A Long Rest.

It's been a long time since I've posted anything on my blog or at least it has felt like it. The gears have changed for me a bit over the last couple of weeks as I have been working solely on revision. My production output has been little in terms of new material but I have been spending hours listening to my head and heart trying to make sense of the story I am working on. It takes a whole different form of energy to come back and revise a piece and I'm finding it quite consuming. I tried last night to work on a new piece and it just didn't work out for me. I feel like I am too deeply submerged in the world of the story I am revising and it is coloring everything I put on paper in terms of new material.

I was given the advice that I should try and connect with my material on a deeper level in terms of the heart of each of the individual characters in my story and it is consuming work. I find myself swimming around in impressions that are not my own but rather things that I think the father in my story would feel, or Jack, the protagonist. There is also the "character" of nature and the external world that seems to be coming into play in this story and it needs further development as I work away at improving what is on the page. There is some kind of push/pull dynamic happening between the characters but also the outside world. The expansiveness of the world outside versus the limited scope of a singular human life. It's been heavy lifting for a while now but I think the story is slowly becoming infused with these thoughts and it is getting better.

My advisor this term is such a gentle and compassionate mentor and he really doesn't push in any specific direction but rather allows me to discover things on my own. Like I said earlier, his advice was to try and connect with the characters on an emotional level as I had captured their "psyches." Seems vague but it is exactly what this story was in need of and perfectly timed advice.

So, I don't know how often I will be posting in the coming days/weeks but just know that the imaginative life is still alive and pumping inside me, we are just out on a cross-country vacation right now and I'll only have Internet access sporadically.

Stinkin' Mailman

I am just sitting here waiting for the mailman to arrive and it irks me that we must be like the last street on his route because he doesn't come yet. Here little mailman, mailman, mailman.

Anticipation

One would think that after almost a year and a half of sending out packets that it would get easier. It doesn't. I sent a packet out last week and I'm hoping that it will arrive in the mail today. It is so funny how often my thoughts flash back to the packet and how anxious I get for the mailman to arrive. At my old house he came around the lunch hour but here at the new house I have to wait until almost 5 in the evening before he comes. It's excruciating. Also, there are no guarantees that the packet will even arrive today and I will have to go through the entire process all over again tomorrow. Ah, patience is a virtue, right? RIGHT?

Packet is in the mail

I completed a full revision of my story and my essay last night and have shipped it off to my advisor for review. I am so thrilled. I can't believe this is my fourth packet, one or two more to go and the semester is over!!! Then, I will only be one semester away from graduating! I can't believe it.

Anyway, the revision process felt really good this time around. It wasn't a full re-envisioning of a story but there were some definite deep dives into the imagination to round out the characters I had created. I found that I fell deeper and deeper in love with them in this process. The father in my story, who was a hard-nosed kind of guy in the initial version softened and become more real in this process. The teenager, Jack, became something a little more adult, a little more sensitive, a little more realized in this draft of the story.

I'm proud of myself for buckling down over the last week and a half and really working my ass off to get all of this done. I'm hoping that the packet will be back by Monday, I'm dying to know if I am off the hook as far as the essay is concerned. I shouldn't say it that way "off the hook" because the process was very educational and beneficial to my writing but I have been working on it now for something like four months, more than that because I started formulating it last semester so it has been a six month essay. Yikes. I'm ready to lay that baby to rest.

Onward and upward.

Bittersweet Anniversary

So today is my third wedding anniversary and I am very excited to talk to my wife tonight over a very nice dinner. Grandma and Grandpa are coming over to babysit so that Tracy and I can get out of dodge and have a nice dinner amongst ourselves.

Here's the problem...

I just found out that my employment is not as steady as I was hoping. The company has been in a downturn and as the part time sales guy I might be the first to go. I noticed the reluctance in my boss' voice when I talked to him earlier today and it troubled me. So, I called him back and asked some very pointed questions as to what the current reality was in our company. He finally caved and filled me in. He is a very nice guy and he is very nervous about the whole deal but I told him that he had to just come out and tell me about these things so that I wouldn't be blindsided by the whole ordeal.

