It's time to water the plants
Where organization leads to chaos, chaos leads to progress, and vice-versa.
I have a pretty long list of newsletter topics in my notes app. This list lives in a folder called, appropriately, “Newsletter Topics” which also includes several other notes with titles like “favorite collage materials” and “anthropomorphic vehicles” and “my picture book process” and “cats.” The list and the folder are there to ostensibly always have something write about. But, strangely1 none of the five newsletters I’ve written so far came from this list. Not a one. There are seventeen bulleted points on the list, most of which have a corresponding note. Three notes have titles that aren’t actually on the list, so that makes twenty ideas in total for things to write about in this newsletter.2 I began writing this list back in October of 2023 when I first started thinking about this newsletter. The idea, of course, was to always have something to write about. I think the Big Fear with starting a regular newsletter (or a daily drawing, or a podcast, or a regular anything I guess) is that you’ll run out of things to say, and making a list of things to say is meant to circumvent that fear. But today I’m purposely circumventing the list itself. I don’t really feel like writing any of that stuff. And I’m maybe a little done with organization and lists right now, which I’ll get to below. So instead, I’m just going to catch up on some stuff I’m thinking about and working on.
First, but not really foremost, I’ve been drawing a lot of plants. The last issue of Random Orbit was about drawing trees, so there was that, of course. But I’ve been drawing grasses and perennials and flowers and succulents as well. I really enjoy this, and drawing plants is quite cathartic. But drawing these things isn’t just farting around. I’m actually working on three different books right now that demand that I draw plants, so I’m actually working. In one of the books, the plants play a role only at the end of the story: a garden gets planted on a rooftop, which is sort of the surprise reveal that solves the conflict3. A second book, a picture book I wrote and am now putting together as a sketched dummy for my agent, involves a bug who goes from the safety and security of a houseplant on a windowsill to the unpredictable, dangerous world outside. The entire setting is in the grass and among flowers and shrubs, and I think every single page requires that I draw a riot of leaves and patterns.
The third book is the middle-grade science fiction novel I wrote about a few weeks ago. In this story, an alien is literally planting the seed4 for an invasion of Earth, and it’s through some wack plants that the protagonists of the story begin to figure out what is happening. So, as I work on this story, I am drawing a lot of weird little plants. And I wish I could tell you more about that, but I guess you’ll have to wait for the book.
And speaking of that book…
Writing about writing this novel is difficult. All I want to do is giddily describe the fun ideas and scenes and drawings that I plan for this book. If I am ever an actual novelist, I will not be the kind that retreats to his study, closes the door, and plots in secret as he avoids publicity and the curious public. I am not that. Rather, it’s often talking about the story, telling the story to anyone who asks, that the story comes together for me. Which brings us to this newsletter in the first place.
One of the main reasons I began this newsletter was to get back into the habit of writing, with the goal being to actually write this novel. In fact, if this newsletter somehow devolved into nothing but “novel writing updates” I think I would be fine with that.5 I’m happy to say that it has been working, more or less. Writing is easier than it was just a few weeks ago, and sitting down to do it no longer feels like a struggle to escape a room full of viscous jello6 like it did back in the fall. As writing is becoming easier, I’m also doing more of it.
Or at least, “getting ready” to. Two weeks ago I sat down and opened up The File7 that contains this novel-in-the-works with the intention of reading and organizing everything I’d written up to this point. The File is divided into several sections. One of these is a section that is the actual draft of the story, and then there are several sections that contain multitudes of ideas and notes. This includes the names of characters, various conflicts, plot points, scenes, lines of dialog, questions to myself, and so on. In addition to The File, I have a black Moleskin notebook where I have been writing and sketching about this story since 2019, and I also have a note in my Notes app called “Frida Notes”8 which comes in handy while reading in bed late at night, or while on the bus, or anywhere else that some amazing idea pops into my head.
While I’ve not been adding to the actual draft of the story at all over the last two years, while I haven’t even opened this file since mid-2022, I did continue to occasionally make notes and sketches in the black notebook, and, more often, I added to a few sentences to the “Frida Notes.” It’s the early-21st-century version of filling a box with clippings and ideas, or, maybe more accurately, a filing cabinet. This virtual filing cabinet is stuffed with ideas and thoughts and drawings and connected detritus, and my goal on the first day of doing this work was to just casually go through this notebook and the “Frida Notes,” and put them where they go in the The File. You know. The goal was to organize things.
