Red Cedar

A post on my facebook wall reminded me that I haven’t blogged about this Advent Bookblog recommendation that was posted earlier this week. Mostly just because I haven’t blogged at all since my last day of work. Been working on the novel a bit, but most I’ve been completely submerged in books and Christmas prep for the last week. Taking the extra time off this year really has made a huge difference in my overall hatred of the holiday – I’ve got to confess that last night as we were decorating sugar cookies I actually enjoying a Christmas experience! That practically has never happened in my whole life – starting with the annual parental Christmas tree fights of my youth right on up through my non-celebration of the holiday for the last several years.

Tonight is dinner with B’s brother, and tomorrow we drop M. off with her mother after Christmas morning present-opening and then head out to the ferry to Victoria to do Christmas Day dinner with my family (which promises to be insane this year – my mother invited a lot of people). A few days of visiting on the island and we’re back in Van on the 29th just in time to prep a little new year’s dinner for friends. I’ve got a stack of books that I’m determined to read over the holidays plus I understand that there just *might* be books in my gift pile this year….. so in between the festivities you know that I’ll be curled up in whatever strange beds B & I find ourselves over the next few days rapidly reading in order to get through some of the stack.

I’ll definitely post from the island. At the very least to update on the novel wordcount (61,000 or so at the moment). I am still working on it and I’ve got a goal of finishing in the next two weeks. We’ll see if that happens.

In any case Merry, Happy, and Good Cheer to all out there on the eve of Christmas. Hope to see lots of you during the holidays and in the new year 🙂

Thanks to my commenters on yesterday’s post. I felt weird about putting that story out there, and I appreciate the feedback on it (and support for the writing). I wonder if this story came out because of the novel I’m working on – set in the 1920s and 30s but close to the same stretch of dirt road I wrote about yesterday. This one five-mile stretch of dirt road is everywhere in my imagination. No matter what theme I’m writing from, this historic novel, the post-collapse novel I have already started writing in my head…. The times I remember most from my childhood. That place. That place. That place.

I haven’t been there since 2002 and before that I hadn’t been there since 1993. But every summer from birth until I was seventeen I spent time there and out of a very poor childhood memory it has left some of the only recollections I have of my youth. Which is a bit unfortunate since it’s quite a dark place in my imagination still. Cold, somehow. Judging. I can’t explain it exactly but my father thinks it’s a place of negative energy (and he’s no hippie flake) and always hated going there in the summer.

Whatever it is, this stretch of dirt road is the location of all my escape fantasies and my nightmares. I’m not quite sure why but I think I’m due back for a visit.

Things are good. Things are weird. Things are tiring. It’s just that time of year I suppose and I’m looking forward to this Friday when my holiday begins and I’m off work for sixteen days in a row. That’s some kind of record for me in the last few years – rarely do I take more than a week at a time off – which is how I ended up with five weeks of leave in my bank as we get close to the end of the year. Why not use it? Because right now I pretty much just want to lie down and sleep for days and days, so exhausted by the season even as I enjoy the parties and socializing.

I’ve just accepted another offer on my house as of last night, since it appears that the people who first offered are not going to come through (they have until midnight tonight to remove the subjects) due to some kind of financing problem. We’ll see of course, it could happen that all their paperwork gets taken care of this afternoon, but generally my experience has been that when people are last-minute it means they don’t have it together. In any case, another woman has put in an offer on the place and we have an agreed-upon price so if these folks don’t come through it’s onto the next one and hopefully that goes alright. I try not to get my hopes up but really the whole thing stresses me out because I want to be done with that property more than anything at the moment.

I’m at 58,000 words and the novel is working for me this week – as opposed to last week when I wanted to shred it up into little pieces and compost it in the backyard. I think I’ve got about 25,000 more words to finish, but I really don’t know at this point and I would just like to get the whole story down on paper before I start with the rewrite process which will bring more consistency to the whole thing. I have no idea right now whether I’m going to try to edit this to a publishable state or just treat it as “practice”. What I do know is that I’ve got a lot more confidence on output as a result, and I’m looking forward to some short story writing in the new year when I take a break from the novel in between versions.

And not that I’m thinking ahead or anything but I’ve decided that my birthday in February should be a salon-style affair loosely based on the 17th and 18th century French tradition of the literary salon. A performance affair in which people bring their own literary work or another contemporary piece to read or perform (as in a skit or a musical piece) for the rest of the participants. Back in university I had friends that held such events occasionally and have found myself thinking of doing this for awhile – so why not in February? More details on that as I figure them out because the hostess or salonierre sets ground rules for discussion and I have no idea what those would be.