Adrift

I’m feeling adrift lately.

My developmental editor is taking a break from editing, so I have to find a new one or wait (I’m tempted to wait, because I like her).

My old mentor/surrogate family from my grad school years has died, and my brain circles around about who I was back then (bipolar but not medicated — think “getting obsessed about guys and crying a lot”). Yet, it was the richest part of my life, and I wonder how to find that again.

Days like this I feel detached from my writing. Should I continue to write? (Probably). Do I need to find a new dev editor? (Yes). What should I do about getting published? (Wait to see if I’m accepted by Pitch Wars before I take on another possibility).

I don’t sound so adrift, but my mind keeps wandering to reanalyze the past in terms of who I was and who I’ve become.

Updates on Gaia

The latest on Gaia’s Hands stuff — I changed the timeline as I said I would, and I’m adding some of the relationship stuff in that I massacred in a previous edit. This time, though, I’m writing it in terms of what I understand their budding relationship to be — at times frustrating and confusing but usually a matter of joy.

I also did move Jeanne’s age back to 45. I don’t know why that five years makes a lot of difference, but it does. At age 45, I honestly believed I could keep up with a twenty-year-old. (In actuality, I suspect they couldn’t keep up with me. Take that how you will.) Fifty, though? That’s a milestone birthday, and one with superstitious portent of old age.

I’m still far from finished, though. And I’m not sure the novel will clear 60k. (Can I publish an omnibus edition? Or be an outlier with fewer pages and get published? I just don’t know.)

This story is killing me.

I’m doing a major editorial change on Gaia’s Hands again. This story is the bane of my existence and I should just burn it, but I’m compelled to make something of it.

The time table is too compressed, it seems. There’s not enough time to develop Jeanne and Josh with the current setup, because it only runs from March to May 31.

Too little time, I think.

So I’m moving the start date back to October (which is important, because Josh needs to be riding his bike) and keeping the ending at Memorial Day (because there’s a big planting of a food forest to be done, and a horticulturalist wouldn’t plant much later than that.)

I will have to add in stuff.

I still wonder if I can make this story into something.

Struggling with Jeanne and Josh

Weiting Jeanne and Josh negotiating a relationship in Gaia’s Hands is harder than I thought. I’m getting hung up on the age difference, although it intrigued me years ago when I was in the middle of a hypomanic episode.

May-December marriages happen all the time when the man is older than the woman. Although a minority thinks it’s unnatural, society in general accepts it. If the woman is younger, has less education, is just getting settled in life, we have some questions but leave well-enough alone if they look happily married.

Older women/younger men pairings, especially when there’s that much distance between the two (30 years) tend to be dismissed as “gross”. Sociobiologists say this is only natural because men look for older women because of their fertility and women look for protectors — just look at chimps with their harems. The problem is that the primate closest to us, bonobos (miniature chimps) tend to have sex with pretty much everyone and don’t make a big deal of age. Sociobiology has its limits, which is that most practitioners are men and select for what they (as men) want to see that establishes the status quo.

And what if we’re evolving from that exchange of babies for protection? In the US, most women work in the marketplace. Childbearing is held off to later ages, and many choose not to have children. Jeanne is 50 years old and has a steady job and income — Why would he need to be a breadwinner immediately? Why couldn’t she help him through grad school?

But oh my God, what about sex? How could he possibly find her saggy body sexy? Art studios have enlisted the bodies of saggy women for ages, because they’re more interesting to draw. And Josh finds her fascinating because he’s had visions of her in a garden that looks like the Garden of Eden. And Josh, with his slender build and shorter stature, hardly looks like Hollywood material himself.

I have to find the realism and paint them as outsiders at the same time, and this is — well, difficult.

Wish me luck.

Cooling down

Hello cold snap.

It’s 36 degrees out and I’m wearing my Chicago Bubs sweater (see below):

which commemorates my favorite Internet-famous cat, Lil Bub.

