I had a pretty productive weekend I suppose. I washed my truck, right before the wind shifted and brought in still more ash from the infernal Zaca fire. I did a little housekeeping; not enough, certainly.

I started a new chapter for my novel, and introduced a character that’s been in the background all along, but never revealed or discussed before. She’s dead, and exists only in backstory, but she needs to be revealed a little. She’s mother to two central characters, grandmother to two others, so she’s crucial to their situation. Want a little nibble? You don’t, but what the hell.

Maybe she had a temper, we don’t know. But this is how her sons remembered her; like an angel in the room, amorphous. Maybe she raged against jackets tossed on chairs and filthy boots worn in on her rugs and just-mopped floors. She was only human. We know that John found her sleeping, completely, in her armchair – dim fabric of roses on a field of pale yellow – one day of soft and steady rain. Knowing nothing else to do, he sat down at the table and waited for everything to change.

Does he sit at the table and weep and wait? Perhaps. I’ll ask him.

So in the past few weeks, I’ve reorganized all the chapters and edited at least 30 of 230 pages. Actually, I’ve snipped and stroked at maybe 20 pages more, like a bored barber, or a topiary gardener at Disneyland. This week, I’ve rewritten one chapter, a long one, entirely from scratch. But the thing I found the most fun was today, drinking coffee and watching the pretty girls in my favorite cafe. I made a list of 20 possible titles for the story; 16 fresh ones, from the damp hall closet at the back of my little brain. New tracks of possible thought, and pretty girls. And French Roast. Life was good.

This isn’t anything finished. I just thought someone might find it interesting. I wrote it this morning, having my coffee, just to get my hands moving and my brain in gear. Maybe it’ll become a story or something.

He got his first pair of glasses when he was six. Heavy black resin, with silver hinges and screws that glinted in the light. He was in the first grade, and wore them to school. He couldn’t see the blackboard clearly otherwise. And clarity seemed so important to the grownups in his life. They seemed to seek that above anything and everything else, except comfort and relief from the abiding anxiety of the early Cold War. But he had come to accept the world as fuzzy, at least from a distance. A slight gaussian blur had comforts of its own.

Before he got the glasses, two kids fighting across the playground were in a kind of dance, derived from Polynesia, or mimicking the clash of wild mountain rams. He had come to think of girls as dangerous fairies; from a distance soft and flightful, but in the classroom full of blunt intensity.

Now he was faced with all this sudden focus. The fights became what they were, lashing out at the world for all its gravity, spinning indifferently, complicit in every authority of people who had lived too long to know that freedom is the most important thing next to love. Even from halfway down the line of wooden desks and chairs, the teacher’s face was anxious, tired. He saw the impatience and frustration in the set of her eyes, the crease of her brow, and the purse of her lips. He had assumed she was an extension of their mothers’ love for all of them, and he’d been wrong. She was simply trying to be nice.

I spent a lot of time today thinking about Uncle Charlie. Not my Uncle Charlie. He’s a character in my novel. He’s pretty important, so I spent a couple of hours rewriting – from scratch – the first several pages of a scene in which I’m first trying to reveal his character.

Charlie left by the back gate, saying goodbye to the boys as he passed them where they played. The vegetable garden beyond the yard smelled ripe. The bottom gate, which kept the garden apart from the infinity of the farm, was made of mismatched wood and bits of wire, and hung from heavy wire instead of hinges. He unlooped the strand that served as a lock, and set the gate aside to pass through. He saw that the part of the copper where they laid there hands was worn brighter, like a penny, while the rest was weathered dull and brown. He whistled for Zeke, who was sniffing around the bushes in the yard, and set the gate in place behind them as they went.

The issue here is how to reveal someone’s essential kindness without coming out and poking your finger in the reader’s eye and yelling this guy is really kind. I mean he’s friggin Buddha. In other words, by showing not telling.

My approach, as I rewrite this chapter, is to show you how much Zeke loves Charlie. Enough said, but as I was thinking about kindness this afternoon, I listened to the 7/23 daily installment of Writers’ Almanac, which includes a poem called kindness. Here’s a sample:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

just “finished,” posted here

Should I take some affirmation, in my mid-40s, from a writer who has just published his first book in his mid-90s? Possibly.

There has never been a tougher time to be a debut novelist – only a tiny fraction receive six-figure advances, and most manuscripts end up in the shredder. So, what makes or breaks the first-timers? Kate Kellaway reports and talks to five who made it into print.

The Guardian, Books

Alright, all you fellow poets and writers, here’s a Deep Thought for your weekend’s work:

The first draft of anything is shit.

— Ernest Hemingway

No green beer for you. Sorry, but you’re a Creative; you’re compelled to try to create something that will outlive you. No fault of mine.