I compounded my third-act despair from earlier this week by spending Thursday and Friday baking instead of writing: My friend and baking idol David Bauer (of the Farm and Sparrow bakery in Marshall, NC) was teaching his “Rustic Breads for the Brick Oven” class at North House, and I was delighted to be able to attend the class and learn (or begin to learn, or begin to begin to learn) some of his techniques.
However:
Despite my best efforts at self-sabotage, I set myself up at the Java Moose for a couple of hours this morning and managed to scribble out the last few scenes. Wonderfully, the characters decided to stage a completely different conclusion than the one I had outlined for them. I like theirs better.
So:
Month One Success! Hurrah!!!
I’ve wandered into some weird doldrums now that I’ve hit Act III. The pressure to generate action and suspense seems to have knocked the wind out of my prose. I will be able to fix this in a subsequent draft, but it’s discouraging.
Then again– an unanticipated, seemingly-insurmountable challenge is what any Act III is supposed to contain. Perhaps I’m caught in a meta-drama. In that case, victory must be just around the corner!
This is my first time keeping strictly to Syd Field’s four-chunk formula of Act I, Act IIA up to the midpoint, Act IIB from the midpoint to the reveal, and Act III. When I wrote the outline for the Pismo story, I was just taking for granted that the four-chunk thing would work for me—it seemed reasonable, but it was still basically an act of faith.
I have to say, though, that both last week while writing the midpoint and today while writing the reveal, I felt the chunk-break transitions so strongly that it almost seemed like I should stick my arms in the air and yell “Woo!” I hope at least a little of that exhilaration manages to trickle through to the reader…
After missing my Week Two goal last Friday, I was in such a state of pessimism that I didn’t bother setting a carrot for this week: I figured I’d just take what I could get. As things worked out, though, I have just wrapped up the second half of Act 2 and am ready to write the reveal and roll into Act 3 tomorrow. (None of this is a coincidence: Rachel has been taking care of the girls almost full time all week to let me get caught up.)
So: A Friday celebration! Fortunately, there was a ready-made one waiting for us over at North House: A barbecue and contra dance that the girls theoretically slept all afternoon to get rested up for. The beauty and glee that characterize my family life right now are in bizarre contrast to the cynical vulgarity of the Pismo story—but you’ll find out all about that as soon as I can get a decent edit put together.
We’ve now driven three hundred miles north to Grand Marais Minnesota, to get the girls here in time to help prepare for the annual Solstice Pageant at North House.
I did yesterday’s writing in a wooden gazebo overlooking Lake Superior. Mostly this had the effect of underlining how immune I am to my surroundings when I’m working. For all I knew or cared, I could just as well have been writing in the basement of a chemical factory, or within sight of a recently-burned-over parking lot. Of course, emerging into an absurdly beautiful setting works as a nice surprise and reward when I’m done.
When my daughters were first born, friends used to ask me how parenthood was going. My standard response was, “Parenthood is easy but not if I have to do anything else at the same time.”
It seems that project is exactly similar: Writing is easy but balancing it against the rest of my life is difficult. It’s not that I’m easily distractable; it’s just that I have a series of commitments (husband, father, handyman) that rank higher in priority and urgency. This is how I want it, of course– I wouldn’t want my career to supersede my family.
The project is likely to be similar in another way too– just as the generosity of my extended family makes the parenthood juggling act possible, so it will probably go with this project.
Today’s case in point: We’re down at my parents’ house for Father’s Day and Rachel and my parents have taken over everything else while I have hacked out my first scenes in four days. Ahh, that feels better.
Got sick, fell behind. No guitar-restringing or cowboy yodeling this evening. Alas.
iPod owners all eventually become subject to a pronoid form of apophenia, in which they become convinced that that the shuffle-play feature can read their minds.
Speech-recognition software users all eventually become subject to the paranoid version of this, in which they become convinced that the software is mocking them.
My father auditioned an early (1992-ish) cut of speech-recognition software intended for medical-transcription use. Whenever witnesses were present, the software interjected the word ‘testicle’ at least once every ten words. When witnesses were absent, this behavior completely disappeared. We eventually had to purge the word ‘testicle’ from the dictionary. Thereafter, if the dictation at hand required use of that particular word, the user was forced to spell it.
The software has improved immeasurably since then, but the curse has not lifted entirely. I have felt the clouds gathering for several days, and I quit today’s dictation session early when I spoke the words ‘pulled taut’ into the headset and the words ‘Pol Pot’ appeared on the monitor.
If mine were a more rational mind, I would doubtless ignore errors like these as statistical anomalies. But I am an engineer, and thus an implicit believer in black magic.
In the course of doing some research for the Pismo story, I came across the following items:
Town Gas: Evidently, natural gas was not in common use in the U.S. until after the Second World War. Each town manufactured its own gas– town gas– out of what was available: most commonly coal, but also rutabagas. (I would use rutabagas at any rate.)
Wood Gas: A cursory googling will yield a number of cars retrofitted to run on wood. Big tanks of wood.
Homemade Gasoline: This seems obvious in retrospect, but if you have a source of crude oil in your backyard and you rig up a makeshift still, you can make your own gasoline. It’s easier than making moonshine.
Every week needs a carrot, so:
If I finish the first half of Act Two by Friday evening, I’ll allow myself to re-string my Silvertone. (Few things are more satisfying than new strings.)