Vacation: My Country Tis Of These

Vacation Day 5: About Effing Time

Vacation Day 4: I can't decide -- suicide? Or homicide?

Vacation Day 3: Four Letter Word

Vacation Day 2: If Only My Work Days Went By As Quickly

7/1. I wake up at 5 (because, y'know, my stupid body is a well-trained overweight machine designed with one purpose and one purpose only: to get me into work by 6:30AM no matter in what damaged condition I am when I get to sleep). It takes me 15 minutes to go back to sleep, after which I groggily wake up once every 30 minutes till approximately 7:15, when I stagger out of bed, say "Good morning" to my sister, who has been working online since 5ish herself, pour myself a cup of coffee, and sit down at the computer. Three hours later I have uploaded yesterday's blog entry and finished the one-act I started writing over the weekend.



The play is called I Know What Alex Would Say, which is a line from The Big Chill (“I know what Alex would say; he’d say ‘What’s for dessert?’”) Alex is the character who slits his wrists before the movie starts, and he’s dead at the start of this play too, which started out as a title and a single line description: “dead guy talks back during funeral to priest, friend, wife, mistress.” So did I wrote it because I went to a funeral three weeks ago? Oh yes, but that was only one of several reasons, which include (a) that funeral, (b) the fact that the Grim Reaper has been cleaning up in the Celebrity Dead Pool Sweepstakes lately, (c) my growing awareness that very soon now (as the universe counts time) my consciousness is going to snap off like a light switch, which means (d) I will have no say in how I am remembered and (e) no way to either correct the record or express my regrets, which only makes me more and more angry at (f) the overwhelming is-this-any-way-to-run-an-airline stupidity of the whole Death Thing. So instead of writing what I know, I wrote what I know I’ll never get a chance to say. And then tried my best to make it not-about-Matthew as it poured out of me.

(Just to give you an idea of how long it took: the outline and the first two scenes were drafted between 8 and 9 AM on Saturday morning in a Dunkin Donuts; they were typed up and printed out from 1:30 to 2:30, and revised from 4-5; the next three scenes were drafted between 8 and 11 Sunday morning in the Wall Street Starbucks, then typed and printed from 12 to 1; and those five scenes were rewritten on the train from New York to Boston Tuesday morning between 6 and 10 AM. The last scene was rewritten four different ways on Tuesday afternoon, from about 2 PM to 6 PM, and then one final time between 7:30 and 10:30 this morning.)

And my reward? The sun actually started coming out 20 minutes after I finished proofing the final draft. So I took my pale-ass self to the beach, plunked a chair down on a patch of sand, oiled myself up, and actually got 90 minutes of haze and actual sunshine . . .



. . . before the fog rolled in off the water, . . .


. . . the clouds blanketed the coast again, the thunder started to echo from the north, and the rain started to fall.


Which it is still doing. So I am spending the rest of the day working on Scarlet Woman, and watching the first season of Wyatt Earp.

zzzzzzzzzzzzz

No, I'm not pregnant, okay? It's a notebook.

Vacation Day 2: The Other Fun Thing About The Beach

Vacation Day 1: The War of Fog

6/30. Warm and muggy when I wake up at 4:30 to catch the 6ish Acela to Massachusetts. I lay out sweatshirt and sweatpants before I take my shower, and totally forget to pack them before I leave. (Big frakking mistake.) On the way up to Massachusetts the sun is shining in a cloudless sky all the way up through Connecticut. Maybe the weather reports are wrong? No such luck. The second we cross over into Rhode Island clouds like a comforter fill the sky. A really thick, Martha Stewart comforter, too, not one of those K-Mart jobs that the sun can shine holes through without even trying. This cloud cover could protect you from a meteor shower. Asteroids would skip off it like a flat stone on a lake. And the temperature drops 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, so that by the time we hit South Station, I feel like Joel Fleischman wearing his weekend-at-the-Hamptons whites in Cicely Alaska.

First thing I do when I get to Ocean Bluff is walk up to the beach. It's about noon, and it's low tide. This is the good news. The bad news is that between the fog and the cloud cover, the best color camera in the world can only take pictures that make everything look like tinted black and white shots:




And because the beach changes with every storm, and there were a couple of beauties in June, the sand that last year went all the way up to the sea wall is completely gone this year. In its place are the kind of rocks that would give Sisyphus a heart attack:

You need a Sherpa just to get from the stairs to the sand.

What does no sand and 15 to 20 feet of nothing but rocks mean for the tides? Well, at low tide, with anything less than a totally cloudless sky, because there is no section of the beach that is ever free from getting hit by the ocean, you can't really lay down a blanket because the sand will be wet throughout the day. And at high tide? You are home taking a shower, because the "beach" looks like this:


This is why I spend the first day of my mini-vacation sitting on a beach chair in the back yard, reading Mistborn and working on my fogburn.

