Hole in the Ground

June 13

Happy birthday, Mike! And yay for all the good writing he's doing of late!

Congrats to Scott Nicholson on his many recent writing-related successes!

Hurray for M'ris, for making those cuts to her novel while preserving the book's integrity!

Have I mentioned lately that my friends rule?

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I fled work yesterday afternoon, glad to be free of it. I didn't get stressed out (despite many misadventures and annoyances), but I was happy to get home. Not that I stayed home. I went for a long walk to settle my whirring brain, wandering all over downtown. I wound up at Javha House (which is quite a good coffee shop, and I'd go there more often if Pergolesi weren't 7,000 times more conveniently located). I sat by the big windows in the cavernous room and sipped insanely strong coffee while reading Sacrament. Then I walked more. I'm definitely still in hyper-reality mode. There's an empty lot at the corner of Church and Pacific, all fenced-off, and the fence has those opaque strips of plastic threaded through it, to block the view. But of course the strips are missing in several places, so it's possible to peer inside. I did, yesterday-- I really looked. It's remarkable in there-- the ground is ravaged. There are huge holes, and humped mounds of earth covered with grass, and trash-- it's something beyond desolation. And yet, there in the middle of the lot, someone had erected several cairns of stones, quite high ones. It looked like an altar designed to call some benevolent pagan god's attention to this ruined place. And yet, I immediately started imagining altars built of trash, altars to a god of waste, and realized that was a scene that would be in the book-- that in particular this would be the place where my Earthquake Cultist gets into so much trouble.

That's just one example-- every time I go outside it's like this, a sublime assault on my creative centers. The book is ripening, darlings.

I went home and sat down at the computer. Not to work on Rangergirl; I'm prioritizing, and there are other things to take care of first. First I revised "Rowboats, Sacks of Gold" (the final polish) and sent it off. Then, sufficiently warmed to the world of words, I opened up my Mr. Li story. I read it with a sinking heart.

It wasn't exactly bad, but it certainly wasn't good. I realized that I'd started off telling the story all wrong, that I'd thrown away several opportunities for tension and revelation. So I scrapped the few pages I'd already done and started the story anew, in an entirely different place. The plot hasn't changed, but the approach definitely has, and it's a much better story, now. I did just over 2000 words last night. Another writing session like that should finish it off. I'm very pleased with how it's going.

Beautiful Heather called me, and we talked for a while about... oh, all manner of things. Lover-talk. Poem-talk. I read her "Drawing Pain," and she liked it, but agreed that there's something a little off about it... I think the poem is just too loose and wandery. She told me about things she's working on. We talked about dreams. I love talking to her; we have so many of the same fascinations, but our perspectives are totally different, which makes for deeply interesting conversations.

I didn't do too much after I finished talking to Heather, just read more of Sacrament and fell asleep on the couch, waking a bit later and finding my way to bed, and to more sustained sleep.

Heather's coming to visit me tonight! She's so great. I sat around last weekend bemoaning the fact that I wouldn't see Heather for a week, and rather than moaning along with me, Heather did something about it-- shuffled the schedule at her job so that she could do a mid-week spend-the-night-visit. I love her so much. I'm so happy.

Tomorrow I'm taking the day off work, lingering in the morning with Heather and then going up to Hayward to see Timprov and M'ris. Should be a fun day.