First a hot, black sip
and then writing like crazy
and a long, cold gulp
Coffee Lemonade
My wife and I read that coffee lemonade is the latest hot new thing. Sadly, no businesses around here are offering. People that I speak with are not even aware of it.
It’s sad to live in such a backward and remote part of the world. I guess I’ll need to travel to a metropolitan area to sample coffee lemonade.
Quick check: what alcohol should be added to coffee lemonade to give it added zest?
Food Suggestions
Have you ever been reading something, and the characters are eating, and you find yourself wanting what they were eating?
In a book I was reading, the main character had oatmeal and avocado. Now I want to try oatmeal and avocado.
I also enjoyed the many times in the book where the hero showed up and handed others coffee, and they were all, “Coffee!” It was instant, but still.
Coffee
Tasting the coffee today, I raised my eyebrows in appreciation and admiration.
It was the second cup of the day. The first had been at home. I was now in the coffee shop.
But this coffee —
“Mmmm,” I said to myself, like I was Wolf the cleaner (Harvey Keitel) in Pulp Fiction, appreciating the coffee Jimmy (Tarentino) had given him.
I enjoyed the coffee sequences through that period at Jimmy’s house in that movie, because it was so damn real, a pause within the gritty to appreciate a flavor.
Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty, and Reservoir Dogs all need to be added to my dirty list, along with Serenity. How could I forget them? They’re mos def movies I stop to watch when I come across them.
Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
The Three Cs
Got my three Cs – coffee, computer, and cookie. The cookie is an indulgence. I ate breakfast – granola and yogurt with blueberries – a few hours ago, but I feel hungry, so what the hell, I indulged myself and ate a cookie. Salty caramel, if you must know.
Admittedly, eating the cookie was a little bit of stalling. I was stalling my start today because yesterday’s writing events surprised me. Handley attacked Kanrin with a sword. Kanrin killed her. What was going on with Forus Ker? He just sat there watching. Meanwhile, the ship’s alarms continue to go off. Kanrin’s nets have been compromised. And where are the rest? What are they doing?
None of this was planned. The destination is known but the path is a wildly winding way.
Once I finished writing those pages and concluded that chapter, I cleaned up errors and checked continuity. Then I walked, and wondered, where are we going now? What’s supposed to happen?
All of this took me down paths about immortality and death. Born with a fear of dying, and still capable of suffering injury and pain, one doesn’t abandon those fears, despite the evidence of past experiences. Even if you’ve died and returned before, or you’re not sure that what’s happening is reality, virtual reality, or a hallucination, and even if you’re doubtful if the outcome matters because of everything else happening, coping with the natural emotional and intellectual stresses inherent in these paradoxes challenges your will and sanity. Put yourself in that position and imagine. And remember, whatever the brain or personality might decide, the body may have different ideas. We’re not the masters of ourselves that we’re told as children. It’s a lesson we learn as we age and our bodies and abilities decay. It’s a lesson that’s reinforced as we meet others with lesser and greater abilities than ourselves. Exploring these avenues of similarities and differences and the impact on our decisions and actions is one of the most exciting and delicious parts of my writing experience.
When I walked and thought, I struggled to know what was to happen next in this story? It’s stupid of me to wonder, but I can’t resist. I know, though, I’ll slip into the moment and begin typing, and things will come out that I never foresaw. Consciously, I don’t know what’s next, but once I assume the typing posture, out it comes, if I just let it.
Yeah, it feels like weird fucking magic, typing something when I don’t know what I’m going to type. After all these years of writing, the process still astonishes me. I hope it never stops.
Now fortified with sugar and caffeine, it’s time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Re-affirmed
Once again, I’ve been reminded that travel brings out the best and worst in coffee. People have different ideas about what tastes good, but they’re also part of geographic trends. “Isn’t that good coffee?” they ask, handing you some swill.
