This Is How It Ends

Another Sunday Scribblings exercise. This week's theme: A Winter's Tale. This one could use a little more work -- always the case! -- but I'm off to work on a real-life tale of winter: crackling fire and homemade chili, warming me and the house against a cold November evening.


So this is how it ends, Jase thought.

He grimaced into the darkness, grinning and winking and flexing his face to try to keep it numb. His hands had gone dead hours ago, after he’d dipped them in the racing sea and let them freeze as they gripped the wooden tiller. Hooks of ice, they were now, frozen to the tiller. But at least he could steer the boat up and down the mountainous waves.

So this is how it ends, he thought again. He heard spray rattling on his back and neck, but felt nothing.

Nineteen days out of Sander Ryk, the schooner had struck a berg. Odd for it to be this far south, but it was never mind that and all hands on deck, even the children, to staunch the killing flow of seawater. The berg had opened the ship like a knife prying open the white flesh of an apple, and forty-nine men, women, and children, had gone down when it plunged beneath the iron-grey waves.

He was lucky, or unlucky: he’d found the only boat, the little tender they used to unload fish in the harbor, and had thrown the only children he could find on deck aboard, stepping into the unsteady little sloop as the big schooner went under.

He’d shouted something at the children, got them under some oilskins and out of the way. Got the sail up, smeared the salt and ice off his face. And got underway in the screaming black storm.

He caught the sour smell of vomit, and looked forward. The younger one, a girl, was staring at her cupped hands.

“Hold it close! Don’t spill it!” She bent her head to say something to the other child, and he was about to tell her the foul mess would keep her warm, when he saw a paleness in the black swirling night.

He rubbed his face into his shoulder and looked again: Yes. Land shone out there somewhere.

A wave caught them sideways and the boat lurched and corkscrewed, sliding sideways and he was laughing, laughing, because he had been wrong, the land was so much closer than he’d thought, they were upon it, they would not drown at sea, God help them they were upon it, and he cried through the wind to hold on, and they were swept under the thunderous icy sea.


A snow-muffled seashore. Flakes melting into the water. The murmur of surf against seaweedy cliffs. A sand-floored cave. Spark of light; smell of woodsmoke; crackle of fire. Steaming wet wool. Two children and a club-handed man huddle toward the fire.

This is not how it ends, Jase thought. Not yet, anyhow.

Slow week

This has been a week of fits and starts. Some great momentum on my work in progress has been replaced by a ragged, strained effort not unlike running my closed fist along a barbed-wire fence. La, writing!

I posted below, somewhat smugly, about how if it's boring you shouldn't write it. Physician, heal thyself: of the 900 words I bled out this morning, probably 600 will be lost in revisions. So it goes.

Lots of compensatory progress in other areas, though! Several days of boatbuilding have provided me with the dressed, measured, and shaped locust pieces that hold up the boat seats on the centerboard well. The centerboard is the vertical plate that is lowered down to help hold the boat upright. It slides down into a slot, like bread into a toaster. The toaster is the "centerboard well," and where the seats attach to either side, they need little supports to hold them up.

Considering that I started with a log, ending up with clean, straight, smooth, beautiful, tough, support pieces is a pretty cool thing.

Last but not least: I seem to have solved the Mystery Of The Unpredictably Stinky House. The culprit is neither fish nor in-laws, but a heat pump condensate pipe that drains into a P-trapped pipe that dumps into our sewer outflow. So far, so good, right? Except when there's no water in the trap, foul humors backflow up the pipe and ... directly into the intake vent for the heat pump. Lo and behold, the stink is instantly dispersed, along with heat, through the house.

Several days' travel and heedless gluttony will, no doubt, make me desperate to return to all three projects (book, boat, pipes).

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

I have been ungrateful

This week's Sunday Scribblings prompt is "Grateful." These prompts are a great way to try a quick different direction from my ongoing work in progress. And for that I'm grateful! Here it is:

I Have Been Ungrateful

There is a dusty little town some miles off of Interstate 25 north of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the Sangre de Cristo -- Blood of Christ -- mountains fill the eastern sky like white knuckles on a fist.

In this dusty little town is a dusty little restaurant attached to the cook and owner’s house. The handwritten menus are laminated in torn plastic. Inside the air is close and warm, thick with humidity and the aroma of roasting chiles and the pinon fire smoldering in the corner brick fireplace.

