“The Ark”: A New Beginning

Posted on January 15, 2014 by McPhedran

I am back to work on my science fiction book, The Ark, at the beginning again.

I edged out further, holding hard to the balcony rail, and looked down to the street, 28 floors below, at the neat rows of sandbags banked up around the Custom House grates.A howling gust snapped sharply over the trees as a line of Japanese tourists, ensconced in cheap clear ponchos, suddenly appeared out of the park, some stopping to take pictures, followed by a police car, its blue lights mute and slow. They had stopped broadcasting the evacuation order hours ago. Zone A was closed. The surge was almost here.

I slid the balcony door closed, and the curtains lulled back. Apollo circled away, eyeing the black sky and buffeting glass.

“This morning’s high tide was at 8:30 am. Eleven hours ago.” The weather guy was earnest, his sleeves rolled up, his square jaw pushed out for this soap-opera apocalypse. “That tide surged over the walls into the city this morning. It has already been here. This tide is a full moon high tide; it’s much worse. This is the one we have to watch. This one could be anywhere from 8 feet up to 11, 12, 13 feet. 13 feet! Think about that.” He had his hand stretched up like he might sing. “In just 15 minutes. 13 feet in 15 minutes. This is as serious as it gets. This is it.”

Winter: “my bad side”

Posted on January 13, 2014 by McPhedran

I crept into my horrible hole, my knees bruising against the ice, everything brittle and cracking, and beat my arms across my body, kicking my legs to get warm, and then lay still, as cold as before, worse.I was breathing fog and closed my eyes. It was so awful and cold. I couldn’t move my fingers. My cheeks hurt. I couldn’t breathe right. I felt for my heart and couldn’t feel that and then it wasn’t right, half beating and then too many in a row and then none at all. I had to tear myself out of my sleeping bag, out of my fucking snow tomb. And I was going to do it. I was going to scream, insanely scream. Scream! It didn’t come out like that. It was just a noise, a groan, hardly like it had come out of me at all. And then there was something else, another noise, a crunch or snap. I held myself and listened. It was a branch or snow falling, an animal looking for food. A bear. I turned onto my side, its teeth and giant paws in my head. I could hear it circling. I dug my hands between my legs and stared. I’m not cold. I’m not cold. I’m not going to die here. I said that around and around in my head. I’m not cold. I’m not cold. I’m not going to die here. And then it wasn’t so dark. I could see the shadow of my snow ceiling and my hand. I stared and waited. It was almost light. I was the first one at the fire. I stood over it, staring into it, feeling horrible.* (*From my bad side)

“my bad side” opening…again

Posted on January 6, 2014 by McPhedran

I’ve edited the opening to my bad side again, for the 30th time? I’ve lost count. I might have it now. It’s focused and clear, emotionally charged, paced, punctuated by effective dialogue; it has the right cadence. I watched my face in the window, fading in and out with the shadows, my eyes and mouth against the doorways, my neck and chest over the slumped scaffolding, the empty street and then Bowling Green, a rectangular line of light sliding down my arm, vanishing in a flash across my dress. The cab rattled heavily over a rutted grate and stopped in front of my building. The driver watched me through his mirror. “$9.40.”

“It’s a $7 fare.”

“What do you want with me?”

I gave him $8.

He snapped around, his white collar tip jutting up like a tiny paper airplane. “I’m not a beggar.”

“And I’m not a tourist.” I didn’t have time to close the door before the car lurched ahead, its wheels catching in a sudden threatening jolt.

“Are you all right?” George wore his uniform perfectly, tie tight, shirt sleeves just out from his jacket.

“Oh, he charged me out of zone.”

“I’ve heard about that.” He walked me up the steps to the apartment doors. “Mr. Walter looked very official tonight. I thought we were being inspected.”

“Derek?”

“He said he would give Apollo some company.”

“He’s here now?”

George frowned. “I hope that’s all right, Miss Sinclair.”

“How long ago?”

“It must have been around 2:00, maybe a little after.”

“Thank you.”My hand reflected ghostly in the silver elevator panel. Derek knew that I didn’t want him near me. I had told him exactly that. When would he go back to his sad drunken life and leave me alone? I rotated my heel back on the stiletto, my foot angling sharply up, and thrust myself through the door before they were half open, my key already out, and pushed the apartment door in too hard.

