Oh my gosh, it’s been great a week. I find I have such a ravenous burst of creative energy towards the end of August, just in anticipation of September, that when I finally get time to sit down and focus on work, I can dive-in whole heartedly. That’s been the case for the past two weeks, even as I’m still adjusting to the new schedule (and trying to keep myself from letting any other appointments creep in beyond one designated day a week).
As of right now, I try to get into my little rented space (which I adore so much) from 8:45-11:00 AM. Early last week, I was so thrilled just to physically be there after the desert of summer that I tried to work THE WHOLE TIME Thing 2 was in school, but that’s honestly too long for my brain. I need to build up those creative muscles. Two hours is more than enough for me, and I still get a good chunk of work done.
As for schedule, I typically drop Thing 2 off at preschool and then head over to the cafe around the corner for a honey and cinnamon latte. It’s been so long since I had enough expendable time to indulge in any kind of pre-writing ritual, that latte has become “my thing.” A little treat I associate with getting words on the page.
After grabbing coffee, I head to my office. It’s a small, one room space in an old 1800s house, so when you walk in the door, it smells like wicker and sawdust and spice, and I adore it. It smells like creativity and building things. It reminds me of the art studio I used to attend in Worcester.
My office is upstairs, so I tromp up with my cup in one hand and my heavy “writing bag” dragging on the elbow of the other. I keep two bags–one for day-to-day use and one for purely storing and carrying the writing gear I need on a daily basis. It forces me to get streamlined on what equipment and texts and printouts I need.
The only other ritual(s) I have are these: I take my shoes off when I get into the office space and I usually keep the lights off. Weird, right? There’s something about bare feet and natural light, even really dim natural light, since my office has small windows and sits in a somewhat un-illuminated corner of the building, that just makes me feel free to create.
I unload my hashbook–a spiral or composition notebook, usually dirt cheap, sometimes those fanciful Decomposition notebooks because they’re so freaking cute–in which I do my half-assed attempt at three pages, single-sided, with a stupidly bright Sharpie fine-tip or a Paper Mate felt-tip. When I’m being thoughtful and intentional, my pages tend to mix Julie Cameron’s “morning pages” with Natalie Goldberg’s “writing down the bones,” but more often I just rambling about whatever is taking up space in my head for a page or so.
Then I pull out my work and my computer and get down to it. Right now, my brain’s fully engaged on editing the third draft of my novel-in-progress, DIRTY BONE, about a man who has an affair with a skeleton who lives in a dirt apartment attached to his basement. It’s strange, personal, and hopefully other people find it as darkly funny as I do. Sometime, I’ll do a full post on what my editing process looks like, but right now, I’m mentally calling it my “Marie Kondo” method of editing. So much talk about how to edit involves angry, slashing, fighting words–cut it to the bone (teehee), be ruthless, kill your darlings–but I find as a recovering perfectionist, I need some love and joy in my editing approach. So this entire pass is focused on finding the parts of the story that bring me joy, KEEPING THEM (as much as possible), and pulling out/replacing the things that don’t “spark joy” in exchange for things that do.
I’m a big fan of Matt Bell’s REFUSE TO BE DONE: one of the things I’m doing on this draft is retyping it from scratch from scene one to scene whatever-the-last-scene-is. I find this method helps so much in honing the language, helping me to focus on weaving important info in that I may have missed the first time while preserving a natural flow of logic, and I think it also helps tighten up continuity issues, too.
So I work on that for about two hours until my brain is starting to spark and spit, and then I head home. I’ll go for a walk with the dog, get some lunch, catch up on submissions for BCS, and if I’m feeling really ambitious, I might unload the dishwasher. Then it’s off to get Thing 2 from school, and the afternoon is household chores (when I bother) and reading (if I can–it’s tricky with wee ones around, sometimes it works when they play well together, and sometimes, they’re just having a day), or writing up a much-belated blog post! I do that four days a week, and then I take Friday off because Thing 2 doesn’t have school, so that’s my planner/food plan/extra chores day to try to get caught up for the weekend.
I try very hard to keep the weekend as just free, fun time with the family, and that’s pretty much how this week has been going.
Andy and I watched MEMORIES OF MURDER, which was very good, though it’s hard not to automatically compare it to Bong Joon Ho’s PARASITE. Still, it was spooky and eerie and quite a ride, and Andy stayed awake for the whole thing! Who needs more endorsement than that?!
Plus, I’m only 300 pages from the end of A SUITABLE BOY, which I’ve been loving the heck out of. There is just no better book to snuggle up with at the end of a long day, just to LIVE in. Sometime I’ll write a post about why massive tomes like ASB are so freaking great. My “putting the boys to bed” reading is currently THE INVISIBLE HOTEL by Yeji Y. Ham, which I’m very much enjoying so far.
I did DNF a book this week (GOSH I HATE THAT): GRIM ROOT by Bonnie Jo Stufflebaum. I was so very much looking forward to it, and it had some really fantastic buzz on Instagram that I was absolutely ON BOARD for, so I don’t know if it’s just the wrong time for me to read it or if I came in with too-high expectations or what, but after 50 pages, I found I just couldn’t get into it. Very frustrating, because Reality TV and Shirley Jackson’s HILL HOUSE are absolutely MY THING, and I love the idea of blending the two.
Maybe it was too many characters right off the bat, or that slightly frustrating author tendency to hint-at but not get specific about each one’s “dark past” (you can kind of feel the authorial carrot: This secret is going to be so cool, but nope! You don’t get to find out yet!). Maybe I just struggled to really inhabit the characters, but–ARG. I really wanted to love it! Still, if I haven’t started desperately caring about what happens after 50 pages, I gotta let it go. I’m not a super impatient reader, either. I like a slow burn!
But there are just too many other books I really want to read. I hate DNF’ing books, so if you’ve read and liked GRIM ROOT, I’d love to hear your perspective and what drew you into it, because I want to like it, and though there’s certainly truth in the idea that not every book is for every reader, if someone tells me it really picks up after the first 100 pages, I will probably try again.
Until next week!