Writing again

I've dived back into an old story, grabbing a few minutes to write when I can, and all the old difficulties come flooding back in: the doubts, the clumsiness, the idiotic repetitiveness, the repeating things, the lack of spark, blah blah blah. No different from any other first draft, in other words.

But no matter! The important thing isn't how it feels now -- since it always feels like crap -- but rather the very simple and primitive fact of work. I am a writer; I write.

Meanwhile fall has turned the corner into winter, and I walked the dogs this morning under a clear sky jewelled with stars, and the frosted grass glittered in counterpoint. I was happy at the beauty, huddled into my warm clothes. The dogs peed, unimpressed and ready to return to their sleepy nests on the couch.

And the best part is that the cold and dark of this morning hangs in my head like a picture now, while the story I'm working in hangs there too ... and I find myself trying to work in a scene that takes place on a cold morning under the stars.

Snowicane

It started with a ghostly ring around the moon, and then three days of clouds creeping slowly, like glaciers or the tide, across the sky, from horizon to horizon.

Then the wind started: a tickle here, leaves scraping down the road there, rustlings in the woods at night. A few dead branches falling and scaring the dogs. But the wind didn't stop. After a day or two you didn't really notice it anymore: the smaller branches swaying rhythmically, leaves fluttering.

It blew for three days. The sky turned yellow. And then it began to rain, at first so gently that you couldn't tell if it was mist or fog instead of thing little droplets.

It's been raining all night and all day now, and the wind is still swaying the smaller branches. The dogs are anxious. There's a strange darkness to the light, like a fire seen through a black shirt, or through dirty smoke.

It is going to get worse before it gets better. We have flood warnings, high wind warnings, severe weather warnings, and now (I can hardly believe it) a blizzard warning.

View from the workshop: only the sheerplank on each side remaining now.

The Giant's Skull

Last week I decided to burn some holiday calories with a bike ride into the mountains. So I bundled up in winter gear, packed map and snacks and extra clothes, and climbed up leafy trails, crunching through frozen mud, sliding across brown ice, crisping through snow patches.

Up and up, until the views expanded and I saw the world ringed with lines of blue mountains. Uphill and downhill and uphill and downhill. A few creek crossings, much bushwhacking through fallen trees and tangles of thorny brush, heated curses at the terrain, thorns, shoe soles caked in ice, my own lack of energy.

When I came out on top after a climb so steep I had to push my bike, I was rewarded with the long views I'd glimpsed through the trees earlier, except now the sun was out. Ridges of blue mountains marching west to the horizon, into West Virginia. And then I saw a gleam of white: the most distant and highest shape was a mountain covered in snow, no larger than a fingernail peeling but bright white against the blue sky. Like the skullcap of a giant three hundred miles distant, or maybe the Rocky Mountains.

Satisfied at at least this glimpse of winter, I chipped the ice off my shoes, clipped in, and started pedaling. Downhill at last.

O Spring, thou cruel minx

80 degrees? In April? Spring blossoms have an actual smell; it's not just poetry.

Each year I forget and each year I remember again, and the smell takes me to the small house we lived in until I was in fifth grade. A small blossoming tree droops over a cracked sidewalk; three brown steps and a leaning iron rail. In the summer you could palm moths on the marigolds. Inside we watched black-and-white Superman reruns and, if it was a good day, TV dinner while Buck Rogers was on. I stood on those basement stairs and wept when I heard my grandfather had died.

I buried a pet in the back yard; we moved when I was nine and I always wondered if some curious child would find, ten inches down from the edge of the metal shed, the towel-wrapped tiny bones of a guinea pig. What pets would they have? Where would they bury them?

So now when I pause while taking out the trash, or walking the dog, or stretching after a run, and I close my eyes and inhale that breath of spring, thirty years flicker past like an eyeblink, and I think of that old house and that young family and the sidewalk with weeds in the cracks.

Then the wind blows, bending the snow-weakened pines, and I think of the sound of river water against a wooden bow. I can almost smell that low-tide mud. And I think of epoxy and curving wood, and the scrape of sharp of tools, and the sound of a man's voice now ten years dead.

How broad life seems on the first warm day of spring.

Attention, Weather Gods

I didn't mean no disrespect!

Repent, repent!

...WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM FRIDAY TO 10 PM EST SATURDAY...

A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM FRIDAY TO 10 PM EST SATURDAY.

* PRECIPITATION TYPE... EXTREMELY HEAVY SNOW.

* ACCUMULATIONS...STORM TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS OF 220 TO 300 INCHES.

* SNOW TO BE ACCOMPANIED BY LOCALIZED TORNADIC DISTURBANCES AND FREQUENT CLOUD-TO-GROUND LIGHTNING.

* ALL CITIZENS REPEAT ALL CITIZENS URGED TO STAY CALM

I Come From The Land of the Ice and Snow

I've never known what two feet of snow looks like. Now I do. And although it resulted in eight hours of shoveling and no small amount of sore muscles, it also enabled long afternoons by the fire, surrounded by books, soft pillows, and dozing cats.

