The Floating World

Under my wiper blade this morning, this message, ink bleeding through the restaurant napkin from the night's humidity, a watercolor conveyance of this koan:

the moon:
I wandered around the pond
all night long

-Basho

Now: night breezes stir gauze curtains into a small dance, round and round, playing to the windowsill audience. Sultry. Cicadas sing their call and response love songs above the thick air. The napkin crumpled on my lap, almost forgotten except for the faint scent of her infused into it. From her purse? Her hand? Like charged particles, we attracted one another at this restaurant two months ago. She has carried its napkin this long. The logo in kanji reads:

The Floating World.

Then: she had me floating dizzily, my thoughts an unrepentant fantasy as I nodded my head toward the caress of her conversation, acting attentive while blood rushed in my ears, through my belly and even lower like a Shinkansen of sensuality thundering over me.

Meet me, I whispered as I brushed her cheek goodbye. I thought…no, I wanted to see that slight nod, that affirmation within the black slate of her eyes. The pond, I breathed, then turned to leave, my heart pounding so loudly I was certain everyone in the room could hear it, especially her husband.

Walking back to the hotel on the soft path, which dances beside the edge of the very pond I had intimated, I realize my folly. She would not show. How could she break away? Get control, I admonish myself, hands still shaking as I meander the dark path to my room. A cold shower. An X-movie. Relief.


I’d almost forgotten my proposed rendezvous. No, that's not the truth. I’d not forgotten, nor could I. Then this morning the note on my windshield. In a game of Go she has informed me it’s my move now.

Unwanted Vows of Silence

I've apparently ended a one month vow of silence.

Actually, I didn't realize I'd taken one, but ever since the AWP Conference last month, blogging has taken a backseat. I finally started another novel, so the time has not been wasted by any means, but I could be more productive.

There are times we need to simply stop our daily grind, to step off this treadmill we accept without question. In this multi-tasking, 24/7/365 madhouse, don't we deserve a little time to decompress? To quote the Pogo comic strip: We have met the enemy and he is us. I have filled my life to the overflow scuppers with inane tasks that keep me from shifting into 5th gear and entering the autobahn of proliferation. The paradox is that to achieve focused proliferation, we must first empty the rain gutters of the prolific flood of information (which we shall call "rain" in order to keep this metaphor flowing) that inundates our creative processes. Whew. That was a mouthful.

So, take a break people! A friend just returned from Italy, amazed that everyone there was so happy. I'm envious. Weren't Americans the happy people not that long ago? Who stole my cheese and all that? Sometime in the past twenty years, while nobody was paying attention, our inalienable right to laugh, to relax, and to take a f**king break were hijacked. How did that happen? It was like we woke up from a long nap and they were gone. Our collective mojo is gone and we want it back. Writers can't write without mojo. My mojo is now only a mojito. We call him "Junior".

Hey, we can empower ourselves. It's easy. Let's just say no. Step away from the cell phone, Ma'am. Just walk away, Rene. Let's do whatever it takes to clear away the brain static of too much "stuff". It's what I need to get back my focus for writing.

If you need a getaway place, here's one I suggest:

www.LuzdeBlanco.com

I suggest it because I'm self-serving and small. Of course it's mine! But it's a good place nonetheless. You should see for yourself.

Writers Hit the Port of Denver

Nine thousand writers.

That’s a lot of people for just about any non-sporting event, but even more astounding is that they showed up at a writing conference.

I’m one of nine thousand. Hear my story...

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, known as the AWP, held its annual conference and bookfair April 7 - 10 in Denver. Today is April 11, and I’m sitting at my 17th floor writing desk in the downtown Sheraton, thinking about the significance of it all while gazing out toward the mountains west of town, across the vast roof of the convention center, past the whalebone structure of the Broncos’ Invesco Field, to the snow-capped peaks beyond the front range. Denver has been a terrific host city, and the conference location is one of the primary reasons I’m here this year – the AWP is a little later into the spring than usual and Denver is do-able from my Austin, Texas home base. Downtown Denver is clean. There are wide streets and space between the buildings because Coloradans seem to understand the value of sunshine and elbow room and expanse. That wide-open feeling is one of the reasons all these writers were a happy lot by and large. We emerged into the light and it felt good.

Writers are a friendly bunch too. We spend so much time alone at our desks, working on solitary projects that can take years, often not sharing with anyone until that first manuscript is finished, perhaps because we don’t know where this illusive narrative may take itself. Where we think it is going and where it actually goes are usually continents apart. So when an opportunity allows us to get out of our solitary profession and come together with others who understand what it is to write, it’s a love fest. The feeling is like seeing your favorite cousins once a year, who although eccentric in their own right, are far more enjoyable to hang with than your own dysfunctional nuclear family.

We have our idols among us, those superstars of book sales, or wit, or intelligence whom we want to rub up against, to have sign their books, or to enlighten us somehow. Michael Chabon’s keynote address was as pleasurable as a massage, his gruff voice taking us on a humorous dialogue between himself and ‘typical’ fans, with Chabon assuming both voices. There were more speakers and readers than you could hear. Gary Snyder. Rita Dove. Silko. Bass. Keret. Sigh. You had to make hard choices.

