The Breathing of Summer Mountains, the Hissing of Summer Lawns

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From whiskey river:

It was almost dark on an early summer eve, and the forest was never more enchanting than now, at dusk. At dusk the mountain begins to withdraw its force back into itself and become quiescent. If you too can become quiescent, so still that you can’t think of your name, you can feel this as a palpable fact. Just become so still that your mind won’t be bothered to remember the mundane, and then you’ll feel it like you feel the shifting of the winds. Then you’ll know when the mountain changes from exhaling to inhaling. That’s not so important in itself, but the mind that is quiet enough to notice is. The mind that is not always caught up in detail is your only treasure. Stop chasing details and become still to feel it. The mind that sees details clearly but is not caught by them is like a vast borderless mirror. That mind does not oppose itself.

(G. Bluestone [source])

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Paying Attention (or Not) to Word Count

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So, bottom line: yes, at around 12:30 this afternoon I bounded across the 3,000-word mark in the 2010 Write Your A** Off Write-a-Thon.

I’d gotten up around 6:30am, heated water in the teakettle, sat down at my desk and by 7:30 — after incidental stuff like selecting the day’s background music — begun to write. Took a break of about ten minutes at around 9:00 or so (cup of tea ), and another (#3) around 10:30. Did a word-count check at 12:30, and found that I’d indeed written just over the 3K target. Afterwards I tidied things up a bit, including bringing the current passage to a conclusion.

And then finally opened up the old blogging dashboard.

Because my morning writing time is pretty much the same length every weekday (90 minutes to two hours), there’s usually — usually — a fairly consistent word count each day, depending on how much revision I do. So I don’t really like to rely on word count as a measure of “success.” For one thing, good or ill, I tend to write very fast — not “write” meaning “…in a publishable sense,” obviously. But the words do pour forth. And although I’ve never had a single typing lesson, just from years and years of working with keyboards (both as a computer guy and a writer) I do type very fast, too.

(Against this latter speed you have to weigh, however, my neurotic hyper-awareness of typos and awkwardness as I commit them, causing me to back up and overtype quite a bit. (Just then, I typed wuite, braked, threw it into reverse, and replaced the w with a q before moving on.))

Still, in light of my creative frozen-ness of recent weeks, I really welcomed the WYAO Write-a-Thon’s 3K Challenge. So when I took my first break and did a quick word-count check, and saw that the odometer had rolled over to four digits, I exulted.

You take what you can get, hmm?

Anyway, if you’d like to see what I accomplished today — the start of (presumably) a short story, or possibly something longer — the first third of it is posted here. And if you want to see all the 3,100-some words, you can find them in this (74KB) PDF.

(Thanks, everyone, for your good wishes as I embarked on this mini-project!)

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Pushing Your Writing, Pushing Your Mind

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Remember The Querulous Squirrel’s 100-stories-in-100-days challenge? Ambitious, wot? Supremely well executed, eh?

Okay, now start with a similar premise:

  • Write a story a day for an entire month.
  • Saturdays and Sundays included. Holidays, too.
  • No limit on word count. Just write a complete story each day.

Simple to say, hard to execute, right? Just as The Squirrel’s must have been.

So then add another huge level of complication: invent your own genre, in which you will write every one of your month’s worth of stories.

I’ll pause to let that sink in: your own genre…

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LitFic: Online Resources

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The other day, Moonrat replied to a question about the acceptability of collections of “linked” short stories: stories united by a common theme, cast of characters, whatever. Along the way, she wondered what the state of short fiction in general might be, in these days when writers seem so focused on books.*

(The comments surprised her, and me too, by implying there are a lot of short-story readers out there. On the other hand, the readers tend to be writers of short stories, too — which implies a certain… goal orientation, let’s say.)

One gauge of continued interest in short stories (and poetry, and “creative non-fiction” as they call essays these days) is the health of the literary-fiction markets. Eileen, a/k/a Speak Coffee to Me, points us to a post at the Third Coast** blog — a “linkbucket” of online resources:

There’s much more to revolution and innovation in literature than the Kindle. To find some, all you have to do is open your browser.

I knew of the DuoTrope directory of magazines (both print and online); it’s been linked to for months over at the right, in the the “Writer’s Biz Resources” category. (I didn’t know, though, about its submission-tracking feature.) And including general links to Twitter and Facebook — not to specific resources there, just to the services’ home pages — seems, er, a little… obvious?

