Until Midnight

Listening to Sarah Smile, Hall & Oates 

Thought I'd have to cancel tomorrow's Zoom writer's workshop. Until my friend Lester RSVP'd, it looked as though our regular Sunday meeting was getting the kind of attention my tweets get. 

I have 14.2k+ followers on Twitter and my tweets get over a thousand crickets. 

Needless to say, I'll at least see Lester who writes Civil War historical fiction at the moment. Prior to that, he brought mostly urban fiction short stories, all very good, mostly a loser or crank as the protagonist. LitFic stuff, the first story I read of his also historical fiction--like the novel he's bringing to group--black lives in post-World War II rural Georgia. I love his work because it's dark and my work is dark af. 

In the moment, I'm working on the novel I thought I could finish for NaNoWriMo but only made it to 30k words. Very different than Powerball's omniscient third-person narrator, apparent setting in this world circa 1990s. This work is set a hundred years later, the planet injured badly by climate change, the technological singularity running the planet in a seemingly utopian society.

My Saturday was spent working overtime, making Christmas money, then some chores, the reward being working on Cooking With Van. First-person voice of a non-binary person raised outside the towers--where the singularity has housed 95% of the world's population--and an incredibly good chef.

My timer's running out (more on that later), here's the rough stuff I've been working on tonight:

“Whatcha readin?”
“Pearls Before Swine, Myra Sandusky. Probably read it a half-dozen times. Epic. I have five books in that pack, a couple of em are over a hundred years old that I keep wrapped in tissue and a sweater. Sometimes on the road, I find a spot that’s so pretty, so peaceful, that I’ll stop and spend my day there reading, set up my camp and settle into the beauty of the land.”
Carly made me think about why I was out on the road, in the wilderness, taking what I needed and giving to the scavengers. What my purpose was and where I fit into the ecosystem. “I never got to be very good with readin. I had to teach myself. I can do numbers like, in my head, but words and sentences? Couldn’t really get into that.”
“That’s tragic. Words, sentences, the way that certain people put them together and transport me to another world? I’d perish in this world if there were no other worlds to escape to.”
“I’d love to escape to another world, right now. Nothing but snow outside, you and me in here. Don’t get me wrong, you’re great company, Carly, but I wanna be somewhere else.”
“I gotcha. You’re good. So… kinda on topic… you gonna carry this baby to term? You’re runnin out of time to decide. I can’t do no abortion but, if we turn south and get to the rez? I know someone who can do it, a real doctor.”
At no point had abortion crossed my mind, it seemed I was destined to have a baby, bein so far on the outs that Carly was the only person I’d told my truth to since Ramon. “How far are we from the rez?”
“I reckon about two weeks, and in this snow? Probably more than that. Some rough terrain getting in there, too. It’ll be more than three weeks if we take this trail back to the road that goes into the rez.”

Let's try this...

Listening to: Don't Let Your Deal Go Down, Sam and Kirk McGhee

I finished Powerball, my novel. Well, almost done. Still workshopping it--the pic I post is from my Sunday group--but it's getting close to the end.

It just occurred to me that I should stop pitching it as LitFic and go for upmarket Urban Fantasy. Except it's not exactly urban, it's more small town. And the fantasy part is mostly magical realism. 

For the moment this space is just for promoting my book. Maybe I'll post what I record during Zoom workshops (if I can figure out how to do that). 

So... this is just me telling you why I'm doing this. I promise subsequent posts will be worthy of a read.

That's the post. Jesus and Mary Chain just came on and I wanna sit and listen to it, enjoy the Jack Herrer that got me here.

Backyard haiku

Mating rituals

Dead leaves chase each other in the wind

Like two horny moths

 

Boom, boom, doom and gloom

boot heels scraping out divots

turf torn up by Goths

 

Alone, a boy cries

ice cream bakes on the blacktop

where bullies gloat

 

Where the water drains

things wriggle in putrid pools

a stick is a boat

 

It’s time for nighthawks

crepuscular insect clouds

and barbecue smoke

 

Spinning soccer ball

Dad spanks his daughter’s ass then

gives his son a poke

 

Brown lizards skitter

into cracked bricks’ crevices

swallowing their catch

 

 

 

My neighbor’s dog bark

insanely whimpering when

I unhook the latch

 

Gray hair and limp gait

little dog pulls them forward

but stops when they kiss

 

Boom stereo thud

“Check me out, motherfucker!”

shatters quiet bliss 

I'm too old for angst, y'know?

 I hate my job.

Let me qualify that--the job is OK and, in this economy, I should be grateful to have steady employment. TBH, the work isn't demanding but stultifyingly dull. At the end of the (work) day, I have plenty of intellectual and creative capital to sit down and write. Or query agents/editors/publishers, a labor that has resulted in numerous rejections. My day job doesn't interfere with my unpaid second job, so that's cool.

It's the soulless corporation I work for that I hate. "Office Space" writ large and most of you know the lament--incompetence at the top rewarded while front-line workers bear the brunt of that fuckery--so it seems pointless to indulge that trope. But the struggle of signing onto work every morning, to seethe at the masturbatory emails polluting my inbox, is daily degradation.

