Welp, re-reading some stuff I flung on a page. Working on new project. June calls like a jaded whore, looking to make two dollars. I have hedges to trim, old dead stuff to haul out of the yard and birds to piss off when I pass too close to their territory.
I need to take some ibuprofen, for problems I’ll not disgust you gentle readers with. We gals are supposed to not mention our unmentionables but let others mention them for us, in ways both creepy and savagely awful. [She’s got a great ass. Dry-boxed old bitch. Oh now, surely you know exactly…of course you do.] If a gal mentions her own stuff, ahem, in public, she’s a dirty, vulgar not-a-lady. So. I won’t mention, at all, why I’ll be gulping a near overdose of pain killers this morn. It’s indelicate. Ahem.
Back to writin’!!
So!! I have about fifteen thou words on Saint Lysette and Bloody Alice, yes, I’ve changed the title a bit. [See blog post right before this one!] I’m already itching to scrap that version and start again instead of pushing grimly through with WHAT I ALREADY HAVE. I can keep what I have, just start a new file, see what good chunks remain in place what new chunks bob up. If that even makes sense?! It makes sense to me. I do that for playwriting. Rewrites tend to be a start over from scratch, to see what sticks around and what goes away. A technique taught to me and my fellow grad school flunkies [I’m kidding, none of us flunked] during a weekend workshop. Where you set aside your drafts, and start over and over…which is, granted, not for everyone. It works for me. It frees me, in a way. It also helps you, in that charming phrase, kill your darlings. Those phrases or passages or, at times, actual characters, that just stop the flow of your work. You might love a turn of phrase or a description that just makes you grin for days…but it might not be best for your project.
I’m also wrestling with JUST WHAT IS THE DAMN STORY HERE.
As in…it’s a meandering mess in my head. I need to scheme and plan and dream and talk to myself —yes, I speak scenes and words aloud. I work out this and that aloud. I can’t be the only writer/artist who does this. I try to make sure no one else is home when I start spouting like Lady Macbeth. Or that I’m not in Wal-Mart buying hand grenades and flip flops. I try to pretend I’m not batshit crazy as hard as I can some days. I should get an award or at least a Nice Participation Award certificate–to figure out just where this is going. And then, of course, not go there at all because the story galloped off for the hills with a mocking tee hee. Not to mention a kick in the face when I tried to control it. Or, to be succinct and staid as a beige couch cushion…I need to get out of the way of the story. Except the story has yet to try to gallop about in any direction. Maybe there is no story. Maybe it’s just vignettes that don’t add up to jack squat! Whee!!!
Oh yeah, we have another shooting. A giant fire in London. There was some talk about impeachment. And how a Keebler Elf got grilled like a hamburger by a much-interrupted Senator, except she was rude and mean, according to the Other Side and didn’t do doodle to the Keebler Elf of Satan and…Fuck!! Probably why I want to go outside, where the still-fresh air is, and cut dead branches off the local bushes and trees and shout insults back at the ranting blackbirds. Get outta my sky, you damn birds! Go back to California, you hippie freak birds! Why do you hate Jesus and America, you anti-human freaks? Oh sure, it’s a lot of fun. I get to yell crazy shit and the birds…I’m not sure what the birds get out of it but who cares, right, they’re birds. Who cares, as long as I get something out of it. [Yes, I think some of the Fox Propaganda is starting to infect yours truly. I’m starting to just hate everything and everyone. Not that I am Ms. Peace Love Joy, but I am finding it far easier to just go, whatever, whenever something happens anymore…]
Off the scary political grandstanding going on and back to the grubby chore of writing.
Ah…ah. This new project seems a chore, a…ugh. I’m not taking any joy in it. There’s no real compulsion there, yet, to see what happens next…Maybe there’s three books instead of one here. From Lysette’s angle, from Alice’s viewpoint, from Nancy’s neck of the woods. Or a three part book where I’m not leaping about from different narrative puddles. The same story told three different ways. Mm…that could get tedious and boring. Or be a real goddamn writing challenge. Or…mmm. Or maybe I can just focus on one untrustworthy narrator. Or. Or. Or.
Squirrel!!
Maybe I need to do an outline, gulp. As I’ve done them for all other big novel-esque projects, to at least give myself a fighting chance. I’m oddly very German that way. I don’t know why it would be German to do outlines but…yeah. [Oh yeah, the meticulous records kept of the death camps and…oh yeah. And having a lot of German ancestors, I can, surely, claim a somewhat knowledge of Germanic orderliness. I mean, the French are not known for lists and order and checking the right boxes off, is all. Why did I go off about Germans? Oh.] It might help me focus on just who should tell this story and, gulp, what the actual story is. I have a vague climax in mind– where one sister…for the other sister and then there’s pie. I can’t give it all away here, that would be anticlimactic for any who might actually bother to read the finished, if ever, product!
So. What to do to gild my steaming turd.
Which is probably much better than I make it out to be. I tend to be rather a ghastly Negative Nelly about my own flipperies in the writing arena. My confidence shagged ass south, permanently, for the long winter of my life. Yes, do cry for me, Argentina. [That works on several levels. Tee hee.] Which, if you’ve dipped your toesies into my blog, you’ve noticed. I know, if I just projected TONS OF HAPPY THOUGHTS out into the universe, which is just waiting to MAKE ME A WINNER, then everything will magically fall into place. I just have to envision happy shit and the universe will deliver happy shit to my doorway via great big exciting packages full of chocolate, rainbows, puppies and stardust. Oh…must work on how vastly and cynically cynical I am, too. That will go on a list, written in a neat, precise hand. Must stop being cynical.
Ah, the pain killers have kicked in.
ANN WUEHLER 