Ah, the juices are back and I'm brooding about new work. The story for which I have a first line. H's new sensitivity to heat/cold suggests interesting dramatic possibilities.
In the story, the woman goes down as the guy is across town, preparing a move to Tucson because he hates how Portland has changed. They will live apart: hopefully she will spend winters with him in Tucson, and he will spend summers with her in Portland. He does not want a divorce, he wants a more sane existence. Then the event ... and he feels guilty as hell.
The roles reverse. He finds all her friends in Portland are a great help and relief to him during a long rehab ... and she hates the Portland winter so much she wants to move to Arizona! So now he wants to stay, and SHE wants to move ... and the story is about this swinging pendulum, how marriage is an unending series of compromises and adapting to changes.
At least that's the rough notion so far. The beautiful thing about writing is that, if it is going well, the characters really do become "real" and they lead you, not the other way around, and you end up feeling like a secretary ... during the creation stage. In the polish stage, which really separates the girls from the women, more left brain manipulation happens to give it shape.
The most important book I ever had in a creative writing class was when I took an exploratory class after the army ... we used a collection of short stories by all the American heavy weights and the book had both the FIRST DRAFT and the FINAL DRAFT of a story ... and it was absolutely amazing to me how bad the drafts were! Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, they were all TERRIBLE on the first try of a story ... and that's when I turned on to writing, because it wasn't inspiration or a gift or any of that, it was actual hard work, starting with a piece of shit and turning it into something beautiful. It was perspiration, not inspiration. And the key was REWRITING, CHANGE, FIXING, POLISHING.
I was a published mathematician before I was a publish author and actually I find more similarities in the two endeavors than differences: math is about structure, and beauty is simplicity ... the more elegant, the least wasteful, a mathmatical proof, the more beautiful it is ... and surely that is why I am a "minimalist" writer and follow the same aesthetic. But thru high school I kept a math journal, I spent a ton of time alone, brooding over math problems. Later I would brood over story and play and screenplay construction. Not really much of a difference, it is still solitary, it is still brooding.
I wonder if Harriet ever broods? She worries but that is different. Brooding is positive, creative, FUN.
Man, do I have a blessed life. Remarkable.