So Sue Me

Weekend Update Part 2

Things my niece Alyssa said to me while I was on vacation:

"You're fat."
"You're old."
"Your feet are ugly."
"Are you going to eat that whole sandwich?"
"Your fingers are like sausages."
"But listen! Listen! You're not listening!"
"Is the water warm?"
"This isn't warm--this is COLD!"
"You write a lot."
"You write funny."
"You read a lot."
"What are you reading THAT for?"
"This is stupid."
"The grille is on fire! The grille is on fire!"
"One minute--honest! Just one more minute!"
"Will you take a walk with me?"
"Why do I have to walk with you?"
"You still read COMIC BOOKS?!?"
"Stop taking pictures!"
"If you put a picture of me on YouTube, can I sue you?"

Weekend Update Part 1

Saturday at the cottage, there were two parties: one for my cousin Brian, who turned 50 on Friday, and a surprise anniversary party for my brother David and his wife Cindy. Plus the kind of pictures that reminded me why I kept getting carded till I was in my late 30's.

First up: me and my sister Monica, who was going through her Dorothy Hamill phase at the time:




This is me with Nana Wells, my grandmother on my father's side. As you can tell from her expression, nobody in our family ever has a good time doing anything.


And how many years has David been married? Hmm; I don't know--why don't we check his ass?



Yes folks, this is my family.

Vacation Diary

Music I listened to while doing the rewrite:

The EmFire Collection, Sasha
Global Underground 27: Miami, Danny Howells
Global Underground 30: Paris, Nick Warren
The Hours, Philip Glass
Communicate, Sasha & Digweed
Transport, Max Graham

Vacation Diary

July 10th part 2. Sat on the beach from 11 till 3. Finished The Name of the Wind, and can't believe I have to wait till April of '09 for the second book in the trilogy. Started The Spa by Fay Weldon, which is like a modern Decameron -- clever lady. Made notes for noir story/novel based on old non-noir movie I saw on TCM a couple of nights ago. (One of these days . . .) Remembered the story I dreamed up about how Shakespeare got the 1,000 pounds he needed to become one of the sharers in the Chamberlain's Men, and wrote down the bare outline of it. (One of these days . . .) Tinkered with the idea of making a novel out of both the play I just finished and all the scenes I didn't put into the play. Put idea aside as something to do for about an hour a day over the next month while I work on a romantic comedy. (My God--two plays with happy endings.) Finally read last week's New York Times Magazine article about suicide, and wondered if the availability of a firearm would have prevented this stupid tragedy. Memo to self: when I get back to New York, go into storage and dig out that copy of Neighboring Lives. Walked my niece down to the only store within a mile of the cottage and bought her a Vitamin Water and some candy. Went looking in the store for books to read; they had exactly six on sale, all romances. Took pictures of the moon after sunset and got eaten alive by mosquitoes in less than five minutes. And before going to bed, watched four episodes of Cowboy Bebop, all of which I'd seen before, none of which I'd remembered.

Vacation Diary

July 10. Long involved dream, but I only remember the end of it, when I ask Cheryl Peyton if we’re seeing the new Superman movie tonight. She shakes her head no, she can’t get away from her husband. I make a mental note to see it on my own and then act surprised when I eventually see it with her. But I’m seeing it tonight.

I walk home through Chinatown. At one of the bookstores I usually go to, I find a copy of a Rafael Sabatini novel I’ve been looking for since I don’t know when (The Devil In The Details). When I pay for it, the Chinese guy behind the counter asks me if I want a dragon too. “We have six of them,” he says. I say sure, and he goes in back and comes out with a dragon which has been petrified into a small jade statue. It comes with an instruction book about how to turn it into a real dragon, and what to feed it, and how to turn it back into jade. On the way past the Mercury Lounge, I see a line of people waiting to buy a dragon, and a guy in front explaining that they’re all out, they didn’t get their shipment in today, but there may be a few for sale at the merch table during the 9 PM Human Sexual Response Reunion Tour show.

From Houston, I cut through the Columbia campus to my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Of the two elevators, the left-hand one is broken and getting repaired. The right-hand one works, and it opens when I push the button. I get in and push 6, then see the landlord coming. I hold the door for him, let it go, see a bare-chested guy in jeans coming, and hold it for him too. The bare-chested guy tells the landlord that all the bathroom work he’s doing on the sixth floor is flooding the apartment on the eighth floor. Without him saying any more than that, I know it’s my sixth-floor apartment he’s talking about, and that it’s the one across the hall that needs the bathroom work, not mine.