But whether you’re a writer or reader of literary fiction, you could build a pretty respectable list of browser bookmarks from nosing around the links the post provides: consider it a “Start Here” post on the subject.

________________

* Hey, you can be a writer of short stories, but we all want to be authors — which means books, right?

** If you’re imagining the “Third Coast” to be along the Gulf of Mexico, er, not. Try the Great Lakes.

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There’s Got to Be a Morning After

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Centuries after the Eastern Orthodox Church began celebrating the Epiphany, the Roman Catholic Church decided to start doing so too. But for some reason, the Western Church really latched on to this image of the Persian priests bringing gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold to the infant Jesus, guided from their homeland of Iran by a shining star. The Magi are mentioned only in Matthew’s Gospel and he never specified how many magi there were — just that there were three gifts. In 1857, the Reverend John Henry Hopkins Jr. wrote some lyrics for a seminary Christmas pageant, a song that begins: “We three kings of Orient are / Bearing gifts we traverse afar / Field and fountain, moor and mountain / Following yonder star.”

(The Writer’s Almanac, January 6, 2010)

The scene: a roadside on the outskirts of a small town in the Middle East. It is morning, lots of years ago. Three travelers sit beside a fire, waiting for a pot to boil, warming their hands, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Their names are Balthasar, Melchior, and… uh… The Other Guy.

Balthasar: So… so that’s it, then?

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Non-Holiday Holiday Reading

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I had occasion recently to hunt down a story by James Thurber which I hadn’t read in *counting*… uh, many years. But the first time I “read” it, I didn’t actually read it: I heard it, read aloud, by my seventh-grade English teacher.

The story itself has nothing to do with Christmas or even winter (as far as I can tell), but the day Mr. Krause read it to us and his other seventh-grade class was the last schoolday before Christmas break — when no one, teachers included, had much interest in academic matters. (An innocent time, eh?)

Mr. Krause’s voice had a flattened, slightly nasal quality to it; years later, as a teacher myself, I heard a recording of Kurt Vonnegut reading from Slaughterhouse-Five (“Overhead he heard the cry of what might have been a melodious owl, but it wasn’t a melodious owl. It was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore”) and thought I recognized in his voice my old teacher’s. As he read the story that day, grinning almost the whole time, he sat on the desk and kept having to stop and laugh. Indeed, even not counting the jokes, it must be a fun story to read aloud — all those smackings and tockings of all the k-sounds. But I’m surprised, in retrospect, that he read it to seventh graders; the diction and sentence structure, the almost literal slipperiness of the writing, seems to me a tad above listening-comprehension level.

(Most of all, I guess, I’m surprised that even one of those listeners still remembers as much about the day as he does.)

The title is “The Last Clock,” not to be confused with Thurber’s more well-known, full-length book, The Thirteen Clocks. Online, the story seems to be available nowhere except at the site of The New Yorker, which originally published it in February, 1959; to read it there, you’ll need either to be a New Yorker subscriber, or you’ll need to purchase (for $5.99) one-year access to the digital version of the issue.

Offline, the most obvious choice is to find the issue in some form at a library… or obtain a copy, one way or another, of the Thurber anthology called Lanterns and Lances.

In the meantime, as a little bit of a tasty holiday treat, I thought I’d transcribe the first section (and a bit more) into a page here at RAMH. (Links to both the New Yorker site and to some places to obtain Lanterns and Lances appear at the end of that excerpt.)

Enjoy!

Read “The Last Clock” (excerpt), by James Thurber

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What’s Your Story? (Are You Sure?)

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From whiskey river:

The Story, Around the Corner

is not turning the way you thought
it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,
the way a child draws the tail of a pig.
What came out of your mouth,
a riff of common talk.
As a sudden weather shift on a beach,
sky looming mountains of cloud
in a way you cannot predict
or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,
takes its own side. And it is strange.
Far more complicated than a few phrases
pieced together around a kitchen table
on a July morning in Dallas, say,
a city you don’t live in, where people
might shop forever or throw a thousand stories
away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it
aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted?
Stories wandering out,
having their own free lives?
Maybe they are planning something bad.
A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember
is growing into a weird body with many demands.
One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,
knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and (italicized portion):

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while.

