Working on My Play List

I’m working on my playlist for Elias this evening and realizing that, not only do I like a lot of songs, but there are a lot of songs that I like just a second of so much, like there’s something very nice about the opening or about the piano part or about how the horns kick in. I’m calling it “Evening Commute with Mixed Feelings.”

I didn’t get as much thinking about chapter five done as I wanted to, though I have some ideas about what should go into it.

It’s weird the amount of time a brain can spend being all “this sucks, I suck, I suck as a writer, suck suck suck. Oh my god, did you see her webpage? I wonder if I’ll have a webpage that nice when I have a novel.” It gets a little difficult.

Huddle House, Literally

I tried to get into work this morning, but I got as far as the Kroger and said, “Well, fuck it, that was scary enough for one day,” and I came home. I did, however, see this right at the garage door, a thousand tiny bird footprints. I have to believe they were huddled by the door for warmth.

Or they were waiting to eat our brains.

You never can tell with birds. Today has involved a lot of curling up on the couch and now the Butcher has gone to get some fire wood so that mammals who want to can curl up by the fire.

That would be me.

I have finished chapter four. It went pretty well once I decided to include the whole bit about Hannah having to go to Mississippi to pick up a baby.

I need to let chapter five stew in my mind some, but I am out of thread and the extra one I bought appears to have no end. It is my luck to have found the mobius strip of thread, but I did.

Chapter five is the last chapter in my outline, which is a shame because it means either my book is very short or my structure is all wrong. It also means something for the second draft, I feel, but I’m not sure what. I am nervous about the second draft, how to do it, how to even know what to do.

I envy people with their MFAs just because I imagine they have someone to say “Oh, your second draft, it should to blah blah blah” or “Oh, you need to work on pacing” or whatever and you would know what those things meant.

Though I suppose there is no guarantee. You could go to a really crappy MFA program where everyone told you you needed to work on pacing, but no one told you how. That would suck.

I’m now going to envision an MFA person who is sitting there contemplating her last chapter wishing she hadn’t gone to school so that she was not faced with knowing how to define all these words, but still no way of knowing if she was doing them right.

Second drafts.

I just don’t know. It feels like you could get lost for years in a second draft.

Briefly on the Arizona Situation

Over at Pith, I’m talking about how, until we hear from Loughner that he was influenced by Palin, we need to shut up on the blaming of her. He was an anti-government dude–during the Bush years, people who knew him thought he was a left-winger, during the Obama years, people thought he was far-right.  If he says that he picked up a gun because he thought no one else would heed Palin’s call or that he’d been influenced by her truth (like the UU shooter in Knoxville said he was influenced by right-wing talking heads), then, yes, let’s talk about how her rhetoric caused this. But until then? We don’t know.

And, if the Gawker reports are true, it’s unlikely that he was influenced by Palin, since he appear to have had a years-long grudge against Giffords because she made a fool out of him the first time he met her. Which is not to say that he didn’t build up a thick series of anti-government, anti-Semitic, gold and silver currency loving justifications why he had to take her down. But, if you’ve been a woman, you know that laughing at a man, depending on the man, can be a sure way to get on his violent side. It would not surprise me at all if this was the germ from which the whole thing started.

But, like I said, we have to wait to see how it plays out.