So, it looks like I am going to try and find some part time work in the meantime. I mean, why not switch positions if my job is unsteady and I don't like it anyway, right? Well, my wife's job isn't exactly untouchable right now either. There have been major layoffs at her work and she is nervous that she might be on the chopping block. I don't know what the future will bring but it is going to be interesting to find out. I need to allow myself the ability to have life change on me and not send me spiraling into a pit of self-doubt and despair. This one should be crazy though if any of this comes to light.

A Weekend with Nothing But Reading

So I took some days off this weekend after four grueling back-to-back days of writing, revising, and general brain twisting. I took some time off and just read, refilled the hopper. I pounded down this book The End of America - Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf. Very interesting stuff paralleling our democracy with other democracies that have come before us (those that came before moved into a totalitarian or authoritarian structure). There were a lot of references to current events and how these individual events add up to a larger problem. I liked the fact that she really tried to keep it based on constitutionality. She had to involve the Bush Administration because they are the current administration but the issues she is speaking about involve all future administrations as well and how, right or left, we all need to be vigilant in protecting our individual rights.

Also, I read some manuscripts for the literary magazine I am working on. There was some good stuff in there and I'm hoping that I can leverage some votes for the ones I like. I already saw that one of the editors did not care for a piece I did, so I might have to come to its defense.

So, hopper full, I am setting off tonight to re-immerse myself in my newest story and the ever-present essay. It should be interesting. I know there is a lot of work that still needs to be done and I'm hoping that with a fresh mind I will be up to the task.

Marathon

I have been working on my writing for hours on end the last three nights and I am just exhausted. I woke up this morning and had to go back down for another fifteen minutes, my eyes straining to open. The work has been fantastic, don't get me wrong, I'm just beginning to feel the physical effects of it.

I've been telling people where I study lately. It seems to come up in conversation and so many people are baffled by the fact that I would willingly go to a hospital to study. They see it as such a morbid place to be, their own experiences coloring their impressions, but I don't believe it to be the same place they recall from their memories of mourning or stress.

I enter the hospital between 5:30 and 6:30 and I make my way down to the public cafeteria. Often there are a spattering of people at the tables, some staff, some family of patients. As I look around at all of the faces it is surprising how few sad or tearful people are there. There are families eating together, talking about their lives, the things that are waiting for them outside of the hospital doors. Oftentimes there are small children in these groups, squirming in their seats, picking at a cup full of pudding, but they are, more often than not quiet, as if reading the solemnity under the surface of their parents' calm. When they see me working on my computer I can tell that they are curious, wondering what it is I am doing in the middle of a cafeteria, typing away.

The stories I hear are often mundane, slice of life kinds of talk, but if you look closely at these conversations, really listen to what is being said you can feel these people surviving. They are doing their best to keep their sights on the things that must go on, either in the face of recovery or tragedy. While the emotional weight of their talk is not blatantly on the surface, it runs as an undercurrent in the things they say. There is often a lot of scheduling taking place, planned visits, follow up appointments, medication schedules, etc. When you sit amongst these people, I have been them, you begin to see the human capacity for hope and renewal. Hospitals are truly places of healing and that kind of energy can only be good for a writer.

Revision as Reimagining

There are two things I brought to my work session last night that I think are working very well and are a relatively new experience for me.

I sat down last night in the quiet waiting room outside the sleep lab at Meridian Park hospital and tried to think about how to approach the revision process on my new story. Two pieces of advice from this program resurfaced for me and I really tried to latch on to them. The first came from my current advisor and a conversation we had a while back. He said that you need to love your characters. Not just the protagonist but all of them. There needs to be that concern that comes with loving someone when you are trying to accurately portray them on the page. Only love will allow you to see them clearly.

As I dove back into the draft I realized that I had not sufficiently loved the father in my story. Yes, I had written him but I hadn't considered his personal situation that brought him to the events on the page. I was too involved with Jack, his son, to see him clearly. In writing last night I began to feel the father unfold before me, revealing layers that I had not considered before and I believe this process is beginning to illuminate the text and to make him a more well-rounded character.

