20 July 2009 : The Status of The True Life (etc.)

The True Life Adventures of Irene in White Tights has survived through four drafts and the weight of an added Epilogue which may, or may not, be incorporated into the final chapter — depending upon what the fifth draft demands.  Each draft assumes its own personality and presence; or, perhaps, each draft decides upon yet another facet of ’self’ it will show.  I begin to think I may be in need of psychoanalytic training, that if I asked the fourth draft to relax on a long sofa (a very long sofa, one capable of accomadating one hundred thousand words, not to mention a circus, a carnie venue, a Brooklyn brownstone, an adobe casa in Cottonwood, Arizona, a park, some pigeons, Barbados, Hell’s Kitchen, China Town NYC —-> nevermind <—- trust me, a  v e r y  l o n g sofa!), and then asked the fourth draft to tell me its innermost fears,  well, I begin to think I wouldn’t know how to soothe the fourth draft, how to give comfort, how to advise it other than offering some sort of mantra, like: 
                                      I’m ok.  You’re ok.

          Advice from my friend and editing coach, Lynn Vannucci, is along the lines of “start a new project, occupy your creative side with other enjoybable tasks.” 

          Sure, Vannucci.  Fine.  Meanwhile, the first chapter may or may not have been discarded by an agent who has those early pages in hand.  Ok.  Ok.  The new project is moving out of one Rosarito, BC, Mexico casita into a casa with an ocean view.  (Has the agent opened the email yet?)  Second new project is knitting socks from yarn recaptured from old sweaters I can’t wear down here in Old Mexico as Christmas gifts later this year for children who live in climes where such socks might be appreciated.  (Will the agent have read the first chapter by December? By Christmas?)  Third project is squeezing pre-mixed sheetrock plaster onto red roof tiles out of a cake-decorator’s parchment cone in primitive motifs of leaves and stick-legged goats.  (Is The True Life Adventures of Irene in White Tights a stick-legged goat?) 

          Fourth project is on the horizon.  I will look there right after I publish this journal entry to my long-abandoned blog.

 

11 March 2009 : Camelias in the Red Bowl

They last such a long time, camelias broken on short stems from a friend’s eave-high plant outside her blue front door.  Only now, a week later, do they begin to show dark beginnings at the edges, as if someone has held a fountain pen or sharpie marker a tad too long in dotting the “i” on a page, but the page is a petal of glorious coral pink.

Second draft on Irene in White Tights has also been waiting for the sharpie or fountain pen to move on, to scrape a horizontal scratch across a waiting “t” wanting to be completed.  Her ladyship, the muse, seems on hiatus.  She never strays a great distance, this wayward muse of mine.  But, since the power outtage for 5-6 days a week ago now — she has been lolling about on the beach or watching pelicans dive headlong into the ocean.  At least some homely, plain birds are at work!

5 March 2009 : Where Has She Been?

The simple answer first.  No.  The simple question first: Where has who been?   I suppose the “who” is me, lynn, and where I have been is here, in Rosarito, Baja, for six days without electricity or DSL or phone internet keyboard printer imagination [oops, no, imagination never went off even for a blink, unfortunately! Ah! but then, you see, the pencil's lead has gone dull! and the only sharpener is electric, but for the pocket knife to shave a new point ... but by then the thread of what I'd meant to write is gone all wonky and there I am, new point on the pencil and wondering what it was that I wanted to write], and sundry other things that go missing when you have no electrical power.  Where is the old manual twenty-pound Smith Corona when you need it? eh?

But the other “who” is Irene of Irene in White Tights.  She is, on page 145, or thereabouts, napping in her frigid tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen while someone taps lightly on her door.  Her mother, Olive, is in Hollywood, California, visiting Irene’s younger sister, Florence (the sister married to the fight promotor named Mike, the second husband named Mike Flo has wed, the fourth husband — but who’s counting — in her much-married, modeling career).  Irene’s other sister, Mae, is in a rocking chair back in Brooklyn and attended by Jane Smith.  (Jane Who? And where did she come from?)

Quite suddenly now, at any second, these words will stop and Lynn [that's me] will be waking Irene up from her nap and putting Olive on a train for home (Brooklyn) with no one waving her off and goodbye from the train station . . .

