place

Last weekend I took a spin out to Hood River for some sensory research. Talked to some folks. Filled my tank up with material for further adventures of Brady and Connor.

It's magic to me, the way it always starts with place. I mean, plot's important. Characters, certainly. But when I consider the starting point for anything I've gone the distance with, it's clear that the germination that sticks must touch on my experience of the physical.

The smell of Daphne wind. The warmth of sun through a closed car window. The texture of early spring landscape, brittle, hopeful, the slightest pastel peeking out from bark-gray. Tractors backing up. Apple cider in cold storage. Crusty leaves in sodden berms.

It's composting fast - as though I added some enzyme to it. I feel a writing day coming on.

Where do you start? When do you stop?

reset

squinty-eyed and mole-like

The book launch - still in progress - is an exhausting, exhilarating, mind-blowing, fascinating and soul-crushing experience.

You hear all this stuff when you're on the other side. The virgin side. About not reading reviews, and about pacing yourself, and about distribution nightmares and sales. And now that the powers that be have announced that there is, indeed, blood on the sheets, the marriage into published has been consummated, I can tell you first hand - it's all true. You go from being in control of everything, to being in control of not that much.

I love Dani Shapiro's thoughts on the difference between the doing and the promoting. She says, "This writer has stepped out from her dark cave — that shadowy, hallowed place where she created her work — and now she is squinting, shading her eyes from the sunlight."

I relate to that quote completely. I love my dark cave. I want to go back there. Not only am I physically fair-skinned and sun-averse, I'm psychically that way. I will say, social media has been a bit of therapy for me - allowing a daily practice of whispering into the vast and clotted world of people and their lives, but my preferred environment is a solitary room, the sun beating on the closed curtains behind me.

This past couple of months my mole self, the squinty-eyed introvert that I am, has been teetering, rather than walking, the tightrope of doing versus promoting. Friends, I am out of balance.

This morning, a Sunday - typically NOT my favorite day of the week due to the parade that it often is - I forced myself to meditate on how to fix this. And I have a start. As always, the remedy to too much promoting, is more doing.

I've started something new. (And yet, even now, when I write that, in my mind is the hashtag way of saying it: #amwriting. God.)

How do you maintain the balance between being part of the larger conversation and talking to yourself?