Just checking in

I've become very busy lately, which is a good thing... although whenever I work towards the life I mean to ilve, I feel the emptiness of Dave not being there to share it with.

Anyway, what I've been busy with mostly is literature. Literature and writing. I'm celebrating tonight because I entered a story in the Fayetteville Observer's annual Christmas contest. It took me two weeks to write, although most of that two weeks was spent realizing that what I was writing wasn't getting anywhere. Then yesterday I woke up knowing where to start my story. I sat down and wrote it.

The story had to be 1000 words or less (the hard part for me, since I'm used to writing stories that go on for at least ten pages. Also, my training at USC was in very literary stories, where "stage directions" are primary--having characters take small but character-revealing actions is considered more important than dialogue or even plot. Most of the two weeks I spent not writing the story were spent excising unnecessary actions.) and be holiday related.

My story is, essentially, a Christmas dinner in a hosue where the father has just died. (Give you three guesses what my inspiration for that was.) At said dinner, the mother reveals she is pregnant with her late husband's child, to the delight of everyone except her 11-year-old daughter. I am so, so tempted to post an excerpt from the ending but I'm going to wait... if it wins it'll get published in the Christmas Eve edition of the Fayetteville Observer and then I can scan it in its entirety. (Not that I've given most of it away with this description or anything.)

In between working on this story, I've been revising my novel. I've rewritten about 3/4 of it. I've made the dialogue tighter, cut irrelevant action (again), and played with my sentence structure. It began as a literary novel... I'm trying to retain some elements of literariness (for lack of a better word), while making it more traditional. My goal is to have it be truthful, have it say what I want it to say, but be a novel rather than a longish "portrait" of a family in crisis. I'm fairly happy with what I'm achieving thus far, although I'm dreading working on the final chapters... towards the end I got tired of writing, I think, and rushed to finish the damn thing. I'd been writing about a year, and I wanted it to be finished so Dave could read it. Well, he never got to read it, but now it's dedicated to his memory... and so I have to make the effot I didn't make then and get those final chapters right.

Yesterday I bought the Writer's Market from amazon.com so I can actually go ahead and work towards getting it published once it's ready. I've got the ghost of an idea for a second novel, too, waiting to be put to paper once I finish this one. (And of course, it would be nice if I finished Elsie Worthing one of these days)

While I've been writing, I've also gone back to reading. I spent the last couple of weeks rereading Crime and Punishment. I read this when I was 10 years old. I doubt I understood most of it, but I liked it. I had borrowed a video adapation from the library. In addition to being the very first borrowed tape that actually played in my VCR (woo-hoo!), it was a fairly well-done movie, and it got me curious about the novel. So I took it out of the library.

I have some thoughts about it that I'll put into an essay version sometime... in the meantime, suffice it to say that it was good for waking my brain up.

I also reread My Name is Asher Lev this week (another book that I read as a young child and loved). Asher Lev is the story of a gifted artist who is born into a Hasidic Jewish family. It traces his childhood and adolescence, growing up with a religious father who wants his son to be a "normal" boy who can carry on the missionary tradition he has dedicated his life to and a loving but sometimes depressed mother, who never quite recovered from her brother's sudden death in a car crash during a mission.

There were so many interesting and sad things about this book... but one thing that struck me was the notion of "incompleteness". Asher's mother goes back to school to become a Russian teacher so that she can complete the work her brother left behind. His father returns to being a missionary so he can complete the work his own father left undone.

It made me think... perhaps lives intersect in a kind of relay race, where one person starts something but leaves it undone... another person, a person he or she was close to, is supposed to pick up the mantle and keep going with it.

I know that Dave sparked so many things in me... he taught me to drum, to cook, to play basketball, to pray, to be part of a team. I think it is for me to pick up where he left off with so many things.

I've been practicing the drums daily as always, and for the first time today I was able to play a five stroke roll (the first rudiment). I want to play in a church band someday... I just feel as if that's part of what I'm supposed to complete.

I've been feeling Dave's spirit nearby a lot lately. He's near me... he's with me... I know it.

Just as I know that I'm going to be a published writer soon, one way or the other.