Recalibration

I’ve been working on a blog post for the better part of a month. It’s ballooned up to over 4,000 words, half of which I’m certain I’ll cut. It’s a little disappointing to me that I don’t work more quickly. As a word-person I know all about The Process, and yet I still strive to skip past it whenever possible.

I’d intended this blog to be more of a freewheeling writing experiment, not A Portfolio of Fine Writing. But amid this there are still some stories worth taking a little time to tell really well. So that’s what I’ve been working on; it’s related to a surprise trip I took earlier this fall. Maybe you’ll read it and think, this took you a month to write?

Sometimes it just takes a while to find the thread. Often there are multiple threads, and like fishing lines (am I killing this metaphor?) they pull some surprising creatures out of your subconscious. I hope to publish this first thing soon, so that I can move on to the second and maybe third stories that emerged during the process.

For those of you that are also word-people, you may already know about Mercury retrograde, the three-week period during which communications run a high risk of going haywire. It’s a time of backtracking, and usually hell on anyone who relies on email or other communication technology. We’re in the thick of it now, and I’ve been hoping to use it to rework some aspects of my writing process and maybe overall strategy.

We’ll see how I’m feeling about that come November 19, when the retrograde period ends. If you also like to keep an eye on the stars, I write infrequently about this stuff on my astrology blog.

I’ve been lax about reading lately; the last novel I finished was The Most Fun We Ever Had, which I started out disliking, gradually got into, but then disliked again by the end. I still haven’t finished Les Misérables.

Most recently I finished a graphic novel titled Are You Listening?, devouring it in an afternoon as is my usual style with graphic novels. I don’t know how to do it differently but I feel like I should spend more time with them somehow. I wish the panels were blown up and posted, maybe sometimes in pairs or triples, on enormous museum walls, and you could walk through the novel physically like a giant exhibit.

I really can’t complain about the comparative convenience and much lower expense of having it in a book form. Maybe I just need to read more of them to train myself in a new habit of taking more time with each panel and looking up once every few pages, rather than emerging from a blanket cocoon with only vague memories of the plot and an aching neck that’s been craned in the same position for three hours.

Recalibration has been the theme lately, maybe: write faster, read slower. And when writing is a form of processing, like it is for me, it’s only natural that it takes some time to polish.