deeplyshallow // away

away

Every so often the things that I take for granted — not even consciously so, just indifferently so — sneak up and surprise me with what was there all along. Today as I settled in at my desk at work, poking around the web to see what has happened over the weekend (nobody famous has died, unless you count the world’s oldest blogger), I found a photograph of Venice as seen from the sky. I have of course known for as long as you have known that there is a city on the other side of the world that appears to be floating, but I think I just realized that there is a city on the other side of the world that appears to be floating. It isn’t, of course — Venice is built on an archipelago, a chain of over one hundred islands — but in that photograph you can’t see the islands. The illusion is a complete one. We have built a city, and it rests on the sea, and we traverse it in boats.

I have not written here in some weeks. There is nobody to apologize to for this. Nobody pays me to do this, or holds me to deadlines. But anyone who has had a blog feels a little tug when a few days have passed and the content has grown stale. I would like to say that I have not written because I have been furiously at work on the novel, but that is a half-truth at best. I have been distracted and caught up in other things, that is the truth. Work has sent me to another city a few times. I’ve slept in a hotel with marshmallow-soft pillows. I hate marshmallow-soft pillows. I have written more about Eleanor, a couple of very promising sketches that involve lightning and heartache, and I have been mulling two decisions about the novel which may a) necessitate rewriting the nearly fifty thousand words I have so far compiled, and b) result in the book being less of a novel and more of a kaleidoscope.

In the past I worked less-demanding jobs. You could walk away from these jobs at the end of your day, and forget about them until the start of the next. During the hours that sprawled out between, I would write as much as I could. I wrote my first, and still longest, novel in three months’ time in 1998. The second book took five or six months; the third took eight.

Eleanor is six years old this fall, and thoroughly incomplete.

Writing in those vacant hours between work days has become a terrific feat, if I can pull it off. I am getting old enough now that I take my work very seriously, and as such, it comes home with me every night, and lingers on the weekends. Detaching from it long enough to write from the head of a conflicted woman, from one of many points-of-view that she holds throughout her life, is so involved that it takes a couple of hours just to come down from my workday. By then I’m often worn thin, and incapable of writing for a sustained period of time, if at all.

This isn’t to say that work is the only thing slowing my progress. Felicia and I take day trips to other towns. She loves to shop, and I enjoy accompanying her. We go to ballgames. The distractions are many. The house is cluttered, the lights are too bright, there’s construction on the empty lot next door. She tempers all of this by preparing the workspace for me when I am not home, so that when I am home, the environment is ripe for me to write in. She takes long stretches of time and disappears, leaving me with quiet, so that I can focus.

About the only thing I can’t do anything about are our two crazy cats, who like to eat the carpet and have learned to put each other in headlocks.

Six years in, I am beginning to realize that Eleanor may be a story that I cannot tell in a linear fashion. Every time I sit down to write full chapters of her story, I get bored. I falter. The story drags. I have a theory, a possible solution. Alternately, I have written the last several sketches in a significantly different voice than the previous three dozen or so. This voice was a whim I entertained at first, but now the story has settled into it. It feels comfortable. It fits. Which means an awful lot of rewriting may have just entered my future. My sabbatical-less future.

An aside: “I Can’t Give You Up,” a lovely song that appears to have been cut from Asking for Flowers is now available, for free, here. It should be titled “I Can’t Stop Looping This Song”.