It was almost strange, to be sitting in chairs without any tv in front of them, I'm sorry to say, and yet also wonderful.
It was so quiet. We could feel the temperature slowly change from the warmth of the spring day to the cool of the evening. We could hear the sounds change slowly from bird song to insects singing.
At first the sky was a washed blue and then it began slowly to soak up color. One star came out, and then there were a scattering and then an airplane flew over the house, all the lights blinking. All the street lights came on, tall orange lamps, shining down the road.
"I'll meet you here tomorrow night," I offered to Keith, as we were folding up the chairs to go in.
"Sure thing," was his happy response.
When we went inside, the house was warm and quiet, the scent of Asian glazed salmon still faint in the air.
A few days ago, I went for a walk with our new camera. In the park, the dogwoods are coming out:
I think I've used up all my poem-writing creative energy, which is good timing, because I heard back from my friend about Torii.
He told me a lot of mind blowing things. First, he told me it was literature.
So... I guess I write literature.
What more could one want from life?
Probably a successful adoption and then a lot of sleepless nights and piles of dirty laundry, but I digress.
He told me not to change anything, but to add to it great depth of interior expression in order to make it great literature.
Anyone else, he said, would read it and think it was great as it was. However, he said that because he read my blog, he knew I was capable of going much deeper with the novel.
He suggested I open a new file, at almost any scene, and simply dive down into the characters- talk about what is driving them, what they remember, explore past associations, emotions, etc.
All this time, I'm frantically scribbling notes and nodding my head and pacing around my kitchen while various expressions of shock passed over my face, due to the incredible nature of this feedback.
I mean- dialogue, world construction, action scenes, plot movement, theme- all of that, needed no work. This man makes his living by writing.
He just wanted more. He said I kept dropping hints about all this other history and he kept waiting to hear this history.
He said he did know the characters better near the end of the story, but he said, "That's an awfully long time to make a person wait."
At the time that I received all this heaping mountain of extraordinary feedback, I was right in the middle of writing the poem, so I filed it away for future reference.
Yesterday, I pulled out good ol' Torii and I was all, "Awwwww! I love Tenshio! He's so adorable."
Then I set about telling all his deepest secrets and generally making him more accessible.
I wrote about five or six paragraphs, to insert into the original scene and sent them off to my friend, to get his feedback, before I went any further in that direction.
He said, and I quote: "It's simply brilliant."
Excuse me while I fall
off.
my.
chair.
*
*
*
Okay, I'm back.
Holy crap!!!
So now I'm going to be writing through the entire first half of the story- which I think is the most spare, in terms of interior richness, and just fill it out.
In other news, it's time to renew our lease and as usual, this has spurred my husband into a house search, thinking that searching for a house, buying a house and moving into a house, all while in the middle of an adoption, is much preferable than signing the new lease.
My husband, he is always on a quest for greatness.
