This is not my office but I aspire to its awesomeness. (I do not however want to have a stuffed possum on my desk nor do I have an alligator skull. I do however have a shark's jaw and many many cool shells including a seahorse skeleton found by my great grandmother in the late 1960s.) I am still excavating layers from my own space which is odd because really it was never that messy. But I've found so many books that I've kept for the most absurd reasons and so many others that deserve far more attention then they've received. Plus there are many photographs and illustrations aching for frames and postcards that need to be appreciated and my mother just came back from Europe with two awesome ashtrays that remind me so much of my grandparents' house I can't hardly stand it. (They smoked, I do not. Ashtrays can be used for a zillion things other than ashes of course.)
There is part of me that is terribly worried that I'm cleaning to avoid writing and I am certain this must be at least partly true. I don't know how authors are able to start a book while still editing another - I can't seem to wrap my head around another big project right now. I have the next book rough outlined so it is not terrifying (and my agent thinks it sounds great) but writing it? I don't know. I'm just unable to commit right now for some reason.
I did take the time to write notes on two short stories: "The Night of the Parking Lot Carnival" and "The Canova Beach Pier" (title will likely change on that one). You should know two things about these, first that my mother never let us go to parking lot carnivals, ("let someone else's child get hurt on a carny ride"), and second, when I was very little I saw a whale die offshore, surrounded by sharks in an event that drew half the town over a period of a couple of days. Maybe we should have done something to save it - maybe someone actually tried to do something - but mostly I think it was what nature looks like and we all wanted to be part of that "real nature" moment. We couldn't really see much (it was all taking place out past the breaker line) but I was there and even though I couldn't have been much more than five I've never forgotten it. So these are two more Florida stories and they are something that I feel like I can maybe, hopefully, write.
I still have the story of the dead girl buried on Tropical Trail written (this is an urban legend in my town and everyone knows it) but the ending is not right. Still needs tinkering so I've set it aside for a little while. It will work with just a little more time. (Oddly one of the girls who was with me the night that I wrote about recently friended me on facebook. I haven't heard about her in 20+ years. That was all just a little too coincidental.)
Anyway, I need to continue to be creative and I know that and I'm working on it. And maybe mucking out the office will help me feel better about this next step in my creative life - the post MAP OF MY DEAD PILOTS period. (Because let's be honest - that book has been part of my life for ten years.) I do have to work on the book trailer though, and make some postcards. (I'm going to make them out of several images I have from AK, not just the cover. I thought that would be cool and different.) MAP is still with me - MAP will always be with me - but I'm trying to think of other things.
It would be a lot easier if I had desk this inspiring to look at though. Isn't that little boy in the cape awesome? I'm sure I have a comparable picture somewhere......
