Another Emma Said
Friday’s Theme Music
Yeah, a free association flow today ended up with this song. It started with writing.
Yesterday morning…stalled on writing a scene. Overthinking it, my home-grown inner writing coach screamed. “Do it!”
Despite that exhortation, I resisted and fiddled. Knowing self, though, finally opened doc, went to scene, started reading and fiddling with words. Then, ah…sweet relief as sentences flowed in and out.
Then, pop: revelation. Surprise. Unseen connections and directions illuminated. Go: write like crazy.
Done with the one-handed writing for the day, the writing continued in my gray space — the brain, yeah, but also those nano vacancies visited while watching TV, petting a cat, searching the sky, scrolling the news — and new nuances proliferated. As it happened (continuing in dream material), it came at last as another piece in the characters’ stained- glass personae: desire.
Who they think they are, claim to be, try to be, fail to be, are seen to be, were before, dream to be, and are said to be punched together.
So, today’s theme music is U2’s “Desire” from 1988.
Monday – Three Things
- $.49. That was our electric bill for last month (May, 2020, for the calendar impaired): forty-nine cents. To break it down, we used $14.99 worth of electricity, and we were paid $14.50 for our solar panel energy. The rest of the bill wasn’t as good. Twenty-six and change for water. We had a wet June this year, so our water use was about half of what it was for the same time last year, even though we planted a garden this year and skipped it last year. Our utilities (gas is on separate bill), then, were about twenty-seven dollars. The one hundred dollar monthly bill’s remainder, about seventy-two dollars, were taxes and fees. Yeah, it’s a regular rant; I can’t save much on my monthly city bill because most of it is taxes and fees.
- WordPress Editor. I’ve returned to the ‘classic’ WP editor. Didn’t like the new stuff. Found it intrusive, counter-intuitive, and irritating. It was a change I didn’t want. And that’s okay, as I went back to the old way. No one’s rights or safety was threatened by my move back to how it was.
- I can’t keep up. My muses tell me the story too fast for my mind, and waaayyy too fast for my fingers. They don’t tell it in order and they’re always filling in the gaps. I get excited by what they’re telling me and their implications, and jump up to pace off my excitement. It’s a fun road that I follow, that struggle to write.
Got my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Why It Takes So Long
After writing yesterday and while preparing to write today, I was reflecting about why writing is so hard for me, and why it takes so long.
The other morning — Thursday, I think, not really important, though — a muse laid a scene out for me. It was a revelatory moment for the novel in progress.
Whoa. Excitement jumped me like Olympians taking the hurdles. Great scene. I saw it all.
First, though, I saw it with characters that didn’t exist yet. Of all the confounded characters who’d already arrived, this was a new batch, in a new setting. Okay, cool, no problem. I saw how the scene and characters (and their baggage) fit into the novel. I could deal.
I began writing. Well, new characters need some kind of understanding about their traits, principles, and back story. So I mulled that while writing. More details to the general novel were discovered. The bible was updated with these new characters and the setting. All of it was a stimulating exercise.
Meanwhile, I kept writing. Things the muse hadn’t shown me before were revealed. I dealt with those details and kept going, exploring this new territory. I’d write some, go off, do chores or take a walk, come back and write, eat, go off, etc., repeat.
This morning, I thought, alright, I’m almost in sight of the revelation. The original scene still hung like a jewel before me, beckoning on. As I approached it, though, I put it all on pause to look.
Damn, thirteen new characters (five of them fleshed out as more than minor characters), their relationships, and three new facets of perspective via history and organizations. Four chapters, five thousand words. That doesn’t include the bible stuff.
All that to get to one scene.
Which is how the whole fiction writing thing works for me. See something, invent something plausible to explain how it fits, wedge it in there, and begin connecting it to the other stuff.
But that it takes so long, and why writing is hard work for me.
Got a fresh cuppa coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Michael Seidel, writer 