songs of tuesday: trace a line, au revoire simone; dilaudid, the mountain goats; eli the barrow boy, the decemberists; loretta, norah jones/gillian welch; la petite mort, erin mckeown.
River, open window, coffee, sun, excellent book (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender). This café, where I come not nearly enough and is like a song you hear and love immediately and want everyone to hear. I used to put people in my car and drive around and force them to listen to music that I loved and hope that they loved it too. Mostly, this would happen in Ohio, where there is a lot of driving to be done.
I’m not feeling awesome about my characters today,which means I’m not sure if they can endure, and if that’s the case,what’s it all for? I’ve been following the Advice to Writers feed on Twitter, which has been great, if you can leave out the part where the majority of the quotes come from Dudes. This one from Edward Albee is one I whip out when I need to keep things afloat: “The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn’t matter.”
(I also think of therapy as an act of optimism, which means it’s working, because I used to think it was an act of indulgence. I have to consider it differently in order to actually continue with it and take it seriously, but really, you can’t do something like dredge up everything that’s scary and painful if you don’t think it’s going to change things. It’s too scary and painful.)
That being said, there have been days when I am deliriously excited about these characters, when I’ve looked at them and thought, “Hello, my darlings, my saviors, my imperfect perfections, I’m so glad you’re in this world.” And then, there are days when I can’t believe that people who don’t exist have the capacity to injure and frustrate me, how vulnerable I am to them. Today I actually thought, fuck you, New Character, when previously, I was so enraptured, I wrote scene after scene that I might never even use, just so I could be close to him. (Boys: they screw up your life even when they’re imaginary.)
It looks like I’ll be doing a reading sometime this summer in the city, so it would be great if these folks got to show their capricious, neurotic, endearing, slight nerdy faces then.
