First there is an ending, then there is no ending, then…?

I can’t figure out how to end this Sue Allen draft. But I need to wrap it up some way. Even if it’s just a shitty first draft, it needs to be a draft, an actual completed thing.

But the thing I thought would be compelling–John comes from the future and kills folks–just isn’t that compelling to me and I’ve now kind of insinuated that he died in the flood. Oops. That’s why picking the end of April 2010 is a bad time for time traveling. Your return trip is going to be soggy.

And I can’t quite settle on what terrible thing Lee is up to, which makes resolving it rather difficult.

I did, today, though, write a cool scene in which John gives a woman a dime from 2009 to prove that he’s from the future, which she then gives to her church, where they dutifully keep it until 2009 only to then have a 2009 dime on their hands. They couldn’t prove it was from 2009 before and once they hit 2009, they can’t prove it’s not from 2009.

Shit like that amuses me. And I want the final thrust of the book to be something like that, because I’ve come to believe that, even if time travel were possible, it wouldn’t matter. People forget, they adapt. And the world is a hard place to change.

I’m reading Brenda Maddox’s Yeat’s Ghosts which is a really good read and not telling me exactly what I’d hoped to know, not that I knew what that was. I’d stop reading, but it’s not like the writing has any direction, so I keep going. Something will come to me, some understanding of the way things should end.

I just need to be patient.

Also, in the future, I should not make fun of Ezra Pound before starting on any reading about Yeats. Ugh.

I’ve Crossed a Border!

My interview with Elizabeth McClellan is up. Not at Pith but at Country Life. Now all I need is for Jack White to write a song about me that he sings to me at Noshville and I can write it up for Bites and Cream and have posted at all four blogs!!!!

I like interviewing McClellan because I really enjoy how her mind works around these ideas and images and concerns. Anyway, check it out. I probably should have asked her more about the naked lady stuff, like, if she’s a judge next year, does she have to read everything naked? But I just thought of that now, so it’s too late.

Chasing Deer

Mrs. W. and I were coming home from our walk, me in a headache-induced walking coma, her in a bout of weirdness. I look down at her and she’s staring across the AT&T yard like she might take off running. I look and there are two white tail deer frolicking in the grass. They see us and hightail it (literally!) toward our house. This is almost too much for Mrs. W. She takes off down the hill. I am trying to anchor her back.

Her whole body just turns into one giant nose. I don’t know how else to explain it, but if you have a dog, you know they always smell more than you, but that there are times when their whole bodies are devoted to smelling something. Ears are disregarded. Chests heave quickly so that air can move as rapidly as possible across all scent sensors. The fronts of their bodies move wildly from side to side while their tail acts as counter-weight. Nothing matters as much as the smell.

And then, there, in the neighbor’s yard, one of the deer stands watching us. I guess waiting to see if we’re going to get out of the meadow so that they can return. I yell, almost unconsciously, and it leaps off toward the creek and is gone.

Man, I’d make a shitty hunter. “Oooooo!!!!! There it is! Look, look, look!” I’d shout, every time.