Senior Fictioneers.

I haven’t slept much this week and tonight is the night I will sleep, sleep, sleep, or, well, sleep until my alarm chimes at 7:13 and it’s already 11:33. Tomorrow is Thursday, and I have an information session to present to 80 high school students on behalf of the Admission Office and a novel to finish and a reading to attend and coffee to drink, so can I just ever so quickly say that I kind of absolutely feel so terribly blessed to be apart of this absurd group of writers?

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present CC’s senior fiction majors complete with our ever patient prof Steven Hayward and our block’s guest of honor Rawi Hage (his eerie novel Cockroach is currently in the final battle of the 2014 Canada Reads competition). Sadly three of our people were in bed when this photograph was taken, but so it goes. Writers like their beds.

I never laugh like that in photos. It must mean something.

You know, I may whine and moan and cry about workshop. About my doubts. About the cost of my education. About thesis. About graduating. About this whole bloody thing. But, seriously, dude, look at that photo. I am blessed, buoyed by a stellar collection of misfits nudging me to my (tentatively) final page.

And when we leave our warm campus and open quads and snow-crusted Pikes Peak, when we leave mandated workshops and required parties, I can think back and remember the day we stumbled outside to take a photograph in front of the tree. I can think about how, so genuinely, I was happy.

I graduate in two months. Take my word for it: college is rather lovely.

Raw Roads.

I want to retreat. I want to hide. I want to do what I did in August 2011, when I put up a virtual wall and didn’t nudge a single brick until 2013. Like every second semester senior I know, I’m knotted and bruised–horrified and excited and proud and out of my damn mind. We’re less than a week away from March. Two weeks from Wednesday, I fly home for Spring Break and quality puppy time. And then April will sweep in, quickly followed by May. Halfway through May I walk on a stage, and then I drive away. I’ll drive to California and I don’t know what will happen after.

And that’s okay.

But, you know, I can recognize it’s okay but still feel like my skin is being pressed to a flame, right?

My rewrite isn’t a rewrite. It’s a rough (roughroughrough) draft. I don’t know how this happened. Back in November–or was it December?–back in that holiday mass, the original plot was pushed over the edge. Nine years and rejection and senior year and a professor urging me to write something new and an idea clucking at my ears, and I was ready to shove this absurd story aside. Ready to close a drawer, lock it shut, and open a new one. I cried a stupid amount. Like cried-cried. But then, within days, something clicked and a character was eliminated and a new character added in and the plot shifted, and suddenly I was rewriting and all was (relatively) okay.

But then this past weekend, I cried and cried and cried. Lately, it feels like, in my attempt to make the book better, my attempt to follow the urge, I broke the book. It’s so new. It’s so raw. It’s so doesn’t resemble anything it once was. It’s Scary Land. Last on Friday, finally, I hit a low, and I (again) cried and cried and cried. I told my mom I was done. It’s over, I said. But on Saturday–like in November or December–on Saturday, at approximately 6:57 PM, when I was reading and sweating on a treadmill at 24 Hour Fitness, a new thought arrived–a new thought that somehow gives me hope, two ideas that might just pull me through the end of this draft.

This new draft.
This rough draft.
This book that holds distant traces of the old, but, in truth, is ultimately new.

I want to hide. I want to retreat. Because I’m in new-new drafting mode. In this mode, the last thing I want is exposure. Which is hard when you’re in senior seminar–in workshop with fifteen other writers, fifteen other well meaning writers yacking and analyzing and mocking and praising my fresh pages. Beautiful intensive workshop, when all I want is to put up my walls and write, write, write. I think it’s good. The challenge. The vulnerability. So I’m going with the flow, giving and receiving for another two weeks (surprise, my draft’s deadline is in two weeks). I’m in limbo, flailing in this odd place, the 130 page slump, flailing and trying to dance with the workshop, to listen, listen and take
it in and set it aside and not let the praise and hate stump me. I can do it. If I try. I can love it. If I let myself.

I meet Zadie Smith tomorrow. That’s cool.

So yeah, my mind is retreat-hide-retreat land, and my life is EXPOSEVULNERABLEEXPOSE. And I’m dealing with it. I’m dealing with it with pizzazz. I’m, you know, driving these raw roads, pretending to be a pro. Funny, right?

Right now, that’s all I have to say.

Happy almost Tuesday.

Park City, Utah.

Park City, Utah. I landed in Salt Lake City on Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday I was sick as you can be without being sick enough to merit a trip to urgent care. Park City, Utah. On Thursday, it rained and rained and rained and the sky slammed with light and thunder. It’s February. We’re at 7000 ft. A summer monsoon in the winter? What an oddity. The rain eventually turned to hail. Monday afternoon, I return to Colorado for Block 6. Seminar. Workshop.

But right now, I’m here. Park City, Utah. With my family. Supposedly, with time to spare.

