Aftermath

So perhaps the veil is lifting.  The silence that I imposed on myself a couple of weeks ago–somewhat unsuccessfully–may be lifting.  Good signs are emerging.  I worked on Such Is Life a little bit this morning.  An email I wrote to Ken Silverstein at Harper’s was posted on their website.  A great ice sheet of words breaks up a bit and a couple of icebergs of writing drop into the Arctic Ocean of my soul.  Ah!  There is nothing quite like an overwrought metaphor to make me feel like I’m back and just as terrible as ever.

What has really happened is that my mind is now more free, more able to roam from topic-to-topic and to occassionally land on some creative pursuit and not just muddle through the tarpit of politics.  In an ideal world I would stop my occasional bloviating (which wins the award as the Most Overused Word of the Year), but we all know in our hearts that that is not likely.  But the creative urge is returning, and the tangents into the temporal will be, I hope, less frequent and less strident.  Being a blowhard is less satisfying as one ages, and middle age is an unflattering mirror to look in while delivering an opinion.  I understand, at last, my own fallibility and the limits of certainty.

And so I shall try to scuttle my way back to fiction, where seeing all sides is a blessing.

Such Is Life

Have I blogged at all about the novel I am currently working on?  And I mean as a writer, not a reader.  I don’t think I have, really.  There’s just been the passing comment here and there.  Right?

Well, I don’t care if I’ve run the entire subject into the ground and am suffering from some sort of mid-term memory loss.  I’m writing about it today.

The working (and probable final) title is Such Is Life, and it concerns a lawsuit and the people involved in it.  It is also about love, in all its variety and nuance, and how it hides itself and how it emerges when needed.  And not just romantic love, either, although there is certainly some of that.  It also touches on the process of finding the proper profession, which is, in itself, a labor of love.

I found the monograph for the book years ago in Lin Yutang’s translation of the Tao Teh Ching, in which he uses extracts from the Chuang Tse as commentary on the older text.  In one of the later chapters of the the Tao Teh Ching, I found the phrase “Heaven arms with love those it would not see destroyed.”  And that’s really what it’s about.

I started writing it about 20 years ago, first as a stage play ( a version that went to about page two before dying) and then as what I called a novel for television.  I’ve never written a complete draft of it yet.  In my most sustained effort at it before, I wrote three-and-a-half half-hour episodes before crumping out or getting distracted or something.

I also tried writing it as a novel before, in the fall of 2001, which wasn’t a good time for much of anybody.

And now I’m at it again.  Some people never learn.

It’s going well so far.  I’ver written drafts of a prologue and two complete chapters.  I’ve been working on Chapter Three for about a week and have gone through at least three false starts before actually writing something worth keeping today.  It’ll come along over time.

This is a project that has been extremely popular with people who have read earlier versions.  So far, so good on the new one.  All I can do now is to keep plugging away at it.  And write occassional posts about my progress.  That’s just how I operate.