The miracle of libraries and loving my writing

Joys of the mid-week

It’s week six for us, the very worst time of the semester. We’re not quite to the halfway point, at which, even though it’s a slog, it’s at least a downhill slog. As seems to happen every year around this time (or maybe more so with climate change), the heat overstayed it’s welcome. I have a long list of soups I’d like to make (butternut…cream of celery…a really nice chili), but it’s hard to feel enthusiastic about soup when the temperature is in the upper 80s. On Tuesday, I broke down and turned the air conditioning back on. I was holding out hope that we were done with it for the season, but, alas, not as of Wednesday.

Less than a week from today, I’ll drive to Columbus to get a tooth pulled. It’s a strange sort of situation to be in, given that the tooth doesn’t hurt. The crack is in the root and there’s no pain. I know the tooth needs to go, but also a small part of me whispers, “But it doesn’t hurt, so maybe there’s nothing wrong?” I’ll be happy to have that small bodily procedure behind me rather than looming ahead.

And October is just a far busier month than it should be all around.

In my witchiness deep-dive, there’s a lot about how fall is a particularly difficult month. Everything’s unsettled. I think of chickens, fidgety while they prepare to roost. Or a cat, turning around and around and around before it finally lays down, warm and cozy in front of the fire. That’s what autumn feels like sometimes—the antsy moment before the settling in.

So in the face of all that discontent, here are some small joys.

- My quality of life declined greatly when Joni Mitchell took all her music off Spotify last year. I miss Neil Young, too, but Joni Mitchell’s music is an essential soundtrack to my life. I’ve spent the last year trying to find other ways to listen to Blue and Court and Spark and Heijra. You can play through the albums on YouTube, but there are commercials. I bought Court and Spark as a record at our lovely, re-branded coffee shop, Analog, but the sound was too distorted on our sad little record player.

Lucky for me, I’m on our local library board. I was watching the cute video they made advertising the library’s many, many services beyond books and I realized, oh, you can check out music digitally (as well as movies and TV shows and audiobooks and ebooks). And, yes, they have all of Joni Mitchell’s albums. I’m listening to Court and Spark on Hoopla as I write this, where I can just keep borrowing Joni Mitchell albums to my heart’s content (or at least, until I run out of online borrows for the month).

I cannot tell you how happy this makes me, to have Joni back in my life, especially in the fall, when Blue is the perfect album to listen to. I cannot say enough about what an infinite source of joy a library is, miracle places that we are now far too stupid as a culture to ever create, so thank god they already exist.

- Last week (or maybe the week before, it’s sort of a blur) I took all the short stories I’ve been working on for the past year or so, put them together in one document as if they were a real collection, and printed them out. I wasn’t really focused on what would come next, just on that very concrete but relatively low-stakes task. The stories are linked, all set in the same town with characters who recur. They were always meant to be together and I’d long ago come up with an order for them, so I didn’t even have to expend the mental energy to figure that out. The final step of actually putting them all together, knowing that some of the stories were not completely finished, had seemed too daunting. Then last week, I just did it.

It's always satisfying to look at the actual, physical stack of pages and know, “Hey, I did that!” Every time, we should pat ourselves on the back for just that. We wrote all those words and pages, such that now, they take up physical space in the world, instead of just mental space inside our heads. If that isn’t a cleansing spell, I don’t know what is.

I’ve written about how pushing my young adult novel out into the world this summer was an exhausting and bruising experience. That’s part of why I put the stories aside. I didn’t have the energy for them. Also, as happens over and over again in the writing life, I’d decided that they all sucked. To be fair, this wasn’t all me. I sent a few of the stories out to literary journals, who after 6-8 months (or longer…some of the stories are still out there, waiting for rejection), sent me back a sad form rejection. This was all after the first story got honorable mention in a novel first pages contest (I wasn’t sure at the time if I was writing stories or a novel…now, I just don’t care either way).

At any rate, it was a joy to hold those pages in my hand and to carry their heavy weight with me to the coffee shop and back. It was another joy to start reading them again and to realize, “Oh, I love these stories.” I love the people in the stories. I love the way they fit together. I love the way characters appear and reappear. I love the humor that makes me laugh out loud at times. I love the way some of the stories make me cry. I love these stories. They’re good. And for a few days, all I wanted to do was read through the stories and edit them. I took them to campus with me to look at between classes. Instead of reading someone else’s book one evening, I sat on the couch with my own words. I got out of bed one night, not to pee, but to write down ideas for how to end one story and fix another.

It was a joy to discover that whatever this thing is (a linked short story collection or a novel in stories or whatever), it’s much closer to finished than I thought when I put it aside. What happens when it’s done? I have no idea and that’s okay.

- Also this week, I took all of the essay ideas I record in the Notes app on the phone and put them into a Word document. There’s a certain organizational joy in this task. Also, a little bit of overwhelm. Friends, I have a lot of essay ideas. Probably more than I’ll be able to write in my lifetime, which is sad. But, also, what a bounty. Some of items on the list are strange, philosophical, proto-ideas, like, “You cannot master teaching or life.” Other are more specific—“Darwin, Spencer and the idea of survival of the fittest.” Some of them have been floating around on my phone or in that document for quite a while, which doesn’t mean I won’t write them someday.

It's a joy just to look at them and bathe in the possibility they suggest. The unwritten essay has so much potential. It could be so amazing. It is the white-hot core before the universe explodes with the Big Bang. Anything could happen.

What are some small (or big) joys that are holding you up right now?