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Today’s little piece is from early in Swan Riders, the sequel to Children of Peace. In this scene our narrator has just met the titular riders for the first time. It’s not a brilliant paragraph but I kinda like how it’s structured.

*I considered the two Riders. They could have been picked for contrast. Francis Xavier was big and broad, with a face as round as the moon. Sri was as narrow as if she’d shut herself in a door, her face almost comically tapered and intense, like a heron’s face: bright eyes and beak. He was thoughtfully slow; she was delightfully quick. They were both murderers, of course.
*

Well, blog, let’s see. It’s been awhile. Last week I finished an edit of the first half of my book in draft, Swan Riders. I discovered what the arc of the main character was somewhat late, and so there was a lot of moving stuff around. You’d think this would be mechanical, but in fact it was hugely satisfying. I even made myself cry.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about Big Weird Poem again. It seems to be approaching chapbook length, and approaching done. I’m wondering if any publishers anywhere are interested in publishing a 40 page book. I may be DOOMED.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Sorrow’s Knot, the book I’m rewriting (usually mentioned around here in the context of how much trouble it’s giving me) is finally moving along. This is good because it’s due — EEEP! — April 1st.

This week I’m planning my first ever writing retreat. I’ve rented a hermitage in the Crieff Hills. I’m going on Wednesday and coming back Sunday. I’m planning to work on Sorrow’s Knot, and my goal is to finish the first half. Here’s the thing. I was really planning that I would completely re-do the first act of this novel and then try to salvage the last two acts. (The first act is the longest act by far, and takes up a half of the book. Then there’s a major turning point, and that’s what I want to write up to this week.) I’m starting to wonder if that’s going to happen — if I’m really going to end the first third in such a way that I can pick the second two thirds more or less intact. As I rewrite, it’s turning into a different book — and a better one, by far. But that makes the April 1st deadline pretty scary. Still, one must follow the energy.

I am currently fussing about my writing retreat, and sublimating said fussing into wondering about what food to take.

I even cast a Tarot about “how to move with my writing on retreat.” (I do not actually believe that shuffled pasteboard influences my life. I do, though, believe it’s useful to borrow an external perspective. Tarot is a mirror mets a dream mets an inkblot: always interesting, sometimes startling.) A notably intense casting: I got major arcana for three of four cards, including the Devil reversed for a signifier. This reads to me like a “break out of the rut” card, so: let go of the old draft of the back half, perhaps? “Deeper emotional connection and more equal footing,” sayeth the book. It’s kind of a wild energy card, though, so it could be (and I hope it will be) a big wild out-of-control few writing days.

I've talked before about "Too Strong to Stop, Too Sweet to Lose," my poem that answers big questions with small strangenesses. Today I'm again looking for more questions. Does anyone have anything they want to ask the oracle?

Want some samples?

What can heal us?

Like men who have lost legs,
we cannot be restored,
but the tumbling world
makes lights of us -
the sea turns glass
to milk. A tea cup handle
to a tool for divination.

For what do we hunger?

Given paint, a starving man
will paint. Given bones to burn
We burn them and again
make paint. Those reindeer at Lascaux
are made from reindeer bones.
The red horses
from the blood of horses.

What is the source of power?

Time. Though this is far
from obvious. Listen:
the waterfall is powered by its drop,
the lightning by its cliff
of charge. Our power is
the lurch and spark, the recognition
that wind in green wheat
makes the sound of a scythe
being sharpened.

Put your questions in the comments I'll do my best to answer them there. Of course, they won't all come off like the above -- I expect them to be roughly promising to unreadable. Still, it should be fun! When composing your question, remember, the oracle doesn't know where your car keys are, and takes no responsibility for your decision to invade Sparta. That's on you.

Check out this Adam Gopnik piece from the New Yorker on why young people like fantasy novels. For a change, it’s NOT insulting to youth or to fantasy. (Much.)

I’m not sure I agree with everything — though it’s always hard not to agree with Gopnik; he’s such a good writer that he can make anything sound reasonable and insightful, if not revolutionary. But he’s spot on about this: fantasy elevates ordinary and eternal problems of young people (and the rest of us, though Gopnik doesn’t say that) into stories via the language of myth. It turns “No one really knows me” into “I’ve got a secret identity.” It turns “I don’t understand why other people act the way they do” into “I’m trapped in a faerie realm.” It turns “my high school must have been built over the mouth of hell” into “my high school must have been built over the mouth of hell.”

