Month: September 2010

In Oregon, It Never Stops Raining

Another dingy motel room tonight, after a few days of familiar surroundings at Benjamin’s apartment in Portland. I find myself drinking more often than usual on this tour, because there’s so many conceivable motivations for doing so: celebrating a successful book event, drowning out the memory of a poor one, just passing the time. Sampling local vintages.

I’m pleased to report we are now 19 events down out of 36, which puts us more than halfway through. There are still six weeks left to go, though, and I can’t quite believe there’s that much time left. I thought I would write something this evening, maybe wrap up the first draft of one of those sea stories, but it’s just not going to happen.  Retreating into someone else’s prefab world via a book seems easier.  We are due for a train ride of titanic proportions starting tomorrow afternoon, though, so maybe that will be a time for being trapped with my own characters and duking it out until one of us emerges bloody and victorious.

Two weeks until I see her.

Some progress

Not that this will become a series of writing about writing, but I thought I’d follow up my last entry with the news that I did actually make some progress storywise yesterday. It was a long day of fairly mundane driving through Minnesota and Iowa, pretty but staid country, and among listening to my music, Benjamin’s music, and the first few chapters of Robert B. Parker’s “Rough Weather”, my mind drifted back towards stories.

My old thesis advisor and writing mentor, Ernie Hebert, once told us that if you get stuck in a story, or can’t start it in the first place, you should take a drive and your brain will work things out as you go.  At the time, I thought this a prescription for distracted driving, but I’ve really come to appreciate this advice.  In particular, driving with evocative music can be a great jumpstart for my brain.  Music that tells a story or sets a specific mood (see Tom Petty for the former or The Clientele for the latter).  After a good seven hours on the road, my mind was raring for the next opportunity to write.  Almost as soon as we checked into our hotel in Omaha, I sat down at the desk and set to Sea Story No. 2.

Now, in a noisy cafe, I may pop on my headphones and move Sea Story No. 1 forward, just for yuks.  There’s a conundrum to solve on a sinister coast, and I know just the characters to tackle it.

False starts

I keep getting the itch to write (fiction, I mean, not this blog), and then faltering once I actually sit down to the page, or sometimes just falling asleep. I guess a three-month national book tour is really not the time to try to start writing something else, but writing has historically been a method of release for me, and this tour has involved more than a bit of stress and disorientation.

Fortunately, we’ve also been spoiled by various friends and relatives along the way, so even when the muse deserts me, I can still manage to have some fun. Benjamin and I went with our friends Kat and Michael to the Minnesota State Fair today, and then came back to their place and watched Iron Man, which I’d never seen. Just a day of fun, a break from the standard touring duties, and I’ll be more than ready to get back on the proverbial horse tomorrow.

There are two sea stories, Nos. 1 and 2, that are asking to be rendered, have been asking for about a month now with little satisfactory response from me. One is fantastical, one “real”, and both drawing from the same well of images and sensations from the New Hampshire coast that also sustains me as I think of Jane and our apartment.  One of these days soon, the quiet will come and the surf will pour in around my feet and I will make it into story.