LOL.
Today was the sixth morning9 of doing this, and it’s starting to look like this is turning into yet another way of not writing this book. I’m only about halfway through just the notebook, not even having opened the “Frida Notes” on the app. It’s overwhelming. Everything I’ve thought about this story, this book, for the last two years10 is here, and the process of reading and sorting and then writing it into the correct place in The File is real work.
It’s good work, too, of course, and it’s serving a purpose that was a somewhat unexpected. It’s moved this stuff to the front of my brain, where it needs to be. Where two weeks ago if you were talking to me and I was staring at the wall, I might have been thinking about the unfathomable inevitability of Trump and Biden, or the collapse of the Philadelphia Eagles. But lately I’ve been thinking about this story. Not thinking about it like “I should be working on that” beating myself up, but like “oh, this makes sense here and if this happens in chapter three then it solves that problem there in chapter four.” Actual constructive and useful thinking about it.
I like living with these characters and their lives and their plot-lines. I like the world I am creating. I like the name of the town and the way the alien invasion unfolds. I’m happy it’s here, with me, again. But it might be time to stop doing this hard work of “organizing” and get down to the harder work of writing. As I’ve been revisiting these notes and ideas, I was surprised to find that I’d actually written more than I remembered. I have a good beginning, written. I have the ending, written. I have several chapters from the vast middle, actually written. These things exist like little isolated islands right now. I don’t know how to connect them. I was also excited to find a list of scenes and conversations in The File that is called shit I could just write right now. Notes or no, this is likely where I need to focus over the next several weeks. Just write.
How to write: Butt in chair. Start each day anywhere. Let yourself do it badly. Just take one passage at a time. Get butt back in chair. -Anne Lamott -Anne Lamott
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. -Chuck Close
Nine Last Days on Planet Earth: One major benefit of going through the collected notes and ephemera that I have amassed over four years of writing and not writing this book, is that in this notebook I have the occasional mention of a story, or a movie, or even sometimes an album that served as inspiration or interest that I’d forgotten about. Daryl Gregory’s short story about a mysterious long-form end-of-the-world is one of those things. It’s really amazing. Here is a link to the story posted on Tor’s website.
School daze: My spring semester began yesterday. I’m teaching an Illustration class at Tyler School of Art, which is part of Temple University. We were supposed to start last Wednesday, but a snowstorm and an icy campus pushed things back a few days. I’ll update this class as it moves along this spring. Writing about teaching is one of the topics in my newsletter folder in my Notes app. (The photo here is from the train I take to campus. Every morning I take a photo from the same spot on the train platform. So this is photo no.1 of the Spring 2024 semester. Here is the entire collection from Spring 2023.)
Cat update: Wait, did I mention this? We now have cats? Our dog Cyrus, who was the subject of the first issue of Random Orbit, crossed that rainbow bridge a couple of weeks before Christmas. Sacha and I plan to adopt another dog, maybe two, this year, but not until later, and the empty house was deafening. We adopted Mrs Maple Rathbone, a four-year-old tortoise cat, on Christmas Eve, and two days later we got her four-month-old kitten, Basil, a plump orange. As you know, the internet was made for cat content. People love cat pics, and I am happy to oblige. Maple and Basil are also one of the forthcoming topics of this newsletter. You know you want it.
Or maybe not so strangely. Maybe predictably. Maybe this should tell me something.
And of those twenty topics, three have sub-bullet-points that indicate either some sort of complexity. This could either be multiple newsletters, or (it looks like) possible conflicting points-of-view. I suspect I’m not alone in this chaos. I suspect you’re just like me, in fact.
This is not a spoiler. The book won’t be out until sometime next year, and by then you’ll forgot you ever read this anyway.
And I mean literally.
mainly because it would mean i’m actually writing the novel, right?
Note to self: Draw a picture of self escaping a room full of jello.
The File is a Scrivener document. Scrivener is a terrific-but-potentially-overwhelming word processor that I learned about through Peter Brown’s blog posts about writing The Wild Robot when I first began work on this book of mine.
Frida is one of the main characters of the story. This book began as an idea for a picture book back in 2002 called “Frida Had a Flying Saucer.”
Not in a row. Over two weeks.
Two years since I wrote anything, but actually four since I began these notes in Dec 2019.
Bah. took too long to get to the point: cat pics.