Dad and I were the only ones there, shouldering in from the starry desert cold, blowing on our hands as Maria handed us the menus. She clucked at our confusion, all white hair and dark eyebrows, and recommended green chile and posole stew, for both of us. We rested our elbows on the grey formica table, unzipping our expensive fleece jackets, stretching out, sighing into the folding chairs. We had been walking in the high country for three days. We were unshaven and unwashed and hungry for warmth and food cooked on a real stove.

Red Christmas lights glowed from the walls, illuminating children’s drawings, statues of the Virgin Mary, paintings of Jesus and desert mesas, faded school pictures.

We heard voices through a doorway: a small group of children and adults, was singing. It took us a moment to realize the unsteady and out-of-tune melody was “Happy Birthday dear Grandpa.” We stopped crunching on chips to listen.

The song finished and a child’s thin voice said, “Grandpa, why are you crying?”

Outside, the stars spread a milky arm across the clear black sky, and the snow on the Blood of Christ mountains glowed blue in the starlight.

Damage

Left hand: a slice from cutting garlic, a red gouge from a splinter of locust, a row of callouses from tightening clamps, mysterious abrasions most likely from rough lumber.

Right hand: two dings on my thumb, one a blood blister of unknown provenance, the other received when the wrench slipped while I was changing thickness planer blades three nights ago. Mystery divot on the knuckle of my middle finger. A small slice from opening a pop-top jar of peanuts, two mostly healed splinter holes.

Boatbuilding and running in cold dry weather are not kind to hands: these things I do in my spare time leave create small damages in their wake.

I'm coming to a point in my work-in-progress where I have to describe some very bad things. Researching them, so I know what to say and how to say it, has taken me into some of the darkest chapters of human history. I'm not boasting; I'm explaining why it frightens me, and why I'm starting to discover that I've been delaying writing this part of the story.

It scares me. I wonder if it will damage me. And if it does, is that enough of a reason not to write?

Or is that all the more reason to write?

I don't like talking about the specifics of things I'm working on until a draft is behind me, so this will have to remain vexingly abstract for now. But I can say this: I'm not afraid of sending my characters into these bad places and therefore going there myself. I'm afraid I won't be able to get them back out.

Then I think about the real people in real history who are now part of my research. Whose pain I am somehow using.

And I think, forget about me, what about them?

And I think: this must be told.

Love the moment

Here's something I struggle with during a first draft. I get very excited picturing this scene or that scene, to the point where I can call up any detail from the color of the sunlight to the sound a cat makes walking down a gravel road (nearly silent, by the way). I can see it! It's a great scene! I am brilliant! Editors will tremble before my prose, and weep!

Usually I have several of these scenes in my head at any one time, and then all I have to do is connect the dots: write the story that links each beautiful and compelling moment to the next.

The trouble comes when I'm writing the parts of the story that are not those scenes. That stuff is less interesting. Bor-ing! It's no fun to write, so I throw something together while daydreaming of how great the next scene will be.

Then I remove that boring transition months later during revisions.

I remove, in fact, everything that's boring. And if it's boring even to write, imagine how dull it must be to read! Here's my solution. It is not exactly rocket science:

If it's boring, don't write it.

A book isn't a series of precious scenes strung together like beads on a cord, it's a whole, with scenes and dialogue, narrative, transitions, flashbacks, all of it, knit together so tightly and so multi-layered that often several things are happening at once, nothing is removable, but nothing more is needed.

So I try to love the moment. Every moment of the story has to be interesting. Has to be worth writing about, has to be worth taking the reader through. I don't mean it all should be slaptastic melodrama, or lurid description. But it does all have to mean something.

Loving the moment means finding the interesting, beautiful, remarkable, noteworthy elements of everything, and then writing about that. Because every moment of the story should be relevant, important, even critical to the story.

It is also, I suppose, a worthwhile principle for daily life as well. Love the moment.

Boat dreams

Schoolkids dream of summer; the boat dreams of water. Inside the child sleeps the man; inside the wick sleeps the fire. Inside the marble sleeps David; inside the cloud sleeps lightning. Does the acorn dream of the oak it will be or the oak it was? Does the wood dream of the boat it will be or the tree it was? Do the words dream of the story?

Warm thoughts after a cold day of boatbuilding, followed by splitting firewood (fun), a roaring fire (delight) and tasty new beer (coziness triumphant!).

It Doesn't Suck. I Think.

When I'm writing a first draft, it's so rare for things to go well that whenever I sit down to write and don't face existential doubts about story, characters, voice, plot, etc., it is a day to be celebrated. Hooray, I don't hate it!

Doubt will come later, certainly during revisions and probably in the tangled middle of the story. And (mercifully) I can't remember enough about what I wrote this morning to say whether it was good or bad.

