Revision, the First of Many

First Sentence: Never having used a record player before, Isaac was astounded when the needle dropped and the silent air was filled with song.

Today’s exercises involve modifying my past writing, which I think I will pull from earlier in this blog. I’m sorry if the material is dull because it is so recent, it’s just the best fit for the kind of editing I’m trying to learn. Now that I’ve written a piece composed of such short sentences, it’s time to look at how necessary that was, and what I might do to improve the piece, even if it means lengthening its parts. Edits (hopefully) in another color.

Regardless of its content, paper burns orange. I watched years of thought consumed. The wisdom of ancients annihilated, and my own thoughts charred black.

I hadn’t been writing long. Only a few years. I was proud of it though. Some of it seemed good, but flames are too ravenous to care for the quality of their fare.

Why did I use candles tonight? The romance, I suppose. I was thinking of ancient writers. I too would work in flickering light. It was a beautiful sight. At least, until the accident. Why don’t I write on computers? Safter, less volatile. I should have migrated months ago. My friends always said so. They’d ask to read my work. I’d mail it to them. It confused them, the mail.

— Why not just email me?

I like the sound too much. Pen scratching paper: rasp, scratch, rasp. The rifling of pages. The paper muffling my mug’s thump. Not the artificial clicking of keys and the cold glare of a screen.

Also the smell: deep, light, rich. My cherished books on the table, lending a more mature musk. The miasma of aged thought. My java permeates all. Until it goes cold, that is. I just sit sometimes. Breathe. Listen.

The candles seemed appropriate. A natural extension of the atmosphere. Flickering lights, adding a new scent.

Why do men have elbows? They swing wide, just reaching across the desk. All I wanted was a sip. It was the coffee’s fault, really.

The candlestick teetered for a moment. It fell impossibly slowly, but my hand was even slower. The flame leapt to the paper. I stood the candlestick back up. Far, far too late. I slapped at the flame. It caught my turtleneck sleeve.

Stop. Drop. Roll. Thrash. Scream. They forgot a few steps in elementary school. I stood again, saw Pompeii: an ashen wasteland of paper. My current short story still burning. I doused it with coffee. The ink ran, distorting my words.

The scents mingled. Burnt paper and black coffee. Bitter.

If you’d like to compare it to the original, you can find that here. I’m not sure if I like all of the changes that I made, I’ll have to go back and compare the two in a week or so, after my brain has time to become objective.

I received a phone call from Santa today. I’m not quite sure how my friend accomplished it, but it was truly hilarious. Somehow Santa knew that I was secretly a Sith Lord and that I wanted a honey-badger for Christmas. It feels great to have friends who will send things like that my way. It makes you feel valuable. Loved. Not the most common thing freshman year of college.

Earlier I finished “Sojourn” by R. A. Salvatore, and I noticed something peculiar about its plot. The climax of the story occurs where you would expect it to, but the falling action seems to end before the book resolves itself. It felt weird, reading the story in a middle ground between the end of the “action” and the actual resolution. I’m not going to say that it was a bad choice, but it threw me.

I’m really looking forward to Creative Writing class next semester. In High School I took a wonderful class on the subject, but it was hard to dig into the meat and bones of Creative Writing simply because it was a High School class full of High School seniors. We learned a lot, but the stuff that I’m doing now goes a lot deeper than the analysis that we learned in that class, and I’m excited to see what other vistas of linguistic nuance will open before me in the coming months.

I had a teacher last semester who talked about defining yourself by what you do. You can write, but not think of yourself as a writer. There’s a level of confidence and ownership in defining yourself by a practice, which he says is often gained by having a mentor in that practice tell you: “You’ve got it.” Simple words. They instill a confidence though, one that I really lack right now. I’m not a writer. I’m currently a computer scientist/knitter who writes. I’m terrified that when I finally do enter the wide world of high-level writing, I won’t be told that. I’m terrified of discovering that all of the stock that I’ve put into my writing abilities over the years due to my friend’s encouragement is misplaced. Terrified of discovering that they were just being nice. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.

Goodnight internet.

Tick, Tock, Circadian Clock

I walk into the room, trying to take stock. Grandmother knitting in a rocking-chair. Tick, tick, tick, go the needles. Toddler playing with a wooden train set. Grizzled man beckoning me to a table. Not a trap after all. It happens in my line of work.

The man offers me a drink. I pass it up, need to be careful. I was drugged like that once. Appreciated SWAT teams more since I got out of that.

I take my seat. Wooden, no cushion. Could be handmade, too. Where could I get one? Focus.

“If you’re able to pay, we have it right here.” The man speaks confidently. Feels safe in front of the child. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t try anything here.

I slide him $300, wait for him to count it. He  nods, opens a drawer and passes a package. Feels heavy enough. I open one side. Has the right shape. All the evidence I need. We shake hands and we’re done. I walk out the door. Hear the click of the lock. So fast. Strangely fast.

I check the package again. The ticking wasn’t the needles. I drop it. Sprint away. I think I ca

Wow. Leaving off that period hurts. It’s disturbing. I want so desperately to finish that sentence, but that defeats the purpose.

Above was my exercise in writing from the perspective of someone who needs to think fast, in short sentences. Thanks again to Noah Lukeman. I’ve actually started to notice how the placement of of periods in other people’s work affects their writing. Now I’m looking forward to advancing to the study of other marks. What secrets about the comma have I yet to discover?

Today was largely spent at the office of a sleep specialist, trying to address the cause of the insomnia that I’ve struggled with for the last 5 years. His conclusions are complex, and he believes my problems to be multifaceted , the most basic of which is that my circadian rhythm is shifted several hours out of alignment with that of an “average” person. If I go to bed at the normal time I lie there for hours, until my circadian rhythm finally says that it’s time to go to sleep.

I also learned that everyone has a threshold of mental activity that is “enough” to keep them from falling asleep. Normally if you absently wonder about your plans for tomorrow and the appointments that you have to keep, the resulting mental activity isn’t enough to override falling asleep. The doctor also suggested that my threshold could be abnormally low, so that thinking about almost anything will keep me awake. That’s certainly true. I spend my late nights thinking of comebacks to insults from that morning. Sometimes I land on pretty goods ones, too.

This doctor also is the fastest talker I have ever met. He dictated his findings over the phone to what I believe was another doctor’s voicemail and he spoke so rapidly that I couldn’t process all of the words. Is that something that students train for in med school now? Speed-dictation, so that doctors don’t need to wrestle with one anther’s illegible scrawl?

The below first sentence was my experience today receiving a call from a number that I deleted months ago.

First Sentence: The moment I saw the number my mind screamed “It’s a trap!” but my fingers had already pressed “accept”.

That’s likely all for tonight, a new R. A. Salvatore novel calls my name.