Wolf

I often listen to songs on repeat while writing. There are people who may have good thoughtful reasons to explain this but I think I do it because I’m trying to capture something specific about a song. The emotion. The texture. The internal sensation of these notes playing against my bones, against my heart. I wrote about this song last year and so I suppose I’m trying to capture this feeling right now, at various points, in this novel.

I’ve been typing with my eyes closed because my eyes hurt. They’ve been hurting for about a week and maybe that’s a bigger problem than just my screen aggravating me or eye strain but for now I type with my eyes closed, half asleep in frog pyjamas, walking the tightrope between awake and asleep, finding this threshold conducive to the process as I try to channel that other world, that shadowlife, that breaking of reality where surreality converges with the fixed material of my daily existence.

I write about wolves.

I write about dust.

A black tongue singing.

For this evening, I’ve been bouncing around the novel filling in space, trying to complete the many scattered notes I have for different chapters but I think I’m going to worry less about some inconsistencies and begin to move forward again with the novel.

This can be easier said than done since so much of the reality and fundamentals of a novel and its world come to life only when I sit down to write them out. So if I skip over an important conversation, this can send me spiraling back later to rewrite or paper over what I now know that I didn’t then.

This is why I keep doubling back. I could continue on and just leave the notes for me later to solve later, but if I continue on, then every change I make earlier will spiral out of control, its ramification atombombing what follows.

And so I close my eyes and try to keep my feet out of the creek while I dance across this keyboard, stringing garlands from steeples to stars, the sky singing only for me at this blurring edge of realities.