I once told a class of 12th Graders that Plain Kate was autobiographical. “Not that I’ve ever fallen victim to a witch hunt because I don’t quite fit in,” I ad-libbed, “except that high school is exactly like that.” As one, they locked eyes and some even nodded. It was an electric moment: my hair stood up. All of them looked at me, all of them. Even the cheerleaders.

“Be kind,” says Pliny, “for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

There are certain things in life that are glorious, and they are glorious for everyone. There are more that are hard, and they are hard for everyone. We like to see these things retold, but with dragons.

One of the upsides of reading other writers’ blogs: realizing you’re not crazy. Or at least, you’re not alone. On reflection I suppose “not crazy” does not follow.

A case in point: many, many writers seem to have playlists for their books. I was so glad to learn this: I didn’t know anyone else did it! I always have, for fiction. I’m fairly literal about it, too. For my abandoned World War Two book (which eventually became Ghost Maps, my first book of poetry), I listened to scratchy old Glen Miller recordings — the “lost records” they recorded in German and broadcast into Germany in a “Radio Free Europe” sort of way. Ever hear someone try to cover “Is You Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” in German? The clash of civilizations has rarely been so audible.

For Plain Kate, I listened to a single album over and over again: Burkene Bruse’s Stone Chair. This, for instance, is Kate’s “main theme,” the song that instantly transports me to the foggy wood and the river, the rough-hewn granduer and the soft sadness of the Russian and Northern European tales from which KATE borrowed its flavour.

The books I’m drafting — Children of Peace, and its sequel The Swan Riders — take place in a far future, in a depopulated Saskatchewan. In the Children of Peace world, they’ve lost the car, the suburbs, the principle that collective punishment is wrong, and (apparently) the electric guitar. I want a to evoke a world where AIs ride horses: modern bluegrass is obviously the way to go. Or, actually, I started out listening to Basia Bulat, and Pandora took me to modern bluegrass from there. This, for instance, is the love theme (GUYS! I wrote a book that needed a love theme!) for book one, where the hero realizes that a) quietly preparing all one’s life to be ritually murdered in a good cause may not in fact be a good thing and b) she may be in big scary love.

But the book I’m editing, Sorrow’s Knot, is so far mostly music-less. I do have a playlist, but I’ve never found the music, the music that takes me right into the story. This may, in fact, have been part of the problem when it came to getting the book out of the box. (See this blog entry, in which my book is STUCK.) LIke Plain Kate, it’s a high fantasy, so the usual moody rock (Van Morrison, Cowboy Junkies) and gospel soul that populates my iPod seem like obvious nos.

It might make sense to go geographically near, but that has proven problematic. The Sorrow’s Knot setting got its start from ancient North America. That is, the same way the people in Plain Kate are NOT Polish, the people in Sorrow’s Knot are NOT Mandan. They may build the same houses and live in the same landscape and grow the same food, but the whole bit about the disembodied zombies is not, to say the least, historically accurate. But the traditional music of the Great Plains is hard to come by, and most modern interpretations of it that I’ve found have a faint whiff of recreational ethnicity — you know, white people hanging dream catchers from their rearview mirrors and visiting sweat lodges on vacation. To idealize and romanticize (and steal parts of) a culture like that is nearly as problematic as demonizing it: both treat the culture as something less than human. That’s something I’m acutely aware of, as a white chick writing about not-white people, and maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to sink into that music.

I think drumming might be the way to go. One of the characters in the book is a drummer, and I love drum music. (I bought my first djembe this year; my bodhran sadly needs reskinning.) I could listen to this guy below forever, but he doesn’t seem to have an album. I don’t know that my blog readers constitute a crowd, but I’m tempted to crowd source here. Anyone want to recommend some music? Something world-beat — not necessarily North American. (Taiko, for instance, would be fine.) Something with some force and energy, though slow is okay. Not too crystal-healing-dolphin. No orchestral windchimes tinklers need apply.

Hurrah! My poetry granting season has opened with a "yes"!

Every year the Ontario Arts Council runs a grant competition called The Writers' Reserve. It's an interesting program: the OAC gathers a number volunteer publishing houses, literary magazines and the like. They allocate to each house a certain pot of money to give away, and writers approach each house directly. The house doesn't publish the work, or make other commitments to the writer -- they just nod in the direction of the kind of work they like. So the OAC is supplying the money the houses are doing the work, just for the joy of being able to say yes to the stuff they love. The result is a great array of small grants, supporting a hugely diverse body of work. I'm such a fan of this program.

