Roadsouls

On Being Devoured

Daybook 212, 2006

I can feel I’m afraid to start on Roadsouls. Because what if I can’t figure it out? 

I still have no idea how to deal with the shape of the book. And yet—she says, grinning cheerfully—it’s time to begin to figure that out. 

So I will. 

But what I “will” do is not to force it. I must find means to put myself in the way of it. That is, I must go up the mountain alone, looking for what must devour me, and when it presents itself I must offer myself, be willing to be devoured, allow what will happen to happen. 

How odd that I should walk toward this with a glad heart. Is that all right? I “should” be terrified, I suppose. Is it valid if I’m not? 

I’m certainly afraid, but that’s a different feeling. I long to be devoured. I want to say, “World, show me how to be consumed, and to write, and to paint, in harmony with the world I am in now.” 

It’s the not knowing how to begin, how to walk up the mountain and make myself available, that I feel stymied about right now. Because my vision has to change. The underpinnings have changed; the continental plates have shifted, so the topography of the surface must conform to the change below. What and how would be the best way to en-corporate, in-carnate, allow to manifest, allow to express on the surface, those deep changes?

On working on Roadsouls

Daybook 217, 2008

So, back to this book. How shall I approach this?

I just finished a very sketchy “reverse outline” of the first draft. Never tinkered a book using a reverse outline before, new approach for me. I wasn’t exactly reading the text to make it, just scanning from the corner of my eye. Duuni’s sections, especially, feel way overwritten, pompous, posturing, taking themselves so seriously. That’s an exaggeration, but I felt first draft-y about them much more than about Raím’s sections.

The book feels hopelessly redundant and undirected at this point. Big gaps, changes of direction. The freaky thing is that I’m kind of uninterested in filling the gaps….

That said, I’d like to cut it way down. I wouldn’t mind cutting it by at least a third—I’d welcome that. I’d like to get this puppy slimmed, trimmed, sharpened, clarified, moving right along.

What I want is a spicy, quick-moving narrative. I want it clear, from the beginning. Not clear in the sense of stupidly obvious, but I want it to feel as though these scattered creeks are flowing into one clear river, culminating at the end.

On being one’s own writer

Email, no date

It is as it has always been, that those who can write prolifically to the market will be successful in the market’s terms. The market means “most readers,” and always has. There are always, also, those of us who stump along doing our own best thing. Doesn’t always succeed, by any means and for many reasons, but we die honest. 

For me, the real reason is that this way is the most satisfying. I’m no martyr. It’s like scratching an itch: Whew, got it. I can tell you Raím would not let me sleep until I wrote him a future. He was not nice about it.

On writing for oneself

Email, no date

I write for myself because I can’t not write. I’m passionately interested in figuring out, as well as I can, what wants to be said. This means many drafts; paying attention to others’ writing; listening closely and subtly to how writing forms itself; and so on and so on. 

But it’s between me and the universe, so to speak. I have no idea “where I belong in the fantasy/speculative fiction world.” I have no control over that. I may not belong there at all. It could be said that Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t; she simply wrote, and the so-called SF world adapted to her because her writing, with her care, grew into a truthful thing.

On what underlies my work

Daybook 221, 2009

For me the “physical reality” of matter, which science works to understand, is loosely paralleled and interpenetrated by a luminous imaginal universe. This paracosm, parallel cosmos, is not “real” in physical terms. It isn’t “spirit,” “angels,” et cetera. It is shifting coalescences of metaphor and analogy, like ganglia or water-riffles, that attempt to catch our intuitions about the state in which we find ourselves. 

The imaginal is real, numinous, powerful. It calls us to obedience to it. “Obedience” here means, “to humbly acknowledge and portray its existence.” Its metaphoric clothing is always relative and arbitrary, never to be considered absolute, yet the ineffable it attempts to describe is to be acknowledged and respected. 

To acknowledge and respect our attempts to describe the ineffable which underlies our varied metaphoric clothing: that is compassion.