Recent New Processes and the Results: How I'm Managing 5k Words a Day

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about the project so far is the way different people use the same material. I’m working on finishing up the next novella in the series, A Cavern Ripe With Dreams. I think I’ve mentioned it before; it’s heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House,” William S. Burroughs’ Junky, and Joe Lansdale’s The Drive-in Chronicles. Here’s the teaser from the beginning of it, which went out with Nirvana Gates.

One morning his father woke him from a nightmare. He was still young, perhaps eight. His father squatted on his heels besides Bill’s bedroll and shook his shoulder. When he woke, shuddering and gasping from dreams of strangle-fingered demons, feeling his breath still in jeopardy, his father didn’t say anything, just beckoned to him.

He followed at his father’s heels, towards the world and the great tube that the city clung to. At the end of each tunnel the space widened considerably, leaving places where shelves and ladders and catwalks could be stretched. And beyond them all you could see the abyss itself, stretching downward and upward into darkness.

The air was full of something. What was it?

His father said, as Bill moved to the railing to see what was happening, “Sometimes the world opens and things fall in. Rarely do you see them. This is something you will remember all your life.”

The air was full of tiny, floating things. He stretched out his palm and kept it motionless long enough that one drifted to be trapped in his palm. A seed, a brown seed, and attached to one end a tuft of hairs, fine and feathery, carrying it along. Carefully he raised his hand, examined it more closely. The seed was so small, but ridges and swirls marked its surface and up close, it was no longer brown, but shades and gray and green and red that somehow blended together to create the impression of brown from just a few inches farther away.

He closed his fingers around it, meaning to keep it, but it was so small that it wafted away even as his fingers moved.

He’d only seen things fall into the abyss. But these, so light, sometimes moved upward or downward, sometimes tugged sideways as though snatched by invisible hands. Thousands and thousands of these, swirling through the air.

He and his father gathered a painstaking handful, picking them from crevices. Other people were doing the same. How often did you get something like that without cost, like a gift from the universe?

They picked up seeds, but they also stood for hours, watching it. Almost everyone in the city came to see it, even if their children had to carry them. People did not speak much, simply watched, as though storing it up. He grew bored and watched their faces. None of them looked at him. Even the other children seemed too self-absorbed to return his gaze, to notice that he was watching them. His mother arrived and paid them little attention, instead going to speak to the city council and offer her opinion of the event. Bill and his father stayed where they were and paid her no mind.

At last he saw the cloud beginning to thin and his father stirred. “You may never see another thing like that,” he said, regretfully. “Some people live lifetimes between Openings. Others see dozens, maybe more. You never know.” He took Bill for breakfast from a vendor, bitter tea and roasted bulbs that tasted of smoke. As they ate, fewer and fewer of the seeds fell but there were still some, hanging in the air.

He slept dreamlessly that night.

When he went to the edge again, the seeds were gone and the air was blank. Not a trace of them remained, even the tiniest fragment had been taken. For the next year everyone tried to grow the seeds into plants. They tried different levels of moisture, or heat, or light from the sunstrip, but nothing worked and the seeds remained inert. He wondered what they would have produced. He wondered how they had come here. What decided when the world would open up and take something in? What lay outside the closed opening?

What decided when it would open and close? It implied some sort of conscious force, he thought, but then again there were random things in the world, things that developed without purpose.

What was Bill’s purpose? Did he have one?

What I’ve realized I need is a system with a single notebook. One problem with decluttering has been the number of old, half-filled notebooks that have surfaced amid the piles and books, some taken from the storage locker after lingering there a literal decade. I’m writing this originally in one of those: 5×8, unruled, a stiff, translucent purple cover, originally intended as a spiritual journal. Since then it’s accumulated a number of to-do lists, some pieces of stories, a few book review notes, and some timed writings (including “Prophetic Lobster Man,” which appeared in The Mad Scientist Journal).

But it must go in a box and soon. I can’t trail fifteen gazillion notebooks along on a trip. I need one at a time, and preferably one that fits easily in a purse so I can have it ever handy but still has enough page space that I don’t feel cramped. Writing on scraps of paper when no notebook is handy has been my undoing in the past.

At the same time, I need to back up what I’m doing, so I’m contemplating a system where I write in my (solitary) notebook and then transcribe either every night or as time permits.

I hope to go through (many more) than one notebook, so I’ll mail the filled ones as they accumulate, probably to my friend Caren.

I have been thinking about why the idea of losing writing bothers me so much. Part of it is my consciousness of having lost big chunks of it in the past: an entire novel, multiple half-finished short stories, poems, and journals entries (the last of arguable interest or value to anyone but me).

Because I could see myself going back to some, at least, of that stuff to remind myself of what that age was like when writing a character somewhere around the same age. Or to mine for stuff. Or simply to see how I’ve changed.

I feel as though most of my writing should be out there working for me. Ironically enough for someone with socialist leanings, I think of the pieces as rental properties, which should be actually housing readers, however temporarily, and earning me either money or fans who will buy other pieces.

In this attitude, I am a crassly commercial writer, despite my literary background, and I feel that when writing that could be out there earning for me isn’t, it’s wasted. It’s not that I feel every word of mine is so valuable that I must get paid for it — there’s plenty of journal maunderings and half-finished stories or essays and always will be.

It’s more that, as a writer, and particularly as someone who’s been primarily a short story writer, I am painfully aware of how crappily we’re paid.

So I want to make the most of the words that spill out of me and, more than that, I know that I’m vain enough that praise is a worthy form of coin. I love it when someone’s read a piece and praises it in an e-mail or a public recommendation.

So how can I best preserve these efforts, in order to most effectively sing for my supper? Notebook and Google Docs seem my best bet so far.

And crucial to this effort as well: putting away all these current half-filled notebooks. One more part of the de-cluttering, a process where I’m currently down to the last 10% or so, a few loads for Value Village and a suitcase or two now that the storage pods have come and swallowed up the heap of boxes that had towered in the front room here. Doing a load of laundry, I’m mentally consigning half the shirts to the discard heap, weighting clothing on a new algorithm of comfort plus presentability plus durability/discardability.

Almost ready to launch.