Any Party In A Storm

I’d have to characterize my trip to The City as a success.

Despite only being around for a few days, I managed to spend some breathless quality time with friends and family–the final count of our exploits including a Japanese print-art exhibit, a gay rugby game and an exhibition to commemorate the anniversary of a century-old industrial fire…with song.

As for the latest draft of my book, it’s now in the hands of “close readers”, who are tasked with gently beating the living shit out of it, while I do my best for two months to forget I ever wrote the thing.

In the meantime I’m trying to get some brand of social life here in Lonesome Valley–and ideally, one that doesn’t involve hiking.  So I’m planning to resuscitate two hobbies that I’d previously abandoned at the county border: The roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, and the Chinese rummy variant Mahjong.

I’ve put together a website for the former, hoping to scare-up some local geeks on their virtual turf. As for the latter, I resorted to “sexuality profiling”.

“Would you be interested in a Mahjong night?” I asked the host of a local gay mens’ meeting, over the bass-heavy dance music on his cabin sound system.

“How about strip Mahjong?” he proposed.

First/Last Ride Out of Town

I’m visiting The City this weekend, but The Je can’t be expected to make that kind of trip anymore.  So instead, I’m taking the bus.

Unfortunately there’s only one of them, and it doesn’t leave for another three hours.

As for trains, there’s only one of them, too–but the train bound out of town leaves from a place that is itself also out of town.  So to take that I’d need a viable car, and if I had me one of them…what would I be needing with a train?

(Incidentally, the train station operates as a theatre in the summertime.  Bob and I saw a friend of ours perform there this June.  If a train pulls into the station while the play is in progress, the lights on-stage dim, and the actors freeze until it pulls out again.  This is true.)

Right now, I am killing time by sitting in the lobby of The Practice, polishing off my third draft, downloading an indie album, and hoping the vacuum lady does not kick me out when she sees me plug this laptop in…

Snapshot

Quick update…

Bob has a temp job, playing clarinet for a local High School production of “One of Those Musicals Every High School Does Every Twelve Years Because It’s Got A Big Enough Cast to Accommodate The Whole Drama Department”.  We also have some tax money coming, which is much-anticipated.

So financially anyway, there’s a tentative sense that, if we can remain cheap for a little while longer, we ‘ll eventually be able to buy Pop Tarts again without guilt.  (Well, without guilt for having spent money on them, anyway–every other aspect of Pop-Tartdom seethes with The G Word, and that’s as it should be.)

Creatively-speaking, I’m closing-in on my third draft, which makes me feel very fulfilled.  The plot problems that used to be big enough for me to drive an imaginary truck through are now only imaginary-motorcycle-sized, at least to my mind.  The next draft will go to a wider readership, so we’ll see what they think.  (Frankly, if you’re reading this, you may even be getting a copy!  If so, be cruel to be kind.)

The trouble is, as I emerge from the book neuron by neuron, I’m realizing that there really is nobody to hang out with up here.  My friends from The Practice make me feel old and weird.  My neighbors make me feel like I’m hanging out with my relatives–which says a lot about their hospitality, but not a lot about the prospect of our being able to successfully improvise a drinking game based on John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13”.

Today, I desperately googled “Lonesome Valley D & D”, but found only a propane supply company.  So I googled “Lonesome Valley Mahjong”, and my computer found a site about things to do while you’re in The City.  (No shit, Sherlock.)

I’m probably barking up the wrong tree.  I’ll need to figure a kind of fun that’s tuned to this place, and have it.

But I tell you this my brothers and sisters, it will not be curling.

Shine On, You Crazy Header

The significance of the header I’ve just retired should be obvious to anyone who’s read this blog long enough, and/or has any love for King-a-la-Kubrick:

Suffice to say that writing a book in the oversnown wilderness while trying your best to avoid partnercide is not just for fictional protags anymore.

Though these days, with Bob trying to quit smoking by way of Chantix, he’s the more Torrancely resident of the trailer by far…

A Writer’s Tools

In November, I did everything I could not to write, or even think about the book, which eventually required distraction that went beyond the casual forms of escape offered by books, video games, or even porn.

That’s right folks: I read catalogs.

Solutions. Hammacher Schlemmer. The Vermont Country Store. One memorable evening, I even spent hours rifling through one of Henry’s catalogs for a lab supply company that specialized in genetically-engineered mice.  (Granted, we have enough rodents visiting our trailer to preclude our needing to shop for more, let alone ones with biologically-induced obesity, but the less useful the catalog, the emptier the head.)

Since then, I’ve met with Calliope, and received some all-essential direction for my third draft. I’ve even read the second draft myself, which only took one bottle of sake to wash down.

Now we’re into the third.  Keep those fingers crossed!