(Joan Didion, The White Album [source])

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The Quickening Squirrel

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Marta was wondering a few days ago about writerly magic numbers: specific quantifiable targets which writers hope to achieve within some given time period. She’s doing NaNoWriMo, so of course over her head looms the magic 50,000-words-in-a-November target. But she asked what other writers might choose to be satisfied with: N pages or words per day, or one complete draft or book by date X, or whatever.

In a long, wool-gathering post back in September, among other things which I scavenged for the point(s) I was making, I mentioned an ambitious project by artist Rowena, a/k/a Warrior Girl/Mama: to create 100 pieces of art in a 100-day block of time. It just knocked me out (it still does) that she managed to pull that off.

Yes, it knocked me out, and made me very happy; although it wasn’t writing but art, it confirmed what I’ve believed for many years now. To wit: To get really comfortable doing something creative, you have to do it every single day. None of this vaporous swoony “Oh, I must wait for inspiration to strike!” nonsense. None of those “But I just have so many things on my mind/distractions to deal with!” excuses. Just do it. Every day.

Turns out someone else took inspiration from Rowena’s experiment: pseudonymous RAMH friend The Querulous Squirrel.

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Have I Forgotten to Remember to Answer the Right Question?

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[Found this image here.]

From whiskey river (highlighted portion):

The Difficult Simplicity of Certain Contemplations

Tapping a tarot card with her dusky finger,
the woman tells me
sit with your emptiness,
in time answers will come.
She says I know them all and only must remember.

My friend tells me I must decide what is enough,
then live with it.

Even my shiny-suited banker waxes wise, asks me
if I think rich people are happier than I.

But always there’s the knowledge
of how all this will end.

In between
we try to love a life that’s like a man who can’t commit–
a little restless, always vague
when someone asks when are you going to. . . ,

a life that’s like the ragged, feral cat
mewling at the door,
insinuating with its cheek and hunger.
We give it mercy or rough blame.

I’ll tell you what love of this life is. It’s looking up
through trees newly bare of leaves
and seeing there the oldest road,
a broken line of white stars
stretching out across the sky.

It’s thinking,
this could almost be enough.

(Susan Elbe [source])

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Ultra-Short Story Competition

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Can you write a ghost story in no more than 124 characters?

Stuart Neville, author of The Twelve (which I reviewed on The Book Book the other day), is running a little contest. The occasion? That book’s publication tomorrow in the US, called here The Ghosts of Belfast. Following is a brief description of the rules/guidelines (for more information see Neville’s Web site):

  • Compose a ghost story no more than 124 characters in length.
  • By midnight, October 31, Post it in a Twitter tweet, with the hashtag #GhostsOfBelfast.
  • Sit back and wait for the adulation and/or prizes to roll in.

All right, it’s not that simple.

For starters, obviously, if you have no Twitter account you are (as the rude abbreviation says) S.O.L. If you’re in that position, you have one, maybe two options:

  1. Enter it as a comment to this post here on RAMH. I’ll tweet it for you. Since I’ve reviewed his book, I hereby disqualify myself from winning. Should your entry be a winner, I’ll put you and Neville in touch with each other. The drawback to this option: anyone on Twitter who’s following the hashtag will think I wrote your ultra-short, although they’ll know better by the time the contest is over.
  2. Neville says in his guidelines (emphasis added): “Each of those [winning] tweets will be re-tweeted by me and the good folks at Soho Press (or linked to a special page on my website if they’re too long).” This implies to me that he’s willing to consider stories which exceed Twitter’s maximum tweet length. The drawback to this option: you’ll have to figure it out on your own and/or wait for Neville to clarify. Or not. :)
    Update: On reflection… no, he’s not saying the entries can be longer than a tweet’s allowed to be. He’s saying that when he and Soho Press re-tweet the winning entries, they’ll probably be longer than a tweet may be because of extra text which Twitter adds to a re-tweet. (And no, I can’t believe adults actually talk like this.) So you’re stuck: either use Twitter to get credit for the story, or use me to front for you. It’s gotta be Twitter.

As I said above, I myself am not actually entering the contest. But here’s an example of what an entry might look like:

Old guy at the bar glares at you, at anyone who dares to sit nearby. Don’t take it personally; he’s been there since 1843. #GhostsOfBelfast

[Hat tip to Moonrat.]

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