Instead, what I remember is the feeling of the story, and of the world it takes place in: the things I saw when I closed my eyes to see, so that I could write down what I saw. I like being there, in the story-world.

So it's a relief, and an uncommon one at that, for me to actually -- can I say it? -- believe in the story. Absence of despair = victory!

Rain and Darkness

There's something about an early-winter rain: it's not cold enough to snow, but the leaves are all off the trees and you can't pretend there's any vibrance or color left in the world. It's a damp cold, too, with numb fingertips and foggy breath and dripping bare trees.

Perfect for staying inside and writing!

I've been trying to figure out why coziness appeals to me as a writer so much. (And I'm not the only one.) There's something about a crackling fire, the raindrops frizzing a wool sweater, water beading down windows, the early dusk of fall ... it makes me want to sit down and imagine.

Maybe it's because there's so little stimulus coming in from the outside world, so there's less to distract me from hearing the high, thin, quiet music singing faintly on the edge of my awareness.

My writing desk (a quarter-sheet of 3/4" marine plywood) faces the wall, after all: a short angled space where the roof hunches down toward the floor. And I keep the blinds closed most of the time: I don't want to see the world outside, I want to see the world inside.

I think the appeal of a rainy day is more than just shutting off the outside world. I think it's days like this when we like to tell stories, or hear them. When we gather around the fire or the dinner table, or even a TV screen, to get pulled into a story. It's the sort of weather that makes it easier to huddle closer to the storyteller. Closer to the story.

Storytelling weather.

Today I wrote

A small celebration of that small fact: today I wrote. Before dawn, with coffee (no need to be barbaric, after all), a few hundred words. Some of them might even have been the right ones. Some of them might even have been in the right place.

But it is, as it always has been and probably always will be, a testing. An experiment, an exploration. Like I've said, you can't improve something that's not there, so I start with an imperfect draft and revise later. Later!

And the strange thing is, I can barely remember anything of what I wrote this morning. Something about a pipe, I think. Oh, and bells, I was looking for different ways to describe the ringing of bells. Hey, it's coming back to me: sunrise and shadows and a cold church.

That's enough, though. I want to not remember it. I want it to stay separate from the awake-me who doubts and edits. And if I can only resist dipping back into the draft to tinker "just for a minute," I might be able to keep that little glowing coal of a story idea alive just a little longer, till I can sit down again with my coffee and sleepy eyes, and tuck back into the story.

Turn

I have tried to stay politically neutral here, with little more success than most television news anchors. Katie Couric got progressively more giddy -- punchy may be the right word -- last night as the numbers trickled in: slowly at first and then with a sense of rushing unstoppable momentum.

In a night of superlatives, after a campaign of superlatives, after eight years of -- oh, forget neutrality: eight years of despair -- one moment stuck with me from the news coverage.

Here is historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King railed against injustice. It is election night and Barack Obama is poised to make history. The noise inside the church is almost a physical weight, a crush of joy and hope and expectations that after so long, things might change.

And here is CBS anchor Russ Mitchell, standing in the throng interviewing people, listening to Katie Couric on his earpiece, trying to provide coherent, objective, neutral reporting in this moment.

He's calm. A cool professional. Suit and tight tie, microphone and journalistic savoir faire.

But look closer. Look at the microphone in his hand. It's shaking. His hand trembles as if a thundering noise is shaking the foundations of the stone church.

And we all turn the page of the story to read more.

Revised Lost Boy

Version 2, with yesterday's edits made. Plus some more that occurred as I was typing.


Something is killing the squirrels.

My neighborhood, huddled in the woods, used to be thick with the little things. One bold grey fellow even gnawed a playing card-sized hole in our cedar siding.

But as the year turns the corner and the brilliant leaves of fall fade to brown and grey, the forest is quiet. No scolding chatter from a swinging branch, no twitching prey for our cats to peer at through the window, lashing their tails.

I walked down to the creek behind our house, wading through dead leaves as the sun set on an unseasonably chilly day. Tree skeletons spiked the glowing sky, and at the creek I found stringy roots, knotted like crooked arms reaching over a trickle of muddy water.

Even here, there were no squirrels. But there -- I bent closer. There was something, under the bank, tucked into the dirty overhang. It looked like part of a doll.

I stepped down to the creekbed, snapped dead branch off a tree, and hooked what turned out to be a rag of checkered blue fabric soaked with something wet. Something rancid. It smelled like potatoes that had been sealed in plastic and left in the dark for too long.

