I had a long cafe session this morning, planning what I was going to do with the 10 days weekend or holiday due me in the next 16. Figured that if I wrote 2 000 words a day, I’d add another 20 000 to a ms that is already pushing 120 000 and for which the end is in sight: ie, I might actually finish the thing by January 5 if not January 1.
5:45 pm wordcount: 41 740
9:45 pm wordcount: 39 681
Sigh.
You didn’t know that the first edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had an terribly useful appendix entitled "A compendium of astro-travel medicine", did you? Its highlights, and its sad fate are detailed in the Christmas issue of the Canadian Medical Journal.
And it had me laughing until I wheezed in an empty office at 8 pm, 3 hours into overtime on zany deadlines with the computer system playing up. It is therapeutically funny.
I was going to go for a swim.
I wrote.
I was going to go running.
I wrote.
I was going to buy Christmas presents.
I wrote.
I was going to wrap Christmas presents.
I wrote.
I was going to put together an invoice.
I wrote.
I was going to put together a course application.
I wrote.
I did make a phone call, receive a phone call, and find some Javascript to place random pictures on the blog (thanks to Cameron Gregory for his random image selector). I ate chocolate (shouldn’t have), spent some time in the used bookstore (likewise, shouldn’t have). But mostly what I did was continue a tear-apart, put-together revision on Graveyards which I was going to defer until I’d finished the list of missing scenes prepared at my last cafe session. But I started tinkering with some details that were niggling at me, and the next thing I knew I was running amuck. I was in that gratifyingly ruthless frame of mind that enables me to say: If there’s no point to it, it goes. If I can do it more simply, it goes. If I can’t figure out how to fix it, it goes. Repetitive scenes go; useful parts are plucked out of scenes that go nowhere and tucked into scenes that already work; dialogue that says nothing goes. I’ve got half a book that mostly stands up, though major caulking is still required before I’d put to sea in it (!) and t’other half is a bunch of strong looking planks untidily propped against each other. Pity tomorrow’s Monday, eh, or I’d just go on until I dropped.
Bowling for Columbine is Michael Moore’s documentary/expose/meditation on the culture of the gun in America, before and after the Columbine shootings. He’s the very picture of a midwest redneck, a big, shambling, check-shirted, baseball capped guy who was born more or less with a gun in his hands in a town and a nation that loves guns, and with a camera at his shoulder and a soft-voiced tenacity he challenges the ordinary, the powerful and the dangerous to explain their beliefs and actions to him, and juxtaposes their responses with the hilarious and the horrific: A South-Park style history of America and the gun. A black-and-white litany of the assassinations and invasions, the dictators supported and elected governments toppled, by US intervention. Grainy closed circuit TV footage of a room (cafeteria?) in Columbine school, with audio of a phone call made by a woman trapped in that room, as people curled under tables, broke, ran, and the white-haloed killers floated into view. What is the difference, he asks, between America and all the other countries whose gun-death rates are a fraction of America’s, even Canada, with 10 million households, 7 million guns. Racism? Economic depression … In his own home town, a 6 year old boy shot to death a 6 year old girl with a gun brought from his uncle’s house, where he was staying while his mother commuted 80 miles to work 2 jobs on a “work for welfare” program … The military-industrial axis … Was it a coincidence, he asked, that the day of the Columbine killings was also the single heaviest US assault on Kosovo … and the culture of fear … Fear of the burglar, the rapist, the black man … fed on and by a media to whom a story with a gun in it is news. Should a people who are that afraid, he asks, have that many loaded guns?
I could not help thinking, though, of a recent BMJ article on the subject of suicide in the media; accounts in the media often offer one-dimensional explanations and ignore the main risk factor for suicide: mental illness. Now, it may be a case of the carpenter thinking everything looks like a nail – the documentary filmmaker looks at cultural causes, and the bioscientist at biological/medical. But the Columbine shootings were the actions of two people either out of touch with reality, or out of touch with humanity. Not mentally healthy people driven to “snap” by a sick society.
Another interesting was how a basic child-safety issue was set aside for the narrative of poverty, welfare laws, and maternal absence. Acknowledged, he was developing themes, making creative decisions, and the decisions he made made it his own. But let me say it here: regardless of your politics, having loaded guns where small children can get them is bloody stupid. Moderating my language, it is what James Reason calls a latent unsafe condition, a failure in the system, and no amount of gun safety education in first and second grade will cancel out a latent unsafe condition. Someone is going to fall in the hole.
Never mind what the film did not say, it covered an amazing amount of ground, in a strong piece of ideological filmmaking. Leaving me with the thought that (a) America has set aside the cross for the gun (b) having some of these folk next door is scary (c) having some of these folk on the same planet is scary. I suspect that some of the attention the film has gathered is because it addresses the deep unease that non-Americans feel about America’s reactions to the rest of the world. Should a people that are that afraid have so many missiles? Which feeds into the right wing American belief that if they don’t defend themselves against a threatening world, no one else will.
I do believe, that after about 18 months, I have finally got the balance of this novel. I was unhappily aware that it is one thing for a character to take over the writer, and another thing for the character to be allowed to take over the NOVEL. As a writer you can immerse yourself in a character and – hopefully – it adds to their persuasiveness, their seductiveness. But a character taking over the novel is an embarrassment to the mature writer, who should know better than to be seduced by the products of their own imagination! I was having trouble that way with Creon. Now, after having listened to Aeron talk for the better part of 5000 words, Aeron is finally emerging as the strong counterbalance that the novel needed. She is telling me (and another character, but right now, mainly me) who she is, why she does what she does, why she does not give up, does not give in, and what created her cunning desperation. She is turning into a very different, and in some ways more authoritative and more admirable person than Creon. But she does not know how to stop, any more than he does. I don’t know how much of the monologue will last, but I must remember it as a technique, because being in someone’s voice lets me work on the metre and tone of their speech, as well as their language. Aeron’s is surprisingly quirky; I must remember on my rewrite to make Creon solid … not solid like rock, but solid like soapstone, or ivory … The balance is also better because she’s speaking directly to Val, one of my other leads, so now I have four dyads working among those four principals, two manoevering/manipulating/exploring/discovering, one mortal enemies, one long close friendship and working partnership – complexities of the latter I will have to explore at another time, since I don’t strain it to breaking point this time out.
I hope I can sustain this … The whole thing is so nearly whole in my head (I have a sinking feeling I said that a year ago) and the balance is so much closer, though the feeling shape in my head has a five-point tension … ugh. Too much for one book that’s supposed to have more action and less character. But character interaction is action.