Project

When you set forth on a new project, you quickly become aware of the usual playground gang hanging around, their body language betraying their interest in being chosen for your team. "Pick me, pick me" Enthusiasm postures. "I'm good in the late innings." "Hey, what about me?" your Inner Critic says. "You never really get going until you tell me to shut up at least once. I keep you honest." "Forget them," Risk chimes in. "You need me, especially when you start feeling confident."

One of the gang stands off toward the rear, making just enough movement to alert you to his presence, his size relative to the others enough to make you doubt the wisdom of bringing him on the team. He is small. But you've chosen him before and he seems to grow into his task. He is Voice.

Another figure who pesters you to be included is Research; you know from experiences on both sides of the desk that he needs to be watched carefully. He wants you to use everything he has dug up, because after all, what's the point of research if you don't use it?

You're pleased to see Disappointment hanging around, hoping to get a foothold somewhere, because in his way he reminds you that you start with a vision which you hope to bring into Reality, and what you end up with is not going to be as brilliant or as wonderful as that first vision you had of it. But here, coming across the playground you see Different and, as though he were leading a kid brother, but the closer they get, you see it isn't a brother, it is a sister. She is Completion. You want them both on your team. You want this project to be different and you are eager to see what it will look like.

You are doing it all for Discovery, of course, that pulsing moment of awareness that comes upon you when you least suspect it, sometimes yanking you into Confrontation with the Awareness that was lurking there in the shadows all the time. Awareness is a humbling thing; no sooner is it out and running around the inner playground that is your imagination than it pauses for a moment to catch its breath and allow you to catch yours before whispering to you that this thing you now know for such certainty and in such pellucid vision is something well known by any number of others. It is fucking time you did know it, Awareness says, raising its voice just enough so that if you were, say, in a restaurant, persons at other tables would turn to see who was speaking out in that manner.

Your revenge, if you care to use that word, is the knowledge that however late it was in coming, it came from your process of writing rather than any other process you might have; you got it by synchronicity, the happy discovery that emerges when you have put forces of yourself in motion and remained with them through their permutations and resolution. All right, it isn't revenge because you aren't in truth getting even with anyone or anything, even if in fact you set out to do just that. It isn't revenge at all, it is fun. It may have taken work and doubt and those three-in-the-morning existential loneliness that arrives on schedule to keep you honest. But it is fun. Of course you are already spending the money you might possibly make from such activity, in fact spending more than you will probably make, but in addition to being fun, it is the kind of expansiveness that makes you who you are.

The Mechanic

On this day, remarkably, you have "solved" two critical mechanical problems related to your computer. The "solutions" came as a result of protracted persistence, a quality you are barely on speaking terms with. The quotation marks appended to the solved/solution words are there because you are not entirely sure how you effected them. In any case, you have achieved a forty-eight-hour bonding with an Internet connection without having to reboot your cable modem or the mysterious white rectangle called Airport Extreme that receives the signal from your cable modem then broadcasts it wirelessly to your computer, printer, music system, and external hard drive back-up.

You have also somehow resolved the dire warnings received each day from your computer's back-up system, advising you that it has been twenty-two days since your files were backed up. At least, you think it is your computer, sending you these warnings as opposed to the external hard drive. You have come to regard the entire process as a robotic rebellion, somewhat of a piece with the Peasant's Rebellion of the Middle Ages, wherein disparate parts go out on strike, wanting your attention.

Not long before you began typing these vagrant lines, you had another such warning about backing up files, almost reflexively responded with the same approaches you used earlier in failure, only to be informed that, ah, your computer was busily backing up files (that you neglectfully allow to go at risk) and further that you could continue what you were doing without interrupting the process.

Your earlier mechanical problem resulted in what you considered rather snippy notes alleging either that your HP Photosmart C4580 wireless printer was not communicating with your computer or that your printer was already in use (moonlighting?) somewhere else. This had caused you some concern and some asking for favors since this is the precise time you need to be printing out a book-length to submit to a publisher. As you keyboard more of these lines, the HP Photosmart C4580 is busily churning out pages with the reassuring sounds of a machine that has been your friend and is, indeed, the very model of a modern writer's friend.

Although you have accomplished these things, you are not entirely sure how you brought about these conditions, much less could you instruct anyone else to have effected them. In a way that is of itself a linking device, you are similarly unsure how you brought about the final results of the book-length manuscript now transiting through said HP Photosmart C4580 except to say that you had a vision of a reference-guide-type of work, its format suggested to you years ago when a $1.50 paperback book, A Dictionary of American-English Usage (based on Fowler's Modern English Usage) came into your possession. Over the years, particularly once you began teaching, you nourished the idea of doing the same sort of thing for what you considered the language of story telling.

