Crickets Beware

I have recently come to realize that if I want to build a boat that looks more like a boat than the closing half of a parenthesis, I'm going to need to be able to get to the port side.

Two years of boatbuilding and garage-storage has littered the wall of the garage with scrap wood, boat frames from an abandoned project, great loops of rope, a few cardboard boxes filled with smaller cardboard boxes of screws, firewood, a rake, two shovels, 200' of 14-gauge extension cord, and so on.

For the most part I've been able to teeter on a stack of 2x4s (as perilous as it sounds) or reach across from the starboard side, or wiggle in under the building jig (crickets, spiders, and nightmares galore).

But as I now need to dry-fit and install the port chine, well: time to clean!

Last night I opened the garage door, donned what I hoped would be cricket-proof gloves, and pulled out as much detritus as I could. Most of this was scrap wood: little knobs of locust, or strip cutoffs, or things accidentally epoxied to each other. Some of it might have been good firewood, but I gotta boat to build, there's no time for discernment! Into the big plastic trash can it all went, to be sorted through later.

Now that side of the boat is not only accessible, but swept clean of dust and the bones of spider victims. In all of this, I saw not a single cricket.

Which means they have massed themselves somewhere. Probably inside my pillowcase or under my toast or somewhere equally ghastly.

The grass is always greener

I have the wooden skeleton of a sailboat in my garage and the always-in-revision third novel on my laptop. Both are wonderful and long projects. And still I find myself daydreaming about the next boat. The next book.

Partly it's the idea of starting fresh. Right now I'm far enough past the beginnings of both projects that I have to struggle to remember how daunting it was to have no momentum, to just ... start.

And partly it's the half-adulterous feeling that "sure, this boat is good. But that one ... that one could be better!" Except unlike spouses, we can accumulate boats and books and grow and learn with each one.

Wait a second, maybe that's exactly like spouses.

*rim shot!*

If for no other reason than wanting to avoid uncertainty when these projects are done, I've already begun thinking about what to do next.

There's always the Folkboat plan, of course, except that wouldn't fit in the garage. Paul Gartside draws some beautiful boats that have helped me couch-sail on many a winter's evening. There's Joel White's bewitching lapstrake double-ender, the Fox Island Class -- if only it had a centerboard I might be building it right now! Because my oh my that beauty looks fun to sail. And then there's Paketi, which I would do with a small cabin and a gaff topsail because life is short. With that flat bottom and all that sail area she would fly downwind.

There's the story of the girl driving west with her loser father. Or is he really that much of a loser? The snow adventure. The desert. More, oh so much much more to say about Rigel and his friends.

There is, I am pleased to discover, so much to do.

Asymptotic quality

Once upon a time, in a cold desert where men performed cruelties by moonlight, an old slave woman had a map of the known world tattooed on her tongue. When she swore, which was often, the juicy invectives passed over rivers and caves and winding blue paths; and when she wanted you lost she closed her mouth with a foamy snap.

Okay, now. The trouble with revising is that ... well, I don't want to do it. I know: wah. But I keep thinking about other stuff I could be writing, strange and fascinating stuff, and then I turn back to my manuscript -- also strange and fascinating, let me not forget! -- as it grinds toward quality.

I have a theory about quality. It is, no doubt, not original, but I like to pretend that I'm the first to have thought it.

In algebra (I'll wait. With me? Okay.) when you graph an equation, say "x=y^2" for example (I'll wait. With me? Okay.) the result is an arcing curve. This line, always changing, soars ever closer to an imaginary limit, but never reaches it. Never reaches it. This imaginary line is the asymptote.

It is perfection. We never reach it.

And so when I change a word, then rethink it and change the sentence, then rethink that and change the paragraph, and then start to have doubts about the whole lousy paragraph and don't get me started on the scene or voice or pace or rhythm (yes, they're different) or metaphor or imagery or tension ...

... it means I'm sliding along toward the asymptote, sluglike, slow and laborious.

Sometimes I think one great side effect of being a writer is the ability to complain in metaphor! Anyway, happy weekend to all and to all a good night.

Twelve pages

Twelve pages. Twelve. Pages. Of single-spaced notes, questions, failed attempts at a workable query. The process is a great exercise -- and I mean 'exercise' in the training-for-a-marathon sense -- because it has forced me to think about what's really at the core of my story.

What it all means. Why it matters.

Simplicity, I've learned once again, is hard. But finally, I think I've landed on something workable.

THE QUERY:

The port city of Quartermoon Bay teems with shipbuilders and captains home from the sea, fishermen and priests and menders of nets. People call fire from the air with a twist of their fingers, and an old woman’s storytelling silences a pub of rowdy sailors.

Twelve-year-old Riga has never seen much point in the stories Grandmother keeps trying to teach him. Until one bright morning, when six strange ships attack and burn his city to the ground, slaughtering the weak and the aged, and enslaving the rest. Grandmother has time to whisper one final story to Riga: across the mountains, hidden in a sea cave, lies the last Ship of the Light, a half-mythical relic of the old wars.