16 February 2009 : Cyclops Eyes in the Elm Lid

Slow going today on the Moses segment of Irene.  It’s Chapter 12 time and I am, after dragging this red trunk around through the Rose of Sharon and Irene threads, finally leaving it behind in dismal room two floors above Heung Fats noodle house on Grant Street in China Town, NYC, circa 1909.  But, two thousand words into a thirty-five hundred word goal I’ve set for this chapter isn’t all bad.  And I’ve managed to introduce Moses, Yun Li, Sing Cheung, Benjamin Smith and Ellie Bowles, not to mention the knots in the elmwood lid of the red trunks where Moses hid out from his daddy, Sing, when he was very young so as not to have to do lessons.

Now.  All I have to do in the next fiftenn hundred words is put a body inside that trunk.

13 February 2009 : Friday’s Quesadilla

When I have no blinking idea what to write in my blog, I come up with a catchy title.  Just now, as usual, the first catchy part I typed was the date; then, feeling not particularly ‘catchy’ I eventaully came up with Friday, because it is.  Where to go from there?  Ah, with what I fixed myself for lumch: a quesadilla!  Admit it.  Just to say “quesadilla” is a pretty catchy event.

Then it all starts to filter in, the morning tortilla of writing and posting Chapter 9 of Irene, of inventing a character named Hank who is now, as of today, the last person to set eyes on “the red trunk”, the grated filling of managing to launder and fold two, count ‘em, two loads of laundry (ah . . . clean jeans!), of redrafting and adding new writing to a number of paragraphs pulled from previous chapters of Irene and building a current Chapter 10, which, all things being equal, I will record and correct and then post on Irene’s blog tomorrow, the chopped and sauteed onions to add to the quesadilla filling of writing a poem titled Cleaning Day about the young Mexican woman who arrives every other Thursday and cleans for four hours for me, and finally the evening tortilla of closing my day with this blog.   I will, in a few minutes, toast my quesadilla by pouring a glass of red and sipping the red while I play internet scrabble.

Life is good.

10 February 2009 : Hot Water

A small thing when taken for what it is, a convenience, the turn of a knob and voila! hot water, right there, at my fingertips!  But take that small thing away and oh my but it seems large, grande, big, huge in the day to day ease of living a ‘clean’ life.  And the ease, too, of turning a knob on the stove and fire, suddenly there, blue flames to warm or boil or stew whatever I might want to stew.  A light switch and a functional light bulb and power to the switch! Miracles one and all!  Down here in Rosarito Baja — one day life is easy and the next, well, life is still easy, if I allow it to be.  Patience is a key word.  What happens — happens; what does not — does not.  And it’s all absolutely ok. 

The work on Irene goes slow today.  The process of where or how to approach the next chapter, one to return to the ‘red trunk’ and keep the Moses thread alive in the reader’s mind, percolates away on a burner with an invisible blue flame that I seem, for whatever reason, unable to adjust.  But it simmers there, the pot of ideas–all the vowels that must go in, all the consonants and phrases–all the bones of the loved and the lost. 

For the moment, there is music playing somewhere and drifting in through my open window.  It is 1:34 in the afternoon and Mexican voices are singing to guitar and accordion while my repaired hot water heater heats and I wait for the blue flames of imagination to take hold.

10 February 2009 : Tuesday! Half Opened

The intense blue is back in my skies; storms are done for the moment.  When I drive out on Avenue Benito Juarez I will find new potholes to dodge lest my Prius be swallowed up or tires fly off and crash through the windows of the tienda pintura where I keep intending to go in and buy paint for the white trestle bench and a wood-framed mirror I want some color other than oak.  But I won’t drive out for a while as the hot water heater is again not heating and Juan is due to come back at some point during the day and I am weary of heating pots of water on the stove for dishes and baths camp-style.

Chapter 8 of Irene in White Tights is written but only half reviewed and I have major transitional problems, have majorly tried to put too much into small a frame of time for my protagonist to possibly think through in such a short action sequence.  And, because the task of sorting this out is daunting, I have procrastinated half of a glorious Tuesday into a past I cannot reclaim by reading poetry and trying, unsuccessfully, to light the damned pilot on the water heater so I can take a real shower . . .

Oh? Does the above read like a whine.  Ah well . . . perfect blue skies do have their downsides.

