Daylight Begins to Dwindle

It feels like we have only had a few days of summer in Chicago so far, and yet with the Solstice on June 21st, the hours of daylight have already begun to decrease as we move slowly toward Fall.

The kids are out of school. We’ve been on one camping trip with friends and family, and there’s more travel in the works. The rest of the summer is mostly unscheduled, allowing us to follow our rhythms: stay up a little later, sleep in a little longer, have a pajama day here and there, lounge in the backyard, read in the shade.

I’m not a fan of overscheduling the kids with camps and activities, and while I may grumble about battles and complaints caused by too much time together, I think we’re usually able to come up with creative ways to spend the day.

I have signed them up for an hour-long art class, and I really savor that time to myself in the middle of the day, ice coffee in hand, sitting outside the cafe under a shaded umbrella with my book and notebook.

Plus I have been writing! So many stories this summer, and even as I gear up to start the next novel in the Fall, I have been immersed in short stories: reading them, listening to them, writing them. I love the form. There is so much to be learned from it, and I’m enjoying the process. I hope to have some solid pieces to shop around this Fall.

Exciting news also in the works about the comic book/graphic novel (to be announced soon), fingers crossed for agent news with the The Supper Club. More on that as soon as I am able.

So that’s the quick recap. I’m going to make an effort to write more, perhaps during that lovely little hour break in the day. Perhaps not. I may just sip coffee and soak in the glorious quiet.

Until then, I hope that you are also finding moments of happiness in unexpected places.

xxo

Exploring, Summer 2013
Exploring, Summer 2013

 

 

Talismans

Writers have creative and quirky rituals when it comes to working on our books. I find the routines fascinating. One writer I know creates complex collages on poster-board with mounted photographs of her characters and settings; another assembles diagrams of his plots posted onto the walls of his office.

Hemingway would get up with the sun and write until he had “said what he had to say,” and then he was done.

Wordsworth read everything he wrote aloud to his dog.

Nabokov wrote Lolita on index cards while standing up.

Before editing, Joan Didion would have a drink to remove herself from the pages.

E.B. White would write in the living room, in the middle of everything going on around him. He once wrote, “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

I have a related interest in the places where other writers write. It’s one of the reasons I love Kyle Cassidy’s project Where I Write: Science Fiction & Fantasy Authors in their Creative Spaces.

Like E.B. White, for me that place is often in the middle of everything, although I do cherish the silence in the house when everyone has gone to sleep.

I have found that wherever I’m working, I like to anchor my book with a few objects that capture the spirit of my work-in-progress. For The Silence of Trees, my most important talisman was a small black rock I had picked up on the shore of Lake Michigan and carried with me everywhere while I was writing.

I started thinking about this because it’s time to clear off the space atop my desk where I assemble these objects, in preparation for a new book. Here’s a peek from my collection for The Supper Club:

SupperClubDesk1

Hope and Harmony

In January, I finally finished revisions on my second book, The Supper Club. It took longer than I would have liked, but last year was full of juggling: the Fuller Award for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, work on the comic book, the death of an old friend, and the decline and death of two of my grandparents. Mixed in were creative moments and misadventures with the kids, coffee and wine with friends, and time spent writing.

I vowed that I would finish the rewrite of The Supper Club by the end of 2012, and I did at 4am on January 1st,. I gave the draft to my readers for a quick read through, then I revised accordingly.

forelornhope
Forlorn Hope 2011 Ost-Intrigen (more information at: http://forlornhopewines.com/)

The night I finished The Supper Club, I opened this bottle of wine given to me by a friend and signed by the winemaker, Matthew Rorick. It seemed a fitting way to toast the trials and triumphs of the past year.

Trillian Stars with the kids. Photo by Kyle Cassidy.
Trillian Stars with the kids at Casa del Lobos. © 2013 Photo by Kyle Cassidy.

The new year continued with visits from some of my favorite people: Maura Henn, Kyle Cassidy and Trillian Stars, as well as a party in their honor  that included a house concert by Bittersweet Drive.

Bittersweet Drive plays at Chez Lindsay's. © 2013 Photo by 8 Eyes Photography
Bittersweet Drive plays at Chez Lindsay’s.
© 2013 Photo by 8 Eyes Photography

You can read Maura’s account of the wonderful weekend on her blog. A few of us also participated in the Chicago chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America’s all-day reading of Pride and Prejudice on the 20oth Anniversary of the novel’s publication (orchestrated by the amazing Debra Ann Miller). It was fun to read Mrs. Bennet for an hour and be a part of the event which included readers from the Jane Austen Society, Terra Mysterium, local writers Jody Lynn Nye, Lawrence Santoro, Victoria Noe, and others.

"Pride and Prejudice" Readers for Chapters 18-23: (left to right): Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Victoria Noe, Maura Henn, and Madeline C. Matz.
“Pride and Prejudice” Readers for Chapters 18-23: (left to right): Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Victoria Noe, Maura Henn, and Madeline C. Matz. © 2013 Photo by 8 Eyes Photography

So it’s 2013, and I am back to writing in earnest. As I try to carve out a routine that works, I keep thinking about the idea of “finding balance” in life. As I try to squeeze everything into my day (and night), it’s a recurring theme.

When most people today talk about balance, they use the metaphor of scales: life on one side of the scale and work on the other. The challenge lies in making the two sides balance.

Perhaps it’s the wrong metaphor for balance. It’s not the right one for me. I prefer the image of a mobile, like those of Alexander Calder, with many different parts of my life suspended and in motion, swinging around as I shift my position and my focus. That sounds a lot more like my day-to-day: elements swirling around, moving in and out of the foreground.

One person’s chaos is another’s harmony.

"Streetcar" by Alexander Calder
“Streetcar” by Alexander Calder at the Art Institute of Chicago