When the elevator stops on the sixth floor and the door opens, the bare-chested guy doesn’t move. He’s standing right in front of me and he doesn’t move when I say excuse me, so I say it a little louder, and when he still doesn’t move, I shout it at him: “EXCUSE ME! I’M GETTING OFF HERE.” He turns and looks at me like I’m the asshole for yelling, and pushes the side of the elevator, which swings away like a barroom door. I feel like an idiot for forgetting that this is how the elevators work in my apartment building, but I’m also still livid when I get out and walk through the open door of my apartment with a huge chip on my shoulder to find the place full of people building furniture and bookcases. That’s right--I remember now--my daughter is coming in from Boston to go to NYU, and she’s going to be staying with me for a couple of weeks until she gets a place of her own.

The workers all approach me to show me what they’re working on and get my approval. A tall brunette with her hair up and wearing a calf-length dress like an extra in a Forties film noir movie shows me a desk/chair combination that looks like one of those grammar school chair/desks, only the desk area on this one is ten feet long and tilts up at a 45-degree angle. I nod; good, Becky will like that. Another woman is building a mountain bike out of stray pipes and tires; she’s arguing with a young man about the way the chain drapes between the pedals and the back tire.

I check the bathroom. Yes, it’s leaking down to the eighth floor, I can see the puddle on the ceiling. As I come out of the bathroom, a balding guy with a moustache asks me about pepper spray. “She’s not here yet?” he asks, referring to my daughter. “No,” I say, “but she will be.” “When she runs away,” he asks, “does she waddle a little?” She does, actually, but I hesitate before telling him he’s correct. “You can be honest,” he says, and I say, “Yeah, actually, she does, a little.” “No problem,” he says, “we have three types of spray, the slow wide spray,” and he presses down the nozzle to release a thin wide cloud of mist. “The slightly more directed spray,” he presses the nozzle of a second can and it comes out like a shower nozzle spitting water, but it doesn’t reach as far as the wide spray. “And this,” he says, and presses the nozzle of a third can to release a steady hose of liquid, which splashes against the opposite wall. “Which do you think would be best?” he asks, and I wake up.

Vacation Diary

July 8, part 2. The mad scene writes itself through me in two stages, the second scarier than the first because I'm actually able to direct things towards the scene I originally planned but couldn't write in the first draft because all the sidetracks got in the way--the scene where Hamlet drives Ophelia offstage by telling her in essence the truth about himself. Because everything is more (directed? concentrated? meaningful?) in this draft, all I have to do is ignore all the chatter in the first draft and write the scene from scratch. Which is the scary part. It's like having a Mapquest printout and then ignoring it; there's a part of your mind that says, "Don't be stupid, use the map you have, didn't it get you to where you wanted to go?" And it did, but it's the journey, not the destination, that's important. There are a ton of roads you can take from Lights Up to Fade Out, and they all present a different scenic route. You have to map out the one with the best sights, and if that means throwing away yesterday's map when you do today's travelling, then that's what you have to do, and trust that you'll be steering everything in the right direction.

I use the word trust a lot to describe this, and when I do, I mean a kind of faith as well, a faith that when you take a leap you will grow wings and fly, a faith that when you start to write or talk to yourself (I do a lot of talking to myself) the words will come. And not just any words, but the right words. Meaning the character's words, not my words. (My words are another sidetrack.) Although in this play? There is a lot of fecking Matthew, and there are a lot of fecking people who will read this or hear this and know it.

I finish writing everything longhand at around 9 PM, and start typing in the changes and the new scenes. At about 10:35, I'm typing up the last bit of dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia and conducting a gmail chat conversation with Allyson in LA when Merry takes control of my fingers and changes one sentence of dialogue that changes everything for me. (Merry is Meroë, the name I've called my source of inspiration since the late 70's.) Instead of typing "I did too" in response to "I thought you were dead," I find myself typing "I was, for about thirty seconds." And the rest of the scene comes out of the nowhere that is the home of all inspiration, having nothing to do with the dialogue I sweated over this afternoon, having nothing to do with anything except the fact that I am at the laptop and the words are coming through my index fingers as I type, and they feel like the right words, they feel like wings.

July 9. After telling Allyson to mark down the time last night when I finished typing everything up (7:41 Pacific Time), I spent about 40 minutes walking around the cottage because I had so much energy inside me that I had to let some of it out or I wouldn't be able to sleep. I tried to read and watched the words slide away from my eyes. I tried to watch television and nothing I saw was anywhere near as brilliant as what I had just finished writing. So I ended up making a lot of tweaking notes -- things to plant, things to knock down that I've set up and forgotten -- and then went to bed.

