storyrainthejournal | (no subject)

Wild, windy, and wet this morning; thunder storms with heavy, drumming rain in the night. Please to picture me with a happy expression.

Yesterday I heard a bit of Prairie Home Companion while I was out doing errands and Garrison Keillor was talking about why some people like rain. He talked about the wildness, the uncertainty of it. For me, it’s that rain speaks to all the senses with so much beauty; it makes music, it smells good, it feels good, clean and fresh, it plays with light—turning headlights into watery gems across car windows, glazing sidewalks, beading the air. And it changes things—turns streets into rivers, skies into paintings. It’s transformative, and full of possibility, making the mundane mysterious and opening hope up within it.

Which is a thread running through most, if not all, of my fiction.

Going to get to see friend K and her fam this weekend, for the wedding of another friend—one to whom she’s closer than I am, but I got invited to the wedding, too, and I’m glad to be going. Taking Friday off to hang with K some.

Working on the short story I started in Buffalo, leaving the others in progress languishing; trying to keep at least a fingertip in the novel, too, so momentum isn’t totally lost.

Honestly, people who write a story in a day or two (other than flash fiction, of course), even a rough draft, amaze me. Of course, generally that is their day job, but still. I’m not sure I could manage it even if fiction was what I did all the day long. I think some people’s minds are just tidier and more obedient, or disciplined, than mine. Or something. It's not a matter of not sitting and doing the writing when I can, which, mostly, except while at the day job, I do, it's that, for me, stories have to grow in my mind and out of the language itself, and the plot is seldom plain and simple to me. Maybe I should work on more straightforward plotting...nah; because that's part of the richness and the joy to me, complexity and surprise in a story that grows organically from the language and characters, the world and its images.