A Mutated Chromosome 17

Okay 3:09 a.m. I am really not happy to see you again. Seeing your pale green LED face – a bit blurry from my lack of eyeglasses and a bit wobbly due to the large green plastic water glass strategically positioned to mute your radiant…ah, radiance -- makes me realize that in the past 15 years or so, you and I have spent some part of this Lost Hour together. Sometimes only a few moments, sometimes the whole damn thing and then some, but at least 2 out of 3 nights we exchange our nocturnal greetings. I for the most part groan, sigh and from time to time launch a curse word in your direction. You return to me your intense faintly malevolent green stare. 

While I recognize that our early morning conversation is hardwired into my genes – insert some scientific jibber jabber here about melatonin cycles and genetically linked paucity of the enzyme required to break it down, or else too much of the enzyme I can never remember which it is. No matter, I have accepted you as part of what my Dad used to call “your specialness” in which context “special” takes the same meaning as the word as “funny” does to the word “peculiar”.  That does not mean, however, that I welcome you or have to be polite to you whenever you decide to show up.

Tragically for me, a wage-slave of the most ordinary 9-5 kind, you often come tip-toeing along with my Muse in tow.  He seems to frackin’ love you. A night person he definitely is and I’ve got no problem with that except for when the alarm sounds at 6:45 a.m.

This morning’s thoughts decided to take a few laps of the brain chasing down the idea of winning the Giller Prize. For those of you not in the know of Canada’s literary stuff, the Giller Prize is a big deal north of the 49^th parallel. It is a yearly $50,000 prize given to Canada’s best English novel or collection of short stories and comes with lots of press and a huge bump in book sales. I’d seen a news clip a few days ago about the award and this year’s winner (Esi Edugyan Half-Blood Blues) and her comments were humble and heart felt. I started thinking about what winning a big splashy prize like that would mean to a writer, not in terms of their career so much but a few layers deeper then that. I started wondering what it would mean to the writing.

So my Muse sat down on the end of the bed and started playing one of his favourite games with me – “What if that were you?”.

And so we began. It started with me imagining what I would say if I won such a thing. What would I talk about in an acceptance speech.  Would I spend a lot of time thanking all the people who ever helped me and then all of those who got in my way? Because truthfully they’d have had just as big a hand in any literary success as those who tried to help. Or would I say something real. Something about writing. Then a transformation of some kind took place. Even though I was still writing my Giller acceptance speech in my head, all of a sudden I was talking about why I write. Why I have to write. It surely isn’t to win prizes I thought, for I don’t think it is possible to actually do the work at all with that goal fixed in one’s head.

It may seem odd to many but it was the first time in my life I spent a big chunk of time thinking deeply about why I write.  Diving underneath all the surface reasons like, “I’m good at it.” Or “So I can fully express myself” or “I get to be the hero of every story” or even the big reason that though it appears on the surface is a True Iceberg of Thought – “Because I get to play God.” – so that surface thought is also one that goes all the way down to the bottom.

In the process of trying to explain why I write to my Muse I came to understand that I write because I have to write.  For better or worse, prizes or no, twenty years of writing has created a Writer, which is as you may or may not know is only kind of a half- human, half mythical sort of construct. A creature that splits her time pretty equally between the Here-and-Now(HAN) and the Land-of-What-If and –Maybe (LOWIM) and no matter how fantastic HAN might be at any point in time, she is always pining for the forests and valleys and oceans and planets of three moons that lie in her truest home LOWIM.

So there it is. I write because it is now as much a part of my genome as the weirdness on chromosome 17 that inverts my melatonin cycle. It’s a curious sort of group of thoughts that make me as sad as joyful. But analysis of that emotional response will have to wait for another day’s Lost Hour. For tonight my Muse has snuggled down in the blankets next to me and closed his eyes, so now I will too.

On Lilies and Ozone and Poets

Lost Hour came a little early tonight. Lot’s of reason’s for that I guess. My stomach was growling so I’m trying to assuage it’s complaining (assuage is your word for the day) with a glass of organic milk. I had dinner with my family tonight and my fourteen year old nephew was rooting in my sister’s fridge for some milk which I pointed out to him was immediately in front of his face, top shelf centre. He read the carton and defaulted to the orange juice. “ I don’t do organic, he said.” Nope, I’m not kidding. I paused in mid mastication of a really delightful potato salad, (which my sister does in the French manner) cocked my head to the side and said, “What?”. And further conversation confirmed that in fact my ears have not yet begun to fail me. I would type it out here more or less verbatim for you, but I hate typing all those quotation marks, and the niceties of punctuating dialogue within prose are pretty much of zero interest to me – but I digress. He did not wish to sample the organic milk. I think even the imagination challenged of you can conjure up, in your mind’s ear, the incredulity in my voice when I inquired if that was because he found all those extra hormones and chemicals where what made the milk so tasty and nutritious. His older sister, a sweet girl not particularly known for her acerbic comment piped in with, “No, he’s just a fourteen year old boy.” Which, according to her means he is set in his ways and astonishinly suspicious of anything hitherto unknown to him.

