Apparently this one of those days where I work non-stop and make up for the days when I can’t face the computer.
My eyes hurt after four hours at the computer. And I really ought to make tea and have breakfast. Or lunch, evidently, now that I look at the clock…
I woke up last night and my head was brimming with ideas for stories and novels. I marvelled and cheerfully went back to sleep, anticipating waking up the next morning to The First Day Of The Rest Of My Life Never Having To Dig For A Story Idea Again.
Of course, when I awoke, I remembered the part about my head brimming with ideas, but not the ideas themselves. I could have kicked something.
On Tara’s website, she mentions developing a Life Mission Statement for herself. That idea (okay, that and all the delightfully funky little owlies) reached deep inside me and ripped something awake in a rather painful fashion. For the past year, I’ve been struggling to figure out why I’ve been unhappy, and what I want out of life that can/will bring contentment. Perhaps a mission statement is what I need. Nothing so structured as a five-year plan; goodness, no. Instead, I want a personal manifesto that inspires me.
So far, I know it will include the exististence of cats in my life, sharing company with my lovely god-daughter who brings tears to my eyes, music (both listening and making), feeling the sun on my face regularly, encouraging freckles, laughter, art (appreciation and perception), believing that I have something to share with the world at large, love on every single level I can think of, and a perpetually renewed joy in the sequencing of language in various ways.
Needs work, I know. And specifics. I have to fit warm bubble baths in there somewhere, too.
My right wrist has been inflamed for a couple of days, and it hurts when I type or use my mouse. I just finished editing a thirty-page document that was time-sensitive and a pleasure to edit, but I’m now pretty useless for most of the things I usually do, like typing, writing, and playing the cello.
Yesterday, I heard that a friend got a light tablet and stylus to use in place of a mouse, and it’s an attractive thought. So’s an ergonomic keyboard at this point. I’m using a rolled-up towel to rest my wrist on, but the mouse keeps bumping into it. After I post this I think I’ll take a walk, which requires no wrist work at all.
I’ve been seized with the extremely odd desire to write verse lately. Not that I’m being inspired with poetry, I just want to be writing it. This is extremely frustrating.
I slept for ten hours last night. I think I’m officially back on track.
The past couple of days have been odd. I’ve been restless, moody, terribly social, terribly anti-social… I’m not quite sure what’s going on, but I’d like it to settle down. I slept a grand total of two and a half hours last night, then had a staff meeting this morning, managed to completely forget my god-daughter’s birthday family gathering this afternoon, arrived at said gathering with the hatchings of a migraine, left quietly two hours later, came home and hid under the covers for two hours of solid, blissful sleep. It got rid of the headache, but now I’m awake and my sleep schedule is even further off-kilter.
I’m now reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and I’m incredibly gratified to learn that if she wrote between fifty and two hundred fifty words per day, she considered herself successful (well, as successful as someone that self-critical can feel; perhaps ‘on-schedule’ would be a better term to use). If I pull off a minimum of two thousand per day, then, I’m doing just fine. Mind you, I entertain absolutely no notions that I’m any sort of a Virginia Woolf. None whatsoever. So no one needs to get nervous when I’m around water.
So, orchestra last night, and we got new music (a necessity, since we handed back all the old stuff after that smashing concert). We’re doing the Peer Gynt suite, Haydn’s Military symphony, and Beethoven’s Prometheus overture. Not bad – at least, nothing I looked at and went “eep!” at tenor clef or evil sixteenth note passages by an idealistic pianist. (Okay, the Mendelssohn might have gone well at the concert, but that doesn’t mean I’m not bitter about the months of failure before that.)
My old stand partner and I were the only two cellists there last night, which meant that (a) we occupied the first and second chairs, and (b) we got to be stand partners again, which I’ve really missed. It was slightly harrowing, because we were sight-reading things we’d never seen before, but we pulled it off really well, expect for one place in the Haydn where we had a three-bar compressed rest whose numeral looked like an eight.
