December 5, 2012
Wednesday

The biggest pressure I feel right now is . . . getting the things I want to do for Christmas done. Doing all this alone seems lonely, although I always did these things [the decorating and baking] alone, but now Lynn’s not here and we don’t have The Party anymore, and there aren’t as many opportunities to share. But I feel a focused energy today — go with it, work with it.
— from my paper journal, J35, p. 11, December 5, 2011

The biggest pressure I feel right now is . . . gathering up all the fragments, preparing for visitors, writing my novel. Be still and know . . .
— from my paper journal, J38, p. 88, December 5, 2012

This morning, when I opened Make Ready the Way, Sr. Jean Evans’s Advent devotional guide now in its twenty-seventh year of use in my daily C&C (Coffee and Contemplation), I saw that I had made a notation last year on this same day, at the same mediation suggestion I seemed led to address again. I completed the C&C, took a deep breath, and then went looking for last year’s response.

The care and maintenance of my journals is one of the things I am least scattered about. They are in two wicker crates (I’m soon ready for a third) that reside under the cabriole legs of a highboy in my living room, filed in chronological order, numbered and labeled with the dates that each volume covers. All I had to do was find J 35, begun on November 28, 2011, and turn to page 11.

The writing I did last year on December 5 alludes to the sense of dislocation I was feeling, a kind of melancholy that resulted from a combination  of external events and my usual internal moodiness that can take on a dark cast as the season moves into short, cloudy days.

Last December 5, according to my notes, I sat down at the table at 6:25 am, having arisen at 4:45. “My rule is that anything before 5 a.m. is still night.” But I got up anyway. When I saw that it was 40° and the paper hadn’t been delivered yet, I put on my sneakers and walked Woodridge in a still, misty darkness. Back home, I considered “all the things I want to do for Christmas,” applying not the usual “what needs to be done this week?” but writer Jane Friendman’s more sensible (for me) “what would I be satisfied to accomplish this week?” I made two lists: “Writing” and “Not Writing.”

Under “Writing,” I put “Father McKenzie” and “Holidailies.” Under “Not Writing,” I had “put up Santa picture display, bake cardamom rolls.”

I had written the exact same list at the start of this week.

I decided that this was not a sign that my life is stuck in the same old same old, but a sign that it is the season of traditions, of repeating events and practices that give us comfort. Father McKenzie, who is a minor prop character in my first novel (the one that is currently in a drawer, ripening), began to figure in his own story last November. Eventually I shaped the material into what became the manuscript I took to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. There, I got strong encouragment from my workshop leader, Steve Yarbrough, to keep on with it as a novel. So that’s why Father McKenzie, brought forward five years from the events in the first novel, has his own fat file now, and concerns about the pastor emeritus he lives with, the young widow who has begun cooking his meals, and the bishop bent on closing his parish.

One of my favorite writing exercises ever, whose source I cannot now pinpoint, is “A Year Ago, A Year From Now.” It asks you to imagine your characters’ lives and situations a year before the present action begins, and then a year beyond the conclusion of the story.

I spent much of this afternoon thinking about where my characters would be a year beyond the situation I have them in. It helped me make a decision for the young widow. She has a difficult choice to make, and whatever way she goes will determine the direction of the story. I’d been moodling about this since September. Today was the most productive day I had had in a very long time.

Before I left my studio, I took a few minutes to think about where I would be a year from now. I hope I will be doing Holidailies again, baking cardamom rolls again, but also considering offers from publishers for Father McKemzie’s story.