It makes me think of Chabon's werewolf-pulled sledges, goblins cracking whips in the frozen air; Lewis's "always winter and never Christmas;" Pullman's wild and muddy trip to the far North; of Angmar and the Citadel of the Stars; of the snows of Kilimanjaro and frozen leopards; Scott's men in their last tent, in the howling dark.

Why is it that winter seems so much more evocative than summer? Or is it because I'm IN winter right now, when for most of the year it's temperate and, well, not covered in two feet of snow? Do children in Spitzbergen dream of the desert, of trackless dunes and sultry nights where the stars glow like jewels, just as we dream of the iron smell of coming snow and the northern lights glowing on fields of white?

Unfortunately for my characters, I'm fascinated by almost any geography, and sending them to experience it is the next best thing to traveling there myself. Because I've found my favorite stories have a rich sense of place, of being there. And everywhere is interesting.

The Good Bad Magic Place

Some time ago I was camping in the winter. There was so much snow we had to shovel a flat space for the tent, and little pathways to the "bathroom." This was the sort of thing that seemed irresistibly cool when discussed by a roaring fire with a glass of amber liquid in hand ... but which, when put into practice, seemed to result in numb fingers and the near-paralysis that comes from wearing six inches of clothing layers.

Not fun! I told myself, scuffing through snow in the blue dusky darkness. Why do we do this, again?

Then I realized: because it's a different place. Because there's something of value to be gained from just being somewhere unusual. Forget about how it feels at the moment; it's enough for it to be different and, therefore, good.

I am way into my work in progress. Way in. Way, way, way in. So far in I can't remember the freshness of the beginning, nor can I see the end. It's exhausting me, and it's not even that good.

But no first draft is, I tell myself, and return to the slog.

But maybe it's like that cold weekend in the snow. There's a magic to writing a first draft. I don't know what's going to happen, so in a sense it's like reading the story for the first time. Yes, it's hard; yes, it's frustrating; yes, it comes nowhere close the shining image I had when I started.

But still, it's different. There's a magic to this part of the process that won't be here when I revise, or send out queries.

Or so I tell myself.

Snow; woe; whoa

Today something white and slushy fell from the sky and made the ground white and slushy too. It may have been snow, but it tinkled like crystal in the trees. But either way I'm home from work. And I made scones. Coziness ahoy!

However, such rare luck is not without a downside: the devil collects his share for every accident of luck. Our grocery store has stopped carrying Peet's coffee, so as far as I'm concerned, that's the end of writing, boatbuilding, and consciousness in the morning. I exaggerate, says you? Never in life, quoth I. For lo, in days past I wrote words on this very topic and now I am sore afraid.

Or is it little more than an excuse, any excuse, to stop writing? The danged book is so inconsistent: one day I can't stop thinking about it and scrawling notes like "K. sulks at implications of story; brother also failed." And other days it's like trying to chew gravel and whistle at the same time.

But like the parabolic swaying of a slender willow branch in a gale, so too arcs my luck back to positive, or at least neutral. For behold! I have seen the Coraline trailer, posted on Laini Taylor's blog, and it. is. awesome. Probably not something to watch alone in a dark house, though.

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.

This is more like it

Here comes Hanna. The forecast of gusty wind and rain bodes for an interesting Saturday morning run. But then I get to say I ran in a hurricane. I know it won't be a hurricane anymore but everyone knows I tell lies anyway. Wait until I describe the possums and crow's wings and oil drums tumbling past me.

But this is why I labor in the garage with iron-hard locust lumber. Because it's thick and dense and will not rot, and if I put in the hours and sweat to make that wood part of my boat, the boat will, maybe, better withstand weather like this.

And this is more like it. 35 gusting to 40! Apart from the high likelihood of catastrophic structural failure on my poor old boat (not the one under construction), that is the sort of weather I should be sailing in. Or very much the sort I should not be sailing in, if you listen to my mother.

 ANZ531>533-052230-
CHESAPEAKE BAY FROM POOLES ISLAND TO SANDY POINT-
CHESAPEAKE BAY FROM SANDY POINT TO NORTH BEACH-
CHESAPEAKE BAY FROM NORTH BEACH TO DRUM POINT-
 626 AM EDT FRI SEP 5 2008

 TROPICAL STORM WATCH IN EFFECT

 TONIGHT
E WINDS 20 TO 25 KT. GUSTS UP TO 35 KT AFTER MIDNIGHT.
WAVES 2 TO 3 FT. SHOWERS.

 SAT
E WINDS 30 TO 35 KT WITH GUSTS UP TO 45 KT. WAVES 2 TO 4 FT.
SHOWERS.

This is why thoughtfulness and care in building -- writing too, for that matter -- is so critical: the world is dangerous. Bad things happen. Has anyone ever been lulled into a real sense of complacency? No! It's always a false sense of complacency.

Let's build our boats strong for they may be in danger someday. Our stories may be read in a world very different from the one we live in. Imagine the books published on December 6, 1941. Or September 10, 2001.

Write strong!

Big and Small II

I've been thinking more about big and small, not in theme or story but actual physical details. This is one of the magical parts of writing (and reading): the way we can squeeze very, very close in and then, almost in the blink of an eye, rush out, way way out.

