25 random things about macdowell too
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| Calderwood: heated floors and charming bugs. |
I’ll have more to say about Matias’s book—which is as warm
and friendly as it is skeptical of narrative—when I’m finished, but for now I
just want to blog about (full) Day 1 at MacDowell in random-list form.
1. Lunch arrived in a picnic basket with “Calderwood,” the
name of my cottage/studio, painted on the lid.
2. It was tuna salad with capers and faro. Faro! It tastes
like peasant food in the best way.
3. I think that when people get stuck, they reach for food,
both literally and literarily. Mangoes and grapefruit are making a lot of
appearances in Matias’s book.
4. The floor in my studio is heated.
5. My studio is at least as big as AK’s and my house, but
with no AK and no cats. It’s all for me. This is good for writing and bad in
the other ways.
6. I told AK that there must be a cat around here that I
could borrow for a couple of weeks. If not, I might kidnap one of the chickens
on the property.
7. I’m going to start writing what I came here to
write…any…minute…now.
8. I think about caffeine like an addict. Mostly I’m going to totally stop while I’m
here. But it’s the first day! Just a cup of tea to get me started. Oh, and they
included a thermos of coffee in my picnic basket.* I don’t want to be rude by
not drinking it.
9. I feel like a kid at Disneyland. I can’t settle down and
enjoy any one thing because there is too much to enjoy. I just sort of have to
run around and touch it all.
10. I just opened a document called “CharsAndStyleDraft1
02-10-12” that lists all the characters in the YA novel I’m here to work on. I
was like, Who are these people? Luckily
it’s annotated: “Aiden Jayne—Miranda’s boyfriend, football douche.”
11. I’ve definitely had too much caffeine.
12. For the record, my novel is not about football douches,
or the girls who date them. Or the nerds who resent them. I think we’ve all
heard enough on those subjects. Yes, high school is a microcosm of society, and
it’s very important when you’re sixteen, but kids have whole lives that happen
outside of school, and sometimes those outside goings-on make high school
politics seem like a luxury.
13. My studio is full of these big brown bugs with long legs
and black markings on their backs. I think they can fly. Because they live in
my charming cottage in charming New Hampshire, I find them charming. It’s not
fair. Cockroaches are really admirable when you think about it, but I hate
them.
14. I’m trying to decide whether I should reread my YA novel
from the beginning (apparently I wrote thirteen chapters already?), which would
be the responsible thing to do, or just reread my outline and jump into the
writing part, which is what the caffeine is telling me to do.
15. I think you know which I’m going to choose.
16. I’m scared I’ll start to like this life, and it will be
hard to go back to writing at Starbucks for one hour a day.
17. Kind of like how, in college, I shared a room for as
long as I could, because I knew that once I paid for my own bedroom, there
would be no turning back.
18. But I like to think of myself as resilient. If I had to
do a lot of things, I could. Whenever people say, “I could never ______,” it’s
insulting to the people who are doing _____. Like they’re sharing a room just
because poverty comes naturally to them.
19. I’ve been writing for a little while now. I got sort of
excited, then I talked to AK on the phone and started worrying, just a little,
about whether Ollie will get confused if he doesn’t get fed at the times I
normally feed him, and will run away forever. Then it was hard to start writing
again.
20. But I did/am anyway.
21. A composer I met earlier today is walking in the meadow
outside my window. Is he stuck? Or is he hearing amazing melodies in his head?
22. How someone composes a piece of music is just about as
mysterious to me as a thing can be. I could design a house as easily as I could
compose a song. They would be equally unstable structures.
23. Leaves are falling. Joe Bills, the guy who drove me here
from Boston yesterday, told me about how a dead squirrel fell onto the hood of
his car recently. It was walking across a telephone wire one minute, dead the
next. We should all go so quickly.
24. I wrote 1,573 words. I’m feeling good about roughly nine
hundred of them.
25. No, that’s not really how I look at it. I sort of said
that to be clever. Really, most of the words themselves are okay. It’s how they
fit into the project as a whole that feels like looking into a canyon full of
scorpions.
*During the kitchen tour, they asked, “Do you want coffee?”
I apparently said, “Yes.”
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