I’ll go over it one more time tomorrow. Just once. Maybe twice.

Newark Train

Posted on December 28, 2013 by McPhedran

I am reading on the train to Newark. A woman wheels on a plastic-covered baby carriage, a crumpled bag of McDonald’s balanced on top.The story is the thing, the arc, the bread crumbs leading on to eat. She is solid, her hair braided thick down her back. She keeps her phone in her back jean’s pocket. There is a solidity to her, a permanence. She blocks out the light from the window, only a glimpse of it between her elbow and waist. There is a man too, her husband perhaps, who she does not acknowledge, and a teenage boy. They are all thick in their coats. Her phone rings, a deep bass and growling voice. She answers. “I’m here.” She pauses. “That’s not going to happen.” She slides the phone back into her jean’s pocket. The sun comes through the window, bright, almost majestic. There is something magical about the New Jersey light. Industrial. Hard. Clear. We have arrived.

It’s not a Hurricane. It’s my Blog.

Posted on December 20, 2013 by McPhedran

My blog had minimal interest when I started 16 months ago – maybe a dozen visits a day, and most of those by my loving partner. And then I blogged about Hurricane Sandy and interest spiked, up to 80-100 hits a day. I tried to keep interest up with my thoughts on gun control and my Top 5 Lists. Interest slid back to 10-20 hits, and I reminded myself that the purpose of the blog was to focus on my writing process. And so I stuck to that.Interestingly enough, people have been visiting more over the past few months – with hits exceeding the days of Sandy, not that this means anything, especially when I admit that most searches are the same: Kesha naked, Nadine Velasquez and Jane Fonda Barbarella.

How anyone could find naked women more interesting than my reflections on the writing process, I will never know.

I feel it in me, tremendous

Posted on December 17, 2013 by McPhedran

I expect another to sit with me. I expect the music. I expect the god embrace. I have that narrative in me. It’s a story in my head.I don’t tell it to myself. I work through the pain of what I must do. I understand that I am a failure. I don’t feel bad. I know what I am. And I get to somewhere. I am here. I wait. I expect this person to sit with me. I expect that with certainty. That’s my narrative. Yes, I have a story. It’s convoluted. I loved deeply. And then I ruined everything. I fought. I desired. I want to tell this to the other person that is supposed to sit here. There is supposed to be music. There is supposed to be something remarkable, Justine’s thunderbolt. There is supposed to be that. But there isn’t. There is this page. There is this writing.There is this supposed reflection, this thinking, this processing, this firing, this continuance, this cold.

And then he is there. He wore a long shirt. He was bald. He moved like a neuron.That’s what I told him. He almost hit me because I said that. And then he looked at me like he was going to love me. And I thought he might. I even thought about giving him something real, thinking he was the one who would deliver me to what I was most afraid of.

“Who doesn’t have cotton candy at an arena?”

And then I realized he was the bartender, that he wasn’t even talking to me, that I had an issue with who I was, with how I got here and how I would leave. And I was okay with that. At least that was the story I told myself.

This is the End?

Posted on December 16, 2013 by McPhedran

I don’t know how to end. It seems like I just go on and then it comes to a stop, the story just gone, ended, like a final breath. This is the way of life, but it’s not supposed to be for writing. The problem is that endings can be so ridiculous and easy to predict, which I blogged about last year. I have had a multitude of endings for my bad side, some of them obtuse, others pointed, all of them too introspective. I had an ending, a moment, part revelatory, part happenstance, but it came across as a blunt object struck on the reader’s head.I have tried to avoid core themes and images and end up with a moment that means more than it should. I need something in between, something clean, something that begs for more but doesn’t, like a good drink.Something like that.

The Myth of Kerrivan’s Men

Posted on December 12, 2013 by McPhedran

A small group led by Peter Kerrivan walked out of a settlement in Newfoundland some 200 years ago and vanished into the barrens. They were never heard from again, transforming them into myth. It’s an image I use near the end of my bad side.The streetlights came in above the band, Kerrivan’s Men, the green and red light across the fishing nets and buoys, onto the pews in the back. Fitz returned with our drinks.

