I've been having fun when I write. It seems so obvious while I'm doing it, while I'm in that zone, but sometimes it seems so hard to do. Lately I've been doing things I don't usually do. I have been writing by hand only. I have been writing on the train. I have been EXPERIMENTING.
My routine is such:
I read on my way to work. This can be on my phone--I happen to be reading some Sheree Greer at the moment--or it can be in book form. The book I'm reading now is, if you haven't guessed by my blog title, Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. If I am particularly tired I will open up my Pulse Reader and scroll through my headlines. I work in Oak Park now so I get a lot of reading done in my commute from the Blue Line to the Green Line.
When I finish work I am pretty exhausted but I work at a GD coffee shop so I drink myself some GD coffee. Then I read a little while I wait for the train as a way to get out of work mode and into the more cerebral part of my day. With a whine the train pulls in and I get on and I sit down and I write.
I used to work in the loop and my commute was one 15 minute train so I sort of honed my skills in immediacy because that's pretty much the only time of my day when I get to write and focus on my words alone. Back in the present I have 45 min. to an hour to get my scene rolling. And roll it does. I haven't clicked like this in a while. I think it helps me to feel motion. It's like a battle. I have to fight my time limit and I have to fight to keep my hand steady on the train. Each successful word is a win.
I break up my train writing with a few paragraphs of reading at my Clark/Lake transfer.
Then back to the writing. This time I'm already cruising in the scene so I hop in and my hand cramps and I push through it because this shit is good, like really good, and I love to write today and yesterday and hopefully tomorrow because it. is. clicking. My scribbling is almost hieroglyphic at this point because of the continued rocking of the train mixed with my own fury. My story is moving and I'm moving and my pen just won't stop, not for one second. I'm shooting through a tunnel, the wettest and dankest and the screaming kids or the piss smell or the wobbling, cussing homeless guy can't stop me until, until we shoot forth from the tunnel and yes, it is an ejaculation. I am spent. I am finished.
In the transition from Division to Damen I retire. I take a deep breath because I can see light again. I am back with the living.
I have survived.
On the stuff I'm reading (up to this point):
In the way that Hubert Selby Jr. turned Brooklyn into a character, Doctorow has turned point in history into a character. As readers we hop around from historical persona to historical persona, from Harry Houdini to J.P. Morgan to Emma Goldman. I'm not finished but it's pretty good.
For the wunderbar Sheree L. Greer. Now this is my first time reading anything other than the news on my phone so it has taken some getting used to. This is also my first time reading any of Greer's work. I've heard her read and she's musical. I was worried that the music I heard in her readings wouldn't come off on the, er, screen, but it did. It does. I'm not done yet, only a few shorts in, but the way they're written, I feel like she's reading them into my brain. It reads like an instance collection about flirtation. The instances I've read flirt with Love and Sexuality. I will update this shit ^ when I finish the collection.
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