The Book ~ In Process

I recently read a column in which the author claimed that no one who says they are writing a book will never, ever finish writing a book.

This made me neurotic for a little while. Had I already told too many people that I'm writing a book? Should I delete all references to it? Do I need to invent a fake job as cover? Is it already too late?

I've decide instead to throw caution to the wind and tell you all about my book-writing process thus far. See that big pile of paper to the right of my laptop? That's my book.

Also can you see the sad cracks on my laptop screen from the day I left it on the couch and someone must have sat on it?

Please don't ask me if it's done yet. Writing a book, in my experience, is not like baking a lasagne, where you prepare all of the parts, put them together, and toss it in the oven until it's all bubbly. It's like making a lasagna if you individually make each part from scratch (including growing the tomatoes), put it all together, bake it until it's bubbly, then take it out, taste the whole thing, then take it all apart, scrape the cheese and sauce off of the noodles, add different seasonings, switch out the spinach for eggplant, add some sausage, then take it back out again, then put it all together again, bake until bubbly, then repeat, several more times until it actually tastes good (or, possibly, turns into an inedible mass of burnt cheese and noodles). Have I taken this metaphor too far?

When we returned from our hike on the Colorado Trail last year, I spent the next couple of months transcribing my journals, adding from memory, rewriting as I went along, and dropping the notes from my first Colorado Trail hike into the document at about the same geographical points. I finished this process the day before the election, after which I went into a bit of a tailspin. I can see now that I needed a bit of temporal and emotional distance from the material, but I would have been perfectly happy to attain this break another way. After a couple of months' hiatus, I spent some time working on shorter pieces which helped me step away from the whole big huge manuscript and focus on specific themes and ideas and begin to process the experience.

Around that same time (January) I also started The Artist's Way, which entails daily writing of three pages, long-hand. Several weeks into TAW, I started to work on my book again, three pages a day, long-hand (coincidence?). This helped me put together my introduction (which has since become Chapter 1). Beginning around February, I printed out my journal notes, one section at a time, and retyped them into a fresh document, revising, researching, and incorporating the first hike as I went along. After a few months of this incredibly slow process, I put a hold on the research and focused instead on retyping/revising/incorporating only (putting in bracketed "research ski industry/spruce budworm/mineral belt" as placeholders). Summer threw me for another loop, what with kids home all day and a big road trip and the sun and the beach and stuff, so that by the time my writing retreat came, I was about two sections, or 60 pages, shy of finishing this process.

Nevertheless, I printed out all I had finished as well as all I hadn't and took the stack of paper and several different colored pens to the artist colony, where I wrote all over the manuscript in a color-coded system (teal=general edits/changes/revisions; pink=find a better word; orange=research; lime green=write better). Now I'm going through that stack of paper, incorporating the edits into my draft and doing research as I go along. I'm up to Chapter 5, which is about where I stopped researching during the first go-round, so I expect the process to s-l-o-w-w-a-y-d-o-w-n again.

During a session at a writing conference this summer, one of the panelists described revision as smoothing out a scarf—you start at one corner and push the wrinkles ahead of you, coming back to that first corner again and again and again. I've been holding this image in my mind—the scarf (book) doesn't have to be ironed flat with each step, just smoothed out a little more than before.

On My Desk

My Artist's Way week starts on Wednesday, and so I've made it a little ritual to, in addition to reading that week's essays and schedule all of the exercises and tasks for the week, clear the decks—or at least my desk—in anticipation of the week's creative recovery. The clearing doesn't last long (a clean surface is like a blank canvas around here, just waiting to be ornamented in hats, napkins, water glasses, tea mugs, homework, candy wrappers, piano music, trumpets, and all manner of flotsam and jetsam), but this is a little glimpse of  my desk after I cleared it this week.

John Muir Laws Guide to Drawing Birds, which I pulled off the shelf Wednesday afternoon and started reading. Because just one self-improvement activity is not enough, I've decided to draw one bird a day for the next year, as recommended by Laws. The only trouble: we ran out of bird seed in the last few days and I haven't wanted to go out in the snow to get more, so the birds don't stick around very long (thus the blank journal page).

And yet another daily, or nearly daily, activity: Cassie Premo Steele's book, Earth Joy Writing. I've had it for a couple years now, but have only just started doing the exercises regularly.