I did eventually resume chewing and reflected, (after swallowing, so don’t be thinking I was talkin’ with my mouth full) that given she grew up with three brothers, and I grew up with none, that she was vastly ahead of where I was at her age in terms of understanding men. She laughed a very self-satisfied little laugh while my sister chimed in from far across the room, that what I said was probably very true. I thought, without saying, as I was chomping through another mouthful of that very delightful potato salad. That in fact I still seem to be way behind the curve on that front. That despite having recently written a spec script for Supernatural which has been widely praised by a number of young men as being astonishingly effective at capturing the respective character voices of the two hot young male characters so central to the narrative. Huh.

Another reason Lost Hour made an early appearance could also be the electricity in the air. Literally. Vast quantities of sheet lightening scored with loud classic rock on the radio scored my drive back north to Vancouver. I’ve never seen such a storm like that in all my years living here. A solid hour of massive horizon filling flashes. The sweet flinty smell - ozone mingled with the heavy scent of lilies coming from the bunch of star-gazers on the car seat next to me – was so intense, so present that I imagined it was seeping into my skin through my pours. Bonding with the flesh beneath and sealed there for all time by the warm rain splattering my face and arms through the open windows. I shouldn’t wonder if there was, henceforward, a faint whiff of ozone and lily emanating from me whenever temperatures rise above seasonal norms.

Good practice for me though, being up again during Lost Hour. Starting August 1 I am planning to participate in the 3:15 Experiment. Organized by a writer friend of mine, a bunch of us will rise every night in August at 3:15 a.m. and write. Supposed to be a poetry experiment in expressing the collective unconscious. I’m going to join with although I’m not much of a poet. Or I’m not much of what I think a poet is. Though my understanding of that is remarkably stunted as causality of not taking Eng. Lit in high school or university. I did have a boyfriend once who laboured at removing some of my heavy ignorance of all things poetical. Despite the fact that he took back his poetry text books upon the dissolution of the relationship, the exposure must have worked a bit as I did in subsequent years, from time to time, buy a few slim volumes – Byron, Keats, Yates, Shelly and a bunch of other 19^th century romantic types mostly.

Okay sleepy now. It has been such a full week that I’m really, really tired of thinking and talking and talking and thinking. Just too many people in my head right now. People past and people present and people future. I want to run away, alone, to a cabin in the woods for a year and a day. Or, at least to the land of nod for another six hours. One minute left in Lost Hour, so I’ll post this later. Night and God Bless – or nite-n-g’bless – as we say in my family.

It's Lost Hour in Montreal

For the most part I don’t much like being sober, awake and alone at 3 a.m. Yet I do find myself here time and again, meeting all three criteria. Of course after a lazy day in a luxury suite in a Montreal hotel I’m not actually crying a river over it. Given that I don’t have to set my alarm and get up for work tomorrow it does turn into a good time for writing. Lost Hour, here I am again, what shall we find here, still so far from dawn? The things I could write, should write are fourfold. I have interview questions to answer for a profile piece on me to promote the Canadian Short Screenplay Competition. I have a series proposal to tart up for submission along with the cheerful and persuasive cover emails. Then there is the short film script at about 1/3 complete. Finally the sample episode of the original TV series that has a broken story and first draft beat sheet but needs some great focus and much key banging to move it along.

The desk in this suite is ideal for me -- tall enough for optimal laptop support, and it faces the window which is by far my favorite writing configuration; one which my current abode sadly lacks. There is me living dangerously with the semi colon usage again. Been a lot of that kind of thing lately. All Coco all the time kind of thinking which has been both tons of fun and very powerful in terms of attracting some very cool and groovy people my way in the last six weeks or so. Must be very aware of the temptation to go dark side with the power rush though. Just because I want to, and I can, doesn’t mean I should. That is what writing is for; keeping me out of jail, the emergency room and the headlines by channeling the dark impulses into something useful, well something saleable anyway. I’ve gotta break the double space at the beginning of a sentence thing though. Maybe I should take a second to find the setting in Word that polices that up for me. Seems a bit lazy, but hey I have other writing issues to mull over, like my erratic use of Oxford commas, and the aforementioned semi-colon conundrum. Not to mention the fact that I am wandering about here in blog land instead of choosing one of those hot stove writing tasks.

Gee, look, Lost Hour is almost over, and there it is folks the mammoth yawn that signals the hour is past and bed is calling. Guess I’ll tackle all this writing stuff and the inner debate on the use and abuse of the weapon of mass distraction that is my wit multiplied by my intellect and raised to the power of ten by my beauty. Lol – I crack myself up – always good to have a laugh snort before sleep. Nighty nite.