You do not consider yourself the host for the tapeworm of mechanical ability or understanding; unless you were dealing with the bright red Olivetti manual portable typewriter of your late twenties and into your thirties, your persistence or its lack determined your success in dealing with gadgets, tools, implements. It was also your persistence that kept you following the spoor of the story, tracking it until you reached a point where you sensed a familiarity with its behavior and its personality.

At the moment, all is going well. The major mechanical things in your life are functioning as they were designed to do; your book-length manuscript is churning merrily forth, another work is not only in mind, you have hit several seeming dead-ends in its plotting, only to have ridden the vehicle of persistence to some solution that appeared or occurred to you or appeared and occurred at the same time. You are launched into chapter seven of the novel you call The Secrets of Casa Jocosa. True, you are also propelled by enthusiasm, but in its way the process is as uncertain as your connection with mechanical things.

At any moment, the Internet connection could become quirky, the Airport Extreme router demand time off, the HP Photosmart printer begin a maddening series of paper jams; the scene in the works at Casa Jocosa could leave you at a dead-end or cul-de-sac or in the midst of some suburban sprawl from whence you cannot emerge.

Thus this recognition that persistence is best maintained on a steed of enthusiasm.

The Five Stages of Writing

You had progressed through all five of the Kubler-Ross stages, enjoying anger and denial so much that you revisited them for second helpings. Then, on November 25, 2008, more from enthusiasm than either resignation or acceptance, you launched forth to recreate what had been so utterly and completely lost.

The first entry was act, which you had defined in a format you would follow all the way through until yesterday, August 10 of 2009. Then came examples and opinions, the voice supplying itself, coming forth in a way that surprised you given the amount of time you'd spent looking for it and, you thought, finding it, and beginning a project you knew for some time as The Fiction Writers' Tool Kit. The project was begun back B.C., which in this case meant before cancer, back when there were a sheaf of unfinished short stories wagging fingers of reproof at you, reminding you in metaphor of Sally wanting to get out the back door to pee or chase a rabbit or coyote, and getting no response from you. You had perhaps a hundred or more entries, definitions sketched out, some of them revised.

In spite of having a back-up drive and any number of CDs with the text burned on them, the whole project somehow disappeared, was not where you thought it would be or, indeed, where it ought to be. You pawed through the old Toshiba and the more recent Acer, thinking surely to find the files there. But no. Gone. Vanished. Aloha, Dr. Kubler-Ross.

You reminded yourself of the stories you'd heard of the lost manuscripts of writers who, like you, lived on the edge of disarray and disorder, remembered past times of pushing deadlines up to the eleventh hour and later. Deadly Dolly, for instance, agreed to over a dinner in which the publisher poured too much wine and in mitigation wrote checks with too few zeros, was done and revised in one week, the last check financing a riotous fling in San Francisco in which a cocktail waitress at a bistro called The Hotsy Totsy played a considerable part, supported by close chums including a concert-level pianist who flew combat missions in Korea, the owner of a Green Street saloon, and a famed lawyer who loved to steal silverware from New York hotels.

This project was not to be done in all-night sessions of youthful exuberance; this project was to be done with daily immersion in the depth of the project, its voice and its connective tissue, bringing together things that were not previously thought to be brought together. Beat came next, beat as in a dramatic movement. Then block, as in determine where everyone was in every scene. By this point the conflation of the dramatic, the stage, and the page was established and acknowledged. The voice and dramatic overview were set in motion and were, in fact, talking to you. All you had to do was listen. You did.

The subtitle can now read: Over 350 words, terms, and concepts to help you write better stories.

The words, terms, and concepts are cross-referenced. All but six of the terms have been revised, the preface is written, and the individual you want to introduce the work is well known to you and will likely agree to do it.

You already know the publisher you want for the project, and you'd thought to have a proposal ready to send them for their next reading period, which begins 1 September, except not this year; this year, they are moving and will not be reading until January, so the next logical thing to do is send it forth to Angela, tell her your preference, then let her do her work while you put together a proposal that will help her do her work. At which point, you are thinking the two short stories that have tapped you on the shoulder, then on to the next book project, which would seem to be an enormous statement of hubris on your part were the project not motivated by enthusiasm and admiration in enough measure to trump hubris and allow it to stand merely for the enthusiasm it embodies.