deeplyshallow // ellie

ellie

The last few days have been good ones, writing-wise. Eleanor is coming awake again for me, here and there, in glimpses rather than broad strokes, which is why I’m writing her on the site again instead of writing her offline, where she breathes more deeply than these thin little gasps I post.

For a few days last week I was gone, swept off to Austin for a conference I didn’t know much about, except that anybody who thought they were anybody was supposed to be there. They were all there. And they all wore the same clothes, so that even if you knew that Somebody was there, you couldn’t have told them apart from Anybody.

Writing has been a rough go lately. I write best when my mind is clear, and my mind hasn’t been clear. It has been occupied by the things I do all day long, with work and branding and client expectations and deliverables and deadlines and so forth. Coming home didn’t help much, because home was not quite there yet. Since January we have been living in a state of flux, trapped in transition between moving in together and finding a home with space enough for the both of us and all of our things. We have done a fine job putting all of these things into my tiny apartment, packing boxes and containers here and there and there again, every corner stacked full, every surface blanketed. And suddenly I was incapable of writing. It’s the whole concept of being in transition, I told Felicia, and while I was away in Austin, she solved the problem. Home is now tidy and wide-open; I can put up my feet, disengage my OCD, and write to my heart’s content. And so I am.

I do not remember if I said this before, but since beginning work on Eleanor I have always wrestled with the ending. It is a novel of a woman searching for god. Would she find some god at the end of her quest? Or would she find herself alone? What would either ending say about her? What would it mean for me, and my own indecision?

Last September, writing near-tirelessly in the woods in Klamath Falls, I found my ending. It surprised me, coming to me in the middle of some other piece of writing entirely; I found myself turning one thing into another, pushing the story towards the ending I hadn’t known was there. Eleanor is finished. All that remains is writing all that comes between her beginning and her end.

And there’s a hell of a lot, let me tell you. So far there’s a marriage, and a pregnancy, and a child, and a divorce, and rediscovery, and infidelity, and self-doubt, and many, many, many dreams. This might seem like a lot, but Eleanor’s becoming a much bigger story than I thought she would be. That’s better than I can say for the last book, which was only about twenty thousand words longer than Eleanor is right now, and which crammed murder, exile, more murder, rape, lust, betrayal, miscarriage, adultery, assault, fraud and about six thousand other terrible things into the first four or five pages.

Either I have gotten better at this pacing thing, or Eleanor’s just not quite as interesting by comparison.

Just as I am settling in, comfortably writing again, I am being sent out of town once more, this time to the more traditional destination of San Jose, where I find myself traveling several times a month during big projects to meet with a particular client. Earlier this year the job promoted me to art director, and gave me a few accounts to oversee, which means I have to actually think about why I do the things I do instead of just doing them.

It’s interesting to me now to look back over the past ten years, and to think that I got into this business as a means of supporting the writing until it became something sustainable. Ten years now and I am still no closer to the writing goal, but it only sometimes weighs on me. In the meantime I have found a thing that I am good at, and I have learned much and gotten better, and I’m proud of where this work has led me.

Though there is still this novel to finish. I will, eventually. I’ve muttered before on this site about the novel potentially taking years to complete, and I think I’m still right about that. 2008 marks the sixth year I’ve been working on this story. I doubt it will mark the last.