My da had more wrong with him than my ma. There was nothing wrong with my ma except sometimes she was too busy. My da sometimes lost his temper and he liked it. He had black things across the top of his back, like black insects clinging to him. . He was useless at lots of things. He never finished games. he read newspapers. He coughed. He sat too much. 
Usually he was fair, and he listened when we were in trouble. He listened to me more that to Sinbad. There must have been a reason why he hated Ma. There must have been something wrong with her, at least one thing. I couldn’t see it. I wanted to. I wanted to understand. I wanted to be on both sides. He was my da.
Tag Archives: writing process
Unsettled
Yes, I knew I was asleep, well, mostly anyway, but I didn’t understand why I would have ever taken another French class and not go to class, being only one credit short, and then forget to start my final project and put myself in a situation where her leg was across my shoulder, her breast peaking out. 
I mean, I was smart enough to get out of there, but I couldn’t get that muddle out of my head because she looked like someone I knew, even with my eyes open and the clock right there, and I had to pee, but I didn’t want to, needing sleep, so that I wouldn’t miss my french class again.
Ice Friday: Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby”
The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. 
Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination: they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.
Safe on the Island
I’ll write a book where people scavenge and socialize far from home and then, in the later hours, scurry back to their island. 
It’s going to be called Safe on the Island.
How Writing is like Block Puzzle Jewel
When I begin the story, I think of everything neat and square, a perfect progression from the corner, building up, clear and strong. 
I come to consider a character or a moment further on and must get that down and then another further along. I might even drift toward the end. And it becomes a messy, multi-colored thing with jagged, hanging bits and far too many gaps. 
I go back to the start to find what I thought was strong and clear is not, those bits not like I remembered, but lonely and spare, and try to flesh those out, sticking them together, patching and editing, hanging them loose, and watch the occasional magic flash. 
And hold to that wondrous feeling too long, having made something from nothing, in no hurry to address the problems that await…until I realize the trap and begin anew.
Ice Friday: Raymond Carver’s “At Least”
I want to get up early one more morning,
before sunrise. Before the birds, even.
I want to throw cold water on my face
and be at my work table
when the sky lightens and smoke
begins to rise from the chimneys
of the other houses.
I want to see the waves break
on this rocky beach, not just hear them
break as I did all night in my sleep.
I want to see again the ships
that pass through the Strait from every
seafaring country in the world—
old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,
and the swift new cargo vessels
painted every color under the sun
that cut the water as they pass.
I want to keep an eye out for them.
And for the little boat that plies
the water between the ships
and the pilot station near the lighthouse.
I want to see them take a man off the ship
and put another up on board.
I want to spend the day watching this happen
and reach my own conclusions.
I hate to seem greedy—I have so much
to be thankful for already.
But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.
And go to my place with some coffee and wait.
Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.
Waking Through Six Layers
I was naked, of course, and late for class, when I was passed by a running figure, a boy who had died years before, and then another, his friend, someone I thought was still alive. 
I woke myself up and walked down a steep stone-lined avenue, searching for his friends, and then woke myself up from that. I was in bed and asked my wife for the phone. She gave me a calculator. 
I woke myself up from that and explained my anxiety to her about whether the other boy, Nick, might be dead. I was moving too slowly and woke myself up again, now exhausted and confused about where I was. The phone was working and the search engine. But I was still asleep and woke myself up again. 
I waited a long time before finding out. There was no news.
Too Many Spongy Black Fungi
It was the black fungi’s texture more than anything that was intimidating – and the volume – but I like mushrooms and so ate them all while working on a screenplay about taking psilocybes at a Grateful Dead concert and expected to go on a massive involuntary trip. 
But it wasn’t like that
I just felt wonky and, after reviewing a few more pages, drifted off to my deep-jungle Carlos Castenadian dream-past, escaping savages in dugout canoes only to be cornered, the spears and arrows raining overhead, and then sunk by a polar bear at which point I decided to wake myself up, not wanting to be mauled, roasted or whatever was to come next. 
I lay in the cold stillness to consider how much we were ahead of that, that I shouldn’t be so concerned with the extra demands at work, just be happy for what I have, even if a tribal chief of the worst order was at the helm of the country, and felt like that on my way to work, until a wave of exhaustion hit me and I wrote this instead.
Black Ice: Channel-Surf Proscrastination
Extract from 1997 novel, Black Ice:
Cam liked the animal shows, the cheetahs and whales, the lemurs and cougars, living in the open, in the forest, on the Savannah, in the depths of the dark sea, with nothing to hang on to but themselves, cut out raw, everything a meal or a monster around them, instinct not a word, but inside them, alive. 
He made a bet with himself: Six blonde women – it didn’t matter what they looked like – just six on one circuit up through the channels, and then he could delay everything, just sit there; he wouldn’t have to turn it off. Six blondes, six different channels. He had one on the first try, a sit-com, and another two channels one up – a newscaster. 
And then nothing. He slowed, waited for the camera to cut to her. But it was all car racing and gardening shows. Then he had another – a paramedic. And then nothing again. Too many old men, talking heads, and that was it. 
He had to get back to work.
Ice Friday: Believable Characters
As advised by Darin Strauss at a writer’s conference, “Characters must be memorable, surprising and move within their essence. Most of all, they need to have their uniqueness made clear.”
“When you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.” (From J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye)