Climbing Up the Cafe

In the course of writing, there are times when you find your body starting to do its best to disobey you.  Sometimes it’s a headache that robs you of the ability to concentrate.  Or your back hurts and you can’t sit right for more than ten minutes at a time.  Or it’s your eyes, or a cold, or any one of a hundred damn things . . .

Last night, for me, I was being hit on two fronts.

There are times when, after I’ve been typing for a few hours throughout the day–as I had to do with my job–my fingers start to swell.  It not only becomes uncomfortable, but it makes typing a difficult endeavor   Where once you feel as if your fingers are flying over the keyboard, they are now feeling like not just two balloons, but eight.  It’s like typing in gloves without the gloves.  You can motor through the discomfort, but you find you start making more mistakes than your ability to correct them allows.

There was something else, however:  a nagging pain in my lower abdomen.  Some people would call it “bloating”; I called it, “A tiny creature that has taken up residence in my bowels, and won’t sit still for more than fifteen seconds at a time.”  This one, more than the puffy fingers, was giving me fits.  It wouldn’t go away.  I’d head for the bathroom to “do something” to get rid of the discomfort, and within minutes it’d come back.  It was like that all the way up until the time I threw in my towel and headed off to bed.

The body:  can’t live with it, a festering pile of goo without it.

I resolved that rather than waiting until later in the evening, when I don’t feel as tried as I do when I first arrive home from work, I should write early on.  That way, I can power through what needs to be done, and get my thousand, or twelve hundred, or whatever words in before my fingers and body and brain all scream, “Viva la Vita!”, and start walking my ass to the guillotine.  Thanks, guys:  you’re real pals.

With all that going on, I still managed six hundred fifty words for the evening, with my musey sisters having their late get together, and Talia, one of the muses, remembering the last time she’d sat with her sister Erin–a time four years before, in a cafe in Austria, not far from the banks of the Danube River.  She remember the good parts of that conversation, and the bad parts–you know there’s going to be bad parts . . .

It was easy to imagine them sitting there, because I’ve done something similar.  In 2006, I had lunch in Arnhem, Netherlands, at a Turkish cafe situated on the banks of the Rhine River.  It was a gray day, a little rainy, an very quite.  As I ate my meal of beer cooked in stewed tomatoes, with a side of rice and cucumbers, and a Dutch beer as a beverage, I watched the river slowly flowing by, while directly in front of me, maybe a half a kilometer away, was the John Frost Bridge, a duplicate replacement named after the commanding officer who’d once held A Bridge To Far against overwhelming forces.

I can imagine how my muses felt, because I remember that ninety minutes or so I spent relaxing, imagining that there was no one else but me enjoying that moment.

Maybe I was meant to, because I’d write about it later?

Will You Still Laver Tomorrow?

Back to The Real Home, and it’s all rainbows and unicorns this morning.  I actually slept in, which is to say that rather than getting up at 5:30 AM, I slept until 6:22 AM, and had enough time for a quick cup of coffee, getting ready, and then taking my daughter off to her martial arts class.

Whereupon I blog.  Such is life.

I even managed another 700 words on Part Ten of Diners at the Memory’s End.  It was a tough write, not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but because my eyes were telling me they didn’t want to stay open the whole time.  However, I managed to find a good break point in the story, so I left Meredith and Cytheria more or less glaring at each other from across a table, a nice, big plate of bara lafwr with cockles and bacon between them, all of it a setup to the hell that’s about to come.

Even though I had half a mind in the process last night, I was starting to enjoy the play I was setting up between the women.  It’s going to get a little ugly, but at the last moment, I felt, “Hey, you know, Meredith is a feisty girl, she’s probably not going to roll over and play bottom, not even for a bad-assed duchess,” so when I ended the scene, I had Meredith doing just that–getting her back up just a little as the Duchess Scoth starts getting coolly medieval on her ass.

