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thanks, comrade.
it's been an interesting experience. i had initially considered trying to get closer to the 50k but found that i'd adapted my mode of writing around the time constraints that i work with tightly enough that it was really difficult to move away from them.
i have to split my working time up. i like to write in the morning but i only have an hour or a little more, depending on when i get up. so i generate material as i'm having the initial coffee. maybe that's why the writing is so dream-like in places: coffee doesn't chase them away immediately.
then i start moving things around...more often than not i don't know exactly where a piece is going to go. it comes together out of the rearranging and cutting process. sometimes it just requires moving a sentence in a sequence. other times it takes longer.
then i have to walk the wonder husky and move into work mode. i usually steal and hour or so when i first arrive to edit.
i found it really interesting to work with notions of forgetting. you can't talk about forgetting without talking about remembering, but trying to combine the two pushes you to pay attention to holes and gaps in what you remember and not fill them in. it also nudges toward the similarities between remembering and dreaming and seems to make it easier to let one drift into the other.
stuff that was happening in real time would show up warped through the thinking and dreaming.
since i didn't really have anything like a plotline, only a motif linked to a procedure, i decided that i would try when i could to work in repetitions and variations on smaller elements. that turned out to be easier than i thought because my brain doesn't move that fast and the things that occupied me at a detail level a month ago still do now. apparently.
there is an intertwining with a woman that always happens in exactly the same way. all that changes are the details of it.
there's a curious obsession with birds falling out of the sky because---i think----it's like flying except more irregular. maybe.
there's the creeping-in of fall. for example, i know the yellow dot clouds were leaves stuck on trees the branches of which were too far away for me to make out through the window of my apartment that looks out over the marsh. and there's the marsh. always the marsh, it seems.
i had an idea that fall and cold meant a slowing of movement within systems (bio-systems, but in general) and that an effect of slowing would be the opening up of gaps, which doubled the forgetting procedure.
so it turned into a pretty tight little game with some arbitrary bits that turned up now and then (seeing the woman in the leopard print dress; playing congas; etc.)
the bits from my past are all altered by these procedures.
my mother's quite offended about what i did to the uncle jim story for example. she claims it never happened. i'm not so sure.
i feel like i'm following a process at this point, one that's taking a pretty definite shape--by this i mean the writing thing as a whole, not just nano-space. it's taken a long time to get to this starting point. i'm getting more stuff published and am starting to get asked to make new things for publication by people i don't know personally. so something's going on.
my plan is to keep going.
i don't have a real plan beyond that.
we'll see, i suppose.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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