The Plight of the Mired Novelist

 

 

Ending with a sentence which I think may turn out to be the besst in the book, I finished Chapter 25 late Friday morning.  IT was one of my really good days, full of spirit and flow, the secret liquors with which I water my garden. 

 

Naively, I expected that this weekend would be a mad frenzy of writing as a consequence, but it seems that novels don’t work like that: at least mine don’t.  I write a chapter full of juice and later on, two days or two weeks later I know exactly what it points to, but the day after, I always have a creative hangover:  I can’t find the sense of the chapter, I can’t find the write words, I can’t even find my socks. I suppose I should just roll over and play dead, read a book or something, but like I said here yesterday, I feel the mass of this project growing within me and it wants to be out in the world where people can read it and I can move onto the next project, God be praised.

 

So I’m sitting here staring at the screen, which I remember now is how a lot of this writer’s writing time is spent, and writing a blog entry which is probably a little silly and probably a little obvious, but which keeps my fingers moving and the birth pains from being quite as sharp.  It all puts me in mind of the bit from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”:

 

Eric Idle:  I want to have babies.

 

John Cleese:  You can’t have babies; you’re a man.  What’s it going to gestate in, are you going to keep it in a box?

 

Eric Idle:  I want the right to have babies.

 

John Cleese:  (Outraged, the way only John cleese can be outraged)  What’s the point in having the right to have babies if you can’t have babies?

 

 

Well, I’m telling you that this man can and will have a baby, and the sonogram says it looks to be about five hundred and fifty pages from head to toe.  I just wish the miracle of childbirth were happening TODAY.

Pregnancy

 

 

I’ve been fretting for some time now that, although I write for four to six hours five or six days every week, I’m not making the progress on the novel that I would like to.  With Word 2003 set at a 12 point Times New roman font, I had only written, or seemed to have written around 230 pages after some one and a half years of work.  It is good work, but it seemed to me that there wasn’t a lot of it for the time invested and I began to feel depressed and rather hard on myself as a lazy slacker.

 

Then my dear friend Kevin reminded me that book length isn’t determined by number of pages as shown by Word for Windows, but by word count.  And when I applied the word count utility, the novel I’ve written so far is no 230 pages but near twice that in length.  Needless to say, I am very, very pleased with myself and take the title of slacker Prince as a badge of honor.  The truth is, I’m kicking ass novelistically speaking and am probably between three quarters and four fifths of the way through my first draft.  The second and third drafts, I expect, will go very swiftly as I already have a pretty good idea of the alterations which need to be made before the book is totally coherent.

 

But even though it turns out I’m writing an ox-stunner rather than a slim volume, there is still a certain amount of suffering involved at this point.  I began to feel this about seven years into my first book, “The Apocalypse Hilton”.  I describe it as a feeling of wanting to give birth when I still haveanother trimester to go.  I have all these characters and situations and they want to be in a published book, not next year sometime and certainly not five years from now, but today or tomorrow.  In fact, I think I feel, as much as any man can, the way a pregnant woman feels when she thinks to her unborn child: “Damn it, baby, I’m tired.  ARRIVE already!”

 

 

In Case of Falling Astronauts, Break Glass

 

copyright William L. Houts 2010

United States of America

All Rights Reserved

 

 

I.

 

o heavenly desert for a wandering tribe, nazareth to astronauts;

cradle of prophets with mirrored faces, our mystics of absolute zero,

striding through hells of kelvin heat or leaping lead-footed for joy.

we knew no domes of glass nor wise antennaed

mayors would meet our traveling boys, flown so far

from the roiling blue, flung so far into darkness and dust.

but if a desert, still a place of birth, you anvil moon: like silver

minted fresh, we’d shine our lives by the pure silent hammers of sol.

this was our dream, our all-american dream of astronauts

grave and poetic: faces full of infinity, minds on plans

for compassionate cities, angelic hands at work in the vine-

yards of science. the rocket packs and rayguns were toys,

dolls in the hands of scheming boys we never thought they’d keep.

what we were after, as always, was space: another place to go

when nowhere was left

a heavenly desert to a wandering tribe,

second bethlehem to a dream.

 

 

 

II.

 

I wonder what plagues we gave to the Indians of the Moon,

I struggle to remember which treaties we broke with the Lunar Sioux,

the precise year of that famous ambush so successfully sprung by

the cavalry of the American Third Orbital Marines upon the Lakota

living by the shores of the Sea of Tranquility.

And I forget exactly how many chiefs we lashed to the coils

of fusion drives, or swung from rocket gantries

or tumbled into void with a one two three.

I get all the dates mixed up, but from where I’m standing

I can still smell the silicate smoke of tipis burning on lunar prairies.

 

 

 

III.

 

When I still played hopscotch,

when i knew just how to throw the stone

and what these lines are for,

I read about Laika, the dog in space,

How the Russians loved their doggy cosmonaut

(a snapshot from some grade school primer:

white coated men and a scrappy mutt

with a lolling tongue) and how she loved her cozy Sputnik, just enough room for her race.

I imagined the husky steering her tiny craft:

Adroit Captain Laika, the dog between worlds,

equal parts Egyptian goddess and loyal pet;

the constellation, drawn in the sky with

stars of chalk, the constellation given life,

the Hunter’s Dog unleashed to gambol and howl

fully enfleshed in the backyards of night.

When I still played hopscotch, and knew

the counting rhymes, and how to get through the game

without hitting the lines, I read about Laika:

but not how her husky fur must have burned

in a blaze when her tiny cage returned to earth,

nor a word for her terrified yawp as the Sputnik

crashed through a ceiling of air, splashed down

in the southernmost part of the Indian Sea.

