Weekly Zephyr #115: The Wind and the Wax
After a gigantic epiphany last Sunday night,
the kind a person only gets once every few years,
I went in my office to work on Monday, and I started the way I always do, which is to light a bunch of candles. I have a whole raft of tea lights on duty when I work on my novel and I feel weird if I haven’t lit at least two of them.
My office is crowded with meaningful-to-me things:
altars, talismans, artifacts, mossy branches meant to impart wild nature feelings, scrolls of story maps, statues, potions, paper signs and sigils, a bejeweled spider, a whole two-floor cardboard house for my protagonist that I made with a door that opens and glossy mailing tape windows, a skylight for inspiration to pour into, and four battery-operated tea lights—one upstairs and three downstairs—that I turn on so it’ll feel like somebody’s home.
I need all the help I can get and I will conjure any kind of help I can think of. And I am intensely fussy and superstitious.
Monday morning, after I lit the tea light that lives in a lantern jar on a slice of birch, I was rearranging the jar of branches and scrolls behind it (the jar had shifted so the branches were aiming the wrong way—I KNOW) and I knocked my ceramic wizard off a plant oracle book straight into the candle I’d just lit.
She stuck the landing exactly vertically upside-down and balanced in place on her wizard hat in the warm wax. I flipped out, did a photo shoot, etc.
The wizard was a gift from my beloved friend/sister Morgan. She made the wizard as a writing totem for me so I’d trust that the words would come, that I would conjure them all when I needed them.
I myself had been dreadfully stuck before the wizard fell into the wax.
After four years of work conceiving this series of novels*, a whole first draft of the first novel, and a carefully-labored-over prologue + three chapters of a first round of revisions on that first draft, I fell into something deeper and more ominous-feeling than a period of rest.
*For those who are new, I’ve been working on this series of speculative fiction/fantasy novels where the protagonist is the daughter I miscarried in real life 14 years ago, set hundreds of years from now. This not-exactly-daughter is slated to live a whole, long, rich life all the way to her death in old age, but in books. You could make the case that books are a better place to live than Earth at the moment.
Even when my work ebbed instead of flowed during those four years, I still believed deep in my heart that I could pull it off, and I felt joy and pride that I was still working, still trying, and many days I felt a kind of wild, thrilled agency while I worked that I couldn’t believe I was getting to feel.
Sometimes I felt resistance and didn’t work, took whole months off, but the story kept moving in my mind and I never worried that I wouldn’t be able to go on.
George Saunders, over in Story Club, says that when you hit a certain kind of resistance when you’re writing a story, that means the story is thinking.
I had of late hit the biggest, heaviest pocket of resistance I had on record. Something totally different. My belief sails sagged. No wind. I was immovable. Despair clouds formed at the horizon, very dark. I couldn’t and wouldn’t work. This story had kept a candle lit in me during these terrible collective Earth years, and I didn’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t keep moving, if the story was leaving. A treading-water feeling was setting in, some desperation, fear that this story joy was sailing away from me. A new bad feeling was setting in, beyond my control.
This had to be reckoned with. I pulled the I-Ching for myself, something I do once a year if I have something dead serious to ask. I let the reading marinate and softly tried to understand it.
What I thought I’d do is stop. With the books. Not give up, exactly, but stop. Not rest. Stop. Take care of my family, the alive ones I can see in my house in human bodies. Stop treading water, stop thinking about it. Let go for now and try to be a good person on this Earth.
I felt sad but okay. An integrity was there, like an anchor, I could feel it, a good thing in the void. I would meditate, clean, care for my people, write the Zephyr, maybe start writing essays again, that’s it. I would need to meditate a lot to access a joy-generating place, but okay. I would try that.
I started this fiction-writing so late in life, at 48, and the idea arrived way too big. Five novels turned into six novels when the first novel split into two novels, when the first novel I’d planned was too big to fit into one book. I’m trying to write a whole incarnation for a person. The best bits, anyway. That’s a lot. And time is proceeding and I don’t know how much I have left, either. None of us do. Oh, well. I’m supposed to stop so I’ll stop. Maybe it will be enough to be a good person, and maybe the story will come back. I can let go and either I’ll float or I won’t.
Exit ramp to the epiphany
I figured while I was stopped, I could just casually do The Artist’s Way again. Julia Cameron has a new Artist’s Way-ish book out, too, that’s a six-week process instead of twelve. I had enough Gift Circle points from Target to order it from them for basically no money, so that was nice.
Started Morning Pages again. Always loved those.