Today I wake up at 8:30, and by 10 I've re-read everything, made spot changes, added echoes that I hope aren't too obvious, inserted a Jeeves joke, inserted a Court Jester reference, and added breathing room here and tightened things there. It's DONE. I e-mail it to the cast; I e-mail it to Allyson in LA; I e-mail it to the reading group; and I e-mail it to Ava in Australia with a cc to Ester in London. Then I go to the beach and fight off the sand flies and for the first time in 5 days (I started the rewrite on July 4th) I have nothing cooking in the writing oven. It's a good feeling; it's a full feeling actually, like I've just eaten a great meal and have a ton of bottled-up energy kvelling inside me. Take the rest of the day off, I think, you've earned it. And tomorrow when you get up at 8:30? You can start pre-heating the second script you brought down with you.

Vacation Diary

July 8. Woke up this morning a little frightened and wary about the mad scene rewrite. The energy leading into it is completely different now, which means I can't even look at the first draft. If I do, I will try to rebuild it from the original pieces, instead of junking everything from the foundation to the attic and starting from scratch. That is the scariest part: starting from scratch.

When I described it to Shannon, I said it's like carving a path in the forest. You have to keep going back to that fork in the road and chopping away until you find out where the correct turn is. Until you make the correct turn. It's all about recognizing the sidetracks. Sidetracks are short cuts. If it comes too easy? It's a sidetrack. If you tap it and it sounds thin? Sidetrack. If you stay on it, it will only lead you to another one. But once you come upon the true road, or a branch of the true road, the path you're taking will always reassert itself -- you'll feel wrong if you step away from it, and it will force you back onto it if you stray too far. Yeah, you can take side trips here and there, just as long as you keep them close to the main drag, just as long as you don't lose sight of that compass needle pointing you to home.

All of which means nothing if you stare at the forest long enough, if you stare at all the trees in your way long enough, and start questioning yourself too much. You always do, so there's no avoiding it. You always say to yourself, not just "Am I going the right way?" but "I have no idea where I'm going--how can I ever find the right way?" It's scary. Actually two kinds of scary. The kind that says "This is impossible" and the kind that says "You know you can do this." How do I deal with the scary? I throw away everything I've written before, put pen to paper, pick a turning point where the dialogue can go somewhere else, and start chopping away. And the road always appears. It always does. It may not look like the right road tomorrow, but that's tomorrow's task, not today's. Today's task is to get from A to B a better way than yesterday. That's what I owe the work.

I joke about the fact that I have to write the equivalent of four different plays just to get a single one that's good enough to put up on a stage. But I never joke about the fact that when I look at an empty piece of paper and just start writing whatever comes into my head, the words always appear. For that I will always be thankful.

Ocean Bluff, Low Tide

Vacation Diary

July 5. Overcast and dreary. I went to bed at 2 AM last night after watching 1776 on Turner Classics Movies. Everyone else went to bed at 3. I get up at 9 and start writing. Three cups of coffee and two hours later I've finished touching up Act One, extending the brief Hamlet/Ophelia scene in I,3 and adding some fortification chatter to Fortinbras. Still have to go back and give Phyllida some Dad stuff to chew over, but I won't do that till I write their scene and discover just what it is she's so pissed off about. The rest of the day is lazy. Nobody wakes up before 3 PM. I make notes for the Phyllida/Fortinbras scene, read the first 200 pages of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, watch the Red Sox lose to the Yankees, and actually see Allyson's Duracell commercial while my brother-in-law is watching COPS. I take a walk around 10 PM and talk to myself about the play while I'm snapping pictures of Ocean Street. Go to bed at midnight and try not to disturb the cat, who ends up sleeping on my feet.

July 6. Up at 7:30. Gather up all my notes for the Phyllida/Fortinbras scene and start writing them out in sections. Junk about four-fifths of what I've written and discover what they're arguing about as I piece the five best exchanges together into one scene. I can now go back and give Phyll a couple of definite Act One Dad moments to chew on. Finish typing up the new scene at 9:30, just as the sun makes its first appearance in two days. Twenty minutes later it's hazy again. Head out to the back yard to make notes for the big Act Two Scene 2 rewrite. Which is going to be more of a first draft than a touch-up, since pretty much all the opening chatter has to go, and Ophelia's mad scene needs to end with every volcano onstage erupting at the same time. As usual, I will have no idea how I'm going to do this as I talk to myself and transcribe as many different dialogue exchanges as I can. And as usual, it will all make sense tomorrow morning when I start to edit them together. Memo to self: this is how you need to live.