Whistle While You Work, Really: a Small Update

It should be clear by now that we are marching to our own drumbeat.  We are the drummers.  At a certain point, you stop worrying about whether you "should" unpack books before spackling or "should" play scrabble when there's insulation still to do.  You have to just … march.

But there are things that are done in a certain order.  You can't bake until you have the correct circuit installed.  You can't take a bath without the hot water tank being in.  (You could, but ow.)  For a while, we did that kind of prioritization.  We had to.

That's not where we are at this stage.  From the beginning, we prioritized keeping warm, preparing food, and a place to work.  We have our desks set up now, with some setting up still to do, but the important things:  clear surfaces, materials at hand, internet and printers.  We can cook or bake, and now we have staples and meats.  We have warmth when there is power and a generator coming.

Meanwhile, we are living in a crooked little spackle house.  I like this crooked little spackle house.  There is so much to do.  The infinite list is barely an exaggeration.

We are hunkering down.  There will likely be times in the next few months where we seem to disappear.  We're probably not doing anything holidayish this year.  We haven't yet unpacked our party clothes -- or our ornaments.  Shucks, we're rural and the internet could go out for a while.  But mostly we are drumming to the beat.

We were talking the other day about music.  I don't play music while I work, at all.  John always plays music.  Back in Virginia, we had our offices on opposite ends of the house.  Now we have to coordinate when music should be played.  Because we've been coordinating, the first time I've really had to do so when it comes to my creative space, we discovered that I'm whistling ALL the time, under my breath usually, out loud sometimes.  I knew I was a whistler.  I didn't know I breathed melodies all day long.  It's not really an epiphany or even useful, but at my age, figuring out something new about myself is fun.  No wonder I don't work with music on!  So we are negotiating the music schedule to maximize creative time in the shared space.

Every day, if we are doing it right, we remind ourselves of our first principles.  Art.  Connection.  Peace.  Work.  Love.  Engagement.  It's a good rhythm.

That's what we're up to.

Living on the Edge, or Better is Better

We've been living on the edge for 10 months now.  Ten months ago today was when we looked at our lives and said, okay, let's do this thing.  The day before, John had gotten laid off from the corporate thing, and we knew we had to make some big decisions.  Why not add career and location into the mix, if we were talking about big decisions anyway?  Right?

So we did and we put all our eggs into a basket and shook the basket.  (Note: don't shake real baskets of eggs.)

Would the Centreville house sell well?  Heaven only knew.  When we bought it, the market was in a nasty spiral.  I paced around, imagining foreclosures and worse.  It sold well.

Could we handle the uncertainties of the new property?  Could we find a place to stay while we sussed it out?  Yes, and yes, with the help of a tremendously supportive network of friends and family.

What about the runway?  The runway was the length of time that we had to get situated to get our creative empire off the ground.  We thought at first that the runway was a few weeks.  We're still on it (although it is looming precariously over us now).  (It is a metaphorical runway, the kind that you can take off from and the kind that hangs over your head like the sword of damocles.)

So the cabin itself will be livable before deep freeze.  We can, at worst, seal off the upstairs and live downstairs.  It's not ideal, but we don't care about ideal.  This has been an adventure in putting perfectionism and expectations into their proper place.  Their proper place is in planning and dreaming. Living is where we say "better is better" and we paint the plywood floors and worry about hardwood floors when we are on the creative career path.  You know?

We are succeeding.  A couple of days like we've had, where we have gotten a little battered and some of the plans have had to drop off, we have to remind ourselves that this is part of living on the edge, and it's the thing we chose.  It's not a hard life at all!  It's actually a fabulous adventure.

Have you WATCHED adventure movies?  There are a lot of bandages.  But they're about heroes, heroes of their own lives.  "Never give up, never surrender."

Back to the futu -- writing, day two: go outside sometimes

I haven't been writing fiction, this is true, and I haven't really been writing much else, unless you count grumping on the internet.  (That should count in the cosmic word count.)  But I've been filling up with ideas and prompts and solutions to fictional problems, and that does count.  It counts a lot.

The lake at Dunn's is home to the best dragon ever.  I had to spend time out there on the water, quietly thinking about him, worrying that he'd tip the rowboat in a pique.  (He has piques.)  And he has a lot more muck and weed down there than I'd realized.  This is a problem if you're the kind of dragon who gathers small treasures.  And he does.  I needed to realize this.