I know she died before I was born, and how.

But I learned it late, and now I call her:

here girl, come on down now and lick my hand;

and brief me on dreams brought low,

dogs in space, these chalk marks

whose use I used to know.

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: William L. Houts,Laika,Sputnik,dogs in space

The Finale of Seem

 

I just made a fool of myself with someone who used to be a close friend.  He moved away, went back to New York and has a busy, satisfying life there.  It’s been about a decade since I’ve seen him, but somehow I had still reckoned him among my friends.  Last night I sent him an email apologizing for things I had done in the admittedly distant past and received a response this morning.  IN the email, he said that he wasn’t angry about the things I had mentioned, which came as a relief.  But he pointed out that those things had happened a long time ago, that he had moved on and that I should probably do that too.

 

His message came both as a relief and as an acute embarrassment.  I like to think, as most people like to think, that I’m infinitely adaptable towards the conditions of life and that change doesn’t make me sad or confused.  In reality, though, what I find is that I’m somewhat stodgy and sentimental.  I remain loyal to friendships which have changed irrevocably into something lesser or worse and all unconsciously, I expect other people to do the same. 

 

I like to say that I am the closest thing you will find, this side of the cartoons, to a talking dog.  I guess I mean that, with regard to people,  I’m a creature of habit.  I expect friends to remain friends unless something terrible or irrevocable happens, even if we don’t see each other for years.  But, as Stephen King says in his novel “The Gunslinger”, the world moves on and you find yourself happier if you learn to move on with it.

 

This sounds like I’m completely at peace with what this person said to me, but that would be untrue.  He more than implied that I was being silly or worse, that our lives had changed and that I wasn’t paying attention to that fact.  Well, that’s a little bit true, but it’s not close to the whole truth.  Ten years ago, my life changed drastically when I went blind, and with a lot of suffering I adapted.  I have also adapted to HIV and poverty and I think this old friend really could have been a lot kinder to meon that basis.  I am not, as he implied, a pathetic man living on delusions of the past.  I’m writing novels now, they will eventually be a success and I will move into yet another phase of my life.  I am not a ssad stick in the mud, I am all about change.  I have my nostalgias, but so does anyone who lives forty years and expects to live another forty.

 

Okay, I’ve got it out of my system.  He’s an unsentimental New Yorker;  I’m an emotional Seattlite. We’re both moving on, in our own ways.  We could have met up through my email and had some good talk about personal history.  This guy doesn’t work like that.  I’ve got friends now who do.  Let be be the finale of seem, as Wallace Stevens says. Peace!

Another Reboot

 

 

I’ve done several reboots of this blog over the last five years or so, and I’m sure there are more to come.  It may just be that I don’t have the temperament to be a blogger, even though I write almost every day.  But that’s writing a novel, not tellling the world that I bought a Subway sandwich today.  Okay, that’s a little snarky.  Many blogs are about much more than the writer’s daily ephemera, what he ate, the annoying bus passenger, or name your poison.  But I think, this time around, I’m going to concentrate on talking about writing, with some of the ephemera that gives it context.  Also, probably stuff about living in subsidized housing, my thoughts and feelings about “poor punk” and the book I’m currently reading or which I have stopped reading because it bored me to the point of melting away.  Also, I will be posting excerpts from the novel, whose title, I establish with great fanfare, is “The Prisoner of Tallgrave”.  I’m very proud of this book, having, at page 220, written more than half of it.  It’s a great whacking slamdance of a fantasy novel, with two dragons, a witch, a saint, high priestesses galore and an eldritch god from a fallen world.  I’m afraid they all speak like Somerset Maugham, especially my first person protagonist, but I think that’s one of the novel’s little charms.  It contains a world of articulate people who prefer to say exactly what they mean.  The diction is nearly contemporary, but it’s a reflective, Jane Austeny sort of book with closet poets around every corner.

 

By the way, today I bought cold cut Subway sandwich off their Five dollar menu.  Scrumptious!

 

Technorati Tags: novel writing,Jane Austen,poor punk,Tallgrave

Tonguespark

 

Strike the tonguespark wild, writer:
lick with hand and eye and ear the sea, the mindfire  blazing white.  Write all stagger wide your cucuru against the
dismal wrigglers.   It's time!  It's time!  Rev the rhyme and sling it down
the orange tracks.  It shines with racy tastings.  Buckle down
and crack the plastic street with flames of metric feet
Fruit the blue with heartful rains, the sea
with gleeful fishes hear them, even wicked fishes sing for
glory then and glory now and glory ever-be.  Taste! Speak! Awake!      

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: writing,inspiration,poetry,just do it

Iovarre

 

 

Constant Reader,

 

I’ve started a Yahoo Group (email discussion list) for discussion of the novel I’m writing, a literary fantasy called

“Dragons & Angels”.  If you like what you read here, you may enjoy my effort at fiction.  I won’t give away the plot, but it involves a maker of toy automata, an imprisoned archangel and an ancient dragon.  Sounds like the usual fantasy ingredients, but I think you may find otherwise.

 

If you’d like to join the growing community of readers and critics, just send a blank email to:

 

iovarre-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

 

You will get a message from the Yahoo server asking you to verify that you’re the one requesting to join.  Simply send a blank reply to this and you’ll be sent a message welcoming you to the group.

 

I’ll be making reposts over the next couple of weeks so people can get caught up.  I’m also posting the chapters in a folder in the Iovarre area at Yahoo Groups,  so people can read the chapters at their leisure.

 

Anyone who participates in this forum is assured of being mentioned in the Acknowledgments when the book is published.

 

 

Technorati Tags: online novel,Yahoo writing groups,Iovarre,work in progress