Of the more than three hundred sessions, there were often conflicts between several that you wanted to hear in the same time slot, leaving you to pick one over the other on nothing other than gut feeling. Those choices were like playing roulette. Of course, every one you didn’t attend you found out later was the best ever. Isn’t that always the case?

There were the odd venues. I went to The Sun's reading at the Mercury Cafe and felt as if I was on an acid flashback to a 1967 hippie tea room. Fantastic.

The bookfair was so huge, your mind could go numb with overload after an hour, and you’d discover you had only covered one aisle among the myriad. Although I made two or three forays into the bookfair every day, it’s doubtful I covered half of it. Next time I will have a better plan of action: map out in advance which tables to visit and try to take care of those first. This year I kept forgetting where I left off, so often ended up repeating aisles. I also believe chiropractic is in order from lugging around a full tote bag of journals, handouts, trade show trinkets and gimme items. I confess to ruthlessly triaging my stash in order to get it packed for my flight.

I learned many useful things, but it will take me several weeks to sort and process it all. The best snippets usually came from the least likely places – odd panels and the readers you took a chance on, or a random conversation in the atrium bar after the daily sessions.

The drinks were overpriced, as were the hotel buffets, yet that didn’t stop us from socializing like there was no tomorrow. The deejay at the nightly dance was a little dated, but the dancing was exuberantly unpolished, almost tribal. We had the raffish air of nine-thousand sailors making port after six months at sea. In fact, the whole affair was exuberant. These are smart people, these writers, even if you'll never see them on Dancing with the Stars.

Just the kind of folks I like to hang around with.

Oh Yeah...Follow Your Heart! Go with the output, not the put-put.

My horoscope tells me I have a choice to make this month -- says it's a Venus vs. Mars thing: On the one hand, a truly solid work and career opportunity, which may ensure long-range happiness and more income. On the other hand, freedom, travel, fun, and ego satisfaction without responsibility. It tells me to opt for the inner happiness with work.

Okay. I've always opted for inner happiness and work. Perhaps it's time for the other choice. Now, don't get me wrong...I'm all about work, but I'm not all about busy work. I don't need a kick to get out of bed and get going, unless there's no creativity to the work. That's when I check out mentally.

Mark Victor Hansen once said, "My wife and I are more interested in our employees' output than in their put-put." That strikes a chord within me. Too many times we are simply going through the motions, doing our work by rote rather than with heart. Put-put...I move a pile from one side of my desk, only to shift it back later. I move things rather than move things out into the world. In my experience, too much of that put-put can give us creative amnesia, into a place where we forget our highest purpose is to put beautiful and useful things out into the world as our tithing.

So yes, I have a decision to make. I'm not worried about me working. I'm mostly worried about busy work that eats up my time, blinds me to the possibilities, dries up my creativity. Maybe I'll opt for the freedom, travel, and fun and then backtrack and see how to make it work into a marvelous career opportunity.

Are you with me?

Let's see how Little Richard has been doing it for the past 55 years. That ain't put-put:

Into Perspective

I was coming back into the neighborhood this morning in my pickup, a rented tiller in the bed, Good Friday, which in my white collar world means a well-deserved day off. Well, a day off from my occupation, not necessarily from "work". I had a to-do list as long as my arm, but I was feeling happy. I'd slept in until almost seven, had breakfast tacos with Terri before we went our separate directions to take care of our individual chores.

I'm driving down the street adjacent to mine and I see the garbage truck coming toward me from the other end of the block. It pulls up to a house and the driver jumps out of the truck and runs over to one of those mobile cans, pulls it out to the truck, hooks it up and dumps it hydraulically, puts it back, jumps into the cab and drives to the next house and repeats the process.

"Holy cow," I'm thinking. "That poor bastard is wearing himself out. No help. Just him."

I pulled my truck up and rolled down my window. The young Hispanic guy came over to see what I wanted. "Man, you have to do all that by yourself? Get out every time and run around and dump the can?"

He sounded almost apologetic. "Yes, it's just me. I can't get all those bags of leaves, but I'm getting the trash. I'm writing down the houses with leaves so we can get them later." He had a myriad of scars through his buzz cut hair, like he'd been through a windshield, or a lot of fights. But he had an amazing aura.

"That's a lot of work," I said, as if maybe he didn't already know that.

He smiled. "Yes, but thanks be to God I have a job."

It hit me like a punch. I smiled and drove on. What do I know about hard work? This guy is so happy to be working that what he's doing is his yoga. He feels like he could do more if he only had some help. He feels bad about leaving those bags of leaves. I'm humbled.

I make penance by tilling and planting the garden. I am determined to enjoy the fact that I am alive and working, thankful to that garbage man for putting things into perspective for me.

