Dear Readers,
It is freezing. What the hell, April? You’re such a flake.
I’m in another coffee shop, one of them chains where it’s wiser to drink the tea. There’s a gale of wind whipping dust in one door and out the other, and the big digital display infinitely looping ads on the wall opposite me has a twitch. Every now and again it has a little judder, a visible wobble, a short staccato moment of distorted coffee cup or special-offer cake. I feel ya, big digital ad display.
I’m finding the writing glitchy. For the past few sessions, I’ve written you lovely lot and then cracked on with the old manuscript. (That was a very country turn of phrase (there altogether)). The going was good or yielding maybe but then I tried to simplify what I’m doing and things got sticky. The story has two (main) characters, each with two voices (inner/outer or self/shadow or time/depth or some combination of those three) and the characters are two un-gendered halves of a long term relationship. If you’re still reading, the trick that I’m trying to pull is to have one of the second voices refer to its flipside plus the other character in plural pronouns that make sense or at least make it clear to the reader who is speaking to who or who they’re speaking about. It’s great craic to try to figure out and I am really enjoying the process but every time I think I’ve cracked it and re-write a couple of chapters, it doesn’t work – I hit a glitch. A particular thing that I want my character to say (or that they themselves want to say, they’re ambitious like that) in some particular moment breaks the set-up I’ve figured out.
So I’m going around in some circles. One big circle is a re-write of the whole manuscript, balancing the characters and cutting out the boring bits. Then there are lots of smaller circles where I go back and re-write the early chapters with new ways of presenting the different voices, finding something that works until it suddenly only mostly works. Going around in little infinite loops, happily glitching on the way. Like my buddy over there, the big digital ad display. We’re so alike.
In other news, I saw Stan yesterday. Stan is doing well, he’s going to work on being more present. I’m not sure what else to say about our latest encounter, other than that it reinforced the case for my Extremely Hot Take on therapists that I might share in a future letter. And I’m going to start journalling, because I am impatient to see change (i.e. get better). More writing. I mean, I do like writing.
Take care everyone.
Yours sincerely,
Paul
p.s. Three of the most wonderful women in my life are a hundred miles away (I miss them very much) so you might be getting more letters than usual for the next few weeks.