One thousand words

Ray Bradbury wrote a thousand words a day from the time he was 12. Michael Moorcock sat and wrote from his early teens. Everyone agrees, you just sit and write and let the characters lead you to the places they need to go.

Wow, what a tall order. Yesterday, I agreed to rest and sleep and allow myself simply to absorb the freakin’ good fortune that leaves me with food and shelter and a soft bed an a sweet beau and a good dog and wow, blessed fortune. I don’t believe it, and I’m terrified sometimes. Often times.

I bought a painting yesterday. A good fraction of the extra bit I try to put down on the mortgage each month, spent on art instead. Meant to help quell the terror, uplift me and allow me to accept the fortune that put me in a house and home.

How many words is that? I’m up to 155. Well, a thousand isn’t that far away.

Friday we went to a photo shoot, Denis was helping set the stage for steampunk modeling, and four or five men with big cameras, two very small models. The stylist had come up with these fabulous collars and bustles that dress up an ordinary little black dress into something from steampunk meets buck rogers how we’d re-imagine it, Ming meets Vogue. I wore heat of summer steampunk western casual, a fluffy shirt over a corset, a mid-knee skirt, boots, a collar made of the tiny porcupine quills and beads.

When I getting out jewelry, I refound the necklace Blue made for me some 25 years ago. Blue was elder, hard to tell age when people are living on the streets, but he was definitely over 50.

You’ve seen someone like him. Craggy, brimmed hat against the sun, travel-worn but clean and neat light-colored shirt and canvas pants, boots, bedroll and cases of jewelry ready to show. Stands tall, at home in his dusty skin. He’s not down on his luck, he’s made his own luck. A sort of luck that won’t drop him too far if he falls.

Blue hitchhiked between Santa Fe and Austin, trading his work at music festivals for food and substances. He was a master at collecting stubs and re-manufacturing cigarettes and joints. He carved antler and found objects into these fantastic sculptures with moving parts that floated on the collarbone.

Imagine a thunderbird, with articulated wings, body, head and tail. Inlaid with crushed blues and greens of lapis, turquoise, malachite. Beautiful inspired work, by a man who sits quietly in shady doorways and watches how things move, and collects the bits and parts and pieces from the roadsides to twist discarded rope, bones and antlers, lost beads and findings. Hand drills and super glue and improvised vises. With stunning results. The birds lifted the spirit. Hawks, doves, the phoenix, owls. I think there were other shapes, but I remember the birds, the tiny feathers.

He was a calming influence, I think. I learned later that many of the men were very careful only to show me their best sides. It’s not that the drunken incoherent rages didn’t happen. I just didn’t see them. There was a deep undercurrent of drug addiction that went far beyond my trading food scavenged from the food pantry for cigarettes and beer. But I enjoyed talking to him, learning of his travels. I don’t remember specific stories. I remember him describing how much he truly loved women, their ripe roundness, that in summer they smelled like ripe tomatoes.

I remember that Cher collected his work from a gallery in Santa Fe, and I was not astonished, I completely believed this to be true. Someone has got to catalog Cher’s jewelry collection, she has collected many fine pieces from great artists over these many many years.

He made me a piece. I was happy to let him work on a piece for me. I imagined some fancy piece from nature. I received a simple jar shape with my initials inlaid in blue, a tiny hole in the top for a blue cord. The body of one of the birds; no wings, no tail feather, no head, no eyes, just a simple jar. A slightly rounded rectangle, but no curves.

Names are funny things, for women, mutable, one receives a husband’s name, discards it when neither of you are capable of living up to your best intentions. And here it was, a body, labeled TKD. A vessel for all my best intentions that could never take flight. I wore it for years as one of several beaded necklaces that carried different remembrances and meanings, never quite realizing it was an irrefutable mark of hippiedom and traveling life. Until 15 years later, I was working a day job, the perfectly-coiffed blonde receptionist from Salt Lake City made some comment about the complete authenticity of my “granola” look and I wondered just what that meant, I’d tried to clean up … and touched my necklaces, a combination of hand-made pottery and fimo and antler.

I lost track of Blue. I’d asked about him, when I saw another of our little temporary tribe. He got a place down on South Congress, at the Don-Mar motor courts. Word was he was deep into heroin again and sharing it with the hookers who wandered the street in some sort of double death wish of the wasting disease of AIDS coupled with hungry skin and bones. I never was brave enough to head down to that area and investigate, I was busy escaping South Congress by attending the community college and working a job in a huge government facility, while continuing to wear the hand-carved fetishes around my neck.