I have a tendency to do this thing. This thing where I stack my “vacations” with expectations–thousands of words on a page, hours dedicated to sweating, books to read, random tasks that have been sitting in my extended to-do list for longer than I dare to admit. So, I do this thing. And then I get sick. Or I get lured into the leisure of idleness. Or my family’s craziness sweeps me into their tide. And I think I need to stop doing this thing, because I only set myself up for irritation, kicking myself for not filling my quota.

The rough draft of my thesis (novel) is due in less than four weeks. The 40,000 word mark is on the horizon, swimming in the triple digits page wise, so, really, I’m doing fine. But I’m at this horrific place in the draft where I’m unsure of the remaining trajectory. I’ve done outline after outline–traditional, emotional, scene lists–but somehow, regardless, I’m still treading mud.

Obviously I know the solution: write. Press on. Move forward, don’t flinch, push to the next moment. I know the solution. I do. But the last two days, since recovering from the flu of doom, I’ve refused to put what I know to practice. Why? To torture myself. To torture those around me. To milk my fears, or whatever you want to call the emotional habit to not write when I know that’s all I need to do. If I choose the wrong path for the book’s second half, well, that’s fine. I can go back and edit, revise, rewrite (as I always do). But I won’t know what’s right or wrong until I put the words to the page.

My family is out skiing. I’m not. One too many freak accidents on the slopes have deterred me away from strapping my feet into a board. Plus, ballet is too important to me (even more so now as it’s my last semester with the free opportunity to bend at the barre) to put my legs at risk of injury. And, well, I’m in crunch time: write, write, write. Right? Take risks. Write. Look at photos of my bookshelf waiting for me back home in Colorado for inspiration. Stare at the snow. Stare out a clear window blank eyed until a guy passes by and he stares back and I keep staring and he waves and I wave too. Write. Write some more.

I’m sorry this blog has turned into a relentless echo. I’m saying the same things in slightly altered forms month after month. My brain is saturated in this pursuit, in attempting to retell this one meek story (again). My life is an echo. Is that a bad sign?

A week or so ago, the CC Senior Class Committee sent an email to all graduating seniors, informing us that we walk the stage in a hundred days, that our year’s quote has been chosen. A quote that I think is kind of perfect.

“Now go, and make interesting mistakes; make amazing mistakes;
make glorious and fantastic mistakes; break rules.
Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.”
– Neil Gaiman

Park City, Utah. Two more days.

Words to Remember.

“Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.”
–Bonnie Friedman

Ass in the chair. Fingers on the keys. Why can’t it be that simple?
I have more difficulties than I can count.
Just. Must. Write, write, write.

And sometimes play in the snow. And sometimes freak out that you only have four more months of seeing that certain building every day. And sometimes spend too much time hiding behind Netflix. And sometimes water log your books by reading in bed every night. And sometimes feel like this rewrite first draft was the worst decision of your life. But then, sometimes, just fucking write.

snowsnowsnow

Only three days left in January. Is that weird? I think that’s weird. Yesterday, I was sprawled out on my bedroom floor, scribbling in a notebook while downstairs my siblings counted down to the New Year. That feels like yesterday. That feels like months ago. It’s been a weird, full month. I taught. I wrote (some 20,000 words). I ran. I plied. I interviewed more applicants. I tutored. I freaked about the future once or, okay, two times. And I remembered something critical: I like winter.

I really, really like winter.

I like the quiet. I like the layers. I like the crunch beneath my boots and the skid of my tires and the rumble of the heater. (I don’t like the cost of winter, because oh my goodness, my electric bill is double what it was in September.) I like how it (kinda) transforms my (kinda) crummy street into a (kinda) homey neighborhood. I like falling asleep to a snows soft so soft fall then waking to whitewhitewhite from the blizzard in the night. I like the excuse to wear giant coats and hats and to hide in bed with a book. I like the nesting, the way the words flow. I like how the snow is like magic: magic writing glitter MAGIC. I like the night drives, just you and the storm, the snow like shooting stars in my headlights. I like feeling like all is right: it’s January and I live in Colorado and it’s snowing, it’s cold.

Colorado isn’t always snowy. South Park is misleading. Its reputation, however, of sunny clear days is based on truth. As is its mood swings. Sunday: sixty degrees and bright. Tuesday: -2 and bright from all the white. I preferred Tuesday’s style. It makes me anxious when it’s beautiful and warm (because 60 is warm after 10) in January. Not normal. Not okay. (Hot weather makes me anxious in the summer too. It might just be the heat, not the season.) During my first January in Colorado (2010), I swear it never pushed past thirty (it probably did, but whatever). Now, you never know. Now, the west is in a killer drought (don’t even get me started on the tragedy of California). But even if there wasn’t a desperate need for moisture, for snow, for rain, for melt, I would still love snow. I would still adore winter.

Is it weird that I equate snow with warmth? Not heat. Warmth.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I’m kind of obsessed with the weather.

In other news, my rewrite is so entirely abstracted from the original draft that I’m hesitate to even call it a rewrite. It’s a first draft. That’s what it is. And I’m 25,000 words in and it’s kind of wonderful and rather horrific and feels so, so, so good (well, when it’s flowing right, otherwise, well, that’s a post for another night).