Mid February Saturday Writing Session

This morning is a free writing session and I can write whatever I would like to write because writing is fun, dammit.  I will now try to write while various family members clunk around the house, sing bloody songs of revolution, and noisily straighten up by moving furniture and vacuuming.  

From All Hallows to Candlemas, the weather turns cold, wet, and dark.  But beyond then the weather is good enough for writing outside. Sometimes, when it's not False Spring or Fool's Spring or Spring Cleaning.

Okay.  I've moved outside to the deck and the new sectional furniture with tea, the writing table and a straw hat to keep the sun out of my eyes.   Off to flights of fancy and lexical dexterity.  With color and light.  And shaking the rust off.  And writing a story. 

And hummingbirds visiting the fountain.  The flash of color over the gurgling fountain.  The lavender making a brave comeback after a cold winer and a summer of overwatering.  The birds in the sky cry. A killdear, I think. The neighbor's open cable box.  That would be a place to hide something in a story. Black wings in the air and I just got cawed at.  And the dogs are barking one house over.  And the dogs are barking three houses over.  And the dogs are barking a block away.  And my co-workers are not going to call me on my cell phone today, thank you very much.

And we'll see how well my stomach is doing, because something upset it last night and I'm still feeling off after a 3:30 AM mug of peppermint tea. I'm sure more black tea will help.

I wonder what I should write, because the stories I've started recently have stalled and—Okay, my earbuds have died.  Bother.  I'll have to use some headphones, which means not wearing my wide-brimmed straw hat.  Which means the sun is in my eyes. And my face will get sunburned, which will make my impending old man wrinkles worse.

Let's get back into the flow.  Really.  Here we go.  Let's just write.  Here we go.  Yes.  Let's start with a character.  Because we enjoy this.  And writing is fun.  And the words will flow off of my fingertips and into the readers' brains.  

...Brains.... I have submitted this logorrhea for your reading pleasure.  It's words desperately in search of a plot.  I need more tea.

Right. A character.  Here we go.  Let's go.  Undoubtedly a family member will call with some kind of family emergency.  But they haven't yet, so seize the moment. Even though at any second the phone could ring, heralding a ninety minute conversation that could have been an email.

No, no! Don't look back.  Don't look forward to interruptions that haven't happened yet. Just keep writing.

The setting....   The olive tree held up leaves against the noon-time sun.  How about two trees? Jill? Pat? Chris?... Chris sa—Lord Almighty, the Child has applied his cologne, possibly with a bucket, which is now wafting through his open window and settling in the back of my throat.  What the hell is the point of writing outside when your family opens all the doors and windows in the house and all the distractions follow you there?

Okay.  Back to the scene.  And Writing.  Which I Enjoy Very Much.

Do the things you love, they said.  

My husband is now spraying Scotchgard onto the outdoor pillow slipcovers, and that is wafting over from the garage, where it settles next to the cologne in the back of my throat.

Maybe I'll just write an essay about art instead.

During a Leveling Up In Bad-Ass scene, the archery-master grandma tells the movie sidekick, "If you aim at nothing, you hit nothing."   Special effects fighting, archery, and magic follow in pyrotechnic glory, but her action-movie words of wisdom are the story's heart for me.  

So.  We're going to write.  And hit a story.

The character:  Tim.  The antagonist:  Jill. The question...

The problem writing character driven stories is that I'm more interested in setting or story question or poetry than I am in character.  I think this makes me an extroverted sociopath or something.

Augh! Character!  Tim wants to get to point A, and he does.

The Quest....

Oops.   I was staring off into space. 

Character! ...All he wanted... was some tea, which has gone cold.  

I'm sure there a metaphor in there, somewhere.

Dreams and Skies

The weather has been a rollercoaster this last week.  Earlier, we spent an enjoyable weekend basking in the sunny 50F weather; this last few days we've had snow and this morning it's 22F outside.  I'm not sure what the hummingbirds think about all of this as ruddy sunlight creeps into our backyard and I imagine they're in a torpor right now.  

Weird and vaguely erotic dreams this morning led to a Reed Dream.  There was a sequence in a dorm or similar student housing.  I was changing clothes?  and noticed that water from the leaking roof had made bulging trails behind the ceiling's and wall's paint/plaster.  At one point during the dream, I commented on the oddness of being a practically sixty-year-old college student, but this did not result in the dream becoming lucid, and instead there was a muddled moment wondering how I was paying for my housing if I wasn't exactly enrolled in classes.  

There's a break in my recall.  I was in a large, dark, brick hall, it may have been a library.  At one point there was a Christmas tree in the middle of the room.  Along one wall were a series of arches, stairs, and balconies.  I had an iPad, which I had been using to write.  A renaissance ensemble was singing a Mysterium (I forget the name of the piece, except that it has a boy soprano part that sometimes is sung with helium).  They were singing it straight, and a woman in a blue period dress was singing the super-high part. She was having a theatrical interaction with one or two male choir members, and I'm not recalling the plot.  