Which challenges politeness. I always err toward gratefulness. Coffee’s aroma helps ground me and restores my balance, to give nothing away about what the caffeine does to stoke my will to live. “Yes, yes, it’s very good coffee,” I reply. If pressed, I’ll mention, “It’s not quite what I would usually drink, but this is delicious. Thank you.”
Unless, of course, my taste buds are so offended that they’re lobbying my brain to spit it out. Then I swallow the coffee and say, “Mm mmm,” and complain privately later.
Some of that hotel and aero-plane stuff really pissed off my taste buds, though. I was afraid they were going to stop speaking to me. But then, they were given pie, and they were happy.
Sunday’s Theme Music
This morning found me awakening with a song streaming in my mind. How unusual! I don’t believe that’s ever happened before (*snark*).
The theme du jour was being delivered by Sammy Hagar on vocals as part of the amplified group called Van Halen. The song, “Why Can’t This Be Love”, was released during my formative years. 1986 found me moving from South Carolina to Germany. I was a wee lad of thirty years old, and full of wide-eyed wonder and innocence. My new friends introduced me to this interesting musical genre called rock. That changed my thinking forever.
I really associate this with Randy, though. After Germany, my next assignment took me to California, where I met Randy. Now dead of cancer at fifty-nine, he was a huge Van Halen, Boston, and Atlanta Braves fan. Go to his home, and it wouldn’t be unusual to find him on the patio smoking, windows open and drinking coffee or beer, with Van Halen, Boston, or the Atlanta Braves on.
Crank it up. You know Randy would.
After the Revelations
This is not how I thought writing would go.
I had a romanticized, glamorized vision about the writing process and a novelist’s life. I thought I would be dictating the story, making it up and writing it down. Instead, here we go again. Philea finishes her wide-ranging tale and brings it back to the moment where it split away, and joins two other paths. One path was forged by Pram when he told his part of this story, and the other path was forged by the six primary characters on the Wrinkle.
I’ve been waiting for this re-connecting. I’d seen and heard, experienced, if you will, what they were going to say and do once they came back together. Honestly, Philea’s side-trip astonished me. She went into a life that I didn’t know existed. It’s also surprising that it startled her as much as it startled me.
But, at last her side-trip is done. It’s time for those long-awaited next scenes. But before I go into writing those scenes, I need to soak in what Philea and the other characters experienced. She and Pram shared more examples of parallel life-experience-reality-existences — a LERE, their shorthand for other Now events that that lived (or are living) and share with the rest trapped in this cycle.
They’re trying to understand what will happen to them. They’re attempting to take a piece of information and fit it in with other pieces of information to create a substantive, believable cause and effect tale for what they’re enduring. That’s human nature, to fill in the gaps, color them with some form of logic or explanation, and make it all whole.
I feel for them, pitying them, because I know that’s not their nature. That’s not what they’re living. Even as they draw closer to the truth, sometimes even stating it in incredulous terms as a possibility, the six don’t always agree on the verbiage or logic. The logic argues against their standard expectations about reality, existence, and the arrows of time. Besides, not all of their experiences will support the truth, in their minds, because they don’t remember everything that they experience. Remembering more answers less by introducing more complexity and gaps. At this point, I think all readers will understand that.
So listening to — hah, typing — my characters’ struggle to resolve these new fragments of information, I really feel for them. The passages of their thoughts and dialogue that I’ve typed leave me oddly reflective.
That’s a first, raw, impression. On greater thought, it’s not leaving me oddly reflective. Instead, I’m taking what I learned through my characters’ learning, and applying it to my existence, here in the real world.
We’re all pieces. We see ourselves as pieces that comprise a whole. Yet, few of us ever fit fully, completely, and comfortably. And when one of us goes, we struggle to see the new whole, because we remember the whole that we knew, and lament its changes. We search for answers and rarely find closure and resolution. We remain wondering.
With these notes softly echoing in my mind, I sip the final dregs of cold coffee and end my day of writing like crazy.
Michael Seidel, writer 