I want to stay in all day basking by my fake woodstove and writing. But it’s a school day, and I have to teach.

Oh well.

Rebel Rebel

I’ve decided to be a rebel for NaNoWriMo.

What that means is that the participant does anything but write a novel in those 30 days*. I have two books I’m editing, the problem child Gaia’s Hands (which may be a novella by the time I’m done with it) and Whose Hearts are Mountains when I get it back from my dev editor.

It feels odd not writing a new novel, but it’s not the best use of my time. I need to get this backlog dealt with and ready for possibilities. When these are done, I will have five completed novels (or four and a novella): Whose Hearts are Mountains, Apocalypse, Voyageurs, Prodigies, Gaia’s Hands. (There’s one more novel, Reclaiming the Balance, but I despair over that particular one, and there’s Gods’ Seeds, the one I’m not finishing for NaNo.

It’s time for me to edit. It’s time for me to write shorter items and try to get those published (I have one short story and one flash item published so far, Flourish and Becky Home-Ecky.) It’s time for me to try something else for NaNo.

*******
* The way one counts progress when editing in NaNo is 1 hour = 1000 words. Which is about right, except when I get really stuck.

Writing from the Dark Side, Part 2

Yesterday, I interrogated the scenario my dark side put forth (which involved moonlight and walking in on someone disrobing) and found out it was not about me at all, but was inside the psyche of Jeanne Beaumont, the heroine of Gaia’s Hands. Jeanne felt disturbed by the dream because — oh, hell, let me just show you the passage:

A silver beam from the moonrise sliced through the darkness of her room. In shadows bled of color, Josh stood, the light falling across his face. He tugged his t-shirt off, the beam illuminating a slender chest and burying itself in his dark hair.

“Why are you here?” Jeanne asked, feeling her voice shake.

He met her gaze, his youthful face serious. “For you.”

Jeanne muttered. “I don’t need you,” and turned toward the door to flee.

“You misunderstand.” A smile flitted across his face; the light showing a dimple incongruous to the moment. “It’s my need.”

“No,” Jeanne shook her head, grasping for the door frame to steady herself. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m old enough to be your mother. If I’d started late. This is impossible.”

“If it’s happening, it’s not impossible.” Josh held a hand out —

Jeanne bolted upright from her bed, squinting at her clock’s luminous numbers in the dark. 3:00 AM, the perfect time to have a haunting dream. Josh? She took a panicked breath. And her?

If it’s happening, it’s not impossible, she recalled from the dream.

If it’s happening …

What the hell was happening to her that she began to dream about Josh, that quirky young man she had become friends with?

She knew. He had become more than that quirky young man to her.

He had become compelling to her, and she tried to deny it. “I don’t need you,” she had told him.

But perhaps she did, and he would reject her instead.

********

My subconscious informed me that, in editing Gaia’s hands, I had lost an important aspect of it, the tension (in part sexual, in part fear of rejection) between Jeanne and Josh.

Let’s see Josh’s point of view:

Josh wanted. It seemed a perpetual state for him, so much so that he wondered whether he wanted to be Jeanne’s friend or to bed her. Or both. Or everything. He leaned close to his notepad and wrote automatically, ignoring the lock of hair that habitually fell out of place.

I want to be reckless; he wrote. I want to kiss her with everybody watching in the middle of the cafe. I want to take her clothes off in a room where there are thoughts of only us. I want to know her twenty-five years down the road, even though she’ll be seventy-five to my 47 years.

I should care about the age difference, but it doesn’t bother me. It probably bothers her. I would be her child’s age, if she’d chosen to have children. She’s never married. Maybe she didn’t want to get married.

In my most intimate fantasies, she waits for me. In reality, she holds me at arm’s length, and I don’t know if it’s for now or forever.

I want a guarantee where there are no guarantees.