So much of this story is really about feelings, how people are with each other, how they handle new situations that they never envisioned.  Part Twelve will get into that more, but right now–yeah, Cytheria ain’t a happy girl.  And when you’re a woman with abilities like telekinesis and you can read minds–it’s a good thing she has a lot of willpower.  Or does she?  I guess we’ll see.

But even more so than Echoes, this is turning into a very emotional story.  That story had hit me in the stomach over and over, but this sucker is giving me some serious groin kicks.  Just when I think I’m going to be able to walk away unscathed, I write something else and think, “Damn, I didn’t need to do that, did I?”  And then I realize that I’d going to get harder before it gets better–getting better happening somewhere around the end of Part Thirteen and the start of Part Fourteen.  After that I’m hoping for a much better ending, but until then–pain.  A lot of pain.  So much so, I should be listening to country music, the music of pain . . . naw, I ain’t goin’ that far.

If there is anything I’ve discovered as a writer, it’s that we not only half to push ourselves into places we don’t often want to go, but even when it makes us feel bad, we do it again, and again, because we understand that by going there, we are learning.  We learn about our characters, our story, and ourselves.  If you aren’t growing as you write, then you’re not really writing.

Trust me, why pay for a therapist?  Just write some fiction and see what happens.

If you aren’t crazy already, you’ll probably drive yourself in that direction.

Dysfunctional Wonderland

No drinking last night, save for tea.  Why tea?  Because I was crashing out on my butt at around 7 PM, and if I hadn’t done anything, I was going to find myself going to bed about 9 PM, and I certainly didn’t want that happening.  So, tea.  Because coffee would be a little too strong, and there’s nothing like slightly flavored water to keep one awake when they don’t want an enormous caffeine buzz going.

So it was back into Diners at the Memory’s End, and damned if this isn’t one of the hardest sections I’ve ever had to write.  I mean, really:  I’m about 3500 words into Part Eight, and it seems like it’s crawling.  Five hundred words here, three hundred here, seven hundred last night–it’s just going on and on.  Part of the reason it’s taking so long is that I’m falling into a lot of socializing of late, chatting up friends here and there.  That’s a good thing, because of late I’ve really needed to have something in my life to make The Undisclosed Location even a bit bearable.

Part of it seems to be this tendency for me not to get comfortable while writing these days.  It’s been horrible; it’s as if I can’t put three words together without having to go back and correct something.  It’s been driving me a little crazy, to be honest, because it’s totally messing up my ability to write.  Nothing says, “Dysfunctional Writing,” like having to stop and correct something every few seconds.

Oh, I know what you’re going to say:  ”Ray, you’re suppose to write first and edit second.”  Maybe I need to break this habit, because I could probably get a lot more done.  Then again, I’d go nuts seeing all those read lines on the screen . . .

Lastly, though, I think there is some mental thing going on as well.  Transporting was a story that, in a very meta-view, was about what was suppose to be a very short kidnapping that turned into something of a grand romantic relationship.  Diners takes place not long after the end of Transporting, and it’s not so much about the grand romance, as it is about what’s wrong with the romantics.  It’s about being unfaithful, and how it affects both partners–partners whom, by the way, don’t have the option of screaming, “Screw you, cheating asshole!” and walking away.

And said being unfaithful is coming up, very quickly.

When I wrote this story the fist time, Cytheria sort of blew off the indiscretion.  Not this time.  This time it’s going to nail her hard, and she’s going to hurt because of it.  She’ll also understand the need to reconcile, because, as stated, breaking up isn’t an option, but that doesn’t make what happened with Albert and Meredith hurt any less.

I don’t like hurting Cytheria.  I know she’s not a real person, but this is something that I get caught up in, the lives of my imagination, and knowing what’s coming isn’t making writing this any easier.

That’s one of the problems I have with Cytheria and Albert.  I’ve become so caught up in their lives that I know what’s going to happen, and where there are rough spots, and where there are the smooth waters.  Where they will find gentle waters, and where they will be engulfed in sound and thunder.  I know their lives better than I know my own.

That’s not always a good thing–not for people you love.