Traveling Companions

Master Toady was riding his turtle beneath the hot Texas sun. Two hours they'd been plodding along Hwy 29, being careful to stay far enough out of the slipstream of thundering autos so they could maintain what trifle remained of their collective sanity. Not to mention, the auto drafts had the propensity of turning Toady's pink parasol wrongside out. And no respectable Toad can deal with that. It's 92.78% about appearance when it comes to Toads.

Turtle was getting tired. He was always the one who carried the load, like some sort of turtle Sherpa, and that was getting old. His bunions were acting up and his football knee was a royal pain in the tortoise butt. But he was a player and was also receiving teamsters wages for hauling that lazy-ass Toad around. Despite the heat, it was good work if you could get it. He was humming as they plodded onward in the noonday heat.

"Wha chu humming there, Tortoise?" asked Toady.
"He ain't heavy, he's my bruvver," replied Tortoise, hoping to keep the ironic inflection from his tonality.
"I doan like it," says Toad. "Do you know any Elton John?"

Tortoise craned his supple neck back to look at that ungrateful carrion he was carrying.

"Tumbleweed Connection. I know the entire album."
"Don't like it," replied that bastard Toad.
"Where are hawks when you really need them?" It was a rhetorical question at best -- one posed by tortoises for millennium.
"What say?" asked Master Toady.
"Din't say nuthin," grumbled the turtle, contemplating suicide beneath the tires of a passing eighteen wheeler.

Wanted: A Two-Book Deal

I’ve obviously taken a vow of silence without being aware of it. I sit at my keyboard or with an open legal pad in front of me and…

Nothing.

What happened to all my ideas? Where do those ideas skitter off to? They remind me of autumn leaves racing away upon the wind, migrating across the lawn one step ahead of my rake.

Think you have a lot of ideas? Just try writing about them. That seems to be the fastest way to assassinate them; tame them like toothless dogs. I’ve had people say to me, “Oh, you’re a writer. Listen, I have a really good idea for a book.” (Not a novel, memoir, or self-help…simply a ‘book’). Of course, I’m not convinced at this point, so I remain non-committal. “All I need is for someone to flesh it out. I’m sure it would be a bestseller.”

They want someone to do what they consider to be the easy lifting—the actual writing. I want to say, “Hey, no problem. I’ll just whip it out in my spare time now that you’ve graced me with the idea for a blockbuster. We’ll both be millionaires in no time.”

If it were only that easy I’d have quit my day job a long time ago.

Everyone thinks they have the idea for a bestseller, a hit sitcom, a grand slam new reality show. But that’s about the place their little idea car sputters to the side of the road, out of gas.

Writing is (usually) enjoyable, but it still feels like work most of the time. And most of it is work done on a speculative basis. It’s similar to writing a dissertation only you don’t get the doctorate until a publisher picks you up. And guess what? A lot of us optimistic masochists would still write. What’s up with that?

I’m one of those strange people who isn’t overly afraid of risk. I’m in the design/build business and sometimes build homes on a speculative basis. They can take almost as long as a ‘book’ by the time I scout locations, plod through the financing and closing process, design it, budget it out, and then get to the ‘easy lifting’ – the actual construction phase. I also get to tie up most of our savings and then leverage myself into debt up to my armpits. The difference is that at the end of the process I have an actual asset with a tangible value. Even if I have to hold it for a while, I can generally sell it for a profit. When the market is good, I build a lot; when it’s bad I don’t. Pretty simple dynamic.

Now let’s look at spec writing.

At the end of a year or more (usually a lot more) of writing, my asset consists of something the size of a ream of paper, or a CD disc if it isn’t committed to paper form. What’s the value of my asset? Nada. Zip. Nothing…unless I can sell it. And nobody knows what that market is doing, especially not the publishers themselves. It isn’t as if there’s an up or down market. From my experience, it’s always a buyer’s market when it comes to ‘books’. In home building, I don’t build speculatively when it’s a buyers market. I have to sell in order to feed my family and buy myself more ‘books’.

Unlike the home building business, anyone can be a writer. I don’t recall any government entity requiring a license, or liability insurance, or a performance bond to write. You just open a vein and go for it. What makes it that much harder for all of us hardcore word addicts is that there are a lot of vanity writers clogging up the blogosphere and driving agents nuts with silly queries. Ever heard of vanity builders – people who go through the heartbreak of it all because, well they just “like to build”? I suppose there are a few, but we refer to them as ‘rich people’. Bored doctors’ wives and the like. There’s no shortage of writers who for some reason, act as if they don’t care if they ever sell anything. That’s crazy. Could you see me doing that with houses? Money for your work is a kind of barometer of how your work is accepted. At least in the building business.

I’m one of those mercenaries who would like to be paid for my work. I get two house deals fairly often. I design/build for a client and their friend now wants me to design/build for them. It’s cool. It’s called making a living. I’d like the same opportunity when I write.

I have two novels sitting vacant right now. Anybody have a good two book deal for me?

You can move in tomorrow.