Friday Already?

Wrote and sent off the FearZone column, so I should be hearing back on that soon. And yesterday turned out to be a surprisingly fruitful Book of Tongues day after all, in the end:

Words added: 1,079.
Words overall: 21,707.
Where you at?: Top of Chapter Five.
Victories: Just moving forward, I guess.
Challenges: Lots of flashbacks in this one, and I've also stumbled across a bit of a logistic glitch which may necessitate going back and fixing something--or not. Depends on how I decide to play it.

Here's another Susan Musgrave poem, while I'm at it...

BREAK-UP
For David Arnason

All your life he has
lived in you, the
ice-fish. He has fed on
edges, on extremities.
All your life you have been an
ice-fisherman. Frozen and
hungry you are finally breaking.

You count the lonely minutes.
You count the hours.
Your heart beats against the breaking,
rages against the beating.

Your gentle hands are nets,
are knives. Your eyes remember a time
before the ice shifted.

Break a hole in the ice,
let the fish breathe.
Break a hole in your heart,
let the heart feed.

Of Susan Musgrave, what can I say? Like Gwendolyn MacEwen, she's another Canadian poet, this time from British Columbia. Still alive; born in 1951, which at least makes her younger than my Mom. She met and married Stephen Reid, an inveterate bank-robber and junkie, while he was in jail, got him out, got him published--he wrote a book about escape called Jackrabbit Parole--then had to watch him devolve back into addiction, crime and institutionalization. I love her declarativeness, the not-exactly-simplicity of her statements and images, the ritual beat of her verses. A lot of her stuff seems overtly gothic or grotesque at first glance, but she has a keen sort of gentleness in her as well, as the poem above hopefully proves. A Man to Marry, A Man to Bury is the only book of hers I have anymore, and the only one I've ever really felt I needed.

Dude!

You would think it would be a lot easier to write a chapter which mainly revolves around incidents of voyeurism and fellatio than it's currently proving to be. But you would be wrong.

Since amended to add: Done today, otherwise...

—Transcribed 1,133 words’ worth of notes (on something completely different, but at least it gets them off my desk).
—Finally took a look at CBC guy’s outline, created a file and transcribed those notes as well, what little there are of them…just have to keep telling myself: “He hasn’t paid me. No fixed deadline”, etc., so I won’t feel like a total loser. We do what we can.
—Have almost decided to cut Chapters Five and Six of “Strange Weight” down to one large Chapter Five, instead. Must make sure to trim and squish while doing this so that the sudden reappearance of a particular group of characters reads less like Deus ex Machina and more like “oh HO, so that’s what happened during the part I didn’t see.” Also really need to figure out if it’s ever been entirely necessary to explain just WTF that thing that isn’t an angel actually is, or not.
—Find myself unexpectedly picking away at “Signal to Noise”, which may be coalescing into something doable at long last. I think I’m still missing a couple of scenes, though—not just the markers where they should be/need to be filled in, but any genuine idea of what should go between points H and I, or what-have-you.

Hmmp; brain seems frozen. I think I need some food, a break, and to take a bath.