The Furious Spinner

It's near the end of the day. Mario is upstairs reading before sleep. It's been a long and sometimes harrowing week. Maybe harrowing is too strong a word. What the people in Lebanon are going through is harrowing. My week has just been difficult. I suppose. Watching other people suffer is difficult.

As I sat by Linda's side this afternoon, I thought about god again and reaffirmed my disbelief in an omnipotent omniscient god. If something/someone had the power to stop suffering, they would do it, right? Unless they were a cruel despicable evil S.O.B. (Or as Paul Erdös calls god: the Supreme Fascist.) Therefore, either god doesn't exist or if it does exist, it is evil.

I’m not saying geni loci and the rest of the Invisibles are not possible. Probable. I'm not eschewing the Old Wild Mother (as Cate calls her). But they are not omnipotent. (If they were and they did not stop suffering, I would call them Supreme Fascists, too.) There’s the difference.

But I haven't the energy for a thealogical argument right this second.

Tomorrow I have a reading at the library. I'll read scenes from Mercy, Unbound. I'll probably read a bit of Broken Moon and Church of the Old Mermaids. I don't do many readings any more. It doesn't really help with overall sales of a book, and it can be exhausting. So I only do ones I really want to do. It should be fun, although I was dreading it for a while—I couldn’t find people to stay with Linda while I was gone. Serena has a class, and nearly everyone else is out of town. Fortunately Linda’s niece is coming for part of the day, and Serena's godmother is coming for part of the day. Hurrah!

So tomorrow I'll talk about story at my reading. Maybe how I started out. I started writing stories before I could write. But you've heard that story before. When I was in college, I was in love with the language, but I didn't understand plot. Didn't understand story enough. After Clarion (the six week workshop where I met Mario), language became just a tool to create story. It was all about plot. Now I understand story and I love the language. But I'm still an Ernest Hemingway kind of writer. He could say so much with so little. I ain’t a flowery writer. If I can’t describe something in a sentence, I rarely do it.

I had more to write on this topic, but I am weary to the bone. I need to get some sleep. I don't generally give writing advice, even when I’m asked. I think most writing advice and writing books are crap. Once you know the language and understand basic sentence structure and grammar, I think you learn fiction writing by doing two things: reading fiction and writing fiction. But that’s just what I think. I also recommend two writing books, Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction and John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist.

I reread Damon’s book regularly—although I just looked for it and can’t find it. Damon was one of the instructors at Clarion. I miss his presence on this planet. I never liked John Gardner’s fiction; he clearly didn’t take his own advice. His writing books are quite good, however. So that’s all the advice I’ll give; I don’t want to stray into crap. Of course, maybe I already have. Strayed. I am a natural born writer (if there is such a thing), so it was probably easier for me. Mario has reminded me of that. And I’ve been writing for 45 years. I know what I did: I learned the basics. Then I practiced, practiced, practiced—and observed by reading. But I said that already.

Okay. This Old Storyteller is going to bed. Still looking for the Sand Man.

Wish me luck.

Labels: Linda, sleep, writing

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