The vision came to him, the garden in its fullness, and Jeanne standing within, naked. All bountiful curves and sags like an ancient goddess. Does one dare to approach a goddess? He walked toward Jeanne in the garden, slowly and deliberately, each footstep pounding in his ears. He reached out –

The vision drifted out of his grasp.

*****

Why does this come from my dark side? It’s a reflection of how I struggle with my age and face the invisibility that women “of a certain age” (I hate that phrase!) experience. The book is, in part, a biological fantasy about outliers — Jeanne, despite her age, represents a fertility goddess with her preternaturally prolific gardens, and Josh, despite his youth, makes a convincing god of the hunt with the inevitability of his pursuit. That’s in addition to the fantasy elements of Josh’s visions and Jeanne’s preternaturally prolific gardens.

I have to edit this book, bring back to it the tension between the two protagonists, add it to the other tensions and menaces. This is my job, to make these fantasies real and complex.

Writing from the Dark Side

I stood face to face with my dark side last night. I felt a sense of panic, as I always do when facing that mirror, clutching my hair and chanting “this is not me”.

My dark side deals in visions of obsessive seduction, sticky strands of need and betrayal in silent midnight rooms bled of color. It revels in its story: my inevitable fall, my contemplation of suicide.

All of us have a dark side which stands counter to who we believe we are. If we deny it, if we romanticize it, we may fall to it because it demands that we pay attention to it. What we need to do is to accept our dark side because it’s part of us.

I accept my dark side, the sulky drama queen in the mirror, but I do not let it run my life. I have built a satisfying life in the golden light of autumn, with a humorous husband and five cats.

Me, coffee, and cat. This is a good life.

Sometimes I write from my dark side — half-elven children who want to kill their elven fathers, succubi with a pang of conscience, a young man who can kill by touch. I write these with my light side, though, framing these characters in dilemma, in conflict.

Darkness must contrast with light to be appreciated. If the writing contains nothing but darkness, it ceases to be dark and is merely mechanical, a factory of death and gore. The light must be there to be taken away, so that we grieve for the individual trapped in their circumstances.

I look at my dark reflection, the person I most fear, because she has the capacity to ruin my life. I nod, knowing that if I try to annihilate her, I become her. She leans over my shoulder as I write, helping me to add her darkness to my bright words.

Getting Practical about Dreams

Dreams don’t work the way I want them to.

For the last couple nights, I’ve been dreaming that I got picked up by a major publisher, and I felt light and strong and perhaps even validated.

Unfortunately, I know why the dreams occurred, and it wasn’t because of precognition. I’d been working all weekend in moulage, and that’s a very visible thing to be working on, and I got a lot of compliments on it. That translated in my dreams to getting recognition in my other life.

Dreams pick up little fragments of real life and sort them out in a peculiar way. I’ve read that we don’t dream of anything we haven’t encountered in real life. From my experiences, I don’t believe that unless I’ve been in a large underground city whose corridors walled in white glossy formica, accessible by a basement door in an old hunting lodge with a kitchen with avocado appliances.

I interpret my dreams, usually by a Gestalt method, telling the story from the viewpoint of each significant object (human or non) in the dream. What happened in the interpretation of the dream of the hunting lodge became the first draft of my first novel, the one I struggle to re-edit, Gaia’s Hands.

The dream of getting published is easier to interpret: I want to get published. I figure it will be as satisfying as moulaging. I can’t wait to get started.

Another year of Missouri Hope in the Books

Another successful three days of moulage at Missouri Hope.

I haven’t written because I was really busy! I had a crew of three volunteers and my husband, and we managed to moulage about 150 people to go out into the field to play victims of a major tornado.

Here’s a couple examples:

I didn’t get a lot of pictures because I was too busy moulaging.

As you can imagine, we were pretty busy with all of those people to moulage, but I can credit my team with making it a pretty painless experience. Usually we’re several people behind by the time it’s time to place them into the scenario, but we consistently finished on time.

It’s great closing on another successful year! And I’m SO tired!