December 27, 2009
Sunday

“It’s been a little chaotic here,” I said as I welcomed my friend this afternoon. We were about to sit down to a meal of filets mignons in a reduction of white wine with cremini mushrooms and rosemary (it’s in the January-February 2010 issue of Weight Watchers Magazine), roasted potatoes with green beans and carrots (a bag of it to steam in the microwave from Green Giant), and no dessert. In the dining room the Advent wreath was in its usual position, but the purple and pink candles had not been replaced with white ones, as I usually do on Christmas Eve after church. The table was laid with a non-holiday cloth, but at least I’d gotten out the large Lenox serving plate with the Winter Greetings cardinal encircled by the words “Friends and Family Gather Here,” a new piece I bought on impulse just before Thanksgiving. And it should be noted that we were using the dining room not because this was a formal state dinner but because the kitchen table was laid out with all my getting-back-to-work stuff.

I checked my work diary this morning. The last notation was made on Saturday, December 5: “A day lost to recovering from the twisted ankle, yet I wrote a 1 ¶ scenario for a new story!” December 5 was just three weeks ago, I thought. Not so bad. Then I turned the pages back through the previous weeks. Although I have kept reading fiction, most days, and writing for Holidailies, of course, the last actual work I did to produce my own fiction was November 8. That’s seven weeks ago.

Five years ago, according to the link below, I did the same thing. I don’t even have to look at my old calendars and workbooks to know that I had followed my usual pattern. After coming back from Bread Loaf, I’d done this and that, maybe addressed some revisions, acquired that year’s volume of Best American Short Stories and started reading, but then lost focus as I turned my attention to Lynn’s adjustment to college and her first college field hockey season. When Thanksgiving came I did nothing but make Christmas and write for Holidailies. On the Feast of Stephen, I drew the line and began again.

So here we are, line-drawing, schedule-making time again. Although I have the next ten months broadly outlined into six different terms, like school terms, let’s be specific about just one term at a time.

The next nine weeks will be devoted to preparing my Bread Loaf application, a process which entails something extra this year as I meet the additional requirements needed to be considered for a new scholarship. That takes me to March 1. My reward? The first Gallivant of 2010, to Yale University, where a friend will be giving a lecture and a reading from her newly-published novel. I’ll attend her presentation, and the next day I will step into the 19th century milieu of William McCormick, American journalist and philanthropist and father of the public playground movement. I changed course on my 2002 research trip to Boston to study him and went not to look at his papers at Yale on my way home, but to revisit a road not taken in Vermont.

After lunch I put my guest to work. As I envisioned yesterday, he accompanied me to Staples to get a good desk chair for the Aerie, and he carried that and my tub of fiction fragments up the two flights of stairs for me. And then we sat for a few hours and shared our hopes and our goals for our writing and our lives, in the near term and the long. When we left, I put the folders with the material I’ll be working with these next two months out on the desk. They’ll be waiting for me when I arrive tomorrow.

I’ll be carrying the notebook, Volume 28 of my paper journal (I started Volume 29 yesterday), that contains that one paragraph of a fiction scenario I devised back on December 5. I have no idea what it was. No idea at all.

I can’t wait to find out!

 

From the Archives
December 27, 2004 – Back to Work: I tried to get back to fiction work today. Yesterday I gathered all my fiction materials and took inventory. I have a plastic crate full of hanging files loaded with folders containing notes, random ideas, copies of other people’s published stories that I’ve outlined, underlined, and annotated to study structure, to answer the questions, How did she do that? How can I do that? . . . Part of my problem is the difficulty I have in picking one project and focusing on it. . . . So today I made something of a schedule.

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