Query and wait. It will be so satisfying when that offer comes and I can walk away from serving self-aggrandizing dipshits. 

My novel is written, a beast at 194,000 words. To market it, I split it into two parts. I'm still line editing and workshopping but it's a complete manuscript. 

Hello Blogger, My Old Friend

It's been awhile. Been writing a novel and tweeting a lot. And I get a mighty rash from that.

Our Exquisite Corpse

Lids lifted to reveal darkness inside,

bloodless and blank-eyed, a void where

life once illuminated

a world we’ll never know,

now null, flatlined,

fallow, forgotten. Nothing

left but lips opened for an oh of horror,

gaping where a last spasm

shuddered forth and

screamed silently,

exhaled what thin reed

stood against the banks

of an arid rill, a final

stand undermined as sand slid

where roots once held

with a rotted parchment claw.

Colorless and cold as porcelain,

twisted fingers clutched

as though scratching

lichen from stone, nails

filled with filth gathered from

petroglyphs scrawled into

the face of rocks.

I Miss My Ring

Muted peel, forgotten bell;

the broken seal

of a shotgun shell.

Skin unbound, denuded, free;

a bloodless sound

where your ring would be.

Empty pall, a phantom limb,

where leaves that fall

sing a dirge-like hymn.

Though the sting is fresh and new,

I miss my ring

but I don’t miss you.

3 Doors, Closed

Door #1

When you smash the pots I made for you,
put the shards tip up in the dirt, so they
look like the sails of small boats or
sharks’ teeth in a ravaging maw.

Arrange them in a way that you’ll never
see the pieces as they originally were,
an assembled whole where roots struck
bottom but pushed stems to air and light.

Door #2

If we’re too stiff to dance,
to move without arms
pinioned to priorities
and everyone on our Friends list,
then what the fuck are we doing with what time we have?

Door #3

In the end, you left me with nothing but
          an unsigned card

                     molding in the drawer,

mawkish tropes, doggerel, words you
         scanned and assumed
                      held weight or meaning

(or at least might mean more to me than you).

As days passed, memory decayed in dirt,
         too late for burial,
                     the card's sentiments

an afterthought with a very short shelf-life.

Mr. Todd's Yard of Charnel Horrors

          We’d buried our Comet in the Square Hole, under rocks, bits of broken concrete and clumps of grass ripped from the surrounding field. We pulled the wheels and Suzie pried off the silver Comet emblem that had managed to survive all the damage we’d done. Billy added a snowglobe to the grave, stashing the others into the sack he’d made from a coat he’d found. Everything else went in the wagon so we could take it all back to our fort. Then we just stood and looked at the mound, silently, as though honoring a fallen comrade. 

           “I wonder if someone will dig that up in a thousand years and ask why it was given a burial? Maybe they’ll think it was some kind of primitive robot that we loved enough to bury in a grave.” I had thought about saying something inspirational, something like what the last person says at the end of those films we watch in school, but all I could think of was how we might be pranking future archaeologists.

Lake Trout and Document 5

Lake Trout

A substantial shadow in the shade of the shore,

a cool place

between stones

that give back the alpine sun’s shining,

its dappled back

like the lights that appear in the shoregrass at night,

going nowhere

and showing nothing.

Waiting. Watching. Wondering

if those eyes admit memories,

if my face is clear

beyond the lake’s spirituel lens,

knowing  

my intention to cast a line.

My father brought me here, many times,

a legend passed on to him about a hidden tarn,

tucked beneath the cups of two peaks’ cirques, 

a deep pool

shrouded by dense stands of spruce and juniper;

where an antediluvian intelligence ruled waters

as rarified as regal spirits,

striving only for survival,

while accumulating

what wisdom or ways

will the realm toward

an equilibrium in death’s dissolute diet.

A tailfin, larger than my hand, fans sand and silt,

mica and decay,

moving out

to light, taunting,

laughing at me,  

lolling in a languid drift from the flutter of its fins’

feathered fingers,

a dismissive wave.

Document 5

There is nothing in the pantry for her to make

and everything there is beyond her grasp,

anyway; a cup of milk may as well be

an Arabic anagram or

a ton of spoiled meat.

Hunger. For.

Eating, a broken clock, a reckoning of time

manifest in hunger, a gnawing knowledge

that something is missing and things will

be better somewhere, where? Where,

where there is eating, a broken clock,

a reckoning of time manifest in hunger,

where? Where are the rest? Eating?

A broken clock.

A reckoning of time.

Something

is missing.

In between, everything is missing but that

static quintessence of each second, the is where –

where. Where the is is, is an opaque reflection of

clouds on a cream-white opal, an ephemeral flash

of what was but is not is.

Is missing something.

Hunger. For.

Dreaming, a desperate plea, someone needs to be saved

as there’s no time left, what’s left has left her

out, left out, out left, gone, left, out, dreaming is

and out where, where? Where is is? Where is out?

Out where dreaming is the eating and a

reckoning of time manifest in hunger,

eating is, is dreaming is, is is but where?

A broken clock.

A dream. Eating. A dream.

Something is missing.