The second piece of advice came from a craft talk at a residency in Seaside, I believe. It was about revision being more a process of re-imagining than a process of a more editorial nature. There are many gaps and holes in the story I wrote and I am having to approach the text as if I am writing a new story, imagining scenarios in new and fresh ways. It was a fascinating process because so much is already happening on the page that is informing the new writing.

It was a productive session and I can't wait to return to it this evening. I am going to be working every night this week because I cannot afford to lose a moment's worth of time. I hope that this new approach to the revision process will allow me to experience levels of my own imagination that I have yet to experience and will teach me a deeper level of what revision is meant to be.

Radio Silence

I know it is pretty typical of my to disappear from the blog over the weekends but I feel like I haven't posted in a very long time. I'll try and catch up on current events.

My packet arrived.

This is a big event in my life these days. I check the mailbox everyday once I submit to my advisor. The first couple of days I know I'm being ridiculous but, sure enough, the first day it is logistically feasible for the packet to arrive it does. And it is filled with comments that are just amazing to read.

It's nice when your reader gets your intent. Understands what it is you are trying to do and even pushes you past the line you had set for yourself. This is how it is working with my current advisor. He is such a careful and heartfelt reader and while he gives me TREMENDOUS amounts of criticism, his comments seem to be framed in a gentleness that is appreciated and so much a part of his character. I have a lot of work to do. In the letter that came with the packet I was asked to push up my next packet date by TWO WEEKS!!! This means that I have two weeks to finish a full revision of my essay and a FULL revision of the story I submitted this last time around. It's on like Donkey Kong, people!

So, that was my Friday and I promised myself I would not freak out about the deadline change and so far I am doing pretty good. Saturday was a nice day. Tracy and I got up and I went to a writer's group meeting while she putted around town getting some things done that were on her list. The writing group was good, I guess. I'm not sure if I am digging the format of the thing but I am going to ride it out for now. They read a piece of mine from my first semester here and it is a stinking pile of poo but the response I got back on it is not all that deep. There were plenty of areas where they could have dug into the story and really given my juicy feedback but I think they are worried about hurting people's feelings and it isn't the most constructive thing to have framing your feedback.

Other than that it was nice to catch up with people from the program and talk advisers, packets, reading, etc. From there Tracy and I went and had dinner with her folks. A quiet night with the in-laws. I got my father talking politics and the strangest thing happened. As I was talking with Tom, debating whether not funding the war was anti-soldier. I took the stance that because I don't feel that the war is justified, I don't think we should give it additional funding. Tom made the point that the funding is meant to stock the troops with better equipment and is for THEIR best interest. I told him I thought it was in their best interest to get out of a war zone and the only way that would happen is if we stop funding the operation. Anyway, we were going back and forth when all of a sudden I felt very present in my body. Not only did I feel present in my body but I felt like I was filling it. I could feel my spirit pressing against the boundaries of my flesh and I felt...big, not fat or swollen, but grown physically to the dimensions of a man.

In many ways I still consider myself to be the teen I once was and that is very much not the case. For some reason I felt a swelling of spirit in standing up for my own personal beliefs to someone who I consider, at least in part, an authority figure. It was great to rant back and forth, poke holes in his arguments and, in the end, realize the level of prejudice I was fighting when two statements broke from him. "If it weren't for the fucking bleeding heart liberals..." and "It's Muslims against the world." It became clear to me that the argument was over because there is no surmounting that kind of prejudice. Any idea I brought to the table would be seen as "liberal" because I am anti-war. But that is beside the point.

Growing up around people who studied Gurdjieff and the idea that one should be present in the body, mind, heart and spirit every moment possible, I became immediately conscious of the fact that I had not felt this way in a very long time. I had not felt like my body, my mind and my heart were in alignment, not like this. I could feel the boundaries of my physical form with perfect clarity. I could hear every word that was being said to me in our conversation and the room stood out in clear focus although it was night and the room half-lit. It was an amazing experience to have and I look forward to achieving this again soon.

Anyway, a long rant. Sorry about the that. Be well.