I hate my novel and an "emotional security air bag"

Today is one of those days when I hate my novel. 

Why?

Well there are many reasons, some of which are to do with the novel itself: 

I'm uncertain of the tone; the characters aren't yet real to me and so they annoy me: they seem a collection of manners and stylistic choices; it's just hard to write when I'm uncertain if any of it will work; I'm writing a novel about death, grief, climate crisis and love, so no wonder I'm resisting and turning that resistance into hate. 

And there are the reasons that have nothing to do with the novel. I'm exhausted. I didn't sleep well. This morning started out quite stressfully: my lawyer wife had to Zoom into three different courts and because of scheduling issues, ended up having to do it from our bed (she was dressed!) and so I had to slither out of bed and crawl, shirtless, along the floor and out the door just so I wouldn't appear to the court on Zoom! And, I don't know--I think the general aura of stress with my friends and family, in the world, takes its toll on me and my writing. I want to immediately put words to paper that make everything—everybody—better. And I want my words to shine brightly: as if they were immediately as important as everything else happening in the world. Of course, that's being ridiculously unfair to my words and the process of writing anything. 

Instead of getting down to work, I spent some time on Twitter, a moment talking to my daughter who had accidently scraped our car in the parking lot and needed insurance information (we imagined a "emotional security air bag" that would deploy whenever we needed it,) and an old high school friend of mine on Facebook was having a hard time. (She's in California, and so in addition to wildfires, Covid-19, racial crisis, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death and the ensuing erosion of women's rights in the US, she is stuck alone and quarantined.) She was feeling very despairing. She had painted a painting which she thought was ugly and titled it, "I don't want to be beautiful, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead." I wanted to console her (and myself, if I'm honest) so I wrote the poem that I posted above using part of her painting's title. I posted the poem as a comment on Facebook. If nothing else, we've communicated. We have connected through her words and her painting and then my response. It does help me, at least. I feel that at least I've addressed some of what I'm feeling and what others are feeling.

I've been thinking about species interdependence. I just read the remarkable book, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (what a name!) about fungi and the entanglement of all life. And so some of this thinking went into the poem. And of course, ideas about death and what happens to us afterwards. Could this be part of my novel? I guess it could. Would a poem work with my characters/ consciousnesses? Maybe. I'll keep it in mind.

Another thing that I did (a friend had posted the piece on Facebook---I am distracted---was to take the third piece of Webern's Three Little Pieces which I love--they are tiny perfect audible haiku, entire dramas in miniature--and slow it down by half and then by half again. Even more dramatic and meditative. Here are my slow versions. The half speed one and the quarter speed one.

I also listened to a bit of a podcast recording of the Odyssey, the part where Odysseus travels to the Underworld while I shaved. I'm trying to saturate myself with a variety of visions and conceptions of the Underworld, not only to help me imagine how my novel's version might be like, but also to be able to connect my novel with past works. A kind of literary entanglement.  For this reason, I have also recently finished reading Robert Macfarlane's great book about hidden and underground places, Underland.

And then, writing this blog post helps me sort out what I'm feeling. I'm not one for keeping a journal, but sometimes writing out how one is feeling about one's writing and where one finds oneself in the world (that's so strange to use "one") is helpful and helps dissipate the anxiety (aka "hate.") If I do end up thinking the novel isn't working, of course, I have lots of time to change it. I'm not streaming it live. I have lots of time to fix. To tinker. To excise. To entirely change. I have to trust the process.

So, this afternoon, after a short walk with my wife and our dog, and after answering a pile of emails, and preparing for a reading I'm doing tonight to help launch a new issue of Carousel Magazine, I will write some more of the novel. Unless, I wait till tomorrow.