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by Matthew | Aug 4, 2014 | Writing
Last Thursday afternoon, Robbi loaded the kids into the car and drove north. Her destination was Lake George. Notably missing from the passenger seat was I, who have been left behind to spend a few weeks recharging my batteries and getting some writing done. It’s funny how perfectly the two go hand-in-hand.
What I miss in the course of my daily life is long blocks of uninterrupted time. In my normal life, I get only short intervals, which is good for certain types of writing tasks but prohibitive for tackling others.
I’d say that roughly 20 percent of writing time yields good writing. If I write for an hour, I’ll get about 12 minutes of good stuff out of it. But if I write for, say, 15 hours, I’ll get three hours worth of good material. Which is a lot of good material. If I’m particularly lucky, I’ll fall into a groove that will yield even a higher percentage of quality stuff. Today (Sunday) was such a day.
Here is where I have been for all but one hour since 5:00am.
I’ve needed every minute. Robbi has left me a to-do list that includes.
- copy for six children’s-themed, make-your own mix-and-match books
- six new Bobbledy Books manuscripts
- copy for a broadside we’re going to print on the letterpress later this year
- copy for a series of humorous greeting cards we’re going to print on the letterpress
- two new Idiots’Books manuscripts
- copy for our new website, which Robbi will be designing in the fall
Additionally, I have a 90-minute presentation to write and a novel-length book project I’ve been meaning to get to. I may not get it all done by the time my family returns on some yet-to-be-specified date in mid-August, but I’m going to do my best.
Today I wrote roughly 90 pages for my book project and one of the Bobbledy manuscripts. Keep in mind that the 90 pages are a horrible, regrettable, shamefully bad first draft, but they are a start. A pile of wreckage I will be able to return to later in hopes of salvaging some usable pieces. The Bobbledy manuscript, on the other hand, is feeling in pretty good shape.
Given all the words that lie before me, over the next two weeks, I am doing my best to act like a writer and look the part. Here’s me, circa 2:00 this afternoon. I think I’m pulling off the gaunt, disillusioned look passably well, no?
In case you are wondering, I am missing my family, but they left a little piece of themselves behind to keep me company.
When I returned to my computer after waving them goodbye, I found this leaning against my laptop screen, left there by elves, apparently.
It’s time for bed. My brain has just run out of words. It happens sometimes.
But, fortunately, not every often.
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by Matthew | Nov 18, 2013 | Writing
For the 18th straight day, I got up early and sat down at my computer. I’ve been hacking away at the draft of a novel (a “middle grades” book for kids), and the process has been surprisingly enjoyable. I decided from the outset that I wouldn’t worry about quality. Which is good, since there is little to be found in the pages I’m accumulating. What I have been able to gather in droves is ideas. Whether they are good ones will only be evident in time, but they feel good to me right now. I am energized by them.
At present, the document weighs in at 57 pages 21,395 words. I have a protagonist, two supporting characters with complicated problems, a story arc, a remarkable happening, a high-stakes struggle with major implications, and dark forces that threaten to ruin all.
What I hope to have by the end of the month is a pile of raw material that can be shaped into something more pleasing in months to come.
And now the children are stirring and the dog is whining for her breakfast, and so I’ll leave my draft for another day. Only 22 hours and 10 minutes until it’s time to start again.
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by Matthew | Nov 5, 2013 | Books, Writing
After a short illness-induced sojourn, I’m back to my early morning waking, running, and writing habits. In honor of November, I have decided to try NaNoWriMo for the first time. There’s something good (comforting/inspiring/affirming?) about knowing that I’m but one of 300,000+ people trying to write a book at the exact same moment.
I’ve picked a book I’ve been meaning to write for a while and am chipping away, one delirious session at a time.
There’s something in the right and left, back and forth repetition of my legs slogging over the bridge before my brain is even awake that makes magic happen. Or, if not magic, it makes something happen. When I get back and sit down at my desk, words come out, like water from a fountain. And, often, they are words that I can’t recognize. Most of the time, they seem to have been written by someone else. And later, looking back on the manuscript, I often cannot remember having written them at all.
