not giving up on this painting lark yet



I'm finding my response to this process interesting. I don't love how this is going, but I'm not discouraged by it either. I am seeing one or two things that are turning out more or less how I envisioned (or hoped), and others that I will look upon as object lessons. I admit, a foolish corner of me was hoping I would turn out something presentable right out of the gate... but no, I need to learn and practise the same as anyone else. And voilà, here is me doing just that.

I participated in NaNoWriMo again this year. After last year's efforts resulted in my first novel, I have continued to write in the year following (as you will know if you read this journal faithfully), and this month I was faced with writing my fifth.

I hit the 50K word count on Nov. 10, which memory told me was faster than I managed it last year. Memory was, in fact, mistaken, because when I look thru last year's archive, I see that I hit the 50K on Nov. 7 last year. Ah well. This time, I went on to write almost 15K more on Nov. 11 to complete the novel. [And never again will I cram that much into one day! I woke the next morning with aching hands and arms, and sandy eyes. Why subject myself to that when it isn't necessary? I just got so caught up in the rush of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.] Since then, I have read through it three times to proofread and make tiny tweaks. In any case, well ahead of the Nov. 30 deadline -- in both cases, I attribute my speed to preparing an extremely thorough outline beforehand.

As I sit here now, I'm not sure how I feel about these books. Ambivalent. They all sound like I wrote them. They are all part of a series of sorts, so I suppose a consistency of tone is a good thing. But I'm wondering if what I actually have is a consistency of voice, or a sameyness that could become a rut, if it hasn't already. On the other hand, I can't see myself writing something wildly different next time just because I feel I somehow owe it to someone, if it isn't the book I actually have in me. So far, I've been writing what I want, because I want. I'm making no effort to court a mass audience. I realize that no book is for everyone, and my books certainly aren't for everyone. And I eventually realized that all I'm hoping for is that I can find the people my books are for, without being particularly worried about how many of those folks there might be. If I can please five or six readers on a regular basis, I can be happy with that. As long as I am one of them, and so far I am. I do like my own books, and if someone else had written them, I would still like them. I guess that's the most important thing.

I also wonder if the fact that I don't concern myself with earning anything from them, or achieving what is normally understood to be success with them, makes me a dilettante. If so, I can live with that.

my life

Lately I have become keenly and repeatedly aware that pretty much everyone I know is having troubles -- most often health and/or financial -- and their problems all seem so much worse than mine. I mean, my life is not amazing and I don't walk around in a state of bliss. I have my share of frustrations and challenges, I have my moments of sadness or anger. But everyone else's life seems so much worse. Just like that old saw about how, if you could throw away all your troubles into a pile, and everyone in the world had to throw theirs into the same pile, and then you had to pick a person's worth to take back, you would choose your own. It sounds so glib to so many, but there is a mighty truth in there. I just never thought that The Ideal Life would ever look like what I've got, somehow....

Bear with me a second:

Back in midsummer, I finished my fourth novel, The Night Shift. During the course of my research for it, I was introduced to the paintings of Gabriele Münter and something clicked. Just as happened last fall, when I was first reading Alice Munro, and suddenly felt a sense of inspiration along the lines of "I could do this" [I don't think I would have started writing fiction without her example], this year I found myself looking at Münter's work and thinking, "I could do this, too".

The idea finally coalesced into another new project: when they are published, my novels will need covers, and I have decided to paint them. Since then, I have been slowly girding my loins, preparing to learn to paint. Part of that learning has been wandering around taking reference photos of my surroundings -- I have a rough idea of the subject matter for my covers, so I know what sorts of views I want to capture. I have been playing photographer for a few weeks now.

I am grateful for the renewed appreciation of [and pleasure in] light and colour which I am gaining thru my photography, and for the increased mindfulness and "being in the moment" this project has brought into my life. I am finding this process more enjoyable and enriching than I imagined.

windshield wipers that don't squeal

amazing weather and my headache easing off

completing the first draft and first edit on my fourth novel -- have already begun rough preliminary notes on the fifth

I was born in 1957, raised in the 60s and 70s, a time when the face of right-wing discourse in America was the erudite William F Buckley Jr, when even the stridently anti-intellectual Spiro Agnew could display a creditable vocabulary as a matter of course. Education was valued, then, as were knowledge, reason, critical thinking. Looking back, it seems that the powers that be supported this, because there was a perception that skilled, intelligent workers were needed to run the massive new technological infrastructure of capitalism in the 50s. Everyone knew that you needed a good education to get a good job. And the intellectual demands of "a good job" seemed to be steadily increasing. It was an unfortunate side effect of education that it also gave one the critical power to question the powers that be, and the social unrest of the 60s and 70s arose from this.

I was also raised in a Fundamentalist Baptist church. At the time, my bubble didn't allow me to recognize this, but Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism were a quaint, remote corner of society's religious life at the time. The church taught me that it valued faith above reason, that at times "making sense" needed to be ignored. But even then, it never questioned the value of learning, of being able to think: it strove to strike a balance instead.

It was in the 80s, with the rise of automation and computers and industrial robots, that the powers that be began to see that an educated populace was of less value to them. Highly skilled work was being done by machines. Whatever work remained that needed to be done by people, didn't need to be done by very intelligent people. By this century, these trends kicked into high gear.

And now we live in a time when the political right routinely seeks to underfund and slash education and science. The insights of science and knowledge are ignored or "debunked", where fifty years ago they were respected and sought out. And at the same time, Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism have risen to a position of political power, supporting the new status quo by taking the position that critical thinking, the ability to reason, is in fact a social and moral evil that should not be taught. There is an unspoken assumption that the innovations needed to maintain our technology will somehow take care of themselves. That they were the work of rare geeky geniuses who somehow always managed to claw their way to the top anyway, so surely they will continue doing so.

Machine production and the service economy don't require people who can think critically. The most that can be gained by teaching them to, is people who will question and criticize the powers that be. So let's cast that as a social evil, and phase it out. 

the end of the heat warning -- and making better progress on Novel #4