A thought blew by. I noticed that I’d been dreaming, in flickers, about when I’d finally have the chance to write the third book in the series. That’s when Oona’s left her childhood home, and completed a long, transformational, sort of post-graduate round of schooling—gone from a totally uncooked, limp, despairing person to a more cooked, upright, happier person, and now she’d be setting out for a faraway group of islands to get wild and learn about magic and make some properly bad decisions. There were some characters in that book I couldn’t wait for Oona to meet, that I couldn’t wait to get to know. Things would start getting sexier in that book, more dangerous and more unpredictable.
She just had to do two books’ worth of penance and learning first. She just had to prove herself super hard and have a rough time for two books before she could have fun and really start her life. Get flogged a while.
I had to do two books’ worth of penance, is the thing. I had to. Because I hadn’t done anything with my life and I’d been a real bother to people early on when I was too full of despair to handle myself like an adult in the world. And people in my family had suffered and/or achieved so much more than I had, and I had to honor them and mythologize them in these books, too. Oona and I couldn’t have fun yet. We had to be sad, we had to learn, we had to try to be good.
Embarrassing thing on the way to the epiphany, right on Epiphany Street but not there yet:
I reread Gone with the Wind last week.
Yes, yes. That infinitely problematic, racist-to-hell-and-back classic. I checked the book out on Kindle from the library like it was radioactive porn. What I told myself was—and this isn’t wrong—that I should find out just what kind of racist swill I gulped down so happily when I was a girl.
I read it over and over between the ages of eleven and twelve. More than any other books I read, that’s the one that made me want to write. That’s the one that made me pick a up pen and write a sequel real quick on a couple of pages of legal paper. I was in it for the apple-green washed silk and the sprigged muslin and Rhett Butler, you see, and Scarlett drove me crazy, she was such a shockingly merciless bitch, but, uh, yes. I had loved it to the point of madness.
The reread.
My dad used to keep Playboys and Penthouses and bags of broken chocolate in his nightstand drawer. Whenever my parents left the house, bang. I was in that drawer, gobbling chocolate and flipping through these magazines, listening for the family car like a freaked-out gazelle in straight-up lion territory eating leaves off whatever tree it is that gazelles can’t resist.
That was the vibe with the reread. I mustn’t get caught. Holy shit, this is compelling. Oh god, what the hell is happening. The balls-out racism is so much worse than I had any memory. FUCK YOU, MARGARET MITCHELL!
I yelled fuck you right out loud many times to the place past the ceiling where I think Margaret Mitchell and the rest of the dead people are, and I shook my fist and threw the Kindle down, but then I picked it back up again and again. I scanned past the endless, deeply fucked Reconstruction philosophy parts (just like I did when I was a kid) to get back to the juicy parts.
What a ripper. I mean. It’s a grade-A piece of shit and I feel appalled that I sucked down all that racist poison when I was forming as a human being but it’s a ripper. Hideous, vile, magnificent. I was relieved and sorry when it was over.
A couple of days ago, while I was taking a shower, the thought arrived:
What if I drop the first two books altogether—the ones that make me feel like I’ll be dead before I complete them to my satisfaction and the fun can start—and start on Book Three right now. Just lose them. Lose everything you’ve done. Start over.
EPIPHANY: WHAT IF WE DO NOT HAVE TO BE GOOD
WHAT IF WE DO NOT HAVE TO DO PENANCE
LET’S NOT AND SAY WE DID
EVENTS THAT TAKE PLACE OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME CAN BE SUMMARIZED
DROP THE DEAD BOOKS, MAKE AN ALIVE ONE
You’ll feel insane, you’ll feel behind, but you’ll be free!
I went into my office to break into book three territory and that’s when the wizard dove into the wax.
I made something for you. I know it’s corny. But it’s not dumb. What I made for you is symbolic but it’s real. It’s meaningful, meaning that it’s magical. Magic is furiously concentrated, ultra-sincere meaning, aimed.
Do it and find out. Do it hard enough to find out.
These are our days on Earth. Don’t do any more stupid penance. You’ve done enough.
I recently remembered how much I love everything you say and re-looked you up again and this post was precisely and exactly the thing for me right now. Thank you. I'm working on my first novel (I'm 55) and its super weird.
One day I'll tell you the story of tonight and how it was a big ole pile of wizard flipping magic, rabbit pullin' one flip and drop after another kind of a night, and that I sat down to write the story of it all when this WZ was waiting for me to make sure that not only did I write it but also feel even more encouraged and grateful for wizardflipping gorgeous artists like yourself. Man! Woman! Tina! Hands up! So grateful! 🙌🏼