Going places

A day of writing. A whole day of writing. That doesn't happen often enough.

But what is there to blog about a day of writing when it’s gone well?

If I'd taken a trip somewhere, I could tell you about all the interesting people I'd met and the places I'd seen. But sitting here all day at my desk, where have I gone? I feel I've gone somewhere. There’s a strong sense of having left my familiar domestic surroundings behind. I wasn't really "here" most of the day. I was in the made-up world of the story, but I was also in that strange, insubstantial, shifting half-world of language itself.

Transferring from one bus to another in the city of sentences, kayaking the currents and eddies of prose rhythm, picking my way through the thorny thicket of punctuation. And all the choices to be made at every turn, dead ends to be backed out of, new routes to be found, or excavated through
the seemingly solid rock of a stubborn paragraph. 

Constantly checking the map of my Planned Route against where I've written to, and sometimes changing the map when it no longer corresponds to an exciting new possibility that the writing itself has uncovered.

The book is a train. I'm on a train of many cars. Each chapter is a car. But there are cars being added on as I go. And some I'm not quite allowed into yet, because they're only ghost cars as yet. 

It's a slow train. So slow. Even slower and more often held up by unscheduled circumstance than a Via passenger train pulling over at every siding to let the more important freights rocket past. 

The track is being laid down even as we go.

And sometimes, every so often, on rare occasions, the writing is a bobsled. A vehicle fitting its groove perfectly and racing along without friction to the end of the sentence, the end of the paragraph, the end of the chapter.

By mid-afternoon the vehicle I've been sitting in all day usually starts to run out of gas, and I'm forced to pull over. 

I unbuckle myself from the desk and stand up to stretch and see where I've gotten to, and I'm back where I started. I haven't gone anywhere at all.