Red Room Where the Writers Are

Pages 500-532 are misaligned in The Man Without Qualities, bound about a half-inch higher than the rest and cut off at the top. Small bit of Texas cussing at that. It finally arrived today. I didn't pay sufficient attention when I ordered it and bought from a seller in the UK. I suppose I received the full value of my $3.99 shipping charge, however. What words have been lost in those sliced pages? What is lost to the breath of each day as it's spoken and not written down? I'm set up tomorrow to have a long night of solitary writing, which I desperately need. Cramming it in between work activities, diaper changes, and wifely attention is difficult. I am pleased that nights are long, however mornings arrive far too quickly. I've a hitch in my giddy-up, as they proclaim here, though I prefer the word lull. I'm a cultured hillbilly.

I spent most of last night sitting in my chair drinking Rum and thinking. Worked on a poem here and there. A few days ago, I had climbed up to the second story of the workshop, where I store the boxes of books that won't fit on the shelves in the house, our old clothes, gifts we didn't want, Christmas decorations, stuff. I opened one box swollen with printed out words that I'd written before I went into my long, black silence. I knew what I was looking for and found it shoved into the bottom. Seventy thousand words or thereabouts of a nebulous something about a troubling time in my life before marriage, before short hair and good hygiene, before mortgages that muzzle, before responsibility. Before real life began?

I had known it was there, of course. It had never left my mind, like a pimple under your cheek that won't quite develop a head. What am I going to do with it? I think I'm going to work it up, re-cast it, impose a sense of structure. Make it grow up, if I can -- if, indeed, I am myself. Stylistically it's way wild. It crackles. All over the place, it doesn't adhere to a linear narrative, but proceeds in bits and spurts to a soft, snowy conclusion that's a mere promise of possible change. It wallows in its own shit, somewhat gloriously, like a bad actor hamming it up. It's a snorting pig of a book. It's of the same tone and tenor as the Yell post on this blog. I hadn't mentioned it and I'd left it in there alone for the years of silence and these months since I've been writing again because I'm scared of it. It holds tremendous sway over me, those words and their snaky, bright way. A tome of temptation. But as I've considered how to begin a new novel, what to write about, how to write it, I've gotten nowhere. I either can't get it up or I blow my wad after a couple thousand words. Something's wrong. The stories that I've workshopped that had the most control are the ones most ignored. Those where I let go a little, where I perhaps violate some convention, suppress traditional conflict, are the ones that prompt vitriolic response. Maybe that's not entirely bad. A heated response is a huge emotional investment made by a reader. The heaviest reader of my blog over the past week has been a man who told me, in vile terms, that I sucked and that he couldn't slog through two paragraphs of mine before giving up. Hate is often indicative of strong worth, I think. After the Rum and the thought and the slow rocking in my chair, I came to the conclusion that perhaps that bundle of papers in that box was somehow blocking me from moving on. It's hard for me to think of anything else, really. I don't know what that means, and in the absence of any concrete answer, I usually just type till the knots unravel.

I do worry that it'll corrupt me, but I worry about many things all the time anyway. Will the car run out of gas? Will work be busy today? Why do I have four ketchup tubs from Whataburger on my desk? The fan on my desk at work rattles. Is it going to break? Without the breeze the air stales. Why was that woman looking at me? Is my crotch undone? But yes, the book. I pulled it out of the box, climbed down off the ladder, started reading it there on a greasy chair next to a lawnmower engine my son and I took apart and couldn't put back together.

I began to think of it in terms of POV, of repetitive imagery, of how to move into a darkness without being consumed by it. In short, the I in the text is slowly becoming a He in my mind. A good and necessary thing. Has it started then? I hope so. The next few months will reveal. Here in my office at work, I am excited. I am snapping a rubber band against my palm as I consider the next sentence. Something is welling within me.