Riga escapes, killing two guards and fleeing into the mountains. He’s driven by the wild hope that he can find the Ship and strike back against the invaders who destroyed everything -- and everyone -- he’s ever known. But as he grasps the terrible significance of the ancient stories, and his role in them, he must weigh revenge against survival, and loyalty to his friends against the true burden of carrying the stories of the dead.

Go, monkey mind, go

I don't think I made up the term "monkey mind" myself. It refers, I've decided / read, to the magical quality of total innocence. Say, when you first learn to bowl and roll a strike because you're not hung up on your shoes or your form, or how crooked your pinkie has to get.

When you don't know it can't be done, in other words. There's a freedom there, before you get down to the nitty-gritty of "technique" and "precedent" and "details" and sometimes -- rarely, but it does happen -- you just ... do it.

Sometimes I'll be daydreaming and ideas will start circling like angry birds, wheeling and coming in so fast my head aches at the thought of writing them all down. I used to lunge for pen and paper, and scrawl incomprehensibilities like "Queen wall bricks" or "Lollipop paper -- semicolon not Tennyson!!!"

This was anti-monkey mind. True monkey mind just lets all those ideas slosh around for awhile -- overnight is best -- before plucking them out.

Other times I'll just forget. Monkey mind is not infallible; there's a reason it's not called Cyborg Mind.

But sometimes, if you can sneak up on a problem (e.g., "who's that bald guy, the lead singer of Genesis, who is NOT called Paul Simon even though that's all I can come up with"; or "how can I get this big meaning into this little sentence") and surprise it after not thinking about it ... you can trap it and figure it out. That's monkey mind.

How do you think he does it?

I don't know. What makes him so good?

These days I'm listening to Michael Chabon read his "Summerland" (book on CD). It is very, very good. A few months ago I read "Gentlemen of the Road," by the same author but very different in style and tone. And also very, very good.

So my question to myself is: Self, although you are certainly dashing and freakishly cool, this appears to be quite the mystery. How is Michael Chabon so good?

Is it innate talent? Practice? A clean workspace? Maybe he does Internet searches more than me. Or less. Or exclusively. Or never.

Maybe I need a plant in my writing room. Maybe I should vacuum it. Maybe I should put more clothes on the floor. Or put away the half-empty epoxy containers.

Or maybe -- just maybe -- none of these mean a damn if you don't just sit down. And get to work.

Perseverance, I believe, is a spark of heat on a cold day. A cold winter. Nothing matters if you do not carry on.

Yes, I will read more, and not just as someone in the audience but as a technician: how does he do that? Why does she make this choice instead of that one? Why so many verbs? Why this pace and not faster? Or slower?

In the meantime: back to work! Still on the query. But I'm close: it is sneaking around my peripheral vision, flicking my ear and melting into shadows when I turn. But I know where to find it: in the corner. And I step toward it.

There is a fire in it.

"That girl is dangerous," one of my characters says, about another. "There is a fire in her."

This is what I must remember; what I do remember: there is a fire at the heart of my story. It can be disguised by the slow death of editing; it can be hidden behind word choice and frustrations over tempo and pace ... but there is a still a fire in it.

Now, then. The job of a query is to burn with that fire. To singe, to smolder, to crackle and glow. To carry some of the story's fire in just a few short sentences that nonetheless sear the reader like a hot sidewalk.

Interesting how I'll choose to write about the query instead of writing the query itself. Enough avoidance. Here goes:

There is a character. He is, like all of us, both a product of his environment and defined by -- imprisoned by? -- his expectations about right and wrong and how the world works.

One day all of that changes, suddenly and horribly. He fights back but learns, for the first time in his life, that he is too weak. That bad things happen no matter how fierce you are.

But still, against all reason and evidence: he believes. He hopes. He, as a very wise man once wrote, carries the fire.

He fails, over and over again. And each time his belief that the world can be understood crumbles a little. In its place is a cynical hope that despite the vagaries of the world, despite the invisible dice-throwing hand of God, despite everything, he can persevere.

Instead of believing in the world, he believes in himself.

Cheesy? No doubt. Like all themes, in the abstract it's little more than a Hallmark card. But when I think of him, my character, Riga, standing in the snow high on the burning white slopes of a mountain, hacking and gasping in the thin air, he wants to stop. The sky is so blue-black it almost vibrates, and he has been coughing up blood for four days.

Behind him is the way back down, to warmth and the soft green lowland valleys. Ahead is a wall of rock and ice.

But ahead is also hope. He takes a step. And another step.

And he keeps going.

Does he believe in himself? Hell and death, he believes in himself because everything else has failed him. Or because he has no choice. Or because he can't stop and die.

Somewhere in there is the kernel of my query.