Natural Abundance. This is one of The Artist's Way tasks for this week: find five rocks and five leaves. Reminders that the world is abundant. The rocks were easy—our house is full of them and all of these were on the windowsill above my desk (I gave them a good dusting). The one on left is a green-and-red heart(ish) shaped one I found on the Colorado Trail. The leaves had blown off the beech and oak trees after the snow stopped falling and were littering the driveway when I went out for a walk yesterday—true natural abundance!



An invitation to a reunion at my MFA program this summer and nice things that three of my mentors wrote in my final evaluations (I had four mentors; one did not say anything nice, but the other three make up for that). This was also an exercise from The Artist's Way, and it was well-timed.



Finally, I had a little money in my PayPal account from some editing work I did, but it didn't last long. Part of it I spent on these cards. The one on the left is "Persist" by Nikki McClure. I used to have the same image, torn from a calendar, in a frame at my desk at work. I passed it on to a co-worker when I left, thinking I wouldn't need to persist in my new life, but last week was a reminder that women face many obstacles and we must always persist. The one(s) on the right are Stand Up Postcards by Maine artist (and fellow COA-grad) Jennifer Judd-McGee. I sent one to my Senator earlier this week and I plan on sending the rest to friends over the next few weeks. I'll also send one to the first person to leave a comment on this blog (with your email so I can get in touch to get your address).

Snow Days

Out of the last nine weekdays, all three kids have only gone to school two.

Three days all three of them had snow days; two days either one or two of them did; and the other two days, they had early release.

Needless to say, I haven't been getting much done these last couple of weeks.

(And next week is school vacation!!)

I should, in theory, I suppose, be able to work when they're around, but I can't. Or not much anyway.

It's "Hey, mom…" every few minutes.



And even when they're not bothering me, I feel obligated to engage them in other activities so they don't turn into total screen zombies (which, I admit, is a serious danger right about now).



And then there is the bickering, and the need to feed them occasionally.



So I heave them outside on a regular basis (and myself, too, because a daily dose of light—no matter how dim—and fresh air and body movement is essential to surviving February).


Last week's Artist's Way question was: what is your favorite creative block? That was an easy one: my kids. What to do about it (which the book doesn't ask, not yet anyway) is another question.

This is the best I could do for a Valentine heart this year. Can you see two of them?

In addition to outside time and puzzles and games and movies we all watch together (which feel a little healthier than each to his own screen), I've tried to engage them in a little creativity, both to keep them busy and to help me in my creative recovery.



One of The Artist's Way activities is to create an image file where you store pictures of things you want or that represent who you want to be or what you want to do. I figured, why create a file when you can make a collage? And E and I spent a happy evening cutting up old magazines and gluing the pictures onto big paper. My collage, necessarily tending toward nature and birds and travel, because that's what kind of magazines we had available to us, tells a little story about what kind of life I'd like to lead.



"Make art" is a phrase that keeps popping up in my mind—and in my Morning Pages—when I think about how I want to spend my time, and I was able to get all three boys engaged in a little painting project with me (when paint and canvas are involved, I can usually even get M to play along). I'd had an idea for monochromatic landscape paintings, based on a project E and Z had brought home from art class a while ago, and gave each of them a cool paint color, plus white, and had them draw a series of mountain lines.



We started with white with just a little color mixed in for the sky, and then added more color as we moved toward the bottom of the painting (foreground). I suppose I should have talked about value a little more, and maybe it would have made sense to pre-mix the different values to ensure there was enough of a range, but, well, I'm not an artist or art teacher, so we bungle along as best we can. I was left with black (though I thought sure M or Z would pick it) and it was surprisingly a lot more interesting to paint with than I expected.



Z had the idea of adding snow to his—using a mostly-empty squeeze bottle of acrylic paint, and I thought it was a pretty good idea (especially considering the blizzard swirling around outside at the time). E suggested I use an old toothbrush to flick paint on my canvas to make the snow (a trick he learned from a former art teacher), so it was a fun, collaborative project and we all learned from each other.

Another aspect of The Artist's Way is to take a weekly "Artist's Date" all by yourself. I had planned  an extended Artist Date for last Friday, thinking I'd head down to the coast, but I wanted to get some work done at home while the kids were actually at school, and it was brutally cold and windy (not a nice beach day, in other words), so instead I took a shortened date to a nearby not-quite-coastal (but on a tidal river so it feels like it is) town, where I sat in my warm car with hot tea and ate  sticky bun while watching ducks on the river and writing in my journal. I also went to a book store, which I seem to do every Artist Date, but was very good and didn't buy anything.