Time to Write

A lot of people have been asking me about my book writing project. It is time to tell you about the hell this writer goes through, some days, as I scrawl out the next 60,000 words or so. For the love of Mike, don't do it to yourself unless you are sure you can handle your own insanity for about 5 months. The cut off date for delivery, of my new love, is August 3 (this year). 

So what is it like? 

It is always in my head. The next chapter, the correct format for the bibliography, or what I am missing down at the beach when it was 70 degrees today, in my little village on the Puget Sound. It rolls around inside the cranium, like incessant jabberwocky. The ability to be lured away from the laptop is slapped away, like a mosquito, since I also have a netbook, so any forays down to the beach, or for a walk along the Chambers Creek Trail, will include a backpack with the netbook , water bottle and a pound of organic red grapes. 

Technology encompasses all that I do and there is little escape from The Book. When I am driving, I think about it, and since the digital tape recorder was invented, my car feels like the one that Deep Throat drove around D.C. in, recording his memories of the White House antics of that president, from the past. Nixon? Remember him?

Friends call asking what I am doing, beginning around 7 PM. They know what is going on here and after a while the conversations, may get boring for them, since I do not discuss what I have written, with anyone, until it is done. Then it gets handed over to an editor, and the real work begins, for me. Which is watching bits and pieces, of the tome, being thrown into the Recycle bin, and creating new paragraphs and chapter re-arrangements for your reading pleasure. A most painful process, which can be compared to that moment you see your spouse or lover, move the final piece of clothing out of the closet, once the love affair ends. 

A writer's life is a weird one. I work alone with no one telling me what to do or how to do it. It is a flash of inspiration, an ability to pull out the superlative expression which ties together noun and verb, creating an intimacy between writer's mind and reader's heart which goads me into submission, of this love of writing. 

Where do the words come from and when do the lovers know the right moment to allow their souls to touch one another? That, I cannot answer for you. Only that it does happen without preconceived expectations and absolute faith, in the moment of movement, or the words arrive to create perfect harmony. 

Writer's lives are very simple ones, when they are writing. Quiet, sometimes, and other times I need to have The Stones, or Lady Antebellum or Andre Bocelli singing, Je vis pour elle, with  Helena Segara. Depends on the mood and the mind. Food and drink are secondary thoughts, when preceded by intense concentration. Many times, that intensity expands into another page, or another, before I withdraw from the keyboard. Other times, I slam the top down, grab the Ipod and run out the door, heading along the dirt road, and into the forest, next to the house. 

Sometimes, just to jump into the woods and sit down against an old fir tree, that looks like it has been around for a couple hundred centuries, is all I need to relieve the intensity, or to celebrate an incredible few pages that were gifts from the cosmos.  Just to breath and release the tension from the heart, which benevolently bestowed another 5 or 6 pages of words, without me knowing how they got there is all that I need to whisper a prayer of gratitude.

A book takes on an energy of its own, unlike, any other book written. 

The topics and the seminal seed for the book begins to grow with each sentence and, like a new lover, you never know where you will end up, as you dance into the relationship. Sometimes, the excitement from seeing the number of words written to date, can destroy a relationship with the new manuscript. No longer do I get excited as the numbers grow from 1000 to 5000 to 20,000, in my toolbar. I will pay the dues, for my false pride, once the editing begins. 

I have thousands of words on paper, in boxes, and on thumb drives, that will never see the light of day, in a published manuscript. There are probably 4 good books of poetry sitting there, that have aged over time, which may never be printed, bound and sold on Amazon.com. 

A writer, like any artist or musician, practices for years. Writes, edits, creates crap, creates a work of pure genius, and yet none of those things may ever be known to anyone else but to their creator. Many of us put those works in boxes, or on hard drives, and look at them once in a while, or pull the oil paintings, out of boxes, and gaze at them, then smile or wince. 

I keep mine, like you may keep yours, not because they are abysmal or admirable but because they are authentic. Me, at a time and place in my life, when the authentic self emerged and wrote a story or a poem about something pivotal, emerging from my soul's consciousness. That is all they were then. Whispers of memories which moved me silently along life's path.

Hours? How many hours do I write a day? A lot and sometimes none. Research takes up a good bit of any book and I do not care what you are writing. There are times when I am writing poetry, where I can spin off into a thesaurus for an hour, forgetting the original word I was looking up, as the love of a new word, the way it winds around my lips and enters the world, lunges into the room as spoken word. The promise to self and goal is 35 pages a week, which is facile for me.

Put me on a plane about 100 times a year, or a train or bus and let me stay in hotel rooms around the planet, and two books a year would be easy to produce. For some reason, unplugging from a home base and throwing myself into the planetary, uncharted paradigm, releases the visionary, fecundity imagination inside. The great thing about it is that anyone could be in that hotel room, with me, with the stereo or a meeting going on, and my tunnel vision kicks in and the writing just flows. Writers are not anti-social. We have ears, even though we are typing or hold pens in hand.

So, the life of this writer is variable and rich. If I stilled live in a big city, I would be hitting the streets around 10pm to eat dinner and go listen to music somewhere. Now, the stereo gets flipped on, when I am done, and I dance around for a half hour or so to re-energize and shake all the words out of my head. 

It is a writer's life and although self-indulgent, it is rich and varied and filled with lovely friends and family, who understand there are actions and desires which can be fulfilled, if you are on your life's path, doing what you love, and diving into its depth, without taking a breath. The breath comes at the end, when the creation is complete and through the creation, I learn a little more about myself and humanity. 

The impulse to write comes from my soul, of course. How can one not follow their soul when it consistently bellows one word: write, paint or sing? Am I a good writer? I no longer visit that presumptive question since who art appeals to is a big crap shoot. You never know who will like what you offer the world, all you know is it has to come out and is sometimes shared. I stopped worrying about it, when I read one of Van Gogh's letters, when I was in Arles, France. I sat at a table, in the same square where he painted Cafe Terrace at Night. The Cafe terrace is still the same now, as it was when he painted it. 

In the letters, Van Gogh writes: "My only anxiety is what can I do...could I not be of use and good for something?

And in a picture, I wish to say something that would 

console as music does...The world only concerns me

in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it and 

out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures, not made to please a certain tendency in art, but to express sincere human feeling." 

So, tonight the writer writes, the wind blows across the Sound, and someone is sitting in Arles, in the same chair I sat in, a few years ago.

I look at the pages written today. Reach for my copy of, The Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, and slip in John Cruz's, Acoustic Soul CD. Time to write.