And I needed to watch the kids run around barefoot near the fireplace.  Kids get black feet when they do that.

I needed to hear families bickering about floats and whose stadium chair this is and how old do you have to be to row your own boat and sit down, sit down!  Get in here this second or you will never go out in a boat again!  I mean it!

And the ladies running out of their cabin, demanding to know where the bees were coming from.  Demanding this of other campers, as though they would have any idea how bees were getting into the ladies' cabin.

Dragons are scary, but so are bees and cabin ladies.

And mattresses, when they have been used for decades, have bones inside them, to poke up into your ribs and wake you every hour, and make you wonder just whose bones they are and where they came from and whether you are seriously sleeping on someone's skeleton, because that part over there feels like an elbow.

And that's just one place.

What Am I Doing Here Anyway?

Back in 2004, I went to Odyssey.  Before that, I had had published some genre stories on internet zines (Jackhammer E-Zine was one that bought several of my stories).  I wrote a terrible* SF novel that is somewhere in one of the PODs and I should use it as kindling because I will never ever let anyone read it anyway.  I wrote another thing that paid me okay, but it is hidden and will never be found.

Then I went to Odyssey and relearned what I was doing.

Then I took a few years to get through divorce and raising teenagers and life events.

I wrote during this time.  I like to call this phase my "creepy" phase.  I have a stack of creepy stories that are looking for homes.  (Anyone?  Want some creepy stories?)

But I don't think I was ever destined to stick with creepy stories or short projects.  I love flash fiction.  I love it.  But it's not as satisfying to me as what I'm working on now, because I have fallen in love with novel writing.

Novel writing might not love me back.  Only time will tell.  And when you're writing novels, you're writing it alllll on faith.  No one is calling you up saying, hey, are you the creepy stories writer?  Because I would love it if you wrote me, oh, I don't know, a YA novel about XYZ.  They are not calling me, anyway.

But the OTHER thing about me is that I like to work on more than one project at once, because I have a lot of writing stamina but I have to fill up overnight with thoughts if I try to write more than 1000 words on one project a day.  So I'm working on two.  If I have extra left over in my brain, I toss it into flash or short stories.  I don't want to waste the stamina.

So I am almost done with YA novel XYZ and I'm halfway through with novel PDQ.  And I have a gargantuan project waiting in the wings which my awesome critique group has given me chapter by chapter feedback on.  I have another idea which I hope to put through the critique group at our fall novel workshop, if I can make it down there for it.

I prioritized XYZ and PDQ, partly because they are shorter than the behemoth and partly because I couldn't spread the handwritten pages out as easily when we were living in my sister's dining room.

And yet, I have a story coming out this week after these many years, and it is:  flash and not-creepy.  I don't think it's creepy, anyway.  (My perceptions may be skewed.)  

I plan to keep sending out the short works I have here in this pile, too.

John and I are pursuing this creative life with a lot of hard work and optimism and a LOT of realism.  We know how this works.  Hard work doesn't get you in the door.  But you can't get in the door without it, and so I work.  Hard.

*Terrible.

Last day of spring

When we woke up this morning, it was cold enough in the camper to turn on the heat.  So I did.

Our neighbor came by today to invite us to hike this weekend, and he said, "how do you like this September weather?!"  I asked him if it's usually hotter around this time of year.  He said, "there's no 'usually' around here."

We're getting some cow manure from one of our contractor men.  It's three years old, which is apparently a good vintage.

I keep thinking of things that will be "fixed" when we move into the house.  I'll be able to use a real bathtub when we move.  We'll have a freezer.  Lots of things will be fixed when we move in.  But my brain keeps glitching:  when the clothesline was a little loose from a heavy item, I found myself thinking, we'll have a real clothesline when we move in.  No, that's the real clothesline, Marsh.

We have an odd mix of slow pace and much to do; connected via the internet to the whole world, but if two cars are on the road in front of the house at the same time, we call it traffic.  We are writing and building; neither of these shows much progress until you're about to hit enter.  At least on the outside.

Big days here.

Summer tomorrow!  Maybe it will hit seventy.

Get To Know A Sheep

I've been hanging out with sheep a lot since arriving here in Maine.  My sister had thirteen when we arrived; an immediate fourteenth was born, and now there are sixteen.  There will be more.  They are raised for both fiber and meat.*

When I first got here, they were a mass of baaing fuzzy beasts that might knock me down.  One time Gloria asked me to check something about Penny.  Which one is Penny?  The one with the even horns and the darker nose, she said.  I looked out at the ten ewes baffled.  How would I know which one had even horns out of all those?  She was flabbergasted that I didn't even know that only one of the breeds had horns.  (Jacobs**.)

I used to live in a townhouse, yo.

Penny is the one who just had twins.  She is wary of me.  I have yet to get her to accept a treat from my hand.

Beryl is the other new mom.  She is also a Jacob.  Her baby is Bluebell, and Bluebell is a NUT.  She chases chickens and once jumped up on top of the chicken building!

Ginger is also a new mom.  Her baby died right after birth.  Because Bluebell was born right after that, Ginger thought Bluebell was hers.  She and Beryl worked it out amicably.  They both nurse Bluebell.  Bluebell is going to be a fatty.  Ginger thinks I'm okay.  She'll take food from my hand.  Beryl thinks I'm awesome!  She comes over to the fence whenever she sees me and tells me how very hungry she is and encourages me to go find something yummy.

If I go into the enclosure with a bucket, they all crowd around me and holler for grain.  They each have their ways.  The Cotswolds are huge and hungry and they'll knock you down and pleasantly chew on grain while you writhe around in pain in the mud.  They have no malice about it.  You're just the one with the bucket.  But they are not faceless either.  Juliet is the mother hen and she might knock you down, but she will worry about you.  She pushes her head under your hand to be petted, like a dog might.  Olga and Nadia, who look a little bit too much like the twins in Matrix 2 -- crossed with a Gary Larsen cow -- basically think about food all the day long, even more than the others do.  If you have food, you're cool with them.  You're a safe person if you have grain.

Molly, Junco, they are the uncategorized ones.  Junco is almost ready to have a baby.  She is gentle and inquisitive.  Molly (also pregnant) is a brown version of the Cotswold twin menaces, but maybe more stolid.  Zither is a teeny Jacob.  She is not as feisty as the other Jacobs.  Life is very serious for Zither, but she doesn't have an attitude about it.  She is just quiet and solemn.  Hopscotch has six horns and looks like she is wearing a tiara.  She and Zither usually eat last.  They are smaller than the rest and get crowded out of the initial stampede to breakfast or dinner.

Okay, so that's the group of ewes.  Let's separate out some of them, Gloria said, so the new babies can stay warm at night without being trampled.  She sent me away from the building with a bucket of grain.  Sheep scattered and hollered.  They wanted to go in the building.  They wanted grain.  They wanted to run and shout.  What no one wanted to do was go where the shepherd told them to go.  They didn't clump up in a frightened herd.  They each had their own stubborn -- and stupid -- ideas about what should happen to maximize their chances of getting fed that delicious grain.  Penny couldn't come near me, because I'm scary, and Beryl was extra eager to be near me because I had a bucket.  Cotswolds bellowed and stepped on my feet, especially loud Olga.  Hopscotch watched it all, frozen and maybe fascinated.

They might be in a group, a herd, but they are not clones, mindlessly following this or that sheep.  They have their own ideas.  It is fascinating to me.  I like them.  I like figuring them out, a lot, and it's not that I'm figuring out how to deal with them as a group; it's that I'm learning who each one is.

(I dunno where the term sheeple really came from, but it doesn't match my experience of sheep at all, unless it is a fundamental need to be kept safe and fed.  Both political parties call the other party followers "sheeple", and they mean stupid followers.  But that's not what I think they are.  Sheeple are people who think they need to be safe and fed, and they have their own vision for how best that should be achieved.  I'm a sheeple, by this definition, and so is everyone.)

*I am learning how the fiber stuff works, but am barely a beginner.

**Those who are reading my Mackinaw project might enjoy this little coincidence.  I didn't know about Jacob sheep when I started it.  Maybe I'll switch something little about the science in the Mackinaw world and make it relevant.

***What does this have to do with writing?  Everything.

Edit to add:  Somehow I dropped Josie out of the piece!  Josie is Juliet's daughter.  She is very like Juliet, to me, and like her mother will come up for petting.  She is friskier, though, and is very often the Cotswold that you can see from the window; she stands up on two legs at the feeder.  When we had Penny and the baby twins in their building, Josie was the one who insisted on standing ON the hay bales to eat them.  I'm pretty sure this was so that she could keep an eye on those babies.  She is not at all sure that she likes babies.