Things that are big:

• "The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls." The sea, the heaving grey sea, so broad and deep that at first it doesn't even seem to move.
• Thunderclouds that rise like blue castles to blot out the sun.
• A hurricane viewed from space, that delicate furious spiral.

Things that are small:

• A drop of salty water flung from an ocean wave onto your lip.
• Hairs on the leg of a spider.
• Flat facets and mineral cleavages on a single grain of sand.
• Salt spilled on a slate floor.
• An individual wood pore.

We don't just read stories, they take us places, help us change size, direct our gaze. I love that this means the scale of the story -- epic, personal, and everything in between -- as well as what we're experiencing -- a speck of dirt, the thunder of war, a bloodred aphid, the trade winds.

P.S. Extra credit for anyone who -- without Google -- can identify the source (author, work) of the quote in the first bullet point. Extra EXTRA credit for anyone who can recite the work from memory. Don't worry, it's very short. And very cool. Comment ... away!

Conditions improve on the Chesapeake

From this morning's NOAA forecast:

 SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 4 PM EDT THIS
 AFTERNOON THROUGH LATE TONIGHT

 THIS AFTERNOON
S WINDS 15 KT. WAVES 1 TO 2 FT.

 TONIGHT
S WINDS 15 TO 20 KT...BECOMING SW 10 TO 15 KT LATE.
WAVES 2 TO 3 FT...SUBSIDING TO 1 TO 2 FT.

I do TOO have a day job!

Few phrases make my heart jump more than "Small craft warning." Or "advisory," in this case. They save the "warning" for even stronger conditions.

I have on my desk at work a stainless steel bolt with a pronounced arc to it. This 1/4-inch thick piece was stressed and bent solely from the pressure of the wind on the sail of my small boat. Partly that means that even a small boat in a fresh breeze can generate surprisingly high stresses.

But it also reminds me of the real world outside the office, where wind bends steel and bats flutter and herons stalk the shallows. Is it any wonder my characters often end up in boats? That's me bleeding through into the story.

S Winds 10 to 15 Kt. Waves 2 Ft.

That's from the NOAA coastal marine forecast for the lower Chesapeake Bay. 10-15 knots is a handful of wind, enough to feel and hear on your ears. It's about what you'd feel while riding a bike; enough to swirl leaves along the road; enough to press behind a small boat with sails outstretched like the broad wings of a gull, water foaming alongside all the way north.

"There come thoughts now..." This imaginary voyage isn't that of fog and icebergs and the "whale's path" I mentioned earlier. No, it's a Chesapeake Bay trip in a smaller, one nimble enough to shove off a sandbar when you run aground, but large enough to carry a stove and some supplies and a sleeping bag.

Luckily, I'm building that very boat! (Pictures here; scroll down.) It's a daily ritual of cutting plywood, calculating numbers, the acrid stickiness of epoxy, the scrape of a plane. But someday it will be a boat and I will pray for days like this with good strong winds out of the south.

The idea, you see, is to circumnavigate the Eastern Shore of the Bay, encompassing portions of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. Why not? There is no better way to see that low watery landscape than from a small boat, and wind is free and inherently better than puttering along with an outboard. There are miles and miles of marshy inlets to explore, blue crabs and herons and the sweet smell of mud, and miles and miles of open Bay to sail across.

Starting at charts is what sailors do in the off-season. Or when their boat is still just a pile of parts in the garage that hasn't been assembled yet.

Though I have to admit: as idyllic as S winds 10-15 sound, this sets me afire:

WITHIN 180 NM NE OF A LINE FROM 55N59W TO 50N51W TO 44N44W
WINDS 25 TO 35 KT. SEAS TO 12 FT.

Now that is a handful of wind. And it gets much stronger than that.

Rain good

I like rain. I don't like being in it, but watching through a window from inside feels like wearing a wool sweater or dozing under a down comforter. It's a good, build-a-fire, flop-in-an-armchair, read-a-book feeling. Snow is even better for the same reason, but this being Virginia, it's wisest to pin my coziness hopes to rain.

I'd like to live in a house of wood and stained glass and bookshelves. A church of stories. It would have sunny spots for the cats (they need little else) and walls and walls of shelves for books and other items (pictures, skeins of wool, little glass bowls of foreign money, dust, errant bookmarks, empty coffee mugs, decorative sticks, small books that don't fit on the shelf with the others and therefore stand in front of the main group).

If it's a strong storm, that's even better. Let's have some trees swaying, trash cans rolling through the street, leaves plastered to the windows. This "sailor's simpleminded delight in bad weather" may be a weakness, as both my books feature violent storms.

Sailing in a storm may be the only way to get some wind. Small Craft Warnings are when the excitement really begins; otherwise you drift around and swear. And huddling under a scrap of nylon on a backpacking trip while the rain beats down is also pretty hard to beat. But walking in it, running in it, carrying groceries through it? No thanks.

This concludes our test

Thank you, everyone. You may put away your heavy coats and ice scrapers. Sell your snow shovels; glue your firewood back into trees; plant crocuses. Crocii.

The Envelope, Please

The night before a winter storm is like one long drumroll. And I'm not even in school anymore.