Progress Report #86

Just before starting the third draft, my final draft, I wrote that I was going to back away from the frequency of these progress reports, that I didn’t want to write the book while sitting in a department store window. I also said that from time to time I’d let people know where I was in the process and how it was going. This seems like a good place to do one.

One unexpected thing happened right at the start. My first and second drafts took me around five or six years to write. (I don’t remember anymore.) Both drafts started from a particular point in time. But as I was writing the second draft, which took me four years to complete, I gradually changed my mind about where the story should begin. But by the time I got to the end of the second draft, I’d completely forgotten that I’d changed the original idea. So when it came time to begin the third draft, I found that the material I wanted to work with didn’t exist. I’d never written it. So, since September or October of 2012 I’ve essentially been working up first, second, and third draft material for the opening section. It was a disappointment to have to go through all that again. I’d been eager to get to the more developed material of the second draft and elevate it. This week I finally arrived got there, and the writing is going faster now. I recently described the process of writing a book as driving across a landscape. Sometimes you get to travel at the speed limit; at other times, you have to slow down—for the curves and when it gets dark. Interestingly, my current favorite chapter is the second, which I’d feared was going to be especially tedious. It describes my family background. Was it my upbringing that sent me to the streets? In a way, yes. But not in the way one might think.

For years my shorthand description of the book has been “It’s about the years I lived on the street.” Now it’s become, “Have you ever wondered when you saw someone on the street how they got there? It’s the story of how I got there.” My story is different than that of most others. But everyone’s story is different. I know I said that somewhere else recently. Maybe here…Whatever…Writing a book is exhausting. It’s almost as if nothing else exists.

Back to Santa Barbara Island

Aerial Photo of Santa Barbara Island

I’ve been offered the chance to return to Santa Barbara Island for a week, and I’m taking it. I’m leaving Tuesday. In case anyone is curious, above is an aerial photograph of the island. It’s about a mile and a half long.

Not much else to say right now. I’ve been working in my head on several ideas for blog posts, but my main focus has been on the book. Every time I sit down, I make progress. There have been days when for one reason or another I haven’t been able to write—life getting in the way and so on. But every time I do work, which is virtually every day now, I make progress. There has never been an instance of feeling stumped or of having writer’s block.

I’ll try to write something from the island.

Beyond the Mists of Avalon

At Webster Point

This is the fourth or fifth time that Judy and I have served as holiday season caretakers on Santa Barbara Island. All the other stays have lasted one week. We’ve loved them, but have always felt we were just getting settled in when it came time to leave. This year we were offered a two week stay, which we happily accepted. The day we got here we found out that a third week was available if we wanted it. We had to think it over, but we both ended up saying yes. The isolation has not been any strain at all. Besides being husband and wife, Judy and I are best friends.

This time I’ve been able to establish a routine: cooking, meditating, writing, working (we’ve been planting native plants), and hiking. One of my favorite parts of the day is right after breakfast when I hike up to a favorite spot in a meadow above the ranger’s house and just sit. The small ranger’s compound is completely out of view. Except for a trail marker, everything I see and hear there is natural. I wrote it all down one day.

What I saw: a broad field of grass with blades around six inches tall, the wooden trail marker, various shrubs (mostly sage and giant coreopsis), Santa Catalina Island (25 miles away), the sun, the marine layer along the horizon, a few distant clouds, the Pacific Ocean, one marsh hawk chasing another marsh hawk out of its territory, a white-crowned sparrow, a hovering kestrel—and on the distant horizon, two container ships.

What I heard: the cry of the marsh hawk being chased, a light wind in my ears, a flock of seagulls, waves hitting the shore, the barking of sea lions, a meadowlark, the grass moving in the wind, the song of the sparrow.

On my way back to the house a barn owl flew quite near and I saw the spouting of a whale.