But I really like this story that’s emerging, and I like squeezing an extra hour or so into the first part of the day. The black skies are beautiful, but not not as beautiful as the tiny, inadvertent night sounds of my otherwise slumbering household. The creaks of the floorboards are amplified when the light is gone. The hum of the fridge becomes a din. Iggy’s breathing is noisy as a waterfall.
There’s something in that negative space between dusk and dawn that’s deep and affirming. It’s my time to borrow someone else’s brain a while and tap into another mind that’s greater than my own.
I think it’s the dark that holds the power, the mystery, the ticket to that other place where books get written while we’re half asleep.
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by Matthew | Sep 9, 2013 | Life, Writing
When it comes to creative writing, I’m mostly a short form kind of guy. My books are more studies than anything else. Meditations on a theme, bursts of satire, picture books for kids. I write short pieces, in part, because that’s how my mind works, but in part because I don’t seem to have the time and focus I need to write longer ones.
But lately, I’ve been feeling like writing a longer one, namely, a “chapter book” for grade school kids. But in taking on the creation of a sustained narrative, there’s so much to keep track of, so much to figure out. That kind of concentration just doesn’t fit inside my chaos of a life.
And so I’ve come up with a new plan: get up really early so that I have a little time to write at the start of each day.
The plan calls for setting the alarm for 5:00am and waking my body and brain with a run.
Even in early September, it’s really dark at 5:00am.
It might as well be 2:00am.
The sky is velvety black.
The roads are empty.
The bridge is deserted.
There’s no one stirring in the houses.
The low-wattage yard lamps are my only lighthouse at the far end of Truslow Road.
The little town slumbers along the river.
All is still quiet as I come back up Water Street.
And home again to my slumbering barn.
But the bakers are awake next door. And world smells like cinnamon and sugar.
I head upstairs and sit down at my keyboard. For an hour or so, the house is still and I am free. I’m writing this book a few pages at a time, one morning at a time.
It stands to reason that eventually it will be done. For now, I’m not in any rush.
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by Matthew | Apr 2, 2013 | Writing
Now Robbi and I can add miseducation to the list of our crimes. We met a very nice woman named Jessica at this year’s AWP, who bought a copy of our Six Degrees of Francis Bacon poster and hung it in her kitchen. We know, because she wrote to tell us. We wrote back, begging her to send us a photo. Which she did.
But now we wish we hadn’t. While perfectly suitable for enjoyment by educated adults, Francis Bacon is a scourge to developing minds, so full of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies. As it turns out, Jessica’s kids have taken an interest in the poster, looking at it and pointing at it and such.
It troubles us to think that these small people might grow up thinking that Dostoevsky actually did have a beard growing competition with God or that Poe and Chaucer were drinking buddies (Amontillado being their grog of choice, of course).
Perhaps we should gracefully surrender our guilt. It is, after all, Jessica’s own fault that her children are thus exposed to our nonsense. But we can’t help feeling some responsibility, wondering if someday these deliberate errors will surface on an AP Literature essay. We can see it now, a young man getting back his D- paper and defending his work to his skeptical teacher: “Thomas Pynchon did have weekly sleepovers with J.D. Salinger, I swear! I read it on a poster!”
Such are the liabilities of satire.
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by Matthew | Mar 7, 2013 | Stuff We Like, Writing
As has been well documented here already, I’m a big fan of Friendship Montessori, the little school in Worton where Alden and Kato spend their days, mostly because my kids came home so happy every day.
But curiosity got the best of me, and so I decided to spend a morning observing in Alden’s classroom a few weeks ago. Robbi joined me with her camera. The result is a piece for the Chestertown Spy.
My goal was to illustrate the basic principles of Montessori education by showing how the kids learn.
It’s about the classroom and the community, the materials and the approach to teaching.
As is my style, there are lots of pictures. This is one of my favorites.
But that’s all you get. Much more is to be had over on the Spy site, just a click away.