During all of this I was going to RollerBlade.  A middle-aged collegiate woman advised me I should put away my iPad, as there had been a rash of iPad thefts.  As I was putting the iPad into my canvas bag, it slipped out, dropped about two feet onto the brick/concrete floor, and cracked.  At first I thought it was just the safety case around the iPad, but it was the glass front, which fractured and offered sharp edges to my fingers.  I put the iPad back into my bag and started to strap on my RollerBlades.  Now that I'm thinking about it, these were my original black-and-neon-yellow RollerBlades.  I had difficulty getting the bindings snapped in place, as they kept crossing and doing phyics defying things only possible in a dream muddle.  I never managed to get both RollerBlades on, and only imagined gliding around the Christmas tree to the sounds of a celestial choir.

On the sky front, we had a break in the clouds and I managed to snap some photos of the Moon and Jupiter (and its moons), as well a Venus

Bone 23

I had a strange dream the other night.  A woman was doing divination from chicken breasts.  She would take a large wooden mallet and smash the breast bone.  The breast bone was a dream construction, a kind of grid of bones over a coin-sized sternum bone.  The woman would smash the grid of bones, which would pop out a kind of bench-shaped or pi-shaped bone.  Where the bone piece landed on the sternum piece was significant.  Somehow the number 23 was involved.  I don't recall if the actual number appeared on the sternum, or if the popped-out bone landed in the 23rd position (or both).  

I spent the day wondering if the number 23 would make a significant appearance, but so far no.

This morning's dream involved traveling by boat and car (I'm thinking ice was involved), and an abandoned art deco tour of a city that might have been New York, or might have been Astoria, Oregon.  Mark and I were touring in a group through structures that had been abandoned, but were simultaneously a hotel.  We started out in a kind of shuttle station which was located underneath the latticed deck of a large cast iron bridge.  Train cars, sort of like what they have at the Old Electric Station restaurant, were on either side of a causeway.  Lots of rusting Art Deco triangles.  

We walked to a five story building.  Instead of stairs, there was a kind of looping metal pipe (maybe it was a pole?) one had to climb.  It involved lots of reaching and swinging; one had to reach out and grab a loop of metal, then hook one's foot in anther loop on the other side.  Mark could climb it, but I was having difficulties.  The building itself was otherwise like a McMineman's Hotel:  vaguely art deco in style, and about a hundred years old.  

I'm going to guess this was inspired by some photos of an Edwardian church and newly released video of the Titanic.

Ides of Winter

It's hard to believe that we're already at the Ides of Winter, half-way between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox.  What convinces me about the change in season is the extra light we're getting in the evenings now that the sun is setting later.  

The sky has been mostly cloudy.  I haven't been able to see the Green Comet, C2022 E3(ZFT) at all.  We did have a few nights clear enough to see Polaris and the Big Dipper, but not dark enough to for the comet to show up.  I tried to take photos in the evening and morning, pointing my camera in the general direction of the sky, but it simply can't be made to take an exposure that's long enough to capture something fainter than a magnitude 5 object.  I did get some photos of Venus and Saturn close to each other, along with the Moon.  About a week later, I managed to get some photos of the conjunction of the Moon and Mars near Aldebaran. 

I've finished attending a Zoom seminar on the ancient Egyptian Books of What Is In the Netherworld.  What I've gotten out of it so far is that ancient Egyptians (which is a loose term considering the source material spans from about 2550 BCE to about 1060 BCE)  really liked their dichotomies (order / chaos, night / day,  living / dead,  manifest / unmanifest), and they use a manifold number of images and symbols to represent setting up a neutral area, timeless and spaceless, wherein the dichotomies are united and cosmic processes rejuvenated.   The ouroboros is one such image, as is an egg.  There's also significance attached to spitting and swallowing in the Netherworld, similar to myths like the one of Ceridwen swallowing Gwion and giving birth to Taliesin later–only with snakes and the sun.

On the writing front, I finally finished the short story, ran it by a reading group, and am editing it.  The ending needs work, as it's really not tying up some loose ends in the way that it should; it couldn't hurt to tighten up the story generally, and I've done that to some extent.  

On the dreams front, I've been having them, but I haven't been writing them down. One or two have been sexy; the majority have been more like soundtracks or me thinking through what-if scenarios.  There was one the other night that involved a cobra near my calves and had an ancient Egypt feel to it, but that's as mythic/magical as they've been.  Otherwise, it been things like Mark and I were going to buy the old rental I lived in when I was at Reed and which was nicknamed "The Motel Six."