“Who’s Kerrivan?” I asked.

“Kerrivan led a group of fellahs off with him into the barrens,” he explained. “This was some 200 years back. Didn’t like how he was being treated by the Royal Navy – the English always hated the Irish, yeah? – and up they went into the barrens, lived off the land. Called themselves the Masterless Men.”

“Never seen again,” Tommy added.

“Charlie swears he’s in the line, his great great granddad the man himself.”

“Probably another great in there at that.”

“Maybe another one, yeah.”

“What do you mean they lived in the middle of nowhere?” I asked.

“Down there on the peninsula, in the rocks and bog, nothing but low trees and wind.”“For how long?”

“No one knows,” Tommy replied. “Generations.”

“Maybe they died,” I replied.

“Some would say that. The English would. Not me. I think they waited to be forgotten and then came back in.”

“Yeah,” Fitz agreed. “That’s what they did.”

How I Have Written

Posted on December 10, 2013 by McPhedran

Many years ago, I was keen to pursue creative writing at the graduate level. I had been out of college for a few years and just completed the first draft of a novel, The Sacred Whore. The genesis of the book had come to me in a flash – a gang of prostitutes kidnap a basketball team so that they can air their views on the declining morality of America – and one of the characters, Chantal, had fought against being removed from the narrative after I had done exactly that. I went back and realized the story was all about her; she was an epiphany. Flawed as it was, the book did have moments – to say nothing of Chantal – and I was enthusiastic at the prospect of work-shopping my prose.

And then I met Ben, a friend of a friend, who was registered in such a program. Ben waxed not-so-eloquently about his attempt to re-invent the novel and went on and on about that. I couldn’t get away from him fast and far enough and promised myself I would never be stuck in such conversations again.

And so instead of pursuing my work in school, I planted trees in northern British Columbia, bicycled across France and Spain, edited closed captions for sitcoms and soft-core porn, did the biking again, coached pee-wee hockey, taught high school English, started a film festival and wrote copy about toilets, all of that to buy time to write. And write I did – in Paris, Dublin, Toronto, Vancouver and New York, in apartments and houses, notes in the post office, on menus and tickets, in transit, in journals, on computer after computer, saving copies, emailing myself additions to text – putting everything together, always in isolation. I have a clear sense of who I am as I write. It’s just me and the words coming out of my head, a long wavering stream that I sometimes catch and can feel crystalline within, almost exactly like that. My writing grants me understanding, gives moments where life isn’t just chaos and missteps. It allows me to consider and process, search through thoughts and events, my reactions and those of others, their expressions, and find the words that make some sense. The book is my focal point – the concept, the research, the going back and starting again, a character suddenly there, the honing and culling, the letting go and bringing to an end.

Basinski & offthesky: Music to Get Unstuck By

Posted on December 5, 2013 by McPhedran

Often I get stuck. I don’t know how the room is – the stairway or carpet, the door – or what a character sees – the wallpaper, the light from the kitchen – or what she thinks – a dull pain in her calf, a memory of a first-grade teacher – and sit and stare, trying to think it through. Music gets me out. William Basinski and offthesky never fail. William Basinki’s Disintegration Loops – literally the sound of a loop of electronic music slowly disintegrating into other sounds – rises and falls, thick like an ocean.

The front door has been left open, only just, the chain casting a long jeweled shadow on the trim.There is an old wooden banister on the stairs; a narrow carpet runs up it, rolling vines and roots, worn blue, a corner of it bunched at the bottom. The third-last step squeaks. Jason Corder’s musical project offthesky is more immediate, starting engines and building long tenuous chords, moving relentlessly to the precipice.

She has her keys, holding them low in her hand. She has forgotten something. She waits but can’t remember. She opened the door. Yes, she just did that. And she came in. She needed to…she can’t remember. She goes up the stairs slowly, pausing on the third step.And remembered, the moment, only ten minutes ago, that she had stepped off the pavement, her feet on the cracked dirt, the leaves and her shadow there, all of the water now gone, from the river, the path and benches immersed, the stillness, and now back. And she was here. She had liked that.*This blog written to William Basinski’s dlp 1.1 & offthesky’s lossless

my bad side

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