Like many pretty-much-mainstream poets, I approach a variety of houses through the Writers' Reserve. Last year it was ten, and I got two recommendations. This year it was 13. The first one just came back: and it was a yes. Thanks for the nod, ARC magazine.

So, what am I writing? Well, according to the project description, I'm writing this: "Too Strong to Stop, Too Sweet to Lose" is a long poem in small parts. The poem is about 30 pieces now: I hope one day it might be 50 or 80, which could make it chapbook or book length.

In what it says "Too Strong Strong to Stop, Too Sweet to Lose" comments on what is knowable - but ultimately the poem is about what it doesn't say, what cannot be known. To wit: What we do with this life that we cannot hold onto, and cannot bear to let go?

"Too Strong" is sometimes known (on Twitter and elsewhere) as Big Weird Poem. Here's a sample:

What do we hold to?

This sweet world -- how we love it.
As an old horse loves the harness,
loves the stall.
The drenching smell of leather.
The work and rest.
The sweat and hay.
Dust-slanted, cricket-singing, the barn.
Even when it's burning.

I think Sorrow’s Knot may be slightly less stuck. This week, I had an 800-word day, a couple 700-word days, and yesterday at last a sticker day, a 1000-word day. There was a brief relapse on Tuesday when I went: “But what if this is all WRONG?” and was again paralyzed for a bit. But I am slowly shaking it. I again feel loose and even a bit excited when I walk into my writing office in the afternoons.

Embarrassingly, the breakthrough came from using one of those “oh, just try for ten minutes: you won’t get much done, but that’s okay, and then you can have chocolate” mental tricks. This particular iteration of the just-ten-minutes trick came in the form software called Vitamin R.

Vitamin R is another in the family of software that urges you to work for just a little bit. I’ve used lots of them, over the years, and particularly like Freedom for the Mac and Write or Die. But when you’re as fragile as I’ve been these last few months (and the “or die” part of Write or Die seems like a real possibility), a nice friendly version is perhaps called for, and Vitamin R seems tick that box for me.

Why did it take me so long to figure this out? I don’t know. Recently I did an interview at an online community for teenage writers, Write On. There I talked about the universal writers’ experience of My Writing Sucks, and how to keep going in the face of that. This was my advice to them, which I myself proceeded to turn around and forget:

*”lower the stakes for yourself. It doesn’t have to be the next New Yorker short story, it just has to — and here you should fill in the blank. Be a fairy tale told from the villain’s point of view. Be a soap opera that’s so over the top it will make people laugh. Use rhymed couplets. You can’t succeed at a whole novel/play/book of poems all at once, but you can probably do this, and it will hone your skills and sharpen your confidence.” *

For me, lowering the stakes turned out to be “write for ten minutes on the scene where Otter rescues Cricket from the ghost in the cornfield.” Compare this to the previous stake, which was: “rescue a book you used to love, but which your editor doesn’t seem to, by making it totally perfect right NOW.” I mean, which of those tasks would get you to lift your head weakly from your desk and peer around with a tiny bit of hope?

I feel silly, but hey. Silly is in fact one of my favourite words. Did you know that “silly” originally meant “blessed”? Sounds unlikely but it’s true. The drifting path of its usage went roughly like this: happy —> blessed -> pious -> innocent/childlike -> weak/pitiable -> foolish. The root is an Old English word, gesælig, meaning happy or goodhearted. It may be related (distantly) to the word “soul.” Fairy story readers will know its much closer cousin “seely” (also spelled “seelie”), which is just silly with an older spelling, and an older meaning hanging on.

What an important idea, an important insight: that to be silly and to be happy and to be holy are the same thing. I am at my most creative and productive (and happiest and holiest) when I remember this.

Even if it takes a rather silly bit of software.

Guys, it’s unbelievable, but my awesome big kid (the one whose online handle is Ninja Princess Scientist) is SIX YEARS OLD today!

She is in first grade, a partial immersion program that has her already speaking more French than me. She can read. We are in the process of writing a picturebook called Don’t Let the Moose Drive the Monster Truck. She can swim like a dolphin. She wants to be a ninja. And a Mythbuster. And a rock star.

In fact, she’s chosen a Rock Star birthday party, on for this Saturday. Yesterday she posed for pictures to be printed on her cake, and improvised (I think?) a song that rhymed “rock star,” “near and far” and “this guitar.” Scansion! Makes a mommy writer heart so proud.

This postcard from the remarkable Seánan arrived today. The timing a bit eerie, no? But writing is eerie. The quote and the figure in the portrait are of course Samuel Beckett. The plan is mine: I will fail again today. But I will fail better.

Well, I’ve reached a new phase in my professional life. I shall call it the Great Stuck phase.

Backstory. Last Christmas, I finished up a solid draft of my second novel, Sorrow’s Knot. I’d already sold the book, as an unspecified “book two” in a two book contract, so I took a deep breath and sent it off to my editor. The draft I sent was not a first draft (I would sooner break my fingers than share my first drafts with my editor) but it was not a finished draft either — I still had ideas about things I wanted to try. But deadline pressed, so I dutifully sent the draft on.

I was excited about the book at first. It had problems, but I loved the main character, loved the world, and was giddy about the ending. The ending makes me cry and grin like an idiot at the same time. It’s probably my favourite of all the things I’ve ever written. I wanted to dive right back into it and try to make the rest of the book live up to that ending.

But, well, circumstances. I won’t get into them here, but Because Of Reasons, it was impossible for me to dive back into the book. That hurt. A lot. I began to see only the book’s weakest points. The frustration began to border on heartbreak. It was like sitting next to the phone, waiting for That Call, and every moment it doesn’t come is worse than the moment before. So, eventually, I put Sorrow’s Knot into the past tense. I thought: well, that book is done. It will come back some day, but for now, it’s done. Put it in a box with the other failed projects and move on.

And I did. I wrote a different book, Children of Peace. I have always been a slow, careful writer — Plain Kate took me six years, Sorrow’s Knot three so far — but Children of Peace came tumbling out in about six months. Lightning fast. Lightning exciting, too. I even started a sequel (a sequel!) and got about 20,000 words in.

And then, those circumstances? They changed. And it was suddenly time for me to write Sorrow’s Knot again. That was two months ago. And here’s the thing. I can’t get the book out of the bloody box.

I have a revision plan, good ideas for what I want to change, and how, and why. But the words themselves won’t come. I try and try, but they just WON’T. I feel like A.A. Milne’s Rabbit, “braining out” notices: “Notice a meeting of everybody will meet at the House at Pooh Corner to pass a Rissolution By Order Keep to the Left Signed Rabbit.” Just that artificial, knocked together of prefabbed parts. If it were up to me, I’d give up. I’d leave the book in the box forever. But it’s not up to me: it’s a sold book. A lot of people have put a lot of work into it already.

So, now what? I’ve always advised young writers — and always believed for myself — that you should follow your writing passions, and not be concerned about what you “should” be writing. “Should” is so often a trap. And there are few good reasons to write beyond passion. I usually throw in a caveat here about the difference between following your passion and chickening out halfway through — but really, that doesn’t feel like chickening out. This is different.

What do you do when you want to quit but can’t? I’ve thought a lot about this this week, and here is what I’ve come up with.

• First: forgive myself. I’ve had very little time to write, recently, because of publicity pressures and dayjob craziness. (Recently my “half-time” job has seen me leaving at closer to 3:00 than 1:00 — I decided that that was temporarily okay to deal with a temporary problem. I’m redrawing that boundary now.) With all the stuff going on in my life in September and October, it’s no wonder there’s been little time to write. Good Stuff is still Stuff.

• Realize, too, under the heading of “forgive myself,” that part of this is reacting to the “You Must” nature of having a book on contract. My muse says: Make Me. That is the nature of the muse (and possibly the reason sophomore books are … ahem … problematic). Realize this, shake my head at myself, and move on.

• Second: realize diving back in is about more than just plot. Oddly enough, each of of my light little fantasy novels turns out to deal, in fact, with one of my Big Scary Personal Issues. (The plus side of writing about talking cats is that no one asks you if they’re autobiographical.) To get back to Sorrow’s Knot, I probably need to get back to the thing about it that moves and scares me. (Swell, that should be fun.)

• Third: be less like Rabbit and more like Pooh. By this I mean, sit quietly with the stuckness and have faith. This is an act of creativity, and creativity is more about faith than will. (For me.) This week, I’ve decided to trust that there is a door back into the work — just one I have yet to find. It’s my book, after all. I liked it while I was writing it. I loved Otter. And I still love the ending, unabashedly. Nothing there has changed. It will happen.

So I record all this so that others can see that Real Writers Get Stuck (I have many students who read this blog) and so that someday when I’ve written a dazzling book that I love beyond all reason, I can remember that I once hated it and wanted to leave it in a box. At that time I will probably have another book I hate and want to leave in a box, so this note to myself may be useful.

I am stuck, but I am waiting with faith. Someone can come read me a Strengthening Book, such as might comfort a Bear in Wedged in Great Tightness, if they’d like.