And with that I cross into 955 words, making me think that 1000-a-day is not a difficult task at all. And in my way of being oh-so-easy-on-myself, scared of scaring off the potential writer, it’s still a weekly goal for a year. Happy, oh-so-happy, and thank you Blue for being part of that initial growth spurt of my young adult scavenging years. Helps me not be terrified, if, when, I end up on the streets again it’ll be OK. In the meantime, I give thanks for this great place to grow and create.

Deep in the land of single-wides and spring fed swimming pools

In writing class, I practiced character sketches. I don’t want to be bound to human characters, so I challenged myself to write from the viewpoint of a plant.

Stone water tank

Looping around the road construction on the way back to the motor court, we noticed a large stone tank in the middle of a crowd of dilapidated single-wides on the high lonesome prairie.

A bit later, looking at archive pictures of the Big Bend area, there was a picture of a very similar stone tank with an explanation of how the settlers found springs and built tanks.

That tank? May be spring fed. “Yup, here we are in the land of single-wides with spring fed swimming pools.”

And from that idea, these paragraphs bubbled up:

It was midnight, and she rustled as the owl landed, shook her leaves, and accepted the weight on her branches. She followed the owl’s gaze searching the scrubby land for any movement, searching for possums and tasty treats.

Shadows from the distant bright moon danced across the landscape as the clouds parted. The owl launched off, flying fast, not swooping towards the ground, heading directly away from … what? As the tallest tree for miles, she could see great distances over the windswept plain.

Nothing. There was a whole lot of nothing. In all the many years she’d stood sentinel over this land, the spring had attracted deer and foxes and mice to sip a drink of cool water bubbling from deep in the soil.

She remembered when she was a seedling, then a sapling, twining her roots deep into the rocks where the cool clear water tickled. As her shadow grew, traveling tribes came for the spring water and rested a spell under her branches for shade.

She looked at the tiny sod house to the right, which she’d watched being scraped out of the meager prairie all those many years ago. The home builders toiled mightily with mules and sharp blades to scrape stones from the ground, put seeds into the dust, and stacked the stones around the spring to build a tank. The others came furtively by the light of the moon.

Thinking back, way back, to that time of the bright flowers blooming, and the anger of the traveling tribe denied access to their spot. And the fire, the hot fire. It scorched her lower branches, but left the home builders unable to move, stretched out across the staked plains, until the coyotes came and howled and tore at their flesh and the big cats ran away with their white bones.

And still the spring burbled and filled the tank. The flowers bloomed. Travelers filled their pouches and rested in her shade. Until this past time of cold, when the white snow tickled her leaves. The warm time came again, but the rain didn’t fall, the flowers didn’t bloom. The spring was dry. Her deepest roots could barely find any water to sip, and none reached the surface for the visitors.

But she couldn’t follow the owl. She must stay here, waiting for the rain, waiting for the spring.

Lightning strikes …

Photo from: http://www.duskyswondersite.com/tag/lightening/

… but in a controlled manner

“Anyone can write one book, and perhaps even sell it, and in the rarest of circumstances,
become famous from it—because lightning does strike. To make a career of writing, though,
you must take up the burden of making lightning strike regularly, where and when you want
it.”

http://www.catnip4writers.com/tools/Lisle-Create-A-Plot-Clinic.pdf

Practice practice practice

Ira Glass points out the beautiful conundrum that faces creative work. At first, we’re not that good. We know what is good, we know what we want to achieve, but our first efforts fall short. Our choices? Quit, or practice.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners …”

Homophone? Who you callin’ a sound-alike?

Feminine whiles?

Quick week here, finishing up the Tudors, coupled with a bit of excellent serendipity when PBS shows a story on how the King James Bible blasted its way into English-speaking culture.

This story reminds me, again, that publishing might be too easy.

And that too often, at home and at work, I’m full speed ahead, quick and dirty, and not taking enough time with the details.

Vin Suprynowicz takes a book to task for poor editing in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/-i-resemble-that-remark-127085973.html?ref=973

Has poor editing ever made you pick up your red pen, then finally put down a book?

What’s the funniest glitch you ever saw?