9 February 2008 : poem : The Characters are Coming

Irene introduces her dunderhead brother
Alex, who lights the fuse: Cannon; barker;
Small-time band; suckers in the stands.

Sharon introduces Teddy, dead, and a desert house
With fake panes and a ghost of her in the window:
Painted chairs; green-tined rake; a daughter;
Pendulum lights; a smudge like a kiss on the glass.

Ricky Towne slouches past Theo’s City Junk Store
Wishing for better days, bicycles in a row, stead of:
Ivory combs; shattered silk; empty ornate frames;
Bowling pins; styrofoam cups; a red lacquered trunk.

Foster introduces Irene, little man, overstuffed;
Irene and Little Fish introduce Bucky and Bucky
Intros the pigs sliding down pig-chute ramps:
One little pig; two little pig; three little pig;
Four; a dog for Buddy; bail to get outta jail;
Pesaries and quiffs; capes and sails; slats nailed
To Sycamores in Penn. 

One by one they tumble to page, one by one they expire
Like paper dolls cut and paper-clothed: Daughter;
Brother; Mother; Son; Strongman; Cousin; Friend;
Clown; Lover; Woman; Girl: The story ends.

8 February 2009 : A Day Behind?

I post the 7th chapter of the second draft of Irene in White Tights on the 8th day of February.  A day behind in my effort?  I don’t think so.  More like several days ahead.  It’s how I feel.  As if I am ahead of the game, already running bases in the sixth inning when I’ve barely managed to take a stance, bat in hand, at homeplate in the first inning, three runners on and nodding encouragement my way,  and the pitcher, a wiley type, is nodding agreements to the catcher as to how to approach my stance at homeplate. 

In the real world, the world of rooms and laundry and sinks and a hot water heater that will not stay lit and showering is an adventure I approach with my breath held–in the real world I am several days behind.  I shake my head, watch my fingers click out the letters to these endless words, know Mama’s head is shaking the very same way from some place, let’s call it heaven, just for kicks, about her Lynn and the lax way she has about living “in” the world.  But she’s smiling, Mama is. 

So am I.

3 February 2009 : The Impossible Death of Pal

There is a quite wonderful dog, a real-life Chesapeake, as I recall,  in the memories of a quite wonderful man who lives on the east coast.  The man is old now, in age, but not at heart.  The dog has been dead for decades.  An uncle shot the dog when the man was still a boy to “stop the dog from pining” for the boy’s father.  Stories from real life are sadder than fiction, and stranger, oftentimes. 

The name of the real-life dog was Pal, as is the name of a fictional dog, not Chesapeake, but a mix and mostly black with white markings at either end.  Both the real-life Pal and the fictional Pal come by way of both the ficitonalized and the real-life Aunt Irene.  The real-life uncle who shot the real-life dog, lived to a goodly age; however, the fictionalized uncle dies at age 23, an age when the fictionalized boy would’ve only been one year old.  Pretty tough to write a believable story with a baby who remembers, and fondly remembers, a dog that he loved and the story of that dog’s death at the hands of an uncle who was only trying to save the dog grief.

Today I have been organizing a “Character Tree” for the Second Draft revisoning process on “Irene in White Tights.”  My first concern were the birth and death dates of main characters; the last thing I wanted to have was a mother who gave birth at age nine, or a father who had died before his last children were conceived — that sort of thing.   For the most part, characters and timing of events jived pretty well with the notes entered from details written in the First Draft.  But not the Pal episode.  It would’ve worked, the Pal episode, if I’d stuck with the timeline of the inspirational, real-life characters — but I haven’t.  Pacing of the novel needed, or seemed to need, a shortened span for the life of Irene.  I took six years off the true-life Irene’s life; consequently, the boy, Buddy, is six years younger at the time of her death and not 19, but 13 years old.  And the early demise of Buddy’s uncle, well, that seemed a fictional necessity, too. 

I am not giving up on the Pal episode.  And thank all that’s good for the linear thinking a Character Tree requires!  But I am now in need of some other appropriate end for Pal — another shooter? another means of death?  I think I have it, the alternate story . . . at least I feel it coming, sifting in and filtering through my imagination, even as I write this post.  Wish me well?  Ok.  Time to get back at it — the “Tree” and the impossible death of Pal.