Everything from:trapdoor

“looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us”

Revisiting the ending of SCARS OF KINSHIP, because this book has come close to convincing people to represent it, but not close enough, and I finally figured out the way in which it was a copout. If I were a quicker learner, a brighter mind, a more diligent worker, a more serious introvert… but I am what I am, and I have done what I can.  And I think it’s pretty fucking awesome. […]

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This kind of thunder breaks walls and windowpanes

I think–only hindsight will prove me right or wrong–I think I am in the middle of one of my good times. It’s a bit hard to see from ground level, but I seem to be hammering out an awful lot of words lately, and feeling rather good about them. And by “rather good” I mean “ten feet tall and covered in gold dust”, to quote Elizabeth Bear, who knows much better than I what it is to be a talented writer at the peak of her powers with an extra booster-shot of brain chemistry. Recent progress: Sold “Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot“ Completed “In the Scent Garden of the Rochester Conservatory” (which may be renamed with a quote from “Faustine”) Rewrote “A Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia”Rewrote and subbed “Weathermakers” Still on sub from a while ago: “Haunts of the School for Duellists” Tinkered with Hour of the Hag opening chapters (this book needs another 10,000 words and it will be ready to query) Reached chapter 5 of Compass of Chicago (this book needs about 20 more chapters, but since I’ve only been working on it since October-ish, I am on track to finish it in […]

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In which it turns out this photograph is a metaphor

Because I miss green things already: have a leaf. This particular leaf is a grape leaf from my back yard. We don’t know what we’re doing with grapes. We inherited them from the previous owners of our house, an elderly Portuguese couple. These vines are likely older than we are. Some years our grape yield is more than we can handle; one year my mother-in-law made jelly from them. This year, I don’t know what we did differently, but all we had were leaves. I have writing years like that. Years where I can see that the vines of my mind are still hardy, but they bear no fruit. Sometimes it’s because I let them run wild earlier, and they only need time to recover their sap. Sometimes, it’s because I cut them back, harshly, all but the ragged dark trunk. This year, I am knee deep in the crush, and well on my way to a strong vintage. […]

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Saturdays, Bob Dylan, ashes

Bob Dylan was Saturday music. Often we had chores to do; I remember shoveling out the fireplace on an April day, working on a poem in my head, with “Tangled Up in Blue” coming from the living room. Things like that lay the groundwork for all the creative work you’re going to do later. You just don’t know it. You might try to plan it differently, if you knew; but there’s no way to predict what will be the triggers, what will lay down the pathways in your brain. You don’t even find out until much later, when you hear a song and you recognize something and it hands you the missing piece to a story. This is part of my father’s legacy to me: a childhood of music, and embedded in it, a library of sensory details and emotional states. […]

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In which I receive a twenty-year-old hug

Today I got back the first of several rolls of film I found in my dad’s old cameras. Three rolls: one containing only a single shot (a tree); one from our holiday two summers ago, during which he was afflicted with extreme cold sensitivity due to chemo, and could not go in the lake, but photographed it from the porch; and the final one, which had apparently been kicking around the camera bag for twenty years. It was shot on our first hiking trip in Killarney. In the last two decades the film seems to have been rained on and x-rayed and liberally dusted with sand, so all of the shots are grainy and streaky and strange. But I’d recognize those white mountains anywhere. Halfway through the roll, I came upon myself: myself at twelve, in my green tunic and ponytails, sprawled grinning on the rock. From my outfit, I think it was taken the day we climbed Silver Peak. I remember that day as the first day I was self-aware, in the sense I am now. The first day I was something other than a child. I already knew my dad was watching–I have another image he took of […]

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