Thinking

Some days…you just have to.

THE DAY

So I jolted awake this morning from a really upsetting dream.  Not scary at all, just upsetting: a close friend of mine from Wisconsin had decided to kill herself.  All I remember was that she had her last party or whatever, and then went off to swallow a pill or something.  She wasn’t ill, and I think there was some kind of world catastrophe going on.  But that’s really all I recall.

So I’m awake and lying there and thinking, wuuuh?  After years of practice, I understand a lot of my dreams, but not this one.  OTOH, the first thing I said to the husband when he rolled over and said it was time to get up–I’d apparently slept through the alarm–was that the book was wrong.  (I tend to pay attention to first associations, too.)  When he asked why, I told him about the dream and that I thought I was trying to tell myself something.  He told me not to pay attention to a dream.

Of course, though, I do.  I always pay attention to that stuff, not just because dreams are an interesting language all their own but since they are related to the brain’s attempt to cleanse itself. (Really, really, I don’t make this stuff up; the flow rate of CSF through the brain increases dramatically during sleep and probably does flush out a day’s worth of build-up; think of it as what happens when you exercise a lot and build up a tremendous amount of lactic acid.  Blood flow to those muscles increases for the same reason: to get rid of all that poison.)  Dreams also service to file away memories by shuffling through filing cabinets to find close matches (and free up storage space),  which probably accounts for why dreams seem so chaotic.  The brain is just constantly pulling out filing cabinets: nope, nope, nope . . . oh, there’s the right file.

Anyway, I figure I must be busy fretting about something.

What I came up with is this: the book was doing . . . okay.  But there’s no urgency to it, no passion, no peril, no ticking time bomb . . . no END OF THE WORLD.  Which was precisely what my dream was about.  Was I bored?  Not exactly, but I’d been worried about my lack of passion for characters–the urge to weep for them–for a couple weeks.

This translated into a lot of pacing around and thinking.  As a writer, you always know when there’s something wrong; you feel it, or–I think it was Dashiell Hammett but don’t quote me–you find that you’re pulling out words rather than letting them push their way out.  I’ve not felt precisely that way but close and enough so I knew there was a problem.

Now, I’m thinking . . . okay, not enough peril.  Not enough END OF THE WORLD.  (And believe me, it doesn’t ALWAYS have to be the apocalypse.  Tim Powers once said that you can write a story about a woman trying to win a baking contest, but that better be the most important cake she’s ever made.)

So I spent the day pacing.  Really.  Walking around and around the house, thinking of characters, how to amp up the tension, the emotion, the ticking time bomb element.  There has to be something that DRIVES everybody.

I think I found it.  It also means rewriting almost from scratch again–and that just makes me want to tear my eyeballs out.  So many damn pages down the drain.

OTOH, I was reading something about Nevada Barr today, and the reviewer mentioned that she hadn’t come out with a new book in about three years–but then mentioned that, of course, Barr had moved to New Orleans.

As in moves are disruptive.  It really is hard to get your mojo back.

I don’t know if I’ve found it.  I know that I’m more interested in these people than I was in the people I’d already created.  So we’ll see.

In the interim: dealt with contractors who did not match the concrete on the deck and so will not be paid until they fix it; dealt with the Oberlin Alumni Office, which is trying to be sensitive but bending over backwards to do the politically correct thing.  I wrote back a very LONG letter and then followed with a short summary: