The Big Balk

No excuses. I thought it had been maybe a month since I posted, but it's more like a month and a half, and the longer it goes, the balkier I get. I get balky. I don't know why, but it happens too frequently-- I start to feel overexposed, start to regret ever opening my mouth, both metaphorically and otherwise.
Here's Merriam-Webster on balk:

So I don't know exactly why the word balk seems to be the best choice for the feeling I have about writing these days, but it's probably a combination of #1 and #5. I need to get to the plowing, I need to complete some motions.

Free Handguns for Patriots

In my mailbox this morning, the Washington Post daily headlines were waiting. Though I already knew that the House had passed HCR, I wanted to see how they were spinning it. Yee-ikes.

Some billionaire patriot is giving away free handguns. For the coming uprising. Against the government, presumeably.

I mean, seriously, WTF?!

Monster Haiku

So I'm multi-purposing here, been really too busy to even drop by, but one of my writing groups has started doing prompts every week. Thus, the Monster Haikus. I am so muli-purposing right now, I even used this assignment for my ninth graders today. Here goes.

Godzilla, Mothra, King Kong, Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves, Frankenstein, Medusa, and Creature from the Black Lagoon.... and one more personal favorite, Cylon.

O my gorgeous green
rage, rise well up and fall hard—
crush our mess to bits.

Pupae in my head
this morning, stirs restlessly
ready to crack free.

You climb because what
else? Civilization hot
to cage up your lust.

We feed on each other
your heart sinewy, my mind
rW, unsavory.

Pale and pretty man
eyes drawing in, draining—
blood leaps to meet you.

Better than a man,
loyal and cuddly and brave,
my wild hairy luvah.

Or any other
part belonging to a man—
what’s this? A kumquat?

She shrinks from eyes, hides
her vicious lovely hair, her
stony loving gaze.

My worst date ever?
Did he have poor hygiene? Not
for a slimeball, no.

What to do with you?
kill, listen, frak, kill—why choose?
Frak—you’ll come again.

A Little Optimism

Swamped, I tell you! So many tasks undone that when I'm alone, I slip into a slightly catatonic trance while the to-dos whirl, and yes, maybe I'm dreaming of poppies, what's it to ya?
But anyway, I've no time today, so I thought I'd just send you over to a very cool post by Robin Sloan at the 3six5 project. If you aren't already following, it's a year's worth of "what's happening today in the/my world" posts by 365 bloggers. (Yes, I wanted to be one of them, I can handle one assignment a year, but I didn't get picked.)

And Spring will come again. Meanwhile, it's exactly ZERO outside.

Happy Lupercalia

No time to do much more than share a link to a great blog post: a debut writer's experience of the rapidly evolving publishing world. It starts out frankly depressing, and ends up powerfully hopeful.
And evolution is really an apt concept here-- the climate is changing fast, and those who can't adapt. . .

So my Valentine to you: Love the life you lead, and vice versa.

Chopping Up My Darlings

We writers have heard it (and repeated it) many times, that old line about murdering your darlings. I'd never seen it in context before, so I went a-lookin'. Here's a bit, courtesy of Bartleby:

Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

The latest version I've heard, and much more gently put, has been in several rejections: "beautiful writing, too quiet." I've been at this long enough to translate this agent speak: boring, boring, yawn. The last rejection used the word "beautiful" twice, ouchy.

But the good news is, the rejecting agent added, "Perhaps if you started with. . ." and here is where I get a little confused. She mentions events that occur in chapter 22 (out of 30 total chapters.) I vacillate between thinking she meant I should dump the first 21 chapters, or else simply tweak chronology, reshape, chop off a few fingers and toes, maybe a chemical peel, definitely some liposuction.

The second option seems too simple, so that is what I'm doing. Baby steps.

I am also coming around to the knowledge that my beautiful, beautiful prologue is a vain bit of ornamentation that may not survive the slaughter. I still harbor some hope that it might slip in somewhere later, when presumably my reader has learned to accept me, warts and all. But after having this funny feeling (like, wow, I love it, that can't be good) for way too long, reading this Pub Rant pretty much strapped my prologue to the chopping block.

Taking a Trip, Not Taking a Trip

Before me squats a to-do list as long as the Giant Squid I saw on the telly yesterday, and yes, that really is an apt metaphor. The list contains such items as "find birth certificate and get pics for passport" and "customize two chapters for deadlined submission". "Write travel grant" is one that keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list because I've never written a grant before, but the deadline is 5pm Friday so if the bulk of it isn't done today, I can kiss it goodbye.

It was during one of those snowed-in periods a few weeks ago I realized it's time to get out of this country for a while. Other than a short camping trip on Vancouver Island in 1977 and an afternoon in Nogales some time in the late 80's, I've never left the Estados Unidos. A year and a half ago, my dear brothers and sisters started a travel account in honor of my fiftieth birthday, intending to fulfill my childhood ambition of going to Paris, and it's grown by dribs and drabs ever since.

During those snow days, there were too many reports of people who died tragically in their own front yards, slipped and somehow froze before morning. A woman was killed by a snowplow in her own parking lot. People die all the time, often with no warning at all. A random bullet, a slippery sidewalk, a freak stroke. It came to me then that the travel account wouldn't spend itself.

Yet my desires have mellowed. Sure, it would be cool to hang around in the cafes, sip espresso where Beckett sat smoking and scowling, but I feel no sense of urgency about Paris. I still want to visit the Louvre before I die, and Shakespeare and Co., before or after, but if I only get one trip before a chunk of blue ice gets me, I want to go to Ireland.

A cousin, the family genealogist, has traced our family to Bunclody, near Enniscorthy in County Wexford. Our ancestors were involved in the revolution that led to Ireland's war of independence. I think I'll be splitting my time between the old home county and the glories of Dublin. Maybe I'll even run into the lovely writer who my aforementioned cousin contends is a distant cousin to us all. Plus there'll be mounds and castles, which hold a special attraction for a nerd like me, so there you go.

Paris can wait.