The Writing Machine
Stories by Christian Cloud Abraham
Taking a Break
It’s June 4th, and as promised, I’m back.
Thank you all for letting me take a break, and I am thrilled to see how many people poured through the archives during the month; it’s always nice to see shopworn web pages.
In my time off from The Writing Machine, I’ve wandered through a troubling month to come to the place I intended to find.
I began the month with the intention of reevaluating my life and my priorities. I work 40 hours a week, freelance on a feast-or-famine schedule, do everything I can to provide for my family both financially and emotionally, and attempt to write new stories for this site. But since the freelance work started in January, I’ve begun many new stories, but when it came time to publish them to the site, I wasn’t ready and so I found myself pushing stories out before their time. Maybe you didn’t notice, but I know better and I found it discouraging and felt my passion for the site diminishing on the grounds of letting myself down, thus sparking the my desire to reevaluate my life and how I do things.
As I reviewed the list of monetary and family needs, the only flexible item on the list is my writing, because—and I am sad to say this is how I must prioritize this—because it does not bring in a single penny each month. This is entirely my fault, but that is another story, and for now, the one I am telling is the one about how I must decide with my limited time where should I focus my writing endeavors. For those who have been hanging around the site for a while may remember back in November, I began work on a piece of creative nonfiction for the NaNoWriMo project (which I know is supposed to be a fiction project, but I see it as whatever it takes to get a book started). During November, I blasted out over 50,000 words in pursuit of writing the memoir of my life so far, and made it to about 2nd grade before December and the holidays slowed my pace on the project, and then in January, the freelance work ground the memoir project to a complete halt.
But my writing didn’t stop altogether. With my freelance money, I purchased a sweet cruiser-style bicycle, and while the weather in Phoenix took on the days dreams of eternal beauty are made of, I rode my bike often, and on one moody, windy, Friday evening after work, while my wife and kid were running errands, I decided to take a ride down the nearby bike trail, and as I returned in a state of absolute hypnosis, I heard in my mind the sentence, “I fired 17 shots into the air.” And then I had it: the approach to a story that I’ve wanted to write for three years but couldn’t find the right angle. I sat down at The Red Machine and tapped that first sentence onto paper and every night following that Friday, I wrote a little more until I filled 14 single-spaced, manually typed pages and completed the first draft. As I wrote, I read my progress from day to day to my wife, and to my surprise, she couldn’t wait for more. It is a good story and will be a great story when I finish editing it, but that will have to wait. My first problem is I find it so hard to write on a computer so all those typed pages need to make it to digital before I can finish the editing and finally publish the story. But I am moving off topic and the bottom line about this passage is that I had to write this story. It sat in my brain bothering me like a rash for three—no, now that I think about it, five years—and I had to get it out. It represents the end of a theme in my writing that I’ve wanted to exercise from my soul for some time, and finally, I did. And now I am ready to move on. So the next item on my list of items that will fester like a flesh-eating infection in my mind if I don’t accomplish them before I die is my memoir.
So I decided to finish writing it; then I read Truman Capote’s, In Cold Blood. Perry Smith not only killed the Clutter family, he just about killed the memoir project. Reading about his sad and tormented life reminded me of all the screwed up and bizarre stories from my own life and it threw me into a state of temporary depression and I decided I didn’t want to dredge through the underworld of my memories and associated emotions again.1 So I trashed the memoir idea. Then, I picked up the binder with the first 50,000 words and reread what I wrote back in November and discovered a great story told in a voice that reminded me of Holden Caulfield, but a bit more grown up, and I decided it really is all about perspective and unlike Perry Smith, my story doesn’t end in a quadruple homicide (at least I hope not!). My story, in my opinion, has a good ending (unless I die tomorrow slipping on a banana peel, then it has a funny ending).
So where am I going? I am going to put aside all my other writing projects and finish my memoir. And to keep me on track, from this point forward, all posts to The Writing Machine will be excerpts from the first draft of this memoir until I am finished. This means I will have to wake up at 5:00 a.m. every morning to write, but it is a level of discipline I need to learn. I hope to be finished by the holidays and return to my normal, eclectic posting format at that point.
With that… stop in often, stay long, and jump into the water with me as I relive my life in words, diving to the bottom of the ocean to bring to the surface the golden doubloons found in the wreckage.2 And remember, you are a stranger here but once
See you soon, and thanks again for reading The Writing Machine!
Christian
1 Wasn’t there a hero in mythology who had to pass under the earth by wading through a sea of blood in order to find his boon? Well if there is, I can relate to his quest as often the weight of certain times in my life feel like I am wading through a dark and vile underworld, but it is all perspective.
2Reference borrowed from my own book, Stealing Wings from an Angel.3
3 Is it in bad form to reference your own books? Aah, so what!
END
© 2006 Christian Cloud Abraham
Posted on June 4, 2006 in
Emotion: Subjection, Type: Creative Nonfiction