As I said about my last trip, one of the things I value most about being on the island is having the opportunity to relax my nervous system. I always lose sight of just how much living in a city jacks me up until I get to a place like this. There is a natural rhythm that we are supposed to live by and that modern life constantly exceeds. One of the great delusions of our time is that by living fast and bold we create dynamic lives that are superior to the ways that preceded us. But all we end up doing is losing our clarity, losing our way. Because of the lack of distractions, I’ve gotten a very good handle on what it is I need to do to make my book, Street Song, work. I wish I could stay here for months and months and not do anything but write. I could finish the book within a year. But that’s not to be.

One final note: During my sits up in the meadow I’ve been dipping into the Stephen Addiss/Stanley Lombardo translation of the Tao Te Ching. While I’ve been reading and liking this particular translation for around a year, I’m in love with it now. Most translations of the Tao Te Ching read either like a cryptic and dry philosophical tract or some New Age pamphlet. With this version I can feel the presence of the mind that wrote it. It’s put out by Shambhala Publications.

Off Again to Santa Barbara Island

Santa Barbara Island

The last few years, Judy and I have spent every Christmas to New Year’s Day as the sole occupants of Santa Barbara Island, a mile-long island 38 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. The island is part of Channel Islands National Park, and the park service relies on a regular staff of volunteer caretakers to watch over the place. Few people ever go there, except in summer, and even then it’s generally vacant. It’s difficult to get to. A boat goes out only once a week. Since there’s no water, unless you have your own boat, you’re saddled with the need to bring out a week’s worth of water and food. There isn’t a single beach on the island. It’s all cliffs. The landing is a dock built into one of those cliffs. Sometimes the ocean is too rough to permit a landing. It can be that way for days. And even when you can dock, to get to the campground you have to carry your gear up a long path with switchbacks.

The situation is different for volunteers, who get to live in the island’s only building, the ranger’s house, which has a gas stove, solar power, and a regular supply of water brought in by the weekly boat. This year, Judy and I are spending two uninterrupted weeks there. They needed volunteers for the week prior to Christmas as well the Christmas to New Year’s week, and we decided to take it. I’ll be using the time for focused work on my book. The island is incredibly peaceful and free of distractions. There are few sounds other than those that nature makes—wind, waves, sea lions, sea gulls, meadowlarks, insects buzzing in the grass. (Last year, though, we were awakened in the middle of the night by a helicopter that was searching for a boat that had crashed into the island in the darkness. They radioed and asked us to search for the wreckage and to take photographs, which turned out to be quite an adventure.)

Besides the radio, the ranger’s house has a modem connected to a satellite dish, so we won’t be completely cut off from what many people call civilization. I’ll try to write at least once while I’m out there.

Happy Holidays to you all.

Progress Report #85

Working on “Street Song”

So, Back to Work.

Like a lot of people, I think, I feel more relieved than celebratory after the election. Basically, we’re back at square one, except that the Republicans are pretty much in a situation where they have to abandon their tactics of confrontation and obstruction. They failed in their bid to destroy Obama, to make him a one-term president. I don’t think most people want another four years of their intransigence. The one aspect of the election that cheers me is the very real possibility that the Republican strategy of depending on the angry white male voter has finally reached a dead end. This is a common theme in all the commentary I’ve been reading. It all began back in 1968 with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” a transparently, if not openly, racist approach. They’ve been tweaking it ever since. But it may finally be dead, dead, dead. Thank God! (Demographically speaking, I am a white male, a taxpaying, home-owning WASP. But I’m not angry.)

In the last two or three weeks I’ve been distracted by the election. Now I can get back to work in earnest. I haven’t done any final-draft level writing in ten years. It feels good to be back in the saddle. I’m satisfied with how it’s going.

An addendum a few hours after posting: No one knows really knows which way the wind will blow, but the Republicans are actually talking intransigence. For them it’s apparently got to be either victory or self-immolation.

