Sipping the rest of last night’s wine, now, in a coffee cup. Looking to wake ridiculously early tomorrow. Not to run, but to write. Tomorrow’s the 1 week mark from the ‘half’. Foot still hurts, but I want to start running again.. soon. Today at winery, crazy but somehow melodious. Not sure how that came to be. But I won’t complain, not if I want to stay sane. Last semester’s novel, still to be edited.. the poetry collection as well. I feel a mess– Mikey-a-mess, my new tag. You should see me, now, drinking this wine like it’s the Verona blend, holding the cup by handle. The poem I wrote early, or have been writing though day, still not done. My Beat has slowed, for sure. But I’ll keep writing. And I’ve decided that my fiction needs to be ALWAYS written in present tense. I direct myself towards and with Truth in my prose, and the more truthful and forthcoming form is present tense expository. “Well, then it just reads, or could read, like a journal entry,” a critic could cough. Good, I respond, as most of the pages stretch from the diarist effort, MY diarist effort.
10:23, sipping slow. I don’t want the wine to follow the writer into hours cruel, as it will win if I underestimate it. Thinking of my character, C——, and how she’s looking to make her own wine, how she wants it to be perceived. Balanced, yes, but vocal, bold, confident, recognized. She wants her bottles to be sipped like they’re a guest at the dinner table, to be respected but not feared. “It’s just wine,” as she wrote in her journal a while back– (and that’s another aspect of present tense, you can more easily hop from past back to present, and even into future as long as the anchor is Now, the Now, the character’s present sense of reality, consciousness).
10:31, and I’m quite ready for sleep, and my early rise. And I’m waking early for sakes of the book, the first release, which is either the poetry gathering or the prose pieces, or 41-page novelette, not sure. But I need something out there, as I’ve been saying for bloody years. Again, everyone’s moving on but me. That stops now. And my punctuation’s absence will capture my urgency as I don’t have any time to pause, not even a moment, or a blink– okay, maybe not completely banished, the punctuation, but reduced or kindly minimized. -5/24/14