It must have been washed there during a flood. Though it hadn't rained in weeks. I took a step back and something crunched like dry twigs under my foot.

Bones. Tiny, fragile bones like rings of porcelain, a pile of them. Rib cages the size of my hand and long things that looked like multi-jointed fingers or spines, all gleaming white, half buried in the wet sand.

I wanted to leave. Right now. I wanted to go back up to the house and turn on the lights.

I started to step out of the creekbed, when there a scuffling noise behind me, something moving in the sand. I spun.

There was a small raggedy child with wild eyes and leaves in his hair. Her hair? Its hair. It was dressed in what looked like a piece of burlap, and its fingers and lips were crusted black.

I stared for a moment, then pointed to the bones. "Did you... Ah, are you, are you lost?"

He just stood there, watching me without blinking, his shoulders moving as he panted. But when his eyes opened wider I could see the dirty whites and I knew he wasn't tired, but excited. He opened his mouth as if to yawn, and I saw a red hole with no teeth.

I stepped back. He stepped forward. My ankle rolled on something and I started to fall.

He made a sort of gargling noise in this throat and sprang. I turned my head but he was on top of me and I looked under the muddy overhang and saw bones and more clothing, so many bones.

Editing "Lost Boy"

Re-reading my Lost Boy post from last week, it occurs to me that it could be sharpened up a bit. What a great opportunity to work through the editing process! It's a good thing it had so many fixable spots.

This is a quick inventory of the types of things I scrawl on my own drafts. Next time I'll make these changes and, I hope, improve the piece. An exercise to improve my own editing skills and to force me to think through what I'm really trying to say: the story behind the words.

Off we go!


Something is killing the squirrels. [I love this high-impact opening. And the "is killing" gives it present-tense urgency]

I live in a wooded neighborhood [so?], and until recently the trees [redundant with "wooded neighborhood"] were thick with squirrels. One bold grey fellow even gnawed a playing card-sized hole in our cedar siding [good detail] and tried to get up our chimney [who cares? chimney is irrelevant].

But as the year turns the corner and the brilliant leaves of fall turn [used "turn" in this sentence already] grey and crunch [nice image but wrong word. "crunch" sounds too substantial] underfoot, the forest is quiet. No scolding chatter from a swinging branch, no twitching prey for our cats to peer at through the window, lashing their tails.

There's a little creek downhill from our house, and I went to see it [what, the creek? the house? rework.], wading through dead leaves as the sun set on an unseasonably chilly day. Tree skeletons spiked the glowing sky, and at the creek I found knotted tree [used "tree" already] roots overhanging ["overhanging might not be a word. rework.] a thin muddy trickle of water [lose one of these adjectives. why spend flowery description on a little creek? that = imbalance].

Even here, there were no squirrels. But there -- I bent closer. There was something under the bank, tucked into the dirty overhang [2nd use of "overhang."] It looked like part of a doll [creepy = good! immediately we think "dead body"].

I stepped down to the creekbed, snapped a stick off a leaning branch [why leaning?], and retrieved what turned out to be a piece of fabric soaked with something wet and rancid. It smelled like potatoes that have been ["were sealed" seems better here. More distant. And passive voice works here] sealed in plastic and in the dark for too long.

It must have gotten washed there during a flood. Though it hadn't rained in weeks. [like this rhythm]

I took a step back and something crunched like a cracker under my foot. I jumped and looked down [at the same time? rework timing.]. Bones. Tiny, fragile bones like rings of porcelain, a pile of them. Rib cages the size of my hand and long things that looked like multi-jointed fingers or spines, all gleaming white in the creek sand.

I wanted to go back up to the house then. Something moved behind me and I spun. [rework timing. The "I wanted" sentence is the turning point of the whole piece: make it easier to see.]

There was a small raggedy child with wild eyes and leaves in his hair. Her hair? Its hair. It was dressed in what looked like a piece of burlap, and its fingers and lips were crusted black. [good and creepy.]

"Did you?" I pointed to the bones.

"Are you ... are you lost?" [sounds like the kid is saying it. Move up.]

He stared at me, his shoulders moving as he panted. But when his eyes opened [opened wider, I mean] I could see the dirty whites and I knew he wasn't tired, but excited. He opened his mouth as if to yawn, and I saw a red hole with no teeth.

I stepped back. He stepped forward. My ankle rolled on something and I started to fall.

He made a gargling throat-noise [noise in his throat? add "kind of noise" to show narrator confusion, fear?] and sprang [is this really the best spot to end? what about a last image of the kid against the dark sky, or looking up into the muddy cave filled with bones?]