This is the novel I'm writing +
It's based on a series of poems I wrote a few years ago. Three of them (I think there were a total of ten by the time I stopped) were included in my book An Education for Field Mice. I've been scared to touch them for a long time, despite a constant itch to develop something from their seeds. I have all of these projects laying around that I love, you see, and my track record with long work isn't one to brag about. I was recently convinced by a good friend that I've been being a pussker about the whole thing, though; so I've been working on the thing since last month. It's scary. It wraps in elements from my poetry and short stories from over the past six years, and if I fuck it up--I'm not aloud to fuck it up.
Anyway, I'm about a fourth of the way through, and the ideas and words continue to come, and I'm beginning to get excited. It's all hand written for now, a way of avoiding pitfalls of the past, and I won't be foisting it onto anybody until it's in a typed, revised, and rewritten state. Still, in the interest of shouting from the rooftops, I wanted to give a little state of the union address and make note that there won't be any stories up here for a while unless I get blocked.
In the meantime, here's the poem that's informing and inspiring the chapter I'm writing at the moment.
"The Manifesto"
she swore that she'd written it in her sleep
and while the look of it suggested some truth to her claim
we didn't believe her for a minute
"why no more"
it read
"a manifesto"
the margins were slightly disordered
the typing
painfully flawed
but the heart of the piece
which travis and i swore to be the work of some mysterious someone else
the soul of it
was just too perfect and true
to be the work of drooling sleep
somebody had spent a lifetime building those words
which always read
"why no more"
when travis read them
he remembered that old dog of his
and he cried
it spoke to me, too
of ancient buildings and washed out glass
gone white from a lack of eyes
gone off from the page to someplace we'd never known to be
it had to be a dream
meg insisted
there was no other excuse
because none of us could live it
if it were real
Timestamp: 08.07.07 at 01:59 PM. Filed under: Striving.
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Comments
If you were "a fourth of the way through" wouldn't that mean you are done? Or is the fourth out of fifths? or sevenths?
I don't understand. Let me know when you are an eighth of the way through... Well, that would mean you are working backwards... whatever.
I like the poem.
Filed by: Stosh on 08.07.07 at 11:31 PM
Dear Stosh,
A fourth, sometimes referred to as 1/4, means 25%. Maybe yankees have a different mathematical system.
Filed by: rp on 08.09.07 at 06:24 PM
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