All in all, a spectacular night, and we were pretty damn proud of ourselves. Two celli holding their own against twenty violins, a wind section and some violas. There were places where we were supposed to play divisi, too, which is where half the celli play one part and the other half play the second part. With only two instruments, of course, that means one of you is carrying an entire line on your own. We pulled it off, and were heard. Go us.
And I wrote 2,693 words of the Great Canadian Novel yesterday afternoon when Ceri came over to work. I am wonderful. Yay me!
Now I must scurry to work through the – snow? Argh!
We had glorious weather all weekend in Oakville until a wonderful thunderstorm during Sunday dinner (mmm, rack of lamb). I saw my grandmother from the west coast, old family friends, and all in all enjoyed a lovely trip. I wish we could have spent another day or so with my parents, but both my husband and I have to work today.
I managed to get a thousand words or so written on Saturday afternoon, too. I’d been dithering about a chapter in the Great Canadian Novel, unsure about how to handle the next step (or, rather, to choose what the next step should be from a pool of four different events). I plunged in and finished the chapter, and even started the next one.
And then, I crashed. Why, you ask? I picked up a secondhand hardcover copy of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. When I read work like this, I wonder why I even bother. (Yes, yes, I know: different styles, all kinds to make a world, different tastes in readership, blah blah blah. I’m sharing. Be quiet.) I despair of ever becoming capable of painting word and thought, of arranging language to convey a depth of emotion with only a few words.
I’ve read scraps of Virginia Woolf’s journals, and she too uses sparse language, and yet conveys something so much larger than what the words say. Is that what genius is? Everything I read of mine seems mawkish and heavy-handed (though not as heavy-handed as some of the published stuff I’ve read, thank all the gods), no longer as airy and bright as it seemed when I set it down. I’ve ordered a copy of Woolf’s journal so I can read the whole thing, not to further depress myself, but to try to understand how it is that she manages to succeed at what she does, even in her own private notes.
When I moved I found a humour coloumn that I’d clipped from the English department newsletter during my BA. It’s an “Ask Your Author Agony Column”.
There are several witty samples of what various authors might have responded (“Get your archetypes straightened out,” recommends Robertson Davies), but here’s Virginia Woolf’s imagined response:
Life’s just a series of brief miracles. This comment was meant to be fun, but it says something important. Juxtaposing the words “just”, “brief” and “miracle” creates a tension that Woolf’s work displays as well. How can something be “just” a miracle? Is it a miracle because it’s brief? Shouldn’t miracles, by definition, be life-changing? Or is it our observation of the miracle and how we choose to be changed by it that defines it as brief or enduring? If they’re brief, is it the knowledge that life is made up of miracles that keeps us going?
More people should see the miracles around them, however brief. And more people should remember that life is a series of miracles; we just have to find them.
I’ve been reading Caitlin R. Kiernan’s blog on writing Low Red Moon journal every day for a while now, ever since Ceri posted the first reference to it a couple of months ago. It’s interesting to see how a published author feels about the day-to-day process of writing, editing, proof-reading, and the other minutiae of the writing life.
Today, on the craft of writing, she says, “[T]o put it another way, yes Samm, it is always difficult.
Except, sometimes, it’s really difficult.
When it’s easy, it’s only because you’re not doing it right.”
Sigh. You know, there are those days when things flow. Then, there are the days where you feel like you’re hacking your way through a textual jungle of snarled storylines and crossed characters, and you have absolutely not a single spark of imagination, and it’s work.
Damn it, though, it’s work you’d rather be doing more than anything else in the world. Even when you cry, and growl, and tear up notes, and re-write an entire day’s pages. It’s work you must do; you don’t have the choice. You write, or you shrivel up and blow away in the wind.
Some days, that makes me cranky. Actually, it makes me cranky most days. If I ignore it, it gets worse. So if I make myself pound words out, then at least I’ll have the grudging satisfaction of having a word count to write down in my log book, which does much to stave off the snarl-inducing feelings of guilt if I defiantly ignore my laptop.