Progress Report #84

In July, when I began my hiatus from Street Song, I imagined myself working on this here blog a lot more. Instead, the actual effect of taking the break was full retreat—in all areas! Today I finally started work on the last draft. My first task is to begin creating an outline for a potential publisher. My intention is to go part way down that road and then begin writing the draft, continuing work on the outline in the evenings. (I’m a morning writer.) I’m working by hand as much as possible now, going to the computer only when I need to edit. As I’ve said, I won’t be writing about my work on this draft very much—an occasional post to say how things are going. I hope to get back to this blog more now. Sometimes I feel as though life in this world has gotten so weird that I don’t know where to begin. And I don’t want just to complain. But it has gotten very difficult to see the way to a better place.

Progress Report #83

I’m still on my break from Street Song. Besides allowing me some much needed rest, the long hiatus has allowed for the broader perspective to reemerge from underneath the flattening mass of details. I had imagined that I’d be posting here more often, but I haven’t felt like writing. I’ve mostly been reading (books! real books!) and helping Judy with her work-in-progress, Pelican Dreams. I’ve been transcribing interviews for her and trying to figure out how to contact the various copyright holders whose photographic stills she’s using. I have not been looking at her edits, so it was a pleasure to see finally what she’s been doing. A couple of nights ago Judy showed a rough cut of the film as a benefit for the Green Film Festival here in San Francisco. I figured it would be exactly that, rough, and probably a bit slow in spots. But from beginning to end I was awake and I was often moved. More than once I felt a twinge of jealousy or envy. I want my book to be that good. While I certainly won’t be regarded as an objective observer, it appeared that the audience of around sixty souls felt much the same as I did. She still has a ways to go. I’d say the film is around 75% complete.

It looks like I’ll be resuming work on Street Song during the last week of September. And then it’s going to be one disciplined romp through to the end. Once I’ve started I won’t be making a lot of these progress reports. The work on the last draft is going to be exacting and, as I’ve said before, it would make me feel too self-conscious, as though I were writing the book in a department store showroom. I’m looking forward to getting back to work. I feel good about what’s to come.

Money: An Introduction

I’ve been having some difficulty deciding what to write about. With the election approaching, there seems to be an awful lot to discuss. I’ve finally settled on the one topic that’s central to everything else in this country: money.

When I was seventeen years old, I took a train trip from Germany to Greece, and along the way I had to pass through what was then called Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was a Marxist country, and as an American I was of some interest to the other passengers in my car. At one point a man approached me rubbing his forefinger and thumb together and smiling devilishly. “Capitalist. Eh?” he said. At that point in my life, I’d not given the question much serious thought. I wanted to be some kind of a poet, not an intellectual. It took me a while to come up with a response. Finally, I shook my head “no.” The man was visibly shocked. He stared at me, and in a voice filled with bewilderment and disbelief asked, “Communist?” I didn’t have to think about that one, and, again, I shook my head “no.” He still wanted an answer, and I looked to the floor of the train for one. After a bit, I raised my head and told him, “Social Democrat.” His face broke out into a huge smile and he gave me a hug, saying happily, “Me, too!”

While I’d heard of Social Democrats, I wasn’t  sure what they were exactly. In that moment it was a shorthand way of saying that I thought we should all take care of one another, but that we shouldn’t have to live under oppressive systems of government. In the past 43 years, my thinking hasn’t changed much—except that I now have much stronger reasons for believing what I do. Lately, I’ve been reading some books about what’s happening with money and the economy, and I have things I want to say. But I’m going to say them in a series of short posts. As always with this blog, I’m not prepared to sit down and write long ones. I have to reserve that kind of effort for Street Song.

Speaking of which, I’m still on my break. I’ve mostly been taking care of the small tasks of daily life and trying to get some rest. I’d been wondering if anxiety might begin to press in on me as I got closer to the starting point for the third draft (two weeks from now), but so far it hasn’t happened. My inner self seems comfortable with the fact and confident. A good sign.

Gone Fishin’

Since finishing the second draft I’ve been feeling a bit shell-shocked. I’ve been bouncing off the walls some. I’m finally coming out of it, though, and getting ready to leave for an extended trip to the woods. This is my last post until I return in early August. I’m going to take another month off after that before turning my attention to what you see below: my research material—books, some of my notes, and my first two drafts. The essential material, though, is in my heart.

Books and Papers