Book 2.0

I used to think it would be difficult to celebrate finishing a “draft” of something.  After all, a book is bound to go through innumerable changes between stages.  What’s to toast, until the thing is DONE done?

Well tonight, I wrote the last line of the second draft of That Darn Book, and let me just say this: Although I am certain that the last line will change in future iterations (going by my track record, probably like fifteen times) there was nevertheless a feeling of “got my life back” when I typed it.

I decided to celebrate by watching an entire movie on my laptop, but I have so many terrific flicks waiting in my DVD folder that, upon opening it, I found myself paralyzed by Watcher’s Block!

Why We Write

The last few bits of book have been taking their sweet time shaking through my fingers–mostly due to October being busier than expected, and to Bob and me both getting that miserable cold that’s been going around Lonesome Valley.  (No, it’s not H1N1, but the way it spread around the mountains, I was momentarily concerned that it might be Captain Trips…)

Now I’m done with the sniffles, and returning to the book nightly, which has led me down the road to pulp-lit responsibility, and perhaps more importantly, toward a closer facsimile of psychological health.

This is in part due to the fact that, while I’m lost in the world of my book, I have less time to update my personal budget–something that’s better done in short panic-stricken bursts.

Returning to the project, even after such a brief hiatus, has changed things, too: Until now, I’d been regarding the book as something that I needed to get done, so I could be free to embrace the unadulterated Lonesome Valley experience.  Now I’m realizing this was the wrong way to think about things: I doubt I’d be able to take the glare of fact without the UV-protection Ray-Bans of fiction.

So it’s only this book I’m looking to finish, and once it’s truly done (some drafts from now, probably), I won’t be taking up tobogganing–I’ll be plunging headlong into other writing/brain-shielding efforts.

Anything to put some distance between me and that mean old OpenOffice ledger…

Where I’m At

Still working on the book.  Calliope was kind enough to give me an extension, and I’ve been using that time to ride the whole shebang home.  I keep finding new logic gaps in the story, but I think I’ve taken care of the worst ones.  (Well, the absolute worst ones, anyway…)

Just a few more chapters to finish, and a couple to wedge in-between the ones I already wrote.  I just wish I could take some time off from work to tackle this.  (When I needed to pound out the first draft of my book, I actually took a near-week off in honor of the chore.)  But I’m still a newbie at The Practice, so such things aren’t in the realm of possibility.

Cross those fingers.  I’m so looking forward to getting my head out of this story for a while, and experiencing full-tilt Lonesome Valley madness!

What’s Happening

Here are some quick items, frantically clacked into my Mac while Bob visits the library (and I sit outside in The Je, to steal its wireless signal)…

Item One: Second Draft

Part of the challenge to writing my first book has been learning not just how to write one, but how I write one, since everyone does it differently.  The way it’s looking, my personal “process” has a great deal in common with theatrical rehearsal–which is to say that dress week is, as ever, the only time I get my act together.  To wit: I’ve promised my friend Calliope that she’ll receive a copy of my second draft on the 30th of September, and I’m currently rewriting the entire thing in honor of that deadline.

Item Two: We Have Electricity

More on this later, but electricity is here, and it means that we can keep a fridge, which means that we can save a lot of money on groceries.  Bob and I are being a little more careless with our energy as a result, treasuring the option to leave on not only one light in the kitchen/living room/dining room, but two.  This hedonism may dissipate once we get our first bill, but for now, we’re in the salad days.

Item Three: The Je

Somehow it passed inspection after all, and I’ve been driving it daily.  The freedom that has come from being where I want to be when I need to be there has done a great deal to reduce the pervasive fear I’ve had lately–and although Bob and I are still trying hard to save The Good Ship Bank Account from a watery grave, it certainly helps to know I can have a Dunkin Donuts coffee should the need for self-medication arise.

Item Four: Chickens

They arrive tomorrow morning.

Item Five: Bob

He’s in the passenger seat now.

Because It Was Snowing, Junior

We’re running the heat earlier in the evening, turning it off later in the morning; autumn is here, and the summer didn’t even leave a note. I have to wear layers just to walk the dog.

The downside of my decision to remained locked indoors during the one season you can actually go out is coming into focus. But it couldn’t be helped; I’d have felt like a failure had I cruised into the icy months without a second draft of of my book under my belt, and that should be finished once the month is out.

This is the reason I’ve remained mum while Bob’s demolition of the house continued to soar over budget this summer: I knew that, no matter what the cost, the thing had to come down. We did not merely come here with dreams; we came with vendettas.

Still, my neighbors think it’s a shame I’ve squandered so much open air. “You should have waited until winter to write that thing,” they tell me. “There’s nothing to do up here in the winter.”

They’re not kidding, either: Cheyenne, one of the longtime staff at the practice, remarked to me yesterday that come August, our office experiences a highly suspicious spike in appointments for newborns.