, he gave me permission to aspire, to write it my way, leaving out the stuff I don’t care about, including only and everything that matters to me–to me, to my aesthetic and sense of story, to my obsessions, fears, and dreams. He says I can write this big book...

Elephants

How do you get your shit together and just do it? How do you get over or around or beside yourself and put the words on the page and tell your inner weeble that it truly doesn’t matter whether the words are right or wrong, so long as you manage to toss them outside the swaying bouncy-house of your own imagination? How do you stop the parsing, the self-recrimination. How do you tame this elephant of a story that’s trying to squeeze through the square white doorway of your screen? How do you co...

Dipping

Let’s talk about you:

Where’s the farthest you have been from home? If you could return to another point in your lifetime and start again from there, where would you go? Have you ever been skinny-dipping? When’s the last time you lost your temper, and do you regret it now? Tell me one secret. Tell me one lie.

Spiral

Over the weekend I took a look through all the writing projects I’ve started and abandoned over the past couple of years. There are so many. Short stories and first chapters and failed attempts at poetry. Scenes and parts of scenes. Outlines, character sketches, intriguing settings and strange milieus. So many files, so many spiral notebooks. Such a monumental mess.

Part of what’s happened, I think, is that along the way I’ve lost confidence in my own judgment. I’ll get a short way into a ne...

The Donald Chronicles

A new chapter this week in the Chronicles: people are starting to say out loud that the Republican nominee for President of the United States might actually be crazy. Not crazy as in zany, ha-ha, or crazy like a fox, or politically incorrect or imprudent or what have you, but crazy as in, Holy shit, this country might be about to elect a sociopath.

It’s an opinion that has crept upon us slowly, in part because it sounds so hyperbolic. You tell the other guy his party’s nominee may have some...

French Vegetable Soup

Soup therapy. Is that a thing? Can we agree that it should be? If so, may I suggest this recipe, with the idea that lots of therapeutic chopping followed by a long, slow cooking process is a pretty good cure for whatever ails you–unless you’re trying to make this on a Monday night after work, in which case these qualities will have the exact opposite effect.

Anyway, if the soup doesn’t work, you can always watch a Trump stump speech and play a drinking game around the number of times he says,...

Daddy Issues

Holy moly, what a show we’re having in the U.S. We’ve got idiots left and (mostly) right, with a racist, know-nothing carnival barker playing to the rubes and a know-all history maker with decades of both service and scandal behind her, and millions of Americans suddenly acting like our once beloved country is some third-world hellhole that can’t be improved except by installing this sociopathic blowhard